 Coming up on DTNS Samsung shuts down its China phone plant people are getting faster at typing on mobile except for me and Microsoft got back into phones This is the Daily Tech news for Wednesday October 2nd 2019 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt in Salt Lake City hitting my f8 key I'm Scott Johnson and I'm Roger Chang the show's producer Saros out, but she will be back tomorrow. Do not fret just now on good day internet We were talking nutrition a lot of life scientific studies are out We were kicking those around talking about nutritional advice If that sounds like something you would be interested in you can go listen to that episode by becoming a patron at patreon.com slash DTNS. All right, let's start with a few tech things you should know Samsung has shut down its last phone factory in China It's citing domestic competition from Chinese brands Rising labor costs and a slowing worldwide phone market as reasons for pulling out of China Samsung expanded its smartphone production to countries like India and Vietnam, so it's still making its phones Let's just making them somewhere else Sony also recently announced its closing its Beijing smartphone plant and will only make Sony phones in Thailand Interesting that is a real shift Google announced action blocks To let you create shortcuts of a multi-step task you might have you got a bunch of stuff You got to get done use action blocks using Google Assistant is how you'll do it Google is promoting action blocks as an accessibility feature for people with cognitive disabilities like advanced dementia autism or Down syndrome To get action blocks. You need to be part of Google's trusted tester program Intel announced a refresh to its high-end Skylake i9 processors the Cascade Lake processors are the name of that refreshed line And they're cheaper Coming in November as an example the Skylake $1,979 9980 XE will be replaced by the Cascade Lake 10 980 XE for 979 dollars so quite a quite a discount there And you even get an increased turbo mode from 4.5 to 4.8 gigahertz the core i9 10 900 X is even cheaper Increasing base clock speed from 3.5 to 3.7 gigahertz and dropping the price from 989 dollars to 590 died dollars Quoted prices from Intel of course are for thousand unit orders not your single chip retail So you'll probably end up paying a little bit more if you build your own machine But it will bring down the price of machines that are made with these processors as well Well the Wall Street Journal has sources who say the companies that make up the Libra Association will meet in Washington, DC on Thursday that would be tomorrow the journals sources say Visa and Mastercard are reconsidering involvement Bloomberg source Says that PayPal and Stripe are also undecided Facebook's David Marcus said on Twitter He was not aware of any company's plans to not step up was his quote. All right Well, I see what leaks out of that meeting Instagram is rolling out its restrict tool to all users to restrict a user instead of blocking them You swipe left on a comment or go to a user's profile page or you can go into the privacy tab in Instagram settings Restricted users comments remain visible to them. That's the difference with blocking But will not show up for anyone else who use who views your post unless you approve them Dms from restricted users will also go to your message request inbox and you won't get a notification And the sender won't know if you've read it or not. Wow That's a super interesting thing actually I kind of hope more people do that It's like muting and you'll never know and you're not just muting you him. You're muting you're being muted from the world Apple also announced to update iOS later this year to let third-party messaging apps work with Siri by default. It's a big change right now Only iOS own messaging apps work by default meaning users have to specify apps Like what's app if they want to send a message that way the update will default to send messages to the app Used most frequently. I hope there's a setting in there Let's me choose a default app as well. That's unclear at this point But I do like the feature of if I don't want to choose just saying like well, we know you always use what's up So we'll just default to that one. Yeah, it seems nice. All right Let's talk a little bit about what Google's doing for cybersecurity month Well a couple things going on Google added a password checkup feature to its password manager in Chrome and Android The feature was previously available as an extension and it checks passwords against known breaches and alerts users If it finds a match as well as encouraging users against reusing passwords or using weak passwords Data is encrypted and cannot be seen by Google and the warnings it generates are local to your machine So only you're gonna see this. Yeah, and they encrypt and hash the passwords when they do the comparison So so they're trying to do all the things to reassure you that you know They're not just letting your passwords out into the world when they check them, which is important This is no different than have I been pwned where you can you can look and find out like hey Is this is my username is our password associate that's been out on a breach But it's a little more automatic and it's built into Chrome and Android So it seems like if you are going to use Chrome and Android In this way, then this