 Hmm, hello everybody. All right, we did it. We did it. Woohoo. We made it So today it was 70 ish degrees outside 72 maybe son of a bitch really Yeah, totally and like it's really warm in here You don't want to know I'll be sweating it. It has been it was I think a high of 48 here today and it's been pouring So oh here as well. We had tornado sirens last night Loud thunder. Wow. Yeah, it's fun. I mean everything was fine. It was just enough to be annoying. Yeah, so my kids recently discovered the Wizard of Oz We haven't watched it yet because they're five and it's it's horrifying but I We did explain to them the story that like Dorothy's in a house and a tornado picks up her house and takes her to the Land of Oz and blah blah and it's all a dream And so then today my daughter came home from school and she had a picture That she drew and she wanted to show it to me and it was like a rainbow and a house and a little mouse going into the house and Big swirls and she's like that's the mouse and that's his turtle house And that's the rainbow and the land that they live and that's the tornado That's gonna pick the house up and take it to another place and I go Oh like the Wizard of Oz and she slams her hands that it goes No, it's nothing to do with the Wizard of Oz I'm just like, okay Wonder what age that becomes appropriate we've been thinking too about showing it to our kids So ours are well about to turn seven and just turn nine I think the nine-year-old would be okay, but our little guy kind of has like a tornado Yeah, if he has a tornado thing then that might be a concern for me currently my son is afraid of the wicked witch of the West so the green face is like that, but he hasn't even seen the flying monkeys or those creepy trees You know that the the the the the weeping trees or whatever it is like we're talking about over Easter the movies rated G But it is horrifying. I mean it is it is like it is scary So I just never really thought of Wizard of Oz in the horrifying sense. Oh, yeah I don't know what age our kids were they were probably yeah, probably five ish I mean, I absolutely watch it at five and six and I'm I turned out fine Yeah We had this is like the early 80s and we had a top-loading VCR Panasonic top-loading VCR the stop button was like this thick, right? You did chuchonk chuchonk and we had on on VHS We had the Wizard of Oz the Muppet movie grease and Star Wars and my sister watched those four movies from 1980 until like 1985 I mean what more do you need? Yeah, that's like yeah, talk about a great you got a musical you got sci-fi capsule right? I think you win my brother and I recorded Do you guys remember the movie point break? Oh, yeah, we've recorded that off of like TV at some point And that was our go-to watch over and over. You had the better collection well, it's funny because there are copy of Star Wars my dad taped off CBS when it aired and He had the little there was a remote to pause the recording so you could edit out the commercials And he successfully did it, but he missed one and we have like 30 seconds of Dan rather giving an update on the Iran-Iraq war Which is like talk about time capsule. Yeah, right Yeah, the commercials are the best part whenever you I mean I've been ages since I've had a VCR hooked up when you go back and rewatch some old thing It's the commercials that are always the best part because yeah, it's so funny now Yeah, and the ones that stick with you when you watch it You're like this is a commercial that was on when I was like seven years old and yet I remember the theme I remember what that guy says when he enters the room. I you can still sing the little jingle Reminding everybody watching live Submit your show titles as we're doing the show go to af.showbot.tv Or if you're on twitch do the little twitch Cody thing to do it At the end of the show, we will pick an episode title. So yes, we will oh boy, will we ever? Where's uh, where's when? Tokyo or Japan, I don't know if she's in Tokyo, but she's in Japan. Oh, cool. Yeah She might make a cameo in the chat because it's like 9 a.m. So And yes, Bob, I miss the memo about the shirts so Disappointed well, you wore yours last I did I wore mine. Yeah. Yeah, so so you so you set the trend and now we're all followers Yeah, he's a show off. Yeah, I just I just literally folded the shirt and put it away like over the weekend I was doing the laundry so right before the show I recorded an unboxing of the t-shirt. Did you really? I'm gonna post it. Yeah Where are you gonna post it? You should post it to our channel. Sure You put on your YouTube channel, please send me the file. Yeah, that was my initial thought is that it would just be a short Yeah, we'll run it on Instagram, too. I mean like why not? Yeah Cheesy thing look I'm opening it up might as well. That's to report it People love their unboxings. You know, I've never paid attention, but I wouldn't be surprised if an unboxing beats a review in like a side-by-side Yeah, yeah, it depends Hasn't been my experience so far With my YouTube channel, but I'm sure for a lot of people I could be All right, should we do this let's do it kick this into gear Okay, I'm ready the dollar. Yeah, I'm good to go. Let's do it And then I'm doing the intros and stuff do I made it to the switch Yeah You might as well. All right, so all right, so we will say goodbye to JR for a minute. Say goodbye to Michelle. I will Stop oh can't hear you every time I do the wrong thing. So it's this one. There we go. There we go Cool off your camera. Yeah, right. So it's not the ones in the box. It's on the the the bar at the bottom Yeah, I know All right. All right, cool. So confusing. All right. Let's do a show. All right. Here we go Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of Android faithful weekly source the latest news the latest hardware the latest apps and You know the latest feedback because that's in there too in the world of Android I am one of your hosts Jason Howell and I am the other hosts Ron Richards and we've got another host to Michelle Ramon Hey, hey doing Michelle Good be back another week. We also have another host, but she's not here. No when it's still on vacation Enjoying her sweet time in Tokyo or we assume Tokyo somewhere in Japan in the Japan's as they say on showgun That I've been watching I've been watching the showgun series on FX Which has been really good with the they keep referring to as the Japan's But we got a great great guest right Jason indeed one of my all-time favorites I would say Hall of Famer really J.R. Ray feel of the intelligence J.R. Good to see you man. Good to see all you house everybody. Well, you know doing good. All right I feel like this is it's funny because last week we had one Dagnalon and it was the first time he was with you Jason in a very long time and J.R. Jason I think this is the first time you guys have been together in a very long time It's been a while, you know, it's been a while it feels like home. This is just it's cozy It's everyone's here. Oh almost everybody but Familiar faces are here. Yes indeed. Yeah, it's really great to have you here Likewise, it's good to be here. How how have things been been going over at the the intelligence? They have been good very busy, but good. So yeah, we we've launched the whole new brand So, you know, I've had Android intelligence forever now. It's the intelligence. We've got a windows vertical windows intelligence So it was a lot to get through like whole new we did a whole like rebranding new website And I feel like we're just digging out of that hole of like fixing all the little glitches and things that have come up But but I think we're there almost like 99% of the way it only took six months to clean up all that Well, and we've got we've got so last time we had you on in the winter You were on with a fantastic offer for our Android faithful folks to get into the intelligence And at the same time we had an offer for our patrons On patreon to get access to get access to the intelligence and for people the intelligence to get access to the Android faithful And it works so well. We're gonna do it again, right? Yeah, oops. We did it again So so everyone who is a is an active member of the Android faithful patreon you want to check patreon after the show we're gonna post that after the show tonight and And JR what will people get if they are a Android faithful patron over at the intelligence? The bigger question is what won't they get? I mean, honestly, it's like we got we've got to start there I'll back up a little so Not to assume that everybody knows who the hell I am. I've write a newsletter weekly newsletter called Android intelligence I've been writing it in some form since I don't know the early 1920s give or take It gives you three things to know three things to try and you're in box every Friday a bunch of insights tips advice cool stuff You don't see anywhere else. So if you aren't already subscribed that parts free It's a great place to start and just go to the intelligence comm or the intelligence comm slash Android if you prefer to sign up But then for the true Android fanatics among us the the Android faithful I even say I guess the intelligence insiders kind of like our inner circle our little exclusive club. It's just 7000 roughly 7000 times more than what you get in the newsletter or anything else It I hate to oversell it, but I don't think I am there's just there's really nothing else out there like it I'm personally a fan of it even though I also want to run it So as an insider you get there's a whole bunch of stuff You get an upgraded version of all the newsletters add free access to the newsletters themselves and everything on the intelligence website Tons of on-demand resources that just teach all sorts of useful stuff in-depth super guides about advanced Android and Googley subjects searchable database of every single tip I've ever shared this letter going way back many years and then there's our really incredible communities super smart funny Android fans always Around eager to interact help with questions advice troubleshooting. I'm very much a part of that crowd myself, of course And you also get free or discounted access to a whole bunch of my favorite premium apps and services like $200 worth of stuff a lot of it like Android or Google connected so yeah, as far as the Patreon subscribers the patreon supporters specifically they'll be getting a coupon code for 50% off half off if they would like to join us on the Insider part And you know the whole thing kind of works because it's so personal and intimate and interactive So we only open the gates to new members a few times a year So they're open now through this coming weekend if you're an Android faithful supporter like Ron said you'll get that coupon code for 50% off soon and Total spur of the moment thing, but we've also whipped up a special coupon code for the faithful Android faithful listeners Even if you're not a supporter of Android faithful yet You can get 25 bucks off your first year as an intelligence insider if you're so inclined and if you sign up this next week And I have a very special coupon code to share for that. I'm very proud of this was my big accomplishment of the day So the coupon code is I love Ron Richards. Oh, that is actually it that will work Just all one word. So you'll go to the intelligence comm slash insider Sign up when you'll see the little thing to put into coupon code I love Ron Richards, and it'll knock 25 bucks off any Membership you want and again if you're already an Android faithful supporter stay tuned because you'll get that extra special 50% off discount But yeah, either way hope to see everyone there It's a big happy family a big party and it'd be awesome to have more of the Android faithful among us by all means And I would like to make it clear that I was not aware that was the coupon code until it came out of JR's mouth just now No Ron was like look if you're gonna do this it's gotta be I love Ron Richards It was a deal point it was that along with the green m&m's in the bowl. That's the only way that I'll show up Yeah, no, he made me get the shirt. He said you got to wear the shirt. You got to use my name in the code But I just I go along with it. It's all good Well play JR well play, but yeah, no, we we love our Android faithful the intelligence, you know kind of Connection and I know that we got a bunch of folks from the intelligence over on the Android faithful patron who we love and then You know a bunch of folks from our side, you know from the patrons went over in the last wave So if you missed that last time now's your chance to get on board So regular listeners, you know non-patreon users use the coupon code. I love Ron Richards get 25 bucks off And those of you who are in the Android faithful patreon keep an eye out for patreon and we'll post the coupon code to get 50% off only for patrons. That's the only way you can get it And that will run until this Sunday April 7th, so Very cool. Awesome. That's too funny. Oh JR. Everybody is Android faithful. They're also Ron faithful Yeah, what he's gonna rebrand the show it's gonna be the Ron faithful I'm calling it right now. You get to watch out for that All right, well shall we talk about some Android stuff? Yeah, all right, cool. All right, so first up Google shared some new features across its umbrella of services around the world under the guise not the guise but under the theme of Six ways to travel smarter this summer Everyone's got their eye on vacation vacation. It's all I ever wanted And so Google's here to help you so first and foremost. They've got some new