 Daily Tech News show is made possible by you, the listener. Thanks to all of you, including Irwin Sturr, Ken Hayes, Phillip Shane and brand new patrons, Will, Andre, John and Eric. Welcome everybody. Will, Andre, John and Eric. On this episode of DTNS, it's Mobile World Congress and we have a transparent laptop, a Samsung Galaxy ring and the rejuvenation of OnePlus. This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, February 26, 2024 in Los Angeles, I'm Tom Merritt. I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang and joining us CEO and co-founder of Scorbit and of course, host of All About Andrew, it's written is all about Andrew, host of Android Faithful. I would notice it's it's it's just muscle memory. I didn't even catch it either. Yes. Android faithful Rod Richards. Hey, Ron. Hey, it's going to be back. Yeah, I think this is my first time being on the show since Android Faithful launch. Oh, no, second time. But yeah, no, it's great to be here. Great to be, you know, it's an exciting time to talk about Android. Indeed. Lots and lots of stuff. We're only going to touch on the highlights today. If you want the deep dive. Android Faithful is that you're going to be what six hours tomorrow? We were just talking earlier today. We're very scared of tomorrow's run. We did like we're gonna have to be really, really hard on what we talk about tomorrow. Yeah. No, but they will do they will do it. They will boil it all down for you. But let's give you let's give you the top line starting with the quick hits. At Mobile World Congress, Google announced new features coming to Android products. You'll be able to access Geminis Chatbot in Google messages in English. A feature rolling out to Android Auto can summarize long test messages for you while you're driving and give you context for your group chats as well as suggest replies. Global users of lookout, which reads out descriptions of images you give it will be able to create captions for images that don't have captions or alt text. Users will also be able to ask questions about the image. So it'll tell you what it is. And you could say, Well, is there a cat there or whatever? You'll be able to point your camera at something in maps and get more information about it. So that lens stuff is getting expanded support for handwritten notes is coming to docs on Android phones and tablets. So expanding the platforms and output switch now works with Spotify. So if you've used that with YouTube music, it'll work the same way with Spotify, you can change from headphones to speakers seamlessly. Google Fitness now supports more data sources like MyFitnessPal and URA. And finally, access to passes and tickets in Google Wallet will not just be available on the phone, you'll also be able to show those on your Wear OS watch. And Android reporter for multiple blogs as well as the cohost of Android faithful, Michelle Ramon posted on X that version 1.2024.052 of chat GPT for Android includes a home screen widget. The widget lets you send text images of voice query or start conversation mode. And you can find out more about this on Tuesday's episode of Android faithful. Indeed. Mistral is less than a year old, but it is trying to position itself as an alternative to open AI and anthropic. And it's getting a lot of attention. It incorporated in May. You probably know it for reigning money on itself, as well as being founded by folks from DeepMind and Meta. Now the company has launched Mistral large, which is its alternative to GPT for and clawed to available in English, French, Spanish, German and Italian. Mistral large is like GPT for it's a thing you can use as a developer and enterprise. So the way they charge for those kinds of things is $8 for a million input tokens $24 for a million output tokens. A token isn't exactly a syllable. But if you think of like, oh, that's a million syllables of text that gets you a rough idea of what that means. And for comparison GPT for charges $60 and $120 for equivalent numbers. So Mistral large much cheaper. Microsoft will offer Mistral large to its Azure customers. That's right alongside GPT for Meta's Llama and others Azure has been very cross platform in that respect. And Mistral is also launching a chat bot, more like chat GPT, you can access that in beta for free, at least while it's in beta. It is called Le Chat, which because this is a French company makes me think it's the cat, but it's Le Chat at chat.mistral.ai. And at Mobile World Congress Qualcomm announced a suite of new products and bear with me as we go through this juicy stuff. The Qualcomm AI Hub has more than 75 pre optimized AOI models developers can deploy for use on devices with Qualcomm Snapdragon processors, obviously Qualcomm will will also demonstrate an on device multimodal models running on Android and Windows. The stable diffusion with low rank adoption is considered the largest multimodal model to run on device say that three times fast. The Windows model will have more than 7 billion parameters. And Qualcomm also showed off the x 85 g modem, which has satellite communication capability, and some software to optimize connections, even when even when at the farthest edge of the range from a tower. And then there's fast connects seven, the fast connects 7900, which integrates Wi Fi seven Bluetooth and UWB in a single chip. So bringing