is a great idea whether you should use Chrome and Android to store your passwords or log into things That's a whole separate conversation. But if you are it's good good feature, right? Yeah, I totally agree Well, they're not done because Google also launched incognito mode for maps And it's kind of what you think it is when you use Google Maps in incognito mode Your activity will not be saved to your Google account or used for personalization Google is also adding auto delete options to your YouTube history that can be set for delivery every three to 18 months I like that one a lot and Google Assistant will now respond to voice commands to quote delete the last thing I said to you and quote delete everything I said to you last week. Those are both pretty cool It's important to know we talked about earlier. So probably should pound this a little bit The incognito mode for maps hides it from Google and hides it from them using it It does not do anything to your ISP or how you're conveying that information So it's not like your mapping info is being encrypted and sent through Comcast and they have no idea It's just when it gets to Google and that's an important distinction. I think yeah It's not a VPN in other words, but it's a way for Google to say hey if you don't want us To count this location It's like it's like when you decide to use incognito mode to search because you don't want it to affect the ads you get It's like that for maps like I'm gonna go to this location But I don't want suddenly that to affect all the things that Google does in personalization I'm I'm sneakily going to a Yankees game, but I'm a Mets fan And I don't want to start giving me Yankee scores because it thought I went to a Yankees game I'm really glad you said that because I've had the hardest time in my head constructing a viable Scenario where this would really matter to somebody because I haven't really been able to figure it out Like why would anyone care or why would I care what Google thought about where I went and your baseball analysis actually really good? It's probably not the most legitimate one or common one, but but but it is I yeah I think it kind of gets the idea across probably more often if you're like visiting somewhere. They're like, yeah I'm never gonna go back there. I don't really want that Who knows maybe it's going to the hospital or something like that You just don't want that that health information into your profile Scientists from universities in Finland the UK and Switzerland combined to present a study Wednesday showing that people type about 70% as fast on mobile devices as they do on physical Quarty keyboards now you could look at that and say like man, that's what I thought slower on mobile But it's a lot less slower on mobile than people expected. This is a pretty extensive study They had 37,000 volunteers across 160 countries More female-weighted and also younger like people in their 20s But they you know statistically, you know averaged it out took typing tests to assess speed and accuracy Mobile typing averaged around 36 words per minute while physical typing ranged from 35 to 65 words per minute People who use two thumbs on mobile achieved the fastest mobile typing speeds and about three-quarter 74% of participants used two thumbs to type on mobile autocorrect Despite your frustrations with it increased typing speed But word prediction where it tells you what word of things you want to type next did not Because of the time it takes you to choose the word it might feel faster, but apparently it's not And another interesting note from the study users between the ages of 10 and 19 Typed an average of 10 words per minute faster on mobile than the olds in their 40s So Mavis speaking could not be reached for comment on This is super interesting because I've noticed that This I've noticed this in my own kids They're all really fast at this and I remember when you know Then just a little nine keypad thing was the way to do it on a crappy foot phone and they were really fast at doing that So my experience is with whatever my experience as a father was is that kids latch on to this stuff because it's all they've seen It's all they know and especially when it comes to Touchscreens that is the default interface that a whole generation is growing up with like straight up when Nick was seven years old He suddenly had touchscreens and it's been all that since now. He's 19 That represents a huge part of his life's experience and memories. So that's just gonna get faster they're gonna get better at it the olds are gonna get worse at it and This seems kind of normal to me, but it is fun to watch things like I watched a fortnight tournament where a kid on his phone Bested somebody who is equal skill in terms of you know How could they are at the game on a console and another person on a PC on the same game and he just rocked them on a cell phone? I've seen others do similar stuff on on tablets and iPads and that sort of thing They're just so much more used to that interface And that we all use in love too. I mean, it's not that it's just that they're gonna be naturally slower They're gonna have a you know an attunement to it that we're just not gonna have and I think it's pretty cool It's kind of impressive Yeah, I there's something to be said for growing up with something making making you better at it You know, there were things that