shopping tools They got the whole tinder swipe thing going on with recommendations where you can thumb up and thumb down and skip things and Well shopping which everybody loves to swipe left or right You can specify your favorite your favorite brands to see more of them within the shopping experience and of course Get ready to you know the the drinking game You can use generative AI to create a style you want and then find similar styles to what you created This is kind of crazy. Like really everyone's a fashion designer inside their bodies colorful metallic Puffer jacket. Yes, something like that and then it's like. Oh, yeah, we've got those It's a this fractals puffer jacket out there. That's sort of like what you just generated. That's so that's pretty cool That's neat They've also got a virtual trial virtual try-on using the quote-unquote try-on icon on shopping sites To still let you see what the product looks like on people which is always weird so that that gets your shopping done before the summer starts and then on the map side of the world They've got list of recommendations from people who know a city really well They've got the whole local guides everything going on there. They're really using that curation stuff You can actually create your own list to share with others if you like to and of course AI will populate things that are important to know about a particular place And finally They're adding in translations and circle to search Which is coming in a few weeks so translations and circle search, which is pretty cool So yeah, so JR is that enough AI for your from Google for you for this month? Or how do you feel about that? It's a lot of AI I'm still a little skeptical about the practical real world real-world usage of a lot of the especially the generative AI stuff But there's some neat stuff here. This is cool I like circle to search a lot and that part in particular Excites me the one thing that that I really think when these kind of big drops come is this would be Like 40% of a new iOS release would be this kind of stuff and we just see it It kind of comes out You don't even think about it and it kind of gets glossed over because of the way Google does it which you know The long run is probably better for us as users But it's interesting to think if Apple had all this stuff as part of the next iOS release people would be Applauding and going on and on about it. We're just like yeah, it's a blog. We read the Google blog Okay, cool watch for it. So I think this is cool I enjoy these kind of little Google app feature updates and much as I enjoy a new Android version I know we'll get to that soon too. I kind of look forward to these little drops more. There's always so much just fun little Neat tiny stuff and it's kind of cool to look forward to an explore. It's funny because I was recently talking to somebody about like What's coming in over the next month and it's like, you know, Google I O is mid-May, right? So at some point Google's gonna stop announcing stuff because they want to announce that at Google I O Like there's it just seems you're absolutely right It just seems like there's just this drumbeat all the time of stuff happening from all corners of the company Good or bad and so it's yeah, you're right Like I guess we kind of take it for granted because there is so much going on Yeah, but then I always come back to also to the question of like like taking this kind of release of features and and stuff for a few services that we Probably use on a semi-regular basis at least How many of these new features? Are you gonna use? Yeah, like I use circle to search like I actually use that on a regular basis now and I know Ron you don't because Google hides you but I Have it on so JR to give you the background for some there's something I gotta I have to factory reset my pixel my pixel 8 pro because I got the update But circle search is nowhere to be found In the settings or anything like that, but I have on my pixel 8 Regular pixel 8 that is not my daily driver. It's on there. So I don't know but I still don't have it But here is but you so you're using it a lot Jason. It's it's it's changed the way you search Well, I mean it hasn't changed the way I search, but there are times where it totally is the right tool for the job Or I'm like, yeah, what is that like a oh, I should know what my dad is on a Samsung I think S23 and he got it this week Search thing I was like David Google. Don't you know? I'm on an ad-right podcast Thinking of a I've used it with Ron I think one thing you forgot to mention during this whole roundup is that circle to search is now available on more Older pixel phones while you're still waiting for I wouldn't say I forgot it Michelle But yeah, no it is it is going wider there every time you see circle search It's been being rolled out to more phones. Yeah, because Google knows like that's a pretty kind of Magical slash, you know useful. I think for a wide wider range of people. They're like virtual try-on clothes with generative AI Okay Those are things that you kind of stumble across and maybe no, I think JR is right though I don't think we're the demographic. I gotta imagine. Yeah, there are you know, there are people who do do that I mean what might I think my wife would do that She I see her over her shoulder looking at clothes and like people wearing them and stuff. Yeah, I think yeah I'm just jaded. I'm really tall and nothing ever fits me. So I'm jaded except for the snazzy new t-shirt Wonderful shirt I'm actually curious if you were to circle to search this right now like would it appear on searches? Right now I have a one-plus open it doesn't have circle to search Well, I mean, that's a good segue because we did get an email and I'm gonna I'm gonna circumvent what we're talking about right now I'm gonna hijack to do our first email the evening Steve wrote in and he said I got my Android faithful t-shirt and had be my Be my AI part of the be my eyes app describe it for me and he sent the disc the AI description of the Android faithful t-shirt The picture shows a black t-shirt lying on a cream colored surface possibly a bed The t-shirt has a graphic and text on it The graphic is a stylized representation of a green Android robot with a blue line graph emerging from its head Suggesting thought or activity below the graphic the text reads Android in lowercase green letters Followed by faithful and white uppercase letters the overall design seems to suggest loyalty or dedication to the Android platform so Thank you Steve for that AI description of the Android faithful t-shirt and you could get yours over at Threadless and read faithful that thread list calm and for our audio listeners Jason Michelle NJ are all wearing the t-shirt and I did not get the memo I did the quick circle to search. I just went to the camera flipped it to the selfie cam Circled it. I don't know it's probably not gonna show up great, but yeah, I got it. It brought up results It worked. Wow, did it bring up results to thread list though Let me see what they are so There's apparently one on eBay No way really it might be something it might just be similar it might just be some I don't think it's it No, the top result is David Gerbino on x who posted about it. We know David Yeah, so it does not have threadless actually when it's someone's lagging our show on Showed t-shirt on eBay. I will say mine. I pre-listed mine. I'm gonna wear tight. So, you know There is a there is a short list of things that happen on the internet over the past 20 years that I've still yet to get comfortable with And one of them is seeing something that you've created being sold on eBay by somebody else Which has happened to me. I did a zine back in college like in the 90s Like a print newsprint zine and I have found people selling copies of it on eBay, which blows my mind Wow, yeah, yeah, that's pretty good So, okay, the the second or maybe third result was a tweet or whatever we're calling them an x From at android faithful that linked to it. So it didn't have the direct result, but it got people there You know, it worked. There it is. So it recognized it. It paired it. That's too funny. That's pretty awesome That's too funny. So yeah, so head over to uh threadless at android faithful dot threadless.com You can get your own wonderful android faithful t-shirt. Um, we are so pluggy today. I know we're so pluggy between the intelligence and the This is a pluggy episode Um, that's not a bad thing. That's a good thing. Okay. So okay on a non-plugging subject I saw something the other day, uh about and I don't remember quite the context But someone from samsung commented that they were seeing more use with circle to search already than with their galaxy AI features which I find to be really telling because the AI stuff Hey, I'm in it. Okay. AI is whatever it is. You could say circle to search uses AI But AI and the current, you know definition of how it's being branded Is like the hot buzzword trendy thing But it kind of gets back to just the simple circle to search is basically google now on tap for many years ago and that's still the more useful thing than Being able to tell a computer to write poorly written text for you in every possible interface and prompt on your phone and computer Yeah, and it's dead simple like you just yeah, you tap and hold and it does the thing basically, you know There isn't a whole lot to know about it other than point at the thing or circle it Yeah So it's still cool today. That's right part of that may also be because google is marketing the heck out of circle to search I see it everywhere. Yeah, I can ads on youtube on reddit on on twitter Like it's everywhere. I scroll. I mean, I know i'm on like on like tech youtube tech twitter tech reddit all the time But I just see it so much more than even like galaxy s24 ads That in of itself is pretty impressive because google is usually so bad at marketing I mean it doesn't usually Promote any of its own stuff as we know because we've talked about so many times over the years Totally, they're trying they're trying though. Yeah All right, so speaking of their trying uh, michelle. What's the latest from the android 15? front So, yeah, google is trying they're on a multi-year path to Uh combat so-called stingray devices. These are devices that are popular among law enforcement agencies among like government actors among like hackers basically to Mimic a real cellular network and convince your device to connect to it instead of the real Cellular network operated by your carrier and what these stingray devices do is they collect your devices unique Identifier information such as the imca or imei which you may be familiar with and using these they can pinpoint And target specifically your device for analysis or interception They can do things like try to Downgrade the connection on your device to a older insecure 2g network or use a insecure unencrypted protocol To try to have your device send text messages or calls Um through the fake network so that it can they can then like intercept and try to read your messages And what google has been trying to do it's been trying to combat like the underlying technologies that these stingrays take advantage of So in android 12 they added support for disabling 2g connectivity at the modem level so that if you disable 2g Well, then these stingrays can't downgrade your device at 2g because it's just not available on the device anymore And android 14 they added support for Disabling connections that used a quote cellular null cipher, which is in form of unencrypted communication And in android 15 it looks like they're adding a new cellular transparency feature that basically discloses whenever Your device's unique identifier is being accessed Um, this would basically tell you that hey you might be connected to a stingray because this network is trying to access your Unique cellular id and it's also going to be a An alert whenever your network is trying to basically downgrade you to an insecure connection So this is another way potentially the os could inform you that you might not be on a legitimate cellular network You might be on an insecure one operated by a stingray or potentially just on a really bad commercial cellular network that's operating an insecure connection and This cellular transparency feature is something that we're working on for android 15 I spotted hints of it and I wrote about it for android authority But um, you can't enable it right now because for one the settings page for it is not available at this moment And two this requires support from the modem vendor to add support for it because this requires the modem itself to be able to disclose to the os whenever these identifiers are being Sent to the network or to or the modem to disclose to the os Whenever a insecure connection is being attempted So it's not something android itself can do is it's something that android has to communicate with the underlying modem Which is often the firmware for which is often written by a third party like Qualcomm for example like samsung for the exanose modem So it's something that you won't see on all devices, but if we do see it on some devices it could potentially Save users from these malicious stingray attacks quicker unfortunately commonly used to target high-profile individuals like journalists or people who are you know being a target by you know nation states that don't want them to you know disclose certain information or say bad things about them, you know Um That's one feature another feature that google is working on. It's somewhat adjacent to this It's a