 Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners. Thanks to all of you, including Norm Physikas, Chris Allen, Chris Smith, and brand new patrons, Thomas A. and Nocturnal Alpaca. Oh, sounds comfy. On this episode of DTNS, New Tech to put a speaker in the phone's screen. Does the new Galaxy phone really have a bad launch bug? And how bad is it that Funimation took down everybody's forever, quote unquote, digital purchases? It's bad. This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, February 12th, 2024 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. In Studio Colorado, I'm Shannon Morse. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. We have all recovered from Super Bowl Sunday here in the United States. The Monday after the Super Bowl, not yet a holiday, as much as people have pushed for it over the years. So we respect all the federal holidays. Should they ever make Super Bowl Monday a federal holiday, we will take it off. But congratulations to Usher for winning the Super Bowl. And Taylor Swift. And Taylor Swift and Travis Kelsey. All right, let's start with the quick hits. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman's sources on the Apple Vision Pro product team say they think it won't be really until the fourth generation that it becomes a mainstream product. Gurman notes that if that was true, it would actually be kind of on par with the iPhone, the iPad, and the Apple Watch. Gurman also speculates that based on his own usage, the Vision Pro might eventually take the place of the iPad since it uses, since he's found its best uses to be light work, watching video, acting as an external monitor, all things that seem to overlap with how people use the iPad. In related news, Apple released an update for the Apple Vision Pro that includes the ability to reset the headset if the passcode set on the device has been forgotten or you otherwise get locked out. That way, you don't have to take it to an Apple Store. ExpressVPN offers a feature called Split Tunneling, which can send some of your traffic outside the VPN, possibly to avoid geo-restrictions or some such reason. A bug in its Split Tunneling function introduced in May of 2022 leaked DNS requests to the server outside of ExpressVPN. It did not expose individual pages or any other data, just the domain names. Still, ExpressVPN has removed Split Tunneling from the latest version of its software after the issue was discovered by CNET. Users should upgrade to the latest version, which is 12.73.0. ExpressVPN plans to reintroduce the feature once it's fixed. And in the meantime, if you absolutely need Split Tunneling, ExpressVPN recommends installing version 10, which does not have the bug. Wow, interesting little work around there. Fandom is that wiki site that lets you create a special wiki just for something you love and your fan community. So there are wikis for bands, TV shows, there's even one for Sort and Laser. Fandom is launching a generative AI experience called Quick Answers that can answer questions related to a fandom sub-wiki that you're on. The feature is optional for each wiki, so you don't have to turn it on if you're running the wiki. The Verge points out that, for example, on the Witcher wiki, one of the questions is, who is Geralt of Rivia, for example? Stuff like that. Fandom will also use models from Coactive AI Image Review to help it identify inappropriate content that should be removed, though humans will make the final decisions. It's just recommending it. Yay, Sailor Moon fandom, yes. There they go. A Waymo driverless taxi was vandalized in San Francisco on Sunday with a crowd covering it in spray paint, breaking its windows, and setting it on fire. Waymo representative Sandy Karp told the Verge in an email that the fully autonomous car, quote, was not transporting any riders when it was attacked and fireworks were to blame for the fire. Public Information Officer Robert Ruica in San Francisco's police department also confirmed to the Verge that the police responded at approximately 8.50 p.m. pacific time to find the car already on fire, adding that there were, quote, no reports of injuries. I mean, it was Lunar New Year this weekend, so a lot of people were out and about. It was Super Bowl weekend, so a lot of people were out and about, like, you know, if a car got smashed and set on fire that wasn't a Waymo, I don't think that would have made as big of a news, but yeah, there's also the fact that people in San Francisco seem to hate these things, so I guess that's what's going on. Eurogamer passes along that Portugal's Universo Nintendo site has sources that tell it the next Nintendo Switch, also commonly referred to as the Switch 2, will be backwards compatible so that you could bring along your current Switch titles. Not only that, but supposedly developers will be able to enhance those older titles to take advantage of new hardware as well. Multiple outlets say Nintendo will have an announcement about its new hardware in March. That seems to be the consensus from all the people who seem to have sources at Nintendo. Universo Nintendo has had a good recent track record when it comes to Nintendo news, and they also say you're getting a Nintendo Direct next week, so lots of Nintendo stuff for the Nintendo fan in your life. All right, let's talk about devices that launch, that are popular, and then everybody says, oh no, it has a bug. That always happens. These are often reported as if the company is somehow derelict in its duties when in reality, it's often unforeseen issues that can be easily fixed, but you just didn't know they were there until you put it out into a million people's hands or more. Small percentage manufacturing defects can show up to like 100 people and still be less than 1% of the users. Or it could just be a mismatch between a promised feature and users getting that feature and going, this isn't as good as we thought it was gonna be. Samsung Galaxy S24 is going through