the goods. Yeah, yeah. And all we as they do at Mobile World Congress. Finally, here in the quick hits, everybody's been criticizing Apple's compliance with Europe's DMA and DSA frankly, one of those compliance methods may be under investigation. If you recall, we mentioned before on DTS, Apple will no longer support progressive web apps in the same way that it does now in Europe. Right now, iOS lets you download the architecture to make it faster to launch. So a progressive web app, even though it's really just HTML can work in the same way as a native app with features like notifications and local storage. EU's rules say that Apple must allow for alternate browser engines. And Apple says doing all the work to allow progressive web apps architecture with alternate browser engines isn't worth the trouble. It isn't worth the cost to integrate. So they're not going to do it. They're just not going to let any progressive web app save locally, lest they run afoul of the European Union rules. So European Commission told the Financial Times it's investigating that policy and has sent Apple requests for information on what they're doing and why, as well as asking several app developers for their perspectives, probably app developers of progressive web apps. Let's get to the smart ring. Samsung mentioned a smart ring, the Galaxy smart ring in its unpacked event earlier this year, and they are showing it at a media briefing at Mobile World Congress. However, it didn't let the press take pictures, meaning there's some detail there that they don't want being examined under widespread scrutiny. They did release stock photos. So whatever they're trying to hide is out of view in the stock photos, I guess, it'll also measure heart rate, track sleep and fertility. Samsung's head of digital health, Han Pak, so said Samsung is considering a subscription plan, if this goes well, so you could you could pay for Samsung health to get you some more tracking and things to go along with the ring. Company also may add contactless payment functionality so you could pay with your ring. They're working on blood pressure and glucose monitoring possibly through the ring, really, really pushing the health and fitness aspects of this. Samsung Galaxy ring is promised to launch sometime this year. They didn't give us a date, they didn't give us a price, really didn't give us a whole lot of details. They did tell us it'll be available in sizes five through 13, which they will market as small to extra large. They did not announce battery life, but they did say that, you know, there will be larger batteries in the size 13 ring than the size five. So the battery life will be a little longer for that. URA, if you know anything about smart rings at all, which a lot of people don't, but if you do, you probably know URA, that that's the leading member of this category is saying we welcome competitors the way scared people do when their monopoly is almost overturned. What do you think of this, Ron? Well, yeah, I mean, I think we talked about this one when it happened on Unpacked. URA has to say that because it validates the product fit, right? You know, because right now, the average person on the street probably does not know smart rings exist, much less could name URA. But then Samsung comes along with a smart ring, that's a major brand, that's a major company that they expected. So it, from my perspective, this validates the whole product category. And from here, we're going to see, you know, there's been rumor that Apple's been looking into one, you know, we're going to see other companies start to start kind of looking into this space. So while URA is, you know, might be, you know, kind of, you know, scared of this, they should also be glad because competition breeds innovation breeds, you know, that sort of thing. And maybe they could get acquired in the process. So we'll see. But yeah, that's an interesting thought. Blueberries Mark German says Apple is not actively developing a ring, which implies that that's something they've looked into and they haven't killed the project, but they're not advancing on, maybe still waiting to see what the market does that that's kind of an Apple playbook thing, right? You know, wait until a Samsung does it. I do think that the problem with Samsung doing this is not really a problem, but the but usually what happens when Samsung does something like this is all the people who have Samsung Galaxy S or or or foldables, you know, the flip or the fold, get very excited, a bunch of them buy rings, but no one else does. And and so being able to have cross compatibility, I think would be a big boost for this. But that also isn't really the way Samsung plays things. But I can counter that with two words. And you said it in as you're running through the details of it, glucose monitoring. There is an entire population of diabetics and people who are health conscious who need to manage their glucose. And we talked about this on Android faithful when when the rumors of this ring or not rumors, but the the acknowledgment of the rings existence was first mentioned. There are there are people who would change would leave iOS and leave whatever Android phone they're doing and go to Samsung to get accurate glucose monitoring in a ring form. Yeah, it would be worth the cost to do 100% worth the cost. If you