location privacy feature and i also wrote about this for android authority and basically what this does is um There are certain ways that carriers can request your location and one of them is called a Um n i dash l r which is a network initiated location request And this is when a cellular network itself triggers a process of determining your device's location over the gsm standard this typically used for critical scenarios such as um getting your location for the purposes of sending emergency services your way and This whenever they initiate a location request using this method Um, they can bypass getting your user's permission to do this because this is you know, they need your Permission your location right now so they can send nine on one your way but um a malicious stingray device could use this Uh network initiated location request without caring that you know It's you actually need help right now, right? So they could do this to bypass any user consent needed for Accessing your location. So what this uh needed location privacy feature is doing it will explicitly restrict these network initiated location requests from sharing your location um, if you've denied location access So this is basically ensuring that this feature can only be used by networks if um That's explicitly being used for emergency calls So like if you're playing placing an emergency call from your phone or emergency text from your phone That's the only scenario where your location can be shared with the carrier and of course there are still ways for carriers to get your Approximate location they can Determine what cell towers you're connected to and then you know try to triangulate your position based on your signal strength And your angle from multiple different cell towers So this is not stopping your carrier from getting your location But it could stop one way that malicious stingray devices abuse to get your exact location I like it. Yeah, I like that google is making these changes. It's not I don't know that these are necessarily those kind of marquee feature things necessarily Because a lot of people are going to be like stingray. What but I appreciate that that google continues to go down this This route this road and uh, I'm curious to know how the carriers feel about that I mean, there's a whole layer of stuff that the average user isn't even aware of until sometimes it's too late Right or until you know, but like but the fact that they are thinking of these particular cases and developing this stuff I think is you know Continues to show the stability of the platform and you know, that's yeah, right, right? That's kind of stuff too. I mean, you know, it's easy to focus on the Marquis features and we talk about an android update, but I've written a lot as as you all certainly know over the years about android upgrades I do these report cards. I'm actually getting ready to do another one very soon Grating how the manufacturers do and there's always inevitably some response of of of people who say I don't care. I don't need the latest update. Anyway, I'm going to get this phone by this person It doesn't mean anything to me. I don't like I don't care about the features I don't need their interface and sure to each their own But this is the kind of stuff that I always come back to and say this is why android upgrades matter whether you care about Whatever feature xyz or the poison polish or the interface or whatever These kind of things matter and these kind of things are often only Able to be provided at the platform level whether it's it's this stuff other privacy and security stuff api restrictions Even if you don't see them or know them or think about them These are the things that Someday may really make a big difference and you're not going to have them if you're not getting active regular timely upgrades Yep Agreed. Um, can we just take a moment and appreciate that jr. You have an xsq In the background well sir in in videos there there's There have been so many times where somebody in a comment or an email or a tweet or whatever asks me What is that flashy thing? I think you're the first person who's ever just identified it right off the bat Well, you wanted a why? Because a I have one yeah and b for years I'm talking years in my in my office at the twitt studio It was plugged in flashing all over the place and draining electricity unnecessarily Well, I will say a little guilty, but yeah, you know, it was a pretty light. I'm slowly unpacking My belongings over a decade of moving from new york to san francisco back to new york And then moving twice in new york, and I did uncover the box with my nexus q um and uh sure enough it was uh, it's still there It's not pulsing, but it's not draining electricity, but it's still there. So it doesn't do much, but it makes a pretty little light It inspires curiosity. In fact, I'm thinking I need to plug that into my little backdrop downstairs. Thank you I wonder is the nexus. Do you think the nexus q would if they added ai to it jason it would drain more electricity Yeah, potentially so yes, I don't think the nexus q has anywhere near the amount of uh of capability to run gemini Let's say just throwing that out of you know out in the thin air here randomly But speaking of that since we're talking about gemini Google had uh, you may remember said recently that pixel eight Not the eight pro the eight pro, you know gets the gemini, uh ai on on board But saying that the pixel eight would not get gemini's ai models running on the device They had cited hardware limitations for this fact But they're kind of changing their story now at least the sort of now google is saying that pixel eight will get gemini in the next Quarterly android update, but It's going to be a little different. It's only going to be a developer option So you have to activate your developer options menu And and then you can go in there apparently once this update comes through on your pixel eight And you can activate the gemini features now google had said Initially, like I said hardware limitations now, they're getting a little clearer about this google decided that the pixel eight Has the eight gigs of ram and said that was a key factor compared to the eight pros 12 gigs of ram 12 gigs allows the model to be more easily loaded into memory on the device, which is a big priority for google and the gemini nano model But you know if you want to you know tax your pixel eight and go into the developer settings and flick it on and Go nuts. That's going to be coming to your device here pretty soon So anyone here actually using the gemini features of any sort like regularly beyond just kind of screwing around with them And testing them regularly. No not really although Um, I don't know if it's gemini necessarily but uh for for preparing for this show one of the first articles that we had What it was it it was one of those six ways to travel smarter this summer and I noticed at the very top of google's blog Sorry, I'm sure the wrong thing right now. Um, I noticed at the top of google's blog post for that Had a little button Summarized this article by pushing this button and I pushed it and it summarized it and I don't know if it gave me And if it saved me any time or not, but that means so gemini. Well, I've been using gemini regularly Um, mainly as a writing tool Um, hey take take a look at this and make it better. I'll do that sometimes Yeah, like you know like or or I'll use it as a writing prompt like you know, like, you know I'll give it a you know I need to do this sort of thing give me a template to start with and then I'll edit the heck out of it And then bring it back in to correct it and or make it better or make it less wordy or whatever because I tend to be a very I'm from the jack karouac stream of consciousness writing school where it tends to be a little more wordy than I like it So like that makes it a little more concise. It's been good. I also use gemini in that I downloaded a um I was doing some research for a project and I I downloaded a state business document filing that was like 80 pages whatever and I said I asked it to look at this and Summarize and tell me what I'm looking for this sort of thing and it went through and here's what you need to know blah blah blah Here's where you can find more information. And so it has been it has been handy. So I think when it comes specifically to gemini nano, which is this the topic of this conversation Regular pixelate users haven't been missing out on much so far because there's only three features currently that it powers Which is the summarization feature in the pixel recorder app The magic compose feature in the google messages app and then smart replies in gboard and smart replies in gboard seems to be the main Reason basically why google held back gemini nano on the regular pixel 8 because as the article noted google said that basically They want the ai models to be resident in memory to be basically always available because if you're loading up a Messaging app like whatsapp, right? You want it the ai model to be ready to generate a smart reply You don't want to be able to wait and then like Maybe like once you're quickly replying like it takes like five seconds for a smart reply to show up, right? You want to be immediately available But to do that you have to have part of the memory at least running available in memory at all times and so With eight gigabytes of ram there's already so much other stuff running that you might have to close off other processes to Make that possible so i guess The mistake that google made i guess was saying that there was a hardware limitation when it was never a hardware limitation It was a more a product management decision from the beginning It was kind of obvious because the galaxy s24 base model has eight gigs of ram and that supports gemini nano um, but You know after all the backlash i guess they decided to cave google was as the verge put it google was Bullied into reversing their decision and enabling gemini nano and we'll have to see how well it actually runs once they enable it that and that's my question is is Yeah, is it going to be a noticeable like slow down difference and if if so If that is related to you know eight gigs of ram versus 12 gigs ram Then i guess technically it is a hardware limitation You know that's eight gigs of ram on the device and it should be 12 in order to run at full speed or full Effectiveness, you know even if it even if eight gigs ram is insufficient like Like if you're a consumer right the blame still goes to google because they're the ones you decided Totally totally eight gigs of ram in the base model and of course like obviously there are there's a pixel team Who probably decided on eight gigs of ram? A long time ago like over a year ago and then there's the gemini team Which scrambled to make all this stuff happen in the midst of you know chat gpt and open ai and all that stuff like There was probably decisions made. Oh eight gigs of ram is enough for our base model phone a year ago Clearly that's not the case anymore and going forward if I see eight gigs of ram on a flagship phone It's it's no not a recommendation for me anymore. No no it even sounds insufficient in today's day in age Yeah All right, so quickly to check in on the rcs drama. I know it's been a little quiet about that lately, but uh last week The news kind of broke thanks to the fact that google noted on its website that rcs is coming to the the iphone in the fall of 2024 Notice apple did not announce this apple still hasn't officially revealed it But the fact that google has said that it's coming makes you think that it really is This it also revealed that animated emoji reactions are coming soon with rcs because everybody loves animated emojis Um, and maybe this means that the reactions might become part of the rcs spec in the future Right now google has its own approach. So does ios. Maybe they're Figuring out how to bring them all to the middle, uh, you know together since in in this wonderful You know utopia that will be rcs for everybody that we have Um, but we'll see so we'll see if this actually all happens this fall or not. So You know, I kind of doubt that apple is going to ever announce publicly that rcs is arriving If you go back when they when they first said this they never announced it themselves They literally just sent out an email to some like apple friendly. I'll say tech outfits like nine to five mac, etc Right. I don't they never actually put out a public statement on their blog No social media statements or anything of the sort When they roll out rcs support in the apple messages app presumably with ios 18 Do you think they're going to mention it in their keynote? I highly doubt that you think they're going to mention it in their changelog Probably not they already confirmed that they're going to leave the Um, text bubble color is green for rcs chats. Yep, like they're probably We're gonna have to hope that apple users figured out that hey green bubble of the past Meant that you had sms green bubble now means they have rcs and you don't have all the same limitations anymore Which what are the odds that the the norm? Yeah, what are the odds that everyone can get the memo? Yeah, exactly Yeah, yeah, so that would probably be fine by apple. I mean this goes against apple business actually So they probably don't want people to notice or make a big deal about it. Yep. Yeah Oh, totally true All right What can you do all we can do is thank our patrons? Let's see here. We got some patron shout outs first of all I want to give a big thank you to mark fleming jeremy paulis