its launch bug reporting cycle right now. And Mashable reported four bugs. And I know you've got the S24, right, Shannon? I do. I have two in hand. One is a loaner from Samsung, and the one I purchased directly from them as well. Okay, so you've got good experience with this. Let's run through and see if you've experienced any of these bugs and then talk about how serious do we think these are, how widespread they are, et cetera. The first of the four is the green line display issue. So apparently some folks are seeing a green line that runs from top to the bottom. It's unclear how many devices have this. And the big issue doesn't seem to be so much the green line, which is clearly a display defect, but the fact that they call customer support and Samsung says, we have to take it to your carrier to figure that out. And the carrier says, we have to take it to Samsung to figure it out. And then they get stuck on the merry-go-round of nobody wanting to take responsibility. Have you experienced this one, Shannon? I have not. And luckily I don't have to experience going through a carrier since I always purchase my phones unlocked. And part of that is just for more freedom to transition if I wanted to. Based on my historical, just my own experience, I had an issue with my Fold earlier. I think it was a few months ago and I had to send it back because the battery was no longer charging, no matter what I did. And Samsung, since it was unlocked, they did excellent in terms of sending it out and then getting the replacement within a few days. So it was a wonderful experience and that was just as a customer purchased device. They didn't know I was reviewing them or anything so it wasn't any kind of special thing. And yeah, it was fine. But again, I'm not experiencing carrier issues and I think a lot of this comes down to how's the carrier going to manage it when Samsung is like, oh, you have to deal with your carrier. Yeah, it very clearly isn't the majority of phones with the green line. This is just a display manufacturing defect. That can happen. And something that ships in as large numbers as the S24, there could be a hundred of these out there to make it look like there's a lot of them. But like you say, they should just take it back. Whoever you bought it should just be like, oh yeah, that shouldn't do that. Here, let's swap it out, right? And they should give you a swap the same day because you can't go several days in a row without your phone. So that one's bad customer support given what people are saying is happening. But I don't consider the green line to be like damaging. Like this isn't a defective product. They just are going to be bugs like that sometimes. All right, number two, the camera jump. Some devices apparently aren't making the transition from the wide to the telephoto smoothly during a zoom. You see a little bit of a jump. One phone seller told a customer, this is a batch of phones made in India specifically that have this. That is not confirmed. But Samsung does say a software update is on the way that we'll fix it. Yeah, so I actually don't know if the thing about India is true because the loaner device that I have from Samsung does indeed have this camera jump issue. And I was able to recreate it on mine. So I'll include that in my review that I'm going to be posting probably later this week or next week. The one that I had purchased from Samsung, which I received the day that it came out, it does not have that issue. But I noticed when I switch over to portrait mode or I do any kind of macro photography, I do get a quick jolt between the two camera lenses that it's supposed to be switching between. It's not a very fluid natural experience. In comparison, I did want to mention with Google, with the Pixel line, they have the ability now to control which lens you are taking a photo with. And I do wish that we had that same experience here in the pro mode with the Samsung S24 line because that would kind of help if you're dealing with this kind of problem and it would mitigate it. It would give you a way around this issue while we're waiting for Samsung to do an update. But currently, we don't have that. So this one seems real. It does. If it were to be a batch of phones made in India, it could be that they're using slightly different parts and the firmware just acts differently on those parts and they didn't properly find that in testing. And so a software fix could fix that really easily. Again, I don't find this one to be terribly damaging, do you? No, I really don't. I think if they can fix it in software, it's not going to be an issue. The third one is Android auto connectivity. This is the one that makes me laugh the most because apparently this isn't new. It's an issue with other Galaxy S phones, not just the S24. And it's apparently specific to cars in particular. I think they said the Volkswagen maybe, but it's not specific to the S24. So I'm like, well, okay, what did you expect? If there's a bug already, then it's still there. In the S24, that's not terribly surprising. So far, I haven't had this issue, but I do have a different car manufacturer. So that might be why. Yeah, it seems like it's a carmaker issue. And then the one that's getting the most attention is vivid display not being vivid. Many users are complaining that when they turn on the vivid display in settings, it looks slightly different, but not that much different than the regular view. And Samsung Spain put out an announcement saying, yeah, that's on purpose. They told Technofilo, we adjusted the colors and brightness of the Galaxy S24 series of products to provide more accurate and comfortable viewing during use. Some changes have been made to the display technology to provide a more natural viewing experience. So users may notice differences in color depth compared to older devices. This display behavior is an intentional color adjustment, not a product defect. So it can be used safely to offer our customers the best