think and I'm not diabetic, I don't know what goes into it. I have friends who are diabetic. I know that there's lots of costs, there's lots of materials, test strips and all that sort of stuff. If we're just getting an effective ring that you can wear that could do that, that would be enough to get people to jump and come over to Samsung that that is almost a a game, you know, it's so cliche, but a game changer in the smart ring kind of space, whether or not that's enough people to like give Samsung total smartphone dominance. I don't know, but the the tech savvy diabetics in the world likely would make the change purely for that functionality. If they can get it working and approved by the various regional medical authorities like FDA and stuff. So there's some hills to claim there still. I love the idea of a ring for sleep tracking. I don't want to wear a watch for sleep tracking, but I would wear a ring for sleep tracking. But again, I want to use it with my pixel fold. I don't want to have to switch to a galaxy. They are talking about expanding functionality to other Android devices and I think that's probably something they should do and we could expect that they would do. I don't expect them to really bring it to iOS because Apple's not going to make it easy for them to bring it iOS. So bring it bring it to the rest of Android and I'd probably be happy. The question the question there is how is Samsung going to treat this? Are they going to treat this like the their earbuds that are compatible with any device? Yeah, they're going to treat it like the S Pen which only works on Samsung devices or you know or something unique and they you know because Samsung does love the ecosystem lock-in, right? Which makes which makes sense in South Korea. It may not make as much sense here, but so you know that's that's the real question whether or not they'll make it available and then of course it's the the question we always have which is the battery life, right? Yeah. You know because I doubt I don't think the reason why they didn't allow photos in the media event is because the ring is hooked up to a very small cable that goes to a battery pack that you wear like like the Apple Vision Pro. Oh my god, can you imagine it? Yeah, that would be that would be pretty horrible. Especially two rings. One ring is the battery, the other ring is all the sensors. One battery to rule your ring in this particular case. No and I don't think they need to do something like that. These things are pretty pretty battery efficient. Just real quick the last thing I wonder is like what are they hiding? Why wouldn't they is it that the form factor isn't finished? You know is it is there some some piece of proprietary tech because URA is also out there going like we have so many patents. I don't know. I don't know why I'm mentioning that but we have a lot of patents Samsung. What is your best guess? I mean just the fact that it's not launched, right? So they're releasing stock photos. We see what it looks like. There's some level of acknowledgement. It's not like their height like we don't know what it's the ring, right? We don't know exactly what it's going to look like. I mean it's not like it's not bright pink, right? Like it looks like a metallic ring. But I think just the fact that they are teasing this and giving little exposure and they're trying to build up you know this media event you know obviously is to get the media on their side. They want to control the look. Exactly. And then they're gonna officially launch it. The question going back to your question about interoperability. The thing with Samsung and Android is you always wonder where on the spectrum does this exist with Samsung's relationship with Google, right? Because sometimes it's Samsung's on its own island doing its own Android thing and then sometimes like most recently Unimpact when you've got you know Hiroshi Lockheimer up on stage with Samsung and there's a great partnership. So if there's a chance that this is a Samsung Google kind of partnership to bring this to Apple and Health and does all that sort of stuff I could see why they're holding it close to their vests because everything's got to be vetted not only through Samsung but also through Google. All right we got we got so many other Mobile World Congress announcements. Let's do a little bit of a lightning round for some of these. Xiaomi launched these out Xiaomi 14 outside of China. It launched it in China last week. If you need to jug your memory the 14 Ultra is the one with a quad camera lenses from Leica and that new one inch type Sony LYT 900 sensor. You also get that on the Oppo Find X7 Ultra. So it's all about the camera. You can get it outside the U.S. now. So elsewhere besides China the 14 Ultra is going to cost you 1500 euros 14 starts at 1000 euros takes on takes on the Xiaomi Ultra. I mean it is true. Ultra is the right adjective they chose for it. This is a dang nice phone. Right. And they've got a they've got two colorways black and white. They were sharing it on on social media last week when it came out of the envy when it came out in China at first top of the line flagship for Xiaomi. I mean this is the latest and greatest right. And the fact that it's being sold outside China you know just opens up even more. So the fact that people can actually get their hands on it