Nikolaj heselhatskov. Did I pronounce that correctly from denmark? I certainly hope so charles Gilagley clint mccollum. Man, we have a lot of patrons. Don't we do and we've upped it from three Thank yous up to five because I want to catch up on the backlog. So Heck yes, thank you patrons. My goodness And we are also, you know putting our patrons to work with artwork Although it's really patrons via generative ai and we're coming up with some really cool things each and every week Who did this one run? Uh, this one Oh, I'm sorry. I had it and now I just lost it. I think this is from bob bob rissler Who's in the chat right now and then the live stream watching bob's awesome little mecca Bug droid reading reading reading the news. So it's got a great little Mech outfit costume rope. Awesome. Robotic kind of thing So thank you bob for sending that in for our patron news pick graphic of the week Brought to you by generative ai Love it. Keep them coming. You know that is really cool. Yeah, and if you and and and we're running low So we need we need some more bug droid reading the news graphics. So send them to contact at android faithful.com So please do And we had some links some stories to vote on Um, and boy, it was a runaway this this uh week But humane's new ai pin working with google photos in contacts 16 percent Samsung I thought that would do better. I thought people want to hear about humane, but I guess not so I guess not Samsung is revamping its bixby voice assistant with generative ai. Maybe it's the generative. Maybe it's the ai Because the winning choice has nothing to do as far as I can tell with ai But has everything to do with you michel because you wrote the article Android 15 could revamp the volume panel and make it collapsible. Tell us about this Well, uh, it's better if I show you instead of just tell you so you can see if you're watching the video feed right now Google is working on a revamp to the android volume panel ui. This is the panel that shows up when you Uh, press the volume key and then tap the little three dot icon on the bottom this revamp volume panel ui Um by default when you're listening to music it's collapsed So the only slider you have is a media slider and then above it you have the a shortcut to the output switcher But this new volume panel ui. It's it's very bubbly very colorful. It kind of reminds me of the um the volume ui when you open the media output switcher and like you're switching between your current device or a cast device or your um bluetooth device and um, yeah instead of these really thin bars For every like uh for media call notification ring tone You have these really thick bubbles instead as your sliders like functionally It's still the same thing like you're just controlling the volume, but design wise it's Very very different. It's way bigger much more colorful These playful animations happen when you slide up and down that basically move the text left and right You have the actual volume level as a number shown on the left side when you're um Swinging it left and right you can tap on the icon to the left to quickly mute that stream And you can tap a button next to the media volume to collapse or expand the um entire slider So this is a significant redesign to the volume panel Which hasn't had a change since android 9 pie Because that was when it was first this version of the volume slider was first introduced It was actually using an api called the slices api which no other app basically uses So basically what it's doing is If you go to settings and then the sound and vibration settings that whole section up top What the volume panel is basically doing is just taking a slice of that settings page and showing it In that panel and why it's called the slices api. It's taking a slice of some other component and showing it somewhere else But uh, basically no one else is using the slices api and it seems like This new version of the panel is completely independent of that settings page So they could add some wild things to it. They could add whatever they want now It looks like they might add some inbuilt noise controls that might have something to do with pixel buds. They might add um toggles to change between the spatial Um between head tracking or note hate tracking for spatial audio They could add some other stuff related to it But um, this is just a preview basically what I enabled in the android 15 developer preview to build and I'm sure we'll find more Speaking of which I did find more just earlier today. I posted about some other UI changes coming to android 15 These are coming to the status bar where we might be getting new icons for the Wi-Fi signal strength for the mobile data signal strength and for the battery level And uh, when I posted this article, I asked my followers. What do you guys think of this and It feels like the response has been pretty overwhelmingly negative Um, I don't know how you guys feel about this like ron jason jr It's probably your first time seeing this. I don't know if you saw my post from earlier today What do you guys think of this new volume? And I'm sorry these new status bar icon You know what it reminds me of looking at it for the very first time right now It reminds me of the modifications that I saw when I was rooting and roaming my devices Yeah, that's pretty spot on The different like mods would be like, oh, well, we've added a new style to the battery that makes it look like a battery and Yeah, I don't know. I like the elegance of this the simplicity of this versus this it just kind of feels kind of needless, I don't know I'm torn here because I don't know because like I my first glance is I don't care Because it just it tells me what the battery percentage is and that's all I really want I don't care how you're doing it right as long as I can see what the percentage is Um, but I feel like the old version Was just more to the point like I I always automatically change it to show me the percentage like the people who like Anybody who has just the battery icon and can use that to eyeball their battery You I mean either you're a savant or understand it understand icons a better way than I do But like I need that percentage number Um, the old way it's kind of bigger and to the point where this it looks it's kind of hard to see It's hard to see that's that's what I'm realizing. Yeah, especially like this is a really great example we've got on the video version kind of a Side-by-side or a top-to-bottom of the Android 14 version With the charging battery and then next to it the words and then of course it's got the colored Kind of pill shape around that and I feel like you can get that small and still read it The other version the new version it's all in you know It's the pill and then inside of the pill is the smaller battery And then inside the smaller battery is the number and the battery happens to be full so instead of it being like a nice contrast of the of the The you know, let's say the empty battery color, which is bright and the dark bold kind of numbers It's like the dark numbers on top of a dark shaded background It's just it's harder to see or know what you're actually looking at. I don't like it It does feel like The backward the opposite progression of what you'd expect. I feel like looking at the new version That would be the old version It kind of it almost and not to say there's this bad this dated But it kind of brings me like a gingerbread sort of feel like like that sort of era 2.x of android I feel like that would be where it came from and then the design would get simplified To what it is presently that being said, I'm sure if this happens We'll all gripe about it for a few months and make it used to it forget But but looking at it side by side it does feel like the backwards progression to me It's funny because going back to the volume slider thing um I feel like we the current volume slider is broken Right, I feel like we can all agree like the and this is the the the one that won the patron pick, right? um The current volume slider doesn't give you as much control You know, you know, we want more detail and all this sort of stuff But michelle the the the video that you showed that we're like Like we're getting what we want and my first reaction is like, oh, that's too much Right, it's just like it's huge and like there's somebody like it's definitely more bubbly And remember jason when they first oh god, this is years ago But they remember when they moved to like they went from really thin small kind of UI Stuff to really big You know chunky kind of style and we're like, oh, this is whatever and jr. It's the same thing We're like you gripe about it the first time you see it You kind of groan and then you use it and you just forget about it and you move on right until until you see The next generation so it's yeah, and they'll change it back again in another two years anyway, so Yeah Yeah, and it's worth noting that these UI changes like the status bar icons and the volume panel They aren't Active yet an entered 15 developer preview. I had to manually enable them and there's a chance that these are not the final designs I mean, of course, they're not the final designs. They're not even active yet in the developer preview So they could be updated or they might not ever go live in the betas or the stable build later this fall So we'll have to wait and see All right, we'll wait and see Cool. Well, thank you to all the patrons who voted for the news pick of the week Go to patreon.com slash android faithful You can vote every week every monday. It goes up If you become a patron this week you can get access to the intelligence at a discounted rate And yeah, we thank you for your support. You guys are awesome. So now's the time go go go go All right coming up. We've got some hardware to talk about All right When we were prepping for today's show, I was like, man, we've already talked about the three pixel Nine future but kind of sounded like maybe we hadn't or if we had it was kind of You know a while ago And I guess in my mind I was like, yeah, I've heard of this before so I assumed we had talked about it on the show So what am I even talking about? Apparently the pixel nine is potentially going to have three different models Not just two which we're kind of used to at this point. It's going to be the pixel nine The nine pro and the nine pro xl Which is kind of funny Anyways, uh How how do I explain this earlier in january? We discussed a render. I think it was by 91 mobiles That was at the time we thought the pixel nine and the nine pro Turns out according to on leaks that those were actually the nine pro and the nine xl Or pro xl or whatever they're calling it now we have the design According to this leak again on 91 mobiles by on leaks Of the pixel nine. So this would be kind of like the baseline device. I guess the smaller Lesser of the three devices, which you know is evidenced by the I guess Do the other ones have three lenses and this one only has two. That's my understanding anyways Although that kind of looks like it's already filled out. But anyways, uh similar in design to the nine pro dual camera setup Um, you know, of course the camera bar is kind of like the the big pill format Which actually now that I'm looking at it looks a lot like the volume sliders that we're just looking at Um rounded corners all around flat display on the front 6.03 inch display in fact So yeah, this is kind of what we're looking at right here. We actually have even um A uh kind of a render Of it as well So there you go. There it is soak it in the pixel nine and all its glory Do how do we the the the three models that are rumored? How do we feel about that? Do we feel as if it's too much or is it necessary? Right, because that's that that's that that's the conversation I'm seeing online, which is like are they are they pushing the limit like do we really need three models at this point? I feel like three makes sense. We already do a lot smaller. Yeah, sorry You basically already do have three models if you consider the a series basically part of the lineup And there were rumors that google may not continue the a series next year So this could basically be you know, like in the future. We might only have the main nine nine plus maybe and nine pro basically to mimic Kind of like the galaxy, you know the s series the s plus the s ultra and Also put it more comparably to the iphone the you know the iphone base model the plus the pro and the pro max, right? So they could be doing something similar Because right now there's a huge price gap between the base pixel eight and the pixel eight pro and They might have something like right in the middle to basically appeal to both ends That's an interesting point. That would kind of make it make sense My initial reaction is also it seems like it's going to confuse people and be too much I was a long time compact phone holdout and I resisted I kind of went back and forth as I had to but I never really liked the larger You know plus size phones that they're all plus size phones now But what were once plus size phones? But that being said it's been long enough that I feel like even I've kind of gotten used to it And given the choice if I could get I have the pixel eight pro if I could get that same phone in a smaller form I don't know that I would I've kind of gotten used to it But what michelle's saying makes a lot of sense that it could Fill the gap of if they're potentially going to phase out the a model at some point It seems like a shame because the a model Was once the affordable option and it's kind of crept up so people who