possible experience. We value your feedback and continually improve our software as the market and consumer interests evolve. This one squarely is in customers expected a feature to work one way and it doesn't. And it sounds like Samsung is like, we will definitely take your feedback and they could change that in firmware too, right? Yes, and I'm looking forward to that because I have experienced that with both of the devices that I have in hand. If you set them right next to an S23 Ultra, you can definitely see a difference in the screens. So the fact that they're going to be looking into this, glad we have a quote from Samsung because I did put that question out to Samsung and I hadn't heard back yet. So it's good to hear that they're going, they're saying like, hey, this is, this is what we expected. Yeah, we wanted to make it look more natural and less fake. We understand that a lot of you don't like that. You liked the fake vivid. We'll think about putting it back. That's that's how I would interpret this. Yes. All right. Well, good. I think we successfully evaluated the major bugs out there. Let us know if you've discovered something else, feedback at DailyTechNewShow.com. So IEEE spectrum reports on a piezoelectric transducer that can serve as haptic feedback in a speaker in your devices screen. This is so cool. Speakers and haptic generators are quite similar. One uses electricity to vibrate air and creates sound. The other to vibrate solids and create touch. So Tom, how are they making this work? Yeah. So IEEE has an article from Synaptics who are working on a transducer. They think solves this. They are using something called a piezoelectric transducer. Those are basically crystals like quartz or in this case ceramics that bend when you apply voltage. Adjusting the voltage can make the crystal vibrate slow like you need to for haptic feedback or fast like you need to to vibrate air and create sound. To execute this in real life though, you need to overcome a few things. One is you need to be able to adjust the voltage from the battery efficiently so that you're not introducing noise or wasting power because you need to step up the voltage. You don't need to increase power usage. You just need to step up the voltage and you need to do that efficiently. And you also need to modify the sound signal to account for some of the quirks of how a transducer emits sound. If you just piped the sound directly, to the transducer, it's going to sound weird. So you need to have an algorithm that can modify it and make it sound normal. Synaptics says it has developed a chip that can do that. It sits on the main board, connects to a ceramic piezoelectric transducer behind the display. And that way you can touch the display and get the haptics from that transducer and sound can come through that transducer and emanate from the screen. Now the benefit of doing that is because it's coming from the thing you're looking at, it's more immersive. You don't have to have an algorithm try to trick your ears into thinking it's coming from the display because it's actually coming from the display. It draws a little less energy than a regular speaker does. So there's longer battery life. And because you're eliminating the bulky coil speakers and haptic drivers and motors, you can make the device thinner. You're talking about one millimeter versus four millimeters, but every millimeter counts. The transducer is one millimeter thick. You also get the benefit of eliminating speaker holes. You don't need the holes because it's vibrating the screen. So you're not going to be allowing dirt and moisture in as easily. Synaptic says the technology is going to arrive in phones, laptops, and wearables by the end of this year. They didn't announce any models though, Shannon. Well, not yet, but I am looking forward to hearing about partners with this. I think it's fascinating and I'm very excited to be able to like review future products that have this built into the technology and kind of compare them to traditional speakers and see how the quality changes between the two. But I'm really looking forward to it. I'm really hoping that like we see this in foldables because one of the issues with foldables right now is their thickness. So maybe this will help with like making foldable smartphones a little bit thinner. I think that would really help with bringing those to a wider consumer market if they're priced efficiently. Yeah, I agree. That is one of the biggest things with foldables is keeping them thin. This is going to help with that. Again, you're talking about saving three or four millimeters, but that is enough to make a difference, right? And you can fill that space with battery and other models. So you could increase battery life even more than just the energy efficiency. Not to mention just the coolness of being able to say, oh no, that sound is definitely coming from the thing I'm looking at, right? I love that they also included kind of a diagram showing you how a laptop would use this between behind the screen and comparing that to what we currently have where you usually have the speakers on like the speaker grill on the two sides of the keyboard. So wouldn't this be wonderful if we could get keyboards that are spread out just a little bit more so that they're like true traditional full-size keyboards in a smaller casing for a laptop which would help with portability. So I'm trying to think of like all these future possibilities for all of our mobile devices that we're currently using and how this would really, really help with portability and help with like just being able to use these devices in a comfortable experience. I'm looking forward to it. I'm excited. I really hope that they get some good partners. The benefits are clear. The physics is well proven, right? This should work. The question is in those two things that Synaptic has solved with its chip, is it stepping up the voltage efficiently enough and is it modifying