be able to use it. But this is this is a very very strong entry in the flagship area. Xiaomi also showing off its EV the Su7 first time they've showed it off in Europe. That's been around since last year as has the Cyberdog 2 a robot pet but they're showing that off as well. And then they also launched a smart band. The smart band 8 Pro a watch the Watch S3 and the Xiaomi Watch 2 as well. I love how Xiaomi is like Samsung light or like the Xiaomi makes everything. Yeah. They used to be fully the bargain brand and then they were the mid-range brand and they're definitely creeping towards trying to be you know a full flagship you know cheap mid-range and above. Yeah they're definitely climbing the ranks for sure and just the diversification of the brand just you know gives them in my eyes more strength as a brand right. You got more products more reason to exist. The Honor Magic 6 Pro also now available outside China a flagship phone that is biggest feature is one that's not on the phone yet they're saying later this year they will launch eye tracking the idea being that if you look at a notification they if you look at it long enough I guess or in the right way I'm not sure how it's going to work but it will launch the relevant app without you having to tap on it. There's some other AI features coming down the pike for this one creating videos from your photos with texts suggestions based on your message text to kind of help you compose stuff typical on board AI stuff Magic 6 Pro will sell for 1300 euros starting March 1st. They also announced a Porsche design version of their foldable the V2 RSR the Porsche Design Magic V2 RSR foldable cost 2700 euros cheaper than a Porsche and that will ship on March 18th. You got to look at it longingly to get that eye tracking to work. The two things I love about the Honor Magic 6 Pro one is just the physical the the external bezel. I love that Android phones are starting to move in the direction of personality from a visual standpoint from a you know it doesn't look like any other phone on the market with the camera bump and all that sort of stuff so I really like the look of it but hey man 5600 mAh battery in there that's a chonker it is a that is a battery that will never die. If you know HMD at all you probably know that it makes phones under licensed brands most famously Nokia. I think it used to make Blackberry but it doesn't anymore but they still make Nokia phones and they've got some retro Nokia stuff coming out. It should not be a shocker then that they are also going to make a Barbie flip phone for Mattel coming in July. Not much to tell you other than it's a flip phone not a foldable like this is a full on flip phone. HMD is also going to market some phones under the HMD name that includes HMD fusion a modular platform that lets you make your own phone accessories so you get the platform it has a battery screen and six Pogo pins and then think special industries like medical for instance a company could create its own blood test module and then you add it to the fusion and use it in medical situations for example. Yeah we've been tracking this over on Android faithful because when they a couple of weeks ago they broke the news that they were dropping the Nokia they did not renew the Nokia sub license and they were going to go out on their own with HMD phones but we didn't know what that meant right and so clearly the Barbie thing is just that's just white labeling hey we got the technology Mattel wants to do something cool you know why didn't you do that last year whatever but the I did not have a modular phone on my bingo card for what HMD would do and those longtime listeners of our old show over and all that android on twit or new show android faithful here on DTNS know that I loved the promise of modular phones like I wanted this more than anything in the world to take off we had the moto mods and then you know they're LG had some had them had the modular what the little the camera modules and lights and things like that they can plug in I'm gonna be all over this when it comes out because I want to see what you can do with it and what you could build for it because like you said medical industry like you can make specialized hardware to work with it or just get an amped up camera or bigger battery or something like I really I'm really excited about this one Lenovo showed off a laptop with a transparent screen and a virtual keyboard why I because they can Lenovo does stuff like this they demonstrated identifying a sunflower so you put the sunflower behind the screen and then the flower stays visible because the screen is transparent and then information about the the flower shows up around it on your display another use case is an architect looking at a house through the screen and then making notes for an extension the laptop is a concept no plans to ship it yet neither one of these demonstrations couldn't be done another way on a regular laptop so I'm not sure whether this has anything can you think of a use for it to live in the expanse yeah that's all I want to I want the transfer displays it is a step in that direction I think sci-fi feature looks cool really yeah yeah Lenovo's Motorola also showed off concept for a bendable device that wraps around your wrist this is tech it showed off at the tech world conference Lenovo tech world