don't want to Pay flagship prices don't have a great Like mid-range upper budget kind of option in the pixel domain anymore, which is a shame But from from a product marketing standpoint I do find it interesting because like I with you if you roll because I like the Calendar placement of the a phones, right? You had the launch of the That we'll just say for now the eight and the eight pro You know with a you know with a fall launch and then the a coming several months afterwards, right? So you had windows of purchases for those customers and I wonder if if you Get rid of the a and just have three phones at that fall point. Are they cannibalizing potential? I don't know. There's I'm sure that there are people Analyzing the sales numbers and talking the salt and talking through the stuff I'm sure samsung's been through this as well You know when when to roll out the phone and that sort of thing But I guess time will tell we'll see I mean does google follow in samsung's footsteps and have you know separate out the foldable Thing into its own time period right, you know have its standard phones is another so many questions They'll be answered this year so many questions and all we can do is guess so many well one of my big questions lately is Can they make foldables any lighter? And luckily vivo is stepping up to the up up to the plate and saying yes, we can Because the latest foldable is the vivo x fold 3 Which is a book style foldable? And it weighs 219 grams, which is very light considering that has a 5700 mAh battery in there And fun fact it's also lighter than most candy bar phones In fact, it's lighter than the s the samsung s24 ultra and the iphone 15 pro max So it's a foldable that's lighter than that phone. Yeah Um, so it's got an 8 8.03 inch 120 hertz interior display and a 6.53 inch 120 hertz cover display And it's running the snapdragon 8 gen 3 chipset and it's got 16 giga ram 512 giga storage or 16 giga ram and 1 terabyte of storage Um, that's a and like I said the the pro model has a large battery of 5700 milliamps So you can get a 1 terabyte foldable phone with a 5 5700 mAh battery And it can be light as a feather So they're getting light. They're getting thin these foldables I've never held a vivo phone in my hand But I sure would like to because every time I see the phone one of their phones come out. I'm like, oh, that's nice I like that But Ron, you would like this to be your hand right here. I would I can only wish yeah, so It's got the big round camera like that like the one plus kind of style Hasselblad, you know, not not Hasselblad, but the but the the circle the circle camera design What's what's the word? I'm looking for the camera camera unit, whatever camera bump module. Yeah camera module. Yeah Think I'm a jigger. I believe yeah, think I'm a jigger so And you know, it does look like the one plus open in terms of book style Uh dimensions and size and you know kind of orientation which I which I do approve of as the the right Dimensions for a fold. So I mean look Look at the thinness of one half of it is slightly Larger like ever so slightly larger than the port for the usbc. That's a very good indicator. Yeah Yeah, that says anything. I don't know It really feels like we're at the cusp of foldables becoming more and more mainstream marketable capable I mean the pixel fold was the first foldable phone. I could actually see myself using I was really tempted to get it until the pixel aid came out Um, and it was kind of a little bit of a toss up for me But seeing the technology get thinner the compromises around it get less with each generation I I think that's going to be a really cool area a fun area to watch in the next This year next year the next few years So jarrett's funny because like when the pixel fold came out I felt the same way. I'm like, oh, this is uh, this is a foldable I could get behind have you seen or held the one plus open yet Yeah, no, it's really cool. I you know, I I get stuck on software and and I just the one plus software just doesn't do it for me The slow updates don't do it for me. I know a lot of people love one plus and it's in the past I've been one plus curious at this point I've kind of gotten a little turned off by by some of the things they're doing but hardware wise that thing is Is phenomenal. So yeah, yeah, just the just the feel of it and the shape and everything I just I just really like that one a lot. So yeah, absolutely It'll be interesting to see what what google takes from other places and how it pushes its pixel fold forward and Who if anyone ends up really running away with that crown? I mean, it's so early in the game yet Indeed All right, all right, sir or is it game sir That's what we'll call you michelle You are today you are a game sir Yes, I am a game sir. I have been Using a controller called the game sir and I'm gonna switch my camera over so I can show you the controller in question Okay, it works So I've been using the game sir x2s mobile gaming controller for a little over a week now And I'm absolutely loving this thing. I've been using its predecessor. Let me pull it out right here The regular game sir x2 for over a year now and the new x2s just adds on to what already worked really well with that controller So let me just tell you why this is basically my favorite gaming controller for android phones First things first the game sir x2s and the x2 before it Are some of the only Telescopic gaming controllers that have a usb type c port on the left half So a lot of other controllers have a type c port on the right half and the reason that's important to me specifically Is because it makes it friendly to use with book style foldable phones like the one plus open Imagine if the port was on the right. I would have to Um Extend half my screen below it So I would have basically have like like this right here with half the screen extending below the controller and that would be Really unergonomic to use But fortunately, I don't have to do that because I can just Stick it in like right here And let me just show you quickly. I can just use this extending type c port I can just plug it in and then what I do is I just extend this outward You're blowing my mind using one of these things on a foldable like uh, it's crazy. It's so good. That's it's so good That's cool. That's even though it's so big by the way. Oh, this is something I'll talk about later The app is a little buggy Yeah, right perfect, uh, it just had to crash right there But uh, even with how big this looks in hand like Ergonomically, it feels great to hold it has soft rounded corners that make it easy to place against my palm as well as a rubber grip on the back That you can place your fingers over all the face and shoulder buttons Feel great and are very clicky Like it does feel a bit heavy to hold as you can see this thing is massive after a few hours of gaming But I chalk that up mainly to how I play it You know lying down on my couch and then like holding this thing up while looking down on it from underneath and you know, basically holding this thing up without any elbow support for like a couple hours And you know, it is kind of heavy compared to the razor kishi this thing By itself is about 100 grams heavier than the razor kishi or comparable controllers But I think it's just constructed significantly better the kishi to me felt flimsy and cheap whereas this just Harder plastic shell. It just feels much sturdier At no point have I felt that my phone was going to fall out or be damaged when enclosed You know, it's pretty easy as I showed you to get this phone in and out Like just to get it out all I gotta do is extend this out a little bit And then oh, sorry, basically what I do is like this just pull it up a little bit and then it just pops right out And then you can just plug it back in because the type c port can be angled, right? So it's just really easy to the pop in and out Can you when it's in there can I ask you a real quick question because it's a foldable? Oh, no, it's folding the wrong way. I was wondering or no, it's not Can you fold the top of that down a little bit or would that even I don't even think oh, no No, I can do that. Yeah, I'm pretty sure I don't know what that would give you But you know, but you can but you can Yeah, I mean if you want to play it like a nintendo ds if you have yeah, totally Totally Simulator if nintendo wasn't nuking them at this point. I was gonna say yeah, good luck. Yeah, you could It's easy to get the phone in and out as I said And the best part is that all the parts that the phone comes in contact with Are protected by like this really kind of hard rubber part So you don't have to worry at all about like your phone getting damaged and there's even like a slight gap kind of hard to see between The part here and the camera bump. So nothing ever gets scratched for me and um Yeah, another key aspect of the controller is its use of hall effect joysticks. So these joysticks Have a magnetic field sensor to measure position of movement of my joystick input in contrast standard analog joysticks use Potentiometers to measure position and movement and if you're a gamer one benefit You may have heard about of hall effect joysticks is that they're significantly less susceptible to stick drift which is when Your stick is basically moving in games even when it should be in its neutral position And I mean I can't tell you if this is actually a problem with this controller in particular because I just have not had it Nearly long enough. I've only had it for about a week and to be fair I've had my regular games for x2 for Over a year and I still don't have stick drift on that But that is a problem that can happen long term with these kinds of joysticks on these kinds of controllers Which is which are much more common. Hall effect joysticks are not nearly as common as the um, regular potentiometer based joysticks But so, you know, if you plan to use this for a long time, it is definitely nice to have that, you know for as a feature And as a bonus game sir includes two pairs of silicone grips. I have added the convex Silicone grips to my device potentially and they feel really really nice to use But if you prefer concave, they also had it in this little packet that they give you with the controller that's inside this box Okay, and this controller also has hall effect analog triggers So what that does is allows you to switch between hair and analog trigger modes If you press down on the capture key, which is this bottom left button plus the left and right triggers For two seconds in the default analog trigger mode. The triggers are pressure sensitive. I can detect exactly how much you're pressing down I'm gonna open up the game sir controller a game sir app. Hopefully it doesn't crash. Hopefully I can show you The game pack that so I'm like pressing down right now. You can kind of see it's like pressure sensitive, right? A lot of controllers like um, if you enable the hair trigger mode If I just tap it lightly it would go immediately to 255 It's it would take a little bit of time to change mode. So I'm not gonna do that right now But this is the default analog mode. It's like detecting exactly how much pressure I'm putting down You can also enable turbo mode for any of the face or shoulder buttons by pressing down on the capture key Then tapping the button you want This basically, you know, just separate the rapid input of buttons So you don't have to constantly mash a in your by yourself By default the controller has an x-box style button layout So a b x y but if you want to swap the a b button so that b's basically here and a is here To match the uh, nintendo switch layout You can hold the capture Plus a button down for two seconds and then it swaps these two buttons so that they do the opposite of what they do right now You can also change from the default x input mode to the direct input mode by holding the Game sir and this s button here Down for a couple of seconds. There's also awesomely a g touch mode Which is a really weird name. But what it does is it allows you to map button inputs to Touches on screen and you can only do this by launching a game directly through the game sir app Um, here I have a screenshot of genshin impact, which normally does not support controller inputs But through g touch mode. I'm able to basically you can see here Um, this is just a screenshot But like I had a map to the attack button be mapped to the jump button And then like my left analog stick allows me to move the game character left and right the camera left and right Um, this is much better than third party solutions like third party apps like mantis gamepad Which also can map um button inputs But those are those use kind of like hacky work around to intercept your key presses on your controller And then they inject touch inputs So this is a much better built-in solution offered through the game sir app Which also offers a whole bunch of other features to you know Test your game pad update the firmware change your buttons, etc The last thing I wanted to mention is that there's a pass through usb type c port at the bottom So that you can charge your phone while you're gaming That's really nice so that you know, you can game for longer or you're short on battery And you don't want to quit your gaming session So overall this device is a Great gaming controller Considering the build quality the number of features that has just how many hours you can sync in the gaming on your phone with this like I love the original game sir x2 and Ever since I got a book style foldable for starting with the galaxy z4 5 and now the 1 