we were better at as kids Then then our parents and grandparents because we were just faster at it, you know things like VCRs for instance Skills that are no longer necessary, but I don't think they didn't talk about in here You know the keyboards and the Android's got a lot of these you can now in the new version of iOS It's actually built in but the whole swipe I don't know if that played into this at all. No, it doesn't sound like it They just wanted people to do like straight on typing versus typing, but that would be interesting if the swipe I wish they would have had that inherent is swiping actually make it faster. Maybe like word prediction. It doesn't Well, folks, if you want to get all that tech headlines each day in about five minutes Be sure to subscribe to daily tech headlines comm Let's talk about Microsoft They had a big announcement today in New York City They had a lot of things that have been leaked this week earlier by Evan Blass So a lot of it was not a surprise, but one thing was Microsoft announced it is getting back into the phone market. The Surface Duo is a dual screen foldable Android phone Not with a screen that folds like the Galaxy Fold but with two five point six inch displays So clamshell device it arrives by the holidays next year 2020 Microsoft didn't really announce a whole lot more details about this They also right before they made the bombshell announcement of putting out a phone Announced the Surface NEO the Surface NEO is a dual screen tablet with two nine inch screens. That one runs Windows 10 X So not as revolutionary as Microsoft putting out an Android phone But Windows 10 X is a new version of Windows optimized for dual screen devices It runs just native Windows apps so 64-bit, although you can run when 32 apps in a container Each side is five point six millimeters thick can rotate 360 degrees on the hinge So you can flap it all the way open for two two screens on each side Features a custom Intel Lake field processor referred to as a hybrid processor With an 11th gen graphics engine to control both screens The cool part depending on if you didn't look too close at the woman's hands Because they seem to be kind of in a painful position Was a Bluetooth keyboard attachment that sits on top of one screen part way Leaving the rest of that screen to be used as a trackpad. So it just kind of clacks on Oh, I probably magnetically and then it connects by Bluetooth and the Windows 10 X knows that that's happened And then turns the rest of the screen into the trackpad Windows 10 X launches an app in the screen in which it's invoked it can span apps across two screens Well, most of the two-screen functionality of Windows 10 X was stuff that we've seen in things from kiosk era and other other dual screen devices in the past Uh, we'll also work with the new surface pen that can attach to the back Surface neo will be available for the holidays next year along with the surface duo for 2020 Uh, this is this is very interesting to me. This is uh You can make any Phone a microsoft phone. You could install office and outlook microsoft's launcher Uh and connect it to one drive any android phone. Anyway, uh, samsung has microsoft's your phone built in at the system level So I I think a lot of people just thought well, that's microsoft's approach to phones is just kind of take it over at that level Um, this Is a whole different Opportunity it makes more sense than galaxy fold Uh, it certainly makes Google's support of dual screen devices make more sense when they were talking about dual screen and and we all thought well Is that because of the galaxy fold? I guess google must be coming out with their own thing Now it makes more sense. Oh, they were developing this with microsoft as well, which they were And it really underlines sacha nadella's plans for microsoft In fact, he out now told wires lower and good. The operating system is no longer the most important layer for us So, yeah, this is uh, this is Definitely a whole new world. Yeah microsoft. I keep making this joke over the last day and a half about how How would steve bulmer Feel about this and you were quick to point out He's too worried about his basketball team to worry about any of this and I think you're right But um, it is such a difference from that microsoft where Platform anonymity mattered where they didn't want to have their stuff everywhere. There was no there was no push toward any of that And in fact, they were still pushing windows phones So they hear that they're finally back to a phone and that it doesn't have anything to do with nokia And that it has a lot to do with android Is kind of nuts if you're looking at this thing on a macro level But I think it's actually perfectly in line with microsoft's recent moves over the last few years This is definitely a new kind of microsoft and they are definitely more about Getting their name their stuff their services everywhere and less about controlling the platform it's on and I still think that's really good for them. I mean I just from a pure pr standpoint I I like microsoft more now than I ever have And I think it's just because I these kind of moves just seem like nice open smart moves good products Customer friendly All that stuff like that's that is not what I felt about them 10 years ago And yet here we are it's kind of it's kind of crazy how that's going I I think you know, it's not