the sound signal in a way that doesn't make it sound like crap? Those are the two things we won't know until Synaptic finally tells us who they're partnering with to put this in their phone or their laptop or whatever. And once we do that, then we can judge it. There are some TVs out there that do a similar thing already but the transducers they're using are much more expensive and much more power hungry than the one Synaptics is describing. So this would be a big advance in this. And when it comes out, you can say like, oh yeah, that's that Synaptics thing. I heard about that on DTNS way back in February. Oh yeah, there you go. Trivia night. Apple has a lot of power users. It has a lot of hipster users. But what about the rest of us who just are like, yeah, Apple makes good stuff, but we're not like married to them or anything? Well, Sarah Lane and Eileen Rivera do a new show called Apple Vision Show to talk about whether Apple's vision matches with what they want from their devices. It comes out on Mondays. You can watch it live right after DTNS at youtube.com slash daily tech news show or get subscribed and listen or watch to whenever you want at applevisionshow.com. Sony's anime streaming service Funimation announced that digital copies that some subscribers have in an online locker are going to go away April 2nd. Funimation sometimes sold physical copies of movies and DVD, Blu-rays, etc. and would include a code that would let you add a digital copy of that physical movie to your Funimation account. Here's where it becomes problematic for me. Funimation described this access being available forever. But of course with an asterisk that indicated not forever. In other words, if the service went away your copy might too. Sony bought Crunchyroll is now merging Funimation into Crunchyroll and as part of that merger it's getting rid of Funimation's online digital library because now they can say well it's said until Funimation goes away and Funimation is going away. Customers have been told to contact support to discuss any possible refunds but there's no clear policy out there on what you're going to get if you talk to them. Shannon, this probably doesn't affect a whole lot of people and ideally those people were supposed to hold onto a physical copy anyway but how justified are people to be upset about this? I love that you say it's probably not affecting many people but my odd my like community in the Sailor Moon like universe of anime weeps we would very much disagree with that it affects a lot of people. Well if anything is more than three people you know our human brain tells us it's a lot of people it's when I say that I wasn't trying to belittle the community I was just saying in the grand scheme of nine billion people it's a smaller slice but yeah if it's affecting you you're not happy about it I get that. You know I have a feeling a lot of people who were subscribed to Funimation and or are subscribed to Crunchyroll currently are probably just using the streaming service but they also have many issues with the fact that Funimation is going away because they're merging their streaming platform into Crunchyroll as well so it's not just the physical copies that people were purchasing where they could you know put this code online and be able to access their their physical library on on a streaming platform as well but it's also the fact that all of these all of these videos that they've watched the reason that they have subscribed to Funimation is now turning into Crunchyroll which may or may not have the same licenses that Funimation has had for a very long time I think that's a bigger I'll be honest I think that is a bigger actual problem for people than the digital codes going away because every person who's told me they're upset about this I've asked them how many did you lose and they've all said none they're like well I didn't have any but I just don't like the idea of it and and I think that's fair I think you don't have to like the idea of this but I don't think that many people actually had digital copies on the other hand there are people who did and you're listening right now and you're going well I did and I'm mad about this and and I get while you're mad you have a physical copy there are laws that prevent you from making a legal backup of that copy or that would be an easy way to to get around this and you were told this would last forever now granted there were terms of service that you know no one reads that said well unless we get rid of the thing but they should never have marketed this as forever if it wasn't going to be forever Sony could transfer this digital library to Crunchyroll they just don't want to maintain it there's too many server complications and it's too costly that's fair that's a choice you can make it is complicated is more complicated and costly than people expect but in the end Sony is not doing anything to make people feel less upset about this probably because they're looking at the numbers and going well not that many people as a percentage of our audience have it but but in the public imagination you've got a lot of people who aren't directly affected looking at what you do and thinking oh well I'm not going to want to buy things from Sony anymore because now this is another Sony product that I can't rely on because there was also the PlayStation movies that almost went away and they didn't but everybody heard they were going to go away and that's what sticks in people's minds I think one of the biggest problems is yeah exactly like you said they're not really giving you an answer but they're taking away this perk that so many people well many people in my community have used for a very long time and even if it was just like five or ten movies that you had put the code in online so that you could watch those videos online like that's still five or ten movies and you're losing that perk and when so many people especially in the past decade or so have kind of