plus open I've just been playing so much more games on my phone because I just did not find it comfortable the game on A regular candy bar phone that would just look like a nintendo switch. I'd never found I have a switch Right, but I'd never game in the handheld mode because I just didn't find it big enough But the book style foldable and with a controller that's basically made for foldables I've been gaming must gaming so much more than I thought I would And the best part is this thing only costs 45 99 on amazon Which I think is a fair price considering the sheer number of things you get Super fair original the original game sir x2 also costs 45 99 But the game sir x2 s adds those additional features like the hall effect triggers and joysticks Compared to some competitors. It's missing some features like a built-in cooling fan 3.5 millimeter pass-through audio jack and As you saw in earlier in the video a less buggy app because it can sometimes crash on this device Um, but I still think the controller itself with everything it offers is more than enough Like I didn't even use the app until I started reviewing it Like I didn't know it offered those extra features because I just found everything and offered by itself just the ergonomics Perfectly fine. So you don't even have to use the app if you don't want to But if you want to play games that don't support button inputs Then I highly recommend you you check out the app and if you want a game on your foldable I highly recommend you do check out this controller for your Foldable phone or if you have a regular clamshell phone for that device as well That's pretty rad I love I love that that it's styled. It's very um, super nintendo, right? Yeah Yes, yeah, they they say it's styled after the nintendo 2ds um, I I guess so I I still like I like the retro-ish look the color scheme of it like this It does remind me of like that kind of era of gaming like the Super nintendo I think yeah, I had this color scheme if I'm not mistaken. Yep sure did Yes, indeed and then the other one of course looked a lot like a switch But I'm pretty sure I have my my super nintendo must be at my parents. I never got rid of it I just sold my xbox and xbox 360s, but I kept my uh, nintendo 64 And uh, yeah Don't get rid of the 64. Yeah That's awesome 40 cool 46 dollars That's a good deal amazon. That's a very good deal for sure. So yeah game sir Great name. Yeah. Thank you game sir. I'm sir All right, cool So we've covered pixels. We've covered foldables. We've covered gaming. What other categories are there on hardware? Oh photography Yeah, that's that's the other thing that people get all all geeked about When it comes to mobile and xiaomi is there to offer you a Something a little different for all of you photography nerds who like your smartphones and your cameras in the same device the xiaomi 14 ultra Has an add-on kit that you can you can well you can add to the phone That essentially turns it into a true camera looking device as you can see here Uh complete with a detachable hand grip. So this hand grip actually comes off. It snaps on to the case and uh Yeah, I mean it it really you know turns that sucker into a camera. It has a two stage shutter A zoom rocker. It has a customizable dial. It has a video button the dial by default is is assigned to Exposure compensation, but you of course that's customizable so you can you know, you can you can change that however you like And uh, yeah, the xiaomi 14 ultra photography kit is what you're looking at there So if you'd like your phone to look this is more like a camera that is also a phone when it's in this mode That's what you got. But of course we're in the u.s. So we can't buy these Not easy. Yeah, we're missing that stuff I miss when you know, what there were all these cool weird gadgety forms of phones and Maybe one day, maybe one day that stuff will make its way to the states again because in the early days of android I mean kind of tying into what michelle was doing. You remember there was What was it like sony had the the I forget what it was called kind of like a game boy phone sort of thing where it was part of the form The play yeah, yeah, yeah Yeah, we used to have a lot of just weird stuff There were phones with kickstands with all sorts of attachments and I feel like some of that Modular back. Yeah the modular the lg modular phones and Yeah, I've got a stack of moto mods over here the Motorola with the camera with the camera I remember the round camera on top of it. Yeah Well, I will say I was talking about this very phone With a friend of the show also in the live chat mr. Burke Who said that he would buy this in a heartbeat for the pixel phone And to your point jr You know, I do think that domestically like it doesn't have to be modular But it can cool little add-ons doesn't have to be pixel. It could be samsung. It could be one plus any you know, but like There's a portion of the world that wants this sort of stuff, right? And so, you know, it's cool Yeah, it's never going to be the mainstream what everyone buys But it's like a cool niche product that that a certain subset of devoted Whatever kind of geeks are going to get into and that's uh, that's kind of what has always made android fund that it can cater Not just to the mainstream but to specific Groups and interests. So unfortunately, unfortunately if you talk to anybody with an mba niche product always equals low sales So but like but then you got to really wonder why xiaomi would then go down this path and even offer it, right? Like because clearly you got to you balance out What is the market going to determine and how much, you know Perspective sales we can get and and if the numbers work then do it like i'm with you I want to see this stuff in the marketplace. Yeah, I guess in theory Maybe that's where somewhere like a one plus or a nothing or one of the the smaller companies Where a small piece of the pie could mean a lot to them perhaps would work better That being said, I mean, obviously the stuff on some level was tried. It didn't work So maybe the business case just doesn't make sense. But from a user's perspective, it would be really awesome to see Yeah, yeah, indeed for sure All right. Well, that's going to wrap it up for hardware. Let's get into some apps some quick, uh Bites for you some quick things to hit Um I don't know Jason if we want to go with the full taps as of yet because it's not truly dead But google podcasts is uh on It's on life support if anything, um as of this week Sure, why not? Um as of this week it actually stops working Um, so no if you use google podcasts as your main podcatcher Stop using it where you get that in a second. Um, they are Fully integrating podcasts into the youtube music app And they've built a migration tool to allow you to migrate your data from google podcasts to youtube music As well as I believe to export your data to go somewhere else if you wanted to Um google actually shared this in september, uh that that quote this matches what listeners of podcasts are already doing According to edison about 23 of our weekly podcast users in the u.s Say youtube is their most frequently used service versus just four percent for google podcasts Which I always thought was interesting that they went with outside edison research versus they're actually They're use of data which they would know how many users were using this or not um, I do think the underlying motive is to Condense their their app offering to and to push youtube music as the main audio You know, whether it's music or podcast or whatever app in the google umbrella Um, but you know a lot of people might wonder like well, what's the you know Does google podcasts even matter or whatever? I did some of our own data some of our own research And with my other podcast iFanboy Google podcasts represent five percent of the listening audience of that show On android faithful, you would think android google podcasts, whatever It actually we actually had eight percent of our listening audience using google podcasts Which means eight percent of you listening right now need to move to pocket casts or youtube music Because we don't want to lose you as a listener or podcast addict or whatever whatever your text box Whatever you want to do. Um, I do believe the the podcast app of choice of the show is pocket cast though I I have no no shame in saying that I love pocket casts, but um, uh, but interestingly enough google podcast at eight percent of our listenership Is in our top 10 of platforms, right? So it is a significant audience That I hope podcasts in general just don't lose by people not I mean, I gotta imagine people will move to something, but um Podcasts are gonna take a hit with the death of google podcasts. So if you're listening to this on google podcasts Go listen. Go get something else It's a shame shame to see google dig itself deeper into this this whole of distrust It's created around itself. I I feel like for a while It was kind of a joke and an in-crowd geek android person thing But over the last few years I hear more and more from just regular non Tech obsessed people like why are they always changing things? Why does this shut down? Why doesn't this I think people even if On some level even if not explicitly you're starting to pick up and get annoyed by it I know I hear it certainly from the tech savvy crowd, but even just from kind of like the lay people and I didn't use google podcasts as much as I was tempted to try it Just because I was thinking yeah, it's probably gonna be gone in a couple years and we've seen that so many times It's like a self self-fulfilling prophecy Yeah, well my problem with google podcasts always was that it just wasn't as feature-rich as I hoped it would be Right and and the that the when we when it came out. We were remember Jason. We were super optimistic We're like wow google's gonna really commit the podcast. We're gonna have a search You're gonna search within the audio or something like that audio Yeah, like all these things that are totally possible that would have been really You know amazing and the interface never really did it for me and just like you know in that way the podcast does Yeah, exactly. Yeah, the ui was not great And so like I don't think we're losing anything By not having google podcasts in the same way like like I think if a product isn't working or people aren't using it kill it Move on uh, you know like I question whether youtube music is the best alternative That's why I would suggest to go to pocket casts, but um You know it is what it is. So another one bites the dust I think I mentioned this when google announced the death of podcasts I I I said that If at this point google announces a new music media or video related Product that isn't part of the youtube umbrella Don't hop on just wait for it It's gonna get killed off and then eventually fold it under youtube as it should have been from the very beginning As sort of all of these things that eventually got killed and moved over to youtube It seemed like that's been the trajectory for every single thing that initially started as Google something related to tv or movies eventually got folded and put under youtube. Yep. Yep. You're right. So All right, so that's it for google podcasts. Uh, so what's going on with with google maps michelle? Well specifically with gemini so the gemini Um app slash service if you're using it on your device Right now if you were to ask it to navigate to somewhere now it'll automatically start google maps navigation for you So just a neat little quality of life update that started rolling out with a recent version of the gemini Service on android. So if you updated the app recently on your android phone Now you can start navigation directly From gemini and when you ask for corrections to somewhere someplace And another integration that recently started rolling out is in the google messages app If you have a samsung or a pixel phone, you can now chat directly with the gemini chat bot Through the google messages app so long as you have rcs enabled. So you're sending your messages to gemini And it's responding directly in that rcs chat for you and this only works one on one You can't add gemini to a group message like an rcs and an encrypted messaging group And then have it ask questions back and forth from multiple members because you know It's I think your messages aren't ended encrypted when you're talking to gemini through rcs So that's one thing keep in mind, you know This is just for like a for fun thing You want to ask it some questions while you're in the messages app And is this another way for google to bring its chat bot in front of users instead of having them Open the gemini app or open a web browser and going to the gemini website Speaking of ghosts of the past anyone else hearing echoes of aloe in the room This is familiar we've been down this road before Yes, indeed But it is nice to see gemini getting closer to almost being capable of Some of the things that google assistant could do maybe one day it'll get there Like I said, I'm a little skeptical of it in these contexts. I feel like it's it's an interesting technology for certain purposes I don't know that being a phone assistant Is where its strengths lie It feels kind of like we're stepping backward and the things we're gaining in the assistant context might not be Great for that context, but uh, who knows we'll see where we are in another six months Here it's obviously evolving rapidly, but it uh, it certainly feels like it got pushed out before it was ready for the masses That's for sure. It's going to take some