a surprise. Sachin Adele has been saying for two plus years I guess five years. It's it's been five years since he took over That that this was the direction of microsoft is is services and software And not the operating system level, but it's also hardware It's also saying like we're going to make best in class prototype hardware that somehow has not angered its partners, right? I mean, I would be tempted to say like, oh, this is going to get samsung upset But it won't Any more than coming out with these laptops and tablets have made hp or or come Come back. Why do I always say hp cover? But may hp or dell upset? What microsoft is doing is saying look, uh, yeah, we'll let google make the operating system for our phone Because that's a dead end You you only can grow so much and if we tried to combat Google's dominance in operating systems right now, we would never catch up It's better to become the software layer on top of android. That's how we win Because android eventually becomes commodified And and and we know what that's like having done windows Like they know what it's like when your operating system becomes commodified and the real Change in market is done on top of it and they're like, yeah, fine. Let android have that no problem We we will be making more progress by selling you office and azure and things like that on top of it Yeah, in a weird way they figured out how to have their cake and eat it too They've they figured out that all these other brands who are not mad at them for making cool hardware and new stuff Can still do the thing they're going to do and they will still benefit from having their operating system everywhere And still benefit from that old relationship And yet here's this new branch. I think it's really smart of them And it was kind of maybe the only way they could go and i'm glad they Glad they figured it out a little weird to be announcing these things more than a year Before they come out, uh, they did announce some stuff that is going to come out Let's get to that. Uh, these have actual prices on them the surface laptop 3 And this is going to be a refrain has a usbc port Uh, it keeps the 3 2 aspect ratio the 1.3 millimeter keyboard travel They made the trackpad 20 larger 13.5 inch model has a quad core 10th gen intel core processor And there's now a 15 inch version of laptop 3 that adds an option to have intel or AMD Ryzen surface edition which they say is the fastest AMD laptop processor made Both models have options for a machined aluminum finish now You can still get the alcantara fabric if you want and both have removable hard drives surface laptop 3 starts at $999 for the 13.5 inch 1199 for the 15 inch you can pre-order them now shipping october 22nd Microsoft also announced a new surface pro the surface pro 7 It's still a 12.3 inch convertible with a kickstand and that detachable keyboard cover has a stylus Now builds in a microphone array to optimize capturing your voice comes with usbc Big improvement is in the internals core i3 i5 and i7 options up to 16 gigabytes of lpddr 4x ram and up to a terabyte ssd That also means the battery life dropped on it from 13.5 hours to 10.5 hours surface pro 7 starts at $749 pre-ordering now shipping october 22nd Other than you know usbc finally showing up nothing terribly stunning about these but they're nice improvements Yeah, it seems it seems decent and if you're if you're already sort of in line to get new surface pro and you've been following that line for a while These are nice improvements other than the loss of battery life that price is still good um, i'm still very Worried about how the pen performance goes with that device uh the surface 2 is still Amazing, but it was a project they worked with Waycom on Now we're in new territory. They haven't been really great since so I'll have my eye on that pro 7 just to see you know how they're how they're doing with that sort of thing, but That's funny that usbc is like Finally coming to these devices. I mean my I feel like my whole life has converted to that I got one or two things with like lightning and a couple of mini usb's now, but I have so many chargers now that are usbc hanging around I I feel like we're finally cresting that hill. Oh, yeah No, we're about we're we're about to turn the corner to people complaining about their usba devices Yeah, you know, it's been a complain complain complain about usbc and dongles Uh, especially for apple users and now it's going to be like no, we have usbc Why aren't people still making usba? I still have these old usba devices I have to use a dongle to convert my usba device. I have to use a little thing Bobble bobble boss. So here we go. I'm gonna call it right now. It's the eternal spin It never ends get used to it and just get ready to buy new cables when it's time. It's fine Microsoft also announced a new surface pro an arm based surface pro the surface pro x With a custom chipset called the sq1 that was developed in a partnership between microsoft and qualcomm The sq1 chipset is based on qualcomm's existing snapdragon hcx laptop chip with lte advanced built-in It also has an integrated ai accelerator and two teraflops of graphics performance This runs windows 10 for arm, uh, which can run all windows apps But it does some of them with instruction set translation So there's a little bit of a performance hit, but it's generally Reviewed as decent the