relied on this minimalist type of lifestyle where people are saying like hey donate your physical copies gift them to other people if you're not if you're just watching the movie online there's no reason to keep your physical copy in your house it's just you know picking up dust because you don't even have a DVD player anymore like you run into those kind of issues where Sony and Funimation or Crunchyroll they're not physically walking into your house and stealing your DVDs but given that we've kind of as a society had this minimalist life cycle for the past few several years like many people have gotten rid of those physical DVDs with the assumption that there are other that their online digital copies would be there forever so yes I agree they should not have said they shouldn't have said forever even with an asterisk because nobody's going to read the small terms like I don't even read those I only read those of some news article talks about it but honestly like it's it's kind of a cringy move that Sony is making and it's disappointing it is yeah and and another issue is the pricing a lot of Funimation the issues with Funimation is the pricing is going up like by double from around $55 up to $99 or $100 per year I'm sure like including tax it's probably slightly over a hundred bucks and that's per year for the crunchy roll service which is taking over Funimation so a lot of people who are grandfathered into an original plan with Funimation they're seeing their prices double and they're extremely disappointed with that as well yeah I think that complicates matters right if you're already mad at Funimation for a price rise because anytime anybody raises prices people get upset right then when they also take away your digital code you're like oh and you're going to take that away too great thanks a lot so so yeah this is not Sony just doesn't seem to care about this sort of stuff and I don't know they seem to survive just fine so maybe they're right not to care maybe we all forget about it in a while but it does make people think right public perception think like well I might as well turn to piracy because I can't rely on a legal way to do this lasting I will point out though just for balance you know a lot of people are looking at this story and saying see this is why you should buy physical copies to which I would point out this only affects people who bought digital physical copies because the digital codes only came with physical copies so it's the people with physical copies who are losing their digital code so you can't say you should buy physical copies because that's what they did they bought physical copies so you know it's probably the least bad example of losing your digital access but still it's still not good right should I tell people how I do my own copies or well maybe not maybe stick around a good day internet maybe we'll we'll hint at that then but before we wrap up DTNS let's check out the mail bag Kevin from Millay Wakey is how he pronounced it The Good Land wrote in asking for a lean back online TV experience similar to broadcast that let the family just run something on just turn something on and not have to pay close attention I suggested that Kevin should look at Pluto TV as an example of a fast service a free ad supported service that has a grid that you can just turn on a channel and let it go and he did but here's what he found following up on the Pluto TV suggestion I tried the service I thought it was interesting and came close to hitting what I was asking for the comedy channels were good cheers fresh prints etc and the old movies were full of classics like Indiana Jones I looked around a bit for similar services and discovered that Plex has live TV channels for PlexPass subscribers that really fit what I was looking for plus I have a lifetime pass thanks for the suggestion and putting me on this path so this is great I love this yeah because I told him like check out Pluto I didn't give him the full like there's also other things like this rundown but he was able to find Plex on his own and be like yep that's the one for me Pluto TV is wonderful they have a whole channel dedicated to just watching Sailor Moon and I love that I don't have to think I just turned to that channel and I can watch an episode of Sailor Moon I don't have to choose an episode it's so cool that's the brilliance and all of these all of these services have slightly different offerings so you know do what Kevin did and look around Plex was the one that fit Kevin but maybe Zumo is the one that has the stuff you like or maybe Roku or maybe the Samsung built-in one there's like so many of these kinds of services out there so I would highly recommend people who want what Kevin wanted to poke around thanks for following up with the report Kevin appreciate that also thanks to you Shannon Morse for being with us today what do you got going on these days I know I know you've got the S24 coming up you can't see it but I have a whole shelf dedicated to like reviews that are coming up I just did a one plus open review after having that phone in for quite a while and I will say it's it's a really nice foldable if you're interested in a foldable like the one plus open is a good one so check out that review if you're interested in a very unbiased perspective I also have the S24 ultra review which will be coming out shortly and I'm doing several videos about that too so definitely check it out and subscribe if you would like more like and subscribe patrons of this show stick around for good day internet we're going to keep going for another half hour we'll talk probably talk a little bit about Shannon's management of media but we're also going to talk about that 200 foot radio tower that disappeared in Alabama Shannon and I have some theories you can also catch the show live Monday through Friday 4 p.m. Eastern 2100 UTC find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live we'll be back tomorrow talk to you then