time. I think yeah to catch up because when I hear, you know, like the Automatically starting google maps navigation like I can't remember if if I if I told assistant to navigate somewhere If it automatically launched it, but like I think it probably did right Didn't like I don't know. Did I did I ever do that and did it actually do that? Seems like a feature that assistant probably did at some point and then eventually they removed it and now they're bringing it back See this is just how it goes. It's an endless cycle endless loop And it'll be in youtube in a couple more weeks. So yes, they're gonna they're gonna fold Yeah, google maps navigation into youtube uh in a couple of weeks. You just wait and see Uh chrome for android is getting a new android tab declutter feature So if you are one of those people Who lets those chrome tabs build and build and build over time Uh, apparently the feature called well android tab declutter Is expected to arrive in chrome 125 launch in may at some point And uh, this is all according to code spotted by chrome story When enabled the browser will automatically archive and delete tabs that aren't in use So it does that for you so you don't collect, you know We've had we've had times on the show where we've counted how many tabs we have open on our Our chrome and you know people in the audience have shared and I mean sometimes it gets up there. It's like 500 Yeah, I mean 600. I this is the thing that makes me wonder who at google listens to the show It seems as if someone on the chrome team was like we could help them with that Do something there 95 google says you should still be able to see the tabs you left open even after they've been archived That's a good thing. That was one thing that I was wondering It's like well, wait a minute. What if I don't want it to do that? And you know, of course, this is a feature so you could turn it off I'm guessing once it actually launches and you don't want Don't want to do that. So Yeah, could could be useful. I don't know are those are those on android on chrome chrome for android If I've got a hundred, you know kind of tabs, they're not all occupying memory at that point, right? Like I know on a browser sometimes you have multiple tabs open depending on their Yeah, their state, you know, they they are drawing or not drawing It seems like they go inactive because even which is like 15 open when you swipe to one is going to refresh basically Yeah, totally, right Yeah, so but yeah, you know you're in trouble and this feature is for you if you ever see that little It's like the sideways smiley face the colon d Which I I just have it like maybe when you hit 100 if you ever see that this feature is probably for you I feel sometimes so you've got several people who've sent in their tab their tab counts. Um, yeah And it's been into the hundreds which is crazy. So Currently right now. I will check mine. Uh, I am at four So that's impressive. I'm at 13, which is pretty low for me All right, Jason. Michelle. What do you guys at? Well, let me just one second One just one. Oh wow, of course. Oh, I've got the side smiley face. Oh, there it is. Jason's gonna win Uh And so much so that it's not telling me how many is there. It's just side smiley face So that means you have over a hundred. That means you have over a hundred. You got to count them up tonight. Get back to everybody Okay, there's my homework for this evening Publish this podcast or count my chrome tabs. Publish the podcast, please. Okay All right, I know do that our last few google podcast listeners need it. So Apparently I need this feature. Yeah I'll activate it. Sure. Why not? Okay Well, that's gonna do it for the show, but first we got some email from the from all of you the listeners Uh, you can email us at contact at android faithful.com and let us know what you think We've had so many people following up, uh, on stuff that we talk about the show. It's so delightful It's hard to pick the show. They you know, what would emails get onto the show? Um, but we got a couple of good ones here So, uh, michelle, you got the first one. So why don't you take it away? Well, technically it's a second one, but you kind of skipped over the first one earlier in the show We pivoted michelle. We pivoted So our new first email of the week comes from dan m who writes in to tell us Hey team, I recently went for the one plus watch two after seeing the initial reviews. It's my first watch Um There we go. There we go. Oh, sorry. There we go with the wrong one. Ah, there we go Oh, there we go. There we go. There it is. There we go. Uh I love it But the only thing I did dislike is the sound quality using the watch versus my pixel six pro with my pixel bots pro There is no equalizer options The sound is flat and so poor that I just don't use it Is this an issue with all where I was watches all the best love the show So happy you came back to life after twit. Thanks dan m so I don't know what Jason you use use the one plus watch two as well, right? Do you listen to music on it like with your buds Um With my buds. No, well, no, actually, I don't really sync my music to my watch No, it's just not something that I normally do so I couldn't really weigh in on this I was trying to I do yeah I was trying to understand uh, if it was through the speaker, but I but I see I miss the the pixel buds As we can't play music over the speaker. Yeah, I do I have paired my one plus watch two with my picks with my galaxy buds two pro that I'm wearing right now and I do occasionally use it like when I'm jogging outside, but uh You know, I haven't really paid attention to the sound quality. It hasn't really sound It hasn't really sounded bad to me, but like I'm listening it in outdoors I'm not really caring that much about the quality of the audio So it's not something I particularly paid attention to but I mean I wouldn't be surprised if there is a difference in quality between pairing it to your phone and listening through that versus pairing it to your watch and listening through that because the Bluetooth chip on your phone is significantly more advanced and probably can focus more on audio quality versus focusing more on battery life when you're pairing it to your watch for your premiere pairing it to your phone versus the watch. So would it be a matter of a different codec or something might be a different codec being used, right? Like I don't know what codecs the one plus watch two supports it does have a Qualcomm Bluetooth chip and a Qualcomm chip set running on it Yeah, it should support AptX but I don't I think the Pixel Buds Pro support AptX as well but I don't know if it's using that codec particularly So it could be a number of things it's unfortunately kind of hard to diagnose what the exact problem is and there's no user app you can install on your watch to kind of fix it on your own Well, it doesn't sound like it's a Wear OS problem necessarily I mean like when I got my Pixel 2 and I experimented with going running I used it with the nothing ear stick and I didn't notice any sound degradation I was listening to podcasts I wasn't listening to music it wasn't totally you know high fidelity or not and as we've all documented my ears are not what they used to be so maybe I didn't notice them but not to say that Dan isn't noticing something different you know be curious yeah I don't yeah I don't know it's tough to say Dan mentions equalizer option and I wonder I mean I don't know for certain but I wonder if because I don't really use an equalizer option on my phone when you know with my bluetooth earbuds I just kind of take it flat and that's fine I wonder if there are some users out there who are so reliant upon the equalizer and shaping the sound to be exactly what they want that when you get onto a device that doesn't have the option for an equalizer it does sound different it's not accentuated in the lows and the highs or whatever will sound flatter and as a result it's not going to sound as good I don't know if that's the problem exactly here that Dan is talking about but Dan does mention the equalizer maybe maybe that's the difference I don't know I feel like I want to test this now because uh sorry Michelle I was just gonna say I've got the pixel watch too as well I don't make a habit of streaming music directly from the watch it just doesn't come up like Jason was saying all that often I know I've done it a few times and I've never noticed anything either but I've never really set out to to test it so now now I'm curious I have to try and see but no it's never jumped out at me either with with the pixel excuse me pixel watch one or two with both which I've used just say yeah I know the pixel buds app has an equalizer feature and I don't know if that's applying like an equalizer curve directly to the watch to the watch itself or if that's I'm sorry to the buds itself or if that's applying it on your phone like for music that's being streamed yeah if this is a good question if Dan has like the equalizer set on their phone and that's being applied to anything streamed you know to their buds that could be why it sounds different when they're playing music from their pixel six versus they're playing it from their one plus watch too yeah I kind of always assume that those eq curves happen through the transit transmission of the sound from the phone to the buds and not that it was like hard coding some sort of eq curve in the earbuds but I actually don't know that for sure I that's just an assumption that I've made well if you if you have a Wear OS watch and you've experienced your you're linking up headphones or earbuds to the watch itself and you've noticed similar to what Dan has right in let us know we want to hear from you the community so yes indeed all right Jason you got the next this is a this is a twofer follow up on last episode dual dual emails one from John from Minneapolis who says last week one one back now was our guest last week asked how to answer the phone without losing the navigation screen one option is to use a headset and answer from the headset then the phone application doesn't come on screen another is to use ways and select keep ways on top in the settings which is a two two solutions which is a good segue to the next email Eric Roseville Michigan says I'm sure you've received a but received a bunch of responses to this but just in case here just in case here it is ways actually has an option to keep ways on during phone calls I've included a screenshot if Juan doesn't use ways and instead uses google maps and supposedly the only reason his issue happens is supposed to be because background operations have been disabled for google maps not sure if that's his issue but it could be thanks for the amazing show and have a wonderful week thank you so he did provide for those those watching the video on the left is the screenshot from ways where many people wrote in and told us the if you use ways there's keep ways on top and that's where you can keep it on there but if you use google maps the second screenshot explains how to keep google maps on screen during a phone call you want to go to settings select installed apps select maps select permissions and then select allow background operations and that will enable maps to stay on on the screen during a phone call so hopefully Juan is listening I know he listens to the show I'm also going to send him a note to tell him to listen to the show about this he can find out about it so yeah right on thanks for sending all those those tips in everybody indeed and then we got one more tip coming in this email comes in from Mike Swanson who says hey guys been enjoying your shows since the days of all about android thanks for the hard work Mike says I purchased the pixel 7a shortly after it was released last year and I've been very happy with it in all respects except one I found from the beginning that even with moderate use I would not make it more than about eight hours before the battery was at 20 percent I reviewed the battery usage stats and no single app was at fault so I searched the web for a solution while many people had the same problem no solutions were presented it wasn't until about three months later that I found a string on reddit that solved the issue read it to the rescue again he says it was simply a matter of powering it down and powering it back up apparently the batter was never close to running out of juice but rather the phone wasn't monitoring it correctly after more than seven months the problem is never returned now I'm perfectly happy with my 7a thought this might be useful info for your listeners as this info is hard to find online best regards Mike Swanson um and I just let this is a testament to the have you turned it tried turning it off and turning it on on again so is Mike saying that for that for three months he never turned it off and on that's what it sounds like that's that's impressive to me like yeah I don't know maybe it's just how's that even possible wouldn't it look they never had an update I mean that's a good point yeah if you didn't because the update call no the update causes a restart it doesn't call a power off power on which which well which does you know like the I think it does I think it does count that should count in terms of like android tracking battery stats but I don't think it does the problem is like the android is you know wasn't properly tracking the battery stats and a quick restart of the OS which is which powered off and powered it back on started I don't know but like I mean going back to the surprising to be that they go back to the day once we