surface pro x comes with two usbc ports Uh, it's 5.3 millimeters weighs 774 grams That's about 1.69 pounds has a 13 inch pixel sense display with 2880 by 1920 resolution at 267 ppi The pro x available for pre-order at $999 shipping november 1st 5th and along with that Is the surface slim pen Which charges wirelessly when you slot it into the surface pro x's type cover keyboard This is sold separately, but the surface slim pen can do inline edits in word Including crossing out words to delete. Uh, you can also use inking to add comments in office documents You can even write over cells and excel to update numbers And adobe came out and did some nice inking with it as well And announced support for creative cloud apps to work with pen in the offing the slim pen ain't cheap It's sold separately for 144 99. Yeah, it's not it's not a cheap deal But I am very hopeful about that device Um, it's also a little bit confusing probably for for some hearing that oh, there's the surface pro x What's different between that and the seven and there's a lot tom obviously just explained specs wise, but uh, this seems to be I don't know kind of like the surface pro seven in that line is your For a bad apple comparison. We'll say that's just ipad Um, good ipads right keep to keep updating them nice new ipad this year This is like then going fully pro At least potentially with both power and capability. The real question is will that pen Work for a lot of the artist types that I know myself included and that that needs some hands on to see But that demo that adobe gave looked really promising more promising than that that pen or their pen tech has worked with microsoft products for a while so I am personally very excited to get hands on on this thing and see How that thing goes integration directly with creative cloud is a huge deal there And um, I think it'd be worth it for creative professionals if it does if it can perform the way that they're showing They really did focus a lot though on like well, you're using office, right? Here's a way to mark up your stuff in word and that's great and maybe the primary Aim of this is you know business users and that sort of thing Um, but where I'm where I'm really curious is that You know the creative apps and how they're going to run and so we'll see I guess and that price is I mean while expensive Not that expensive. It's all right. You know if this is truly a a big jump for them in that pen tech 144 is okay I could see that and And I and I know the presentation definitely made it seem like the surface pro 7 is the old and the surface pro x is the new But it's really just a chip difference. It's it's arm versus intel So they were doing a lot to make the pro x sound powerful because it has arm in it And I I think the pro 7's probably still more powerful I mean certainly that inking demonstration that they did with the pro 7 They they didn't have to go and wow look it can even do this It was just showing you what it could do where I was with the pro x There was a lot of like it's got an arm processor, but it can still do this So I'm very curious what the benchmarks of this will end up being Once people put it through its paces, but but you're right It's it's a lovely laptop a little bit of a higher price point than the pro 7 But they're throwing a lot of bells and whistles into it And and like you say that surface slim pen sure sounds good. Hey, it's pricey Well, and everything comes down to latency in the in the in the category that I'm talking about And I bring this up a lot when we have stuff on the show about this sector, but Like for example the ipad pros that have been pretty strong for artists So is the pencil they just had a free os update taking the thing from out of ios and forking it into ipad os And for whatever reason and they announced it on stage, but for whatever reason The latency went way down and it's so it's already faster and it was already kind of top in class for latency So they have a lot to live up to in that regard If they can win on that level they've already got like full creative cloud support They'll that they'll also have all of the other windows apps that are already well established as competitors in the art space like generally I think this is a real shot over the bow of that particular market. I just don't know how big that market is I don't know how much microsoft wants it the their studio desktop model didn't do that great sales wise Also didn't perform very well This could be the one And maybe by pushing it as a more general use device like the ipad is You'll get more out of it. I don't know this is going to be fun to watch I can't wait yeah that graphics performance pays off like they're saying if that ai accelerator works like they're saying This is going to be a compelling machine Finally, we must acknowledge the surface earbuds The the wireless earbuds announced to design to work with microsoft office office You can do powerpoint slide forwarding voice transcription and live translation in 60 languages right from your earbuds They offer one click pairing with microsoft devices And even work with spotify on android for quick music playback So you don't have to press play you just launch spotify it knows the earbuds are on and starts playing I promise 24 hours of battery life Uh, and they're coming later this year for 249 dollars. They also are not going to blend into your