We Skipped the Pixel Event

Recording from Spain

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1:00When you hear that this new phone in 2026 has a custom RGB notification light, I wouldn't blame you if your first thought was, oh, great. When I get a