started their phone in like three months going back to the days of windows you know like the difference between control alt delete and powering it off letting it sit for five minutes and powering it back on and getting a clean boot you know I think whatever something is weird going on my phone I do a power down I let it sit for a minute and then I power it back up and so like sometimes that just it cures all else but it definitely does that's that's just I'm I'm kind of like impressed at that three months because I feel like I I feel like I reboot my phone for so many random reasons multiple times a week and I'm just kind of used to it at this point I've done it for years I rebooted my phone earlier today actually it's fun not rebooted but power like hard power powered up because actually Michelle the near drop on my mac os stopped working with quickshare on my phone like it was working and now it stopped working and I can't figure out why it stopped working it doesn't see my phone anymore so that was nice while it lasted did the power cycle do anything for you it did not I was hopeful I was hopeful that it would but it did not so I'm assuming that whatever is causing circle to search not to work is also affecting quickshare you just need to wipe your phone and start I don't want but oh my god I don't want to have to reset I hear you I totally get it I don't want to well it's what you need to do and the thing is is that like I know that it's better than ever to reset up a phone now like I know that the problem is this is no it's still such a huge pain it's a huge pain for me and it's also the control freaking me I have to back up my entire whatsapp chat uh you know I the I back up all my sms messages I do all this backup all like the played and unplayed status on pocket cat like all like there's a whole bunch of stuff that exists on that phone I don't want to do it again so yeah I mean the process is better yeah but I mean yeah it's it's still a pain in the butt it still takes me a couple of hours at least to set up a new phone and then you still find three days later like oops I forgot to sign into this app yeah yeah I'll log into those websites that didn't keep me signed in or yeah totally but there are certain settings that that transfer over that I don't have to some don't to then you then you log in and it's why totally it's totally notification sounds they I just reset up the phone recently and that was one that you always forget like the custom notification sounds per app those never carry over yeah right right gosh all right well thank you everybody for writing in thank you Mike all the mics and Dan's and Eric's and John's who wrote in email us at contact at android faithful.com we love to hear from you bring it on the emails yes indeed love the feedback love hearing from you all love having j.r.a feel on the show anytime we can get you on the show it's always a pleasure always a treat to see y'all yeah it's really great to have you here man tell us give us a little end of show plug for the intelligence any last final thoughts yeah come on over join us theintelligence.com I write android intelligence every Friday it goes out with three things to know three things to try there's also a windows intelligence newsletter if that's your cup of tea and then we do a cool tools newsletter every Wednesday with one off the beaten path cool tool as it were that you probably haven't heard of that'll work on any device you're using so you can sign up for any or all those at theintelligence.com if you want to join us on the insider front one last time is theintelligence.com slash insider and use that coupon code I love Ron Richards it'll knock 25 bucks off and again if you are already an android faithful supporter keep an eye out because you'll get an extra special code that will do even more for you so yeah we'd love to see everybody I did not have anything to do with that coupon code but I love you for sure you could say that you love you jr you're the best yeah you're the best thank you jr uh michelle what do you want to leave people with so as you can tell I write a lot about androids especially android 15 this year and a lot of the new features that are being talked about in the media are things that I found from doing a lot of digging into the developer previews and beta builds so if you want to find out first what's coming new in android 15 you can follow me on twix mastodon threads reddit etc at Michelle Ramon and if you want to support the work that I do you can go to patreon.com slash Michelle Ramon support me for minimum three bucks a month you can join my discord group which is where I share a lot of information I share a lot more there now because I'm focusing more on article writing but I don't have nearly as much time to post on social media as much but I do post a lot on discord I even share sneak peeks of things that I'm working on so if you want to see a sneak peek of the articles that I'm writing for tomorrow and the day after and next week and so on you can go to discord and you will be able to see what's coming next in android before I actually finish and publish my article on it amazing get the inside scoop with Michelle Ramon thank you Michelle that's your tagline you can go ahead and put that on the on the patreon there it is it's the t-shirt super original thank you Michelle uh ron what about you yes you can follow me on social media i'm at ron xo across all the various socials and all that stuff most active on instagram um it's very easy but also uh i've got an app in the google play store called scorbid if you're into pinball i encourage you to check it out if you haven't downloaded yet already um leave a review if you like it but uh yeah it's a great it's a app that me my friends put together to help you uh keep find places to play pinball keep track your scores put your friends all that fun stuff um we've got exciting stuff coming soon uh this year so if you haven't checked it out please do uh and go play pinball it's a ton of fun so do pinball's rad it is excellent thank you ron and Jason what is going on in the world of yellow gold oh boy um just trying to trying to stay on that treadmill and keep creating things um great you're doing great thank you thank you i'm having a lot of fun i'm learning a lot about what it takes to to run a youtube channel and grow a youtube channel anyways just go to yellowgoldstudios.com that's where um pretty much all of like my independent kind of content creation is is hitting in one way shape or form yes i have podcasts but they also have video components and they're hitting here as well um or you can go to aiinside.show which actually i should mention i really happy with this week's episode we had sal khan who is the founder and um and CEO of conacademy on uh this week's episode and or last week's episode rather and it was just it was just really great to have sal on he's he's a brilliant man and i love what he's doing with education he's he's done a lot um for the digital kind of classroom and now he's talking a lot about kind of the future of the classroom with ai so that's what we uh talked about me and jeff jarvis it was a lot of fun so check it out aiinside.show that's it um as for this here podcast we do the show every Tuesday all you have to do is go to androidfaithful.com and you can find all the many ways to subscribe to android faithful yes we do have a video component which is on youtube um but if you go to the android faithful site for each episode you can find the audio version there and then you can also find the video version kind of embedded into there so that's kind of nice and then of course as we've said a few times in today's episode patreon.com slash android faithful if you want to support us directly you do get special perks you get uh sometimes you know we we put up special videos just for you but really i think the big feature that a lot of people subscribe for is the fact that you get an ad-free uh recording of the podcast so android faithful uh can be found at patreon.com slash android faithful thank you so much for watching and listening to this episode of android faithful we love doing this show every Tuesday and uh we hope that we will continue to see you week after week if you want to join us live you can through uh youtube as well the dts channel and uh yeah we'll see you next time thank you again jr for being here and uh thanks to you all for watching and listening we'll see you next time on android facebook bye the shirts look good yeah yeah this feel good really comfy i'm glad it's comfy so which which style did you get like you know how they had like 10 different styles you can get there were lots see i splurge because i have found when i just get the regular i don't a cotton shirt i never wear i yeah i i feel like it's that religious to say this but i like the poly whatever blend they're just softer they fit better so i paid an extra like five bucks or whatever and got that one the tri blend or something like that i always go tri blend all the way yeah yeah i'm with you yeah so i have so many shirts that i've gotten that i just never wear up because they just they're not comfortable yep yeah yeah it's it's amazing what the t-shirt heads like because going back i mean i'm dating myself but like back in the in the 90s like when i had a lot of friends in bands and they still screened t-shirts to sell them and stuff like that and there was just like there was just like jersey shirts like there were just like two hains right and they were always like super stiff or like yeah very stiff and like the past 20 years there's been like such crazy t-shirt tech that has gone through in terms of like the tri blend and this blend and like all this sort of different approaches and how they hold the ink and print on demand for silkscreen and all that it just it's it's crazy so yeah do you also find all of your cool 90s like concert t-shirts because the same era here they're all way too big on you now which is funny because you know i was like whatever a teenager then but that was the era when every shirt was enormous on yeah whereas now i can wear clothes that fits yeah i actually i i would because i'm going to go to the basement i found a bunch of bins of t-shirts like it like it's almost like the fossil record it's like oh here is 1999 to 2005 and like oh an old jimmy world shirt old get-up kid's shirt like all this all this stuff i didn't put any of them on though so like yeah and then my wife and i were talking like what i could do with them she's like well you know there's some places where you can send them and they turn them into a quilt i'm like yeah but i don't want to destroy them like and also that's cheesy um and so so we just agreed to leave them in the bins and so yeah that's what a lot of them like the old lot of the old school band t-shirts at least underground like there's a whole secondary market where i see t-shirts that i had that people are selling for hundreds of dollars which is just crazy yeah i can't bring myself to get rid of them either even though i never wear them because they don't fit but yeah there's just like a memento it's like he said like an old album or a ticket stub or whatever you know you know you'll deal with when you're 75 or 80 somewhere down the line then you'll make the decision my children will deal with it one day when i'm not here is there right they open the box whoo okay what is this garbage put that out on the street yep they'll throw out the things i can't bring myself to including multiple phones and and stupid gadgets there you go there you go f.showbot.tv to help pick the title for tonight's episode right now leading with six votes as i love ron richards you're welcome i'm glad i contributed something unbelievable we're not doing that one i we won't i'm gonna go vote for it right now jr brings the intelligence jr brings the intelligence r.i.p google podcasts did you turn it off and back on again google hates ron richards google slaps stingray scammers that one has a nice alliteration to it jr shirt game faithful google slicing sliders slicing sliders what was that uh the slices api that ron was around oh that's right that's right got it i was one plus curious what's your account google generative travel guide pixel nine proxel proxel proxl proxl oh pixel nine proxl got it we pivoted michelle we pivoted that's probably related to something last minute titles emails and that is about it i mean i say r.i.p google podcasts that's just me but i vote for i love ron richards but i don't want my name in the time i don't know why i don't want my name in the title but yeah i understand i understand yeah we can do we can do r.i.p google podcasts i like that my name is in description i don't want to say one in the title just wait till we get the shirts yeah we don't wait someone's gonna sell it on ebay so yes indeed all right r.i.p google podcast there we go that's a winner all right well jr thank you thank you so much man we appreciate you hanging yeah it was fun thanks for having me as always we'll do it again um don't leave though because we have to end the stream and finish our uploads so don't worry about it that's right yeah so thank you everybody for watching listening hanging supporting all the things yes and thank you everybody staying hanging around mike and and uh free spoken one and everybody and eric and everybody talked about the t-shirts and just real quickly mike shulman yes i do have a nezzatomic dustbin t-shirt i have several in fact so there you go i love nezz all right all right everybody we'll see y'all later have a great night night