ears They're huge I mean a lot of people made fun of airpods and I think it's a fair thing But these things are just gnarly in fact, I would say this if you were always tempted to get eargages You know cutting out your your lobe and really that's right This will at least look like you've done it They could go right into your eargages I actually think these look like they'll be lost less the fallout less like there's some benefits to the size the battery life's probably the biggest but Um, I don't know man. They're big old discs in your head and I'm not sure that's going to work for me But you know, somebody's got 250 out there. Give it as Roger pointed out in our pre show. You won't lose them That is easily Thanks to everybody who participates in our subreddit You can submit stories and vote on them at daily tech news show dot reddit dot com and facebook dot com slash groups Slash daily tech news show checking out the mail bag. Uh, we actually got a voicemail Yesterday, I posited that apple wasn't worried about not getting tariff exemptions for its mac pro parts for some of them Anyway, because they could source them from outside china and they likely knew the parts wouldn't get exemptions Well, james thatcher aka big jim called us from his car on the way to present at a conference To give us his expertise on the topic With regard to yesterday's show and apple not getting some exemptions but getting other exemptions tom, I think you're half right I think that apple most definitely is planning on sourcing those items from either somewhere in asia Or probably somewhere in uh, mexico and my only reason for that guess is Just because of the proximity to the border. Maybe it's easier to do it that way With regard to did they have some kind of conversation with the us tr I find it highly unlikely and here's why every company I have talked to Who has submitted trade exemption requests and there have been several None of them that I have talked to have had a conversation with the us tr Or their office If it was done, it was either done completely open and in public or it was put on the exemption request specifically But that's just my two cents For tech and trade and yes tech and trade is still around. We're still kicking. We're not dead yet Visit us at the trade nerd. That's the trade nerd calm I'm big jim That's great. So I guess my best guess knowing that now that I have big jim's expertise weighing in on this is Maybe they just knew that those parts might not get approval might not get exemptions I I I'm still holding to the idea that I don't think apple was shocked and is now suddenly upset I think they probably planned for that, but thank you. Thank you big jim. Yeah, that was awesome I wasn't part of that conversation. Obviously because I wasn't here but the um I was just stunned by the idea that hey, they're gonna build them in texas and I went Didn't they already do that the the one I have over here the old pro can They were building them in in austin and then they decided they were no longer going to build them in austin And then when the tariffs came along they changed their mind and now they're going to keep building them in austin All right. Well, good luck and I can't afford your new mac Yeah, I don't think it's bad for you really anymore weirdly not anymore. It's the old one. Yeah, I don't know those guys They got to figure that out Well a big shout out to patrons at our master and grand master levels including andrew bradley dustin cambell and paul boyer Thanks for your support of the show and thank you scott johnson for joining us What's going on to tell folks about oh There's a lot of things and I know I keep teasing this but uh if we're getting closer We're not sure we're using Kickstarter now because of some controversy a Kickstarter We may be using something else, but my board game slash card game is coming out. It's called rock runners It's available at least some details about it some pictures of it I have an actual test deck here that works and it's great All the artworks completed. You can find that over at frogpants.com slash rock runners It's a really fun game for quick five round games the friends up to four people And I love it and I can't wait to get this thing out there, but head on over there Bookmark it and soon you'll figure out how you can get them for everything else you're looking for frogpants.com And of course I am on twitter at scott johnson We have new patreon rewards You just heard one of them shout outs in the show Become a member of dts and you could get a peek at our show rundown as we develop it You could have been watching as I was fumbling around with all those microsoft announcements today Behind the scenes chats and more and on november 1st Everybody who is at the $2 level or above will get a pdf copy of the official dtsns Good day internet cookbook with recipes from the show hosts and even some listeners sign up now at patreon.com slash dts Our email addresses feedback at daily tech news show dot com we're live monday through friday 4 30 p.m Eastern 20 30 utc you can find out more about that at daily tech news show dot com slash live Back tomorrow with justin robert young and special guest tony stanley To give us some idea of what the trends in fintech are these days talk to you then This show is part of the frogpants network get more at frogpants.com I hope you have enjoyed this brover