conference in October it's a six point nine inch phone that basically wraps around your wrist so you can also bend it to be its own kickstand and unbend it and use it as a phone barely it's buggy as heck but people kind of loved the fact that it worked at all I love it I love it please spend more R&D on this concept you can you can fold it in the other way to prop it up to watch video on the upper part of the screen like I felt like I love it it's zany and this is exactly what the world needs and I kind of love that Lenovo is like we don't know what it's good for either but here maybe you can come up with something let's show it to people but we did it it's possible they're making they're making magic over there and they have some rollable screen prototypes and all kinds of cool stuff I can't I'm telling you the foldables are not it's not gonna stop there the the the interfaces are just gonna evolve and change and I'm here for it yeah well you know we talk about Android a lot with Mobile World Congress and you may be like I'm so tired of everyone always talking about Android won't anyone give Apple a moment well thank goodness for Sarah Lane and Eileen Rivera's Apple Vision show talking about how Apple's vision matches what they want out of Apple products it streams live on Monday right after DTNS at youtube.com slash daily tech news show and twitch.tv slash good day internet or you can subscribe at applevisionshow.com Oneplus revealed the watch 2 its latest smartwatch at Mobile World Congress new watch features a 1.43 inch AMOLED display big old 500 mAh battery 32 gigs of storage 2 gigs RAM Qualcomm Snapdragon W5 and BES 27 microcontroller this is where it gets interesting the watch can last from 48 to 100 hours depending on what settings you have whether you have the screen go into sleep or whatever but still 48 to 100 hours is a pretty good range for a watch where OS handles things like watch faces and apps and that runs on the Snapdragon W5 the reason it has a second chip BES 2700 is a second operating system the RTOS runs on that chip to handle background operations lighter tasks stuff like that and that's supposed to help expand the battery life you can pre-order it now it's $300 and allegedly shipping March 4th the one plus watch the first one plus watch was was not well loved Ron I know you've been following one plus for a while is is this the Renaissance are they they building their ecosystem back up it really is I mean yeah you're right the one plus the first their first for a into smartwatch was I derided as one of the worst smartwatches ever but one plus so I've been following one plus since they came out with the one plus one way back in the day when they were this wacky little upstart that did crazy weird little marketing things and we've seen Jesus that's been like 10 years now but we've seen this like evolution of this brand where they're trying to establish themselves as an affordable phone doing things you know for the user stock it was stock Android then they had their own you know they have their own flavor of Android the operating system side and grow up to try to be a flagship killer and then Carl pay their co-founder left and that seemed to have knocked them down the latter a couple of rungs and they took a while to figure out what they wanted to do with themselves there was a lot of rumors that opo who is a major investor in one plus was just gonna absorb them and they were gonna get rid of one plus so just gonna be opo and that sort of thing you notice that one plus and opo share a lot of the same components and a lot of the stuff that came from one plus's fold foldable came from research and development from opo right so they've got that relationship but after Carl pay left they kind of were listless and just kind of going through the motions and doing some neat things here and there they had the little telescoping camera that came out from the top and the one plus seven and one plus eight back in that generation and then the pandemic hit and they got like everybody got knocked back again on their heels trying to figure what to do and over the past year they're kind of you know like a like a butterfly coming out of the cocoon right like they're kind of like going into their their teen years not only is a more mature company that doesn't make the same marketing mistakes they made back in the day but they seem to a couple of years ago got a product vision and now this you know beginning last year into 2024 we're seeing the execution of that product vision into what is a pretty formidable ecosystem you know last year we saw the one plus open come out there for their first entry point the foldable I know a ton of people deemed that to be their best phone of the year for last year myself included that was my pick for phone of the year and then at the very end of 2023 beginning 2024 they came out with the one plus 12 and the one plus 12 are I've got the one plus 12 right here and I've got the 12 are you know the one plus 12 with the hassleblad camera you know the camera system and all this stuff great flagship phone like a high high level flagship phone the 12 are great mid-range phone 499 it doesn't feel like a mid-range phone it feels like it feels like a really good flagship level phone but at half the price which is fantastic hell they've even got you know they've got earbuds I got the one plus buds 3 right here so they're coming together and then you add a smart watch to the mix and now much like Samsung you can live the one plus lifestyle by having all of your accessories be on the one plus banner and their high quality and they're just doing a really great job yeah and what are the things if I walk into a phone store and I see Apple obviously on one whole wall and then I see Samsung dominating in another part what is it that would draw me over to get a one plus well that's a tough question I don't know but you know if you're the iOS versus Android debate I'm assuming you're like I don't want iOS I'm gonna take I'm gonna come over on Android right okay and so in that case you've got price at least price parity or in some cases a little bit of a edge on price and they're a little cheaper they're a little more affordable but additionally they've got a high build quality it does it can do everything that you know a Google you know Google Pixel can do or Samsung phone they're building up their own software in terms of their their own operating system marketplace and I mean honestly just looking to be a little different what's super interesting and how they're being really aggressive in this is that right now if you go to oneplus.com they have an insane trade-in offer which honestly when they announced that the one plus open I was at the media event and everyone kind of laughed and nobody believed it but they are they will they will give you dollar amount trade-in on any phone and now smartwatch that you send to them so so it could be a Nokia candy bar phone from 2002 they'll give you a hundred bucks off the my original Motorola razor any device they will knock the they will knock money off right and so on the in the one plus twelve it could be up to seven hundred dollars knocked off if you send in a comparable you know you know iPhone or or later released you know Android phone but even if you found a Motorola star attack they'd give you a hundred bucks off like it's it's that's crazy yeah just unique kind of things in a unique kind of take on things and what I really like and that kind of come to life in the one plus watch two in that the fact that this has the dual processors on it right so it's got it's got the one processor the the Qualcomm Snapdragon that's running where OS in partnership with Google and then the other processor comes in to do the other functions on the watch right that's unlike any other you know most androids you know based smartwatches that are out there and they did that and why this is a big deal is they did that in cooperation with Google in order to make where OS work with the dual processors and the and the you know kind of those modes they had to make adjustments to where OS to accommodate that so much like Hiroshi Lockheimer being on stage with Samsung at Samsung Galaxy Impact you've got Google standing now on the virtual stage at Mobile World Congress with one plus in this development which is kind of like you know Google saying hey they're the real deal yeah they're worth they're worth our time we're gonna engineer stuff and that that is a really interesting engineering solution to battery life we'll see how well it works and in practice but it does seem like it you know theoretically pretty sound so I'm curious about that as well and I will I will I will get in a little plug on tomorrow's and this is this is breaking news on tomorrow's episode of Android faithful we actually have an interview with Bjorn Kilburn who's the VP of where OS at Google talking more about the watch and the partnership so if you want to hear more about about Google and their involvement one plus tune into Android faithful tomorrow and we'll run that so for sure yeah you Jason when Michelle are killing it over there at Android faithful in fact before we go tell folks all about where they can find that and anything else you got going on yeah so head over to androidfaithful.com that's where you can find all the links to subscribe to the show and support us on Patreon all that great stuff we broadcast live right here on the DTNS and Good Day Internet YouTube and Twitch channels every Tuesday at 8 p.m. Eastern 5 p.m. Pacific it's myself Hwinta Tao Michelle Ramon Jason Howell we get guests in from time to time we're having a great time it's basically the next generation of all that Android and Twitch that we all did that we loved and we love being a part of the DTNS family doing it and so yeah just go to androidfaithful.com all the links so there are all the social stuff you can find everything there indeed indeed go check it out androidfaithful.com patrons stick around for the extended show Good Day Internet with baseball season coming back Ron and I wanted to talk a little bit about how following our favorite sport or even if you don't follow sports anything really has changed in this world of streaming and YouTube and TikTok so we're going to talk about all of that you can also catch the show live Monday through Friday 4pm Eastern 2100 UTC find out more dailytechnewshow.com slash live back tomorrow talking about how Stingrays can teach us how to make robust and chemistry free colors on soft materials of course it's Dr. Nikki talk to you then the DTNS family of podcasts helping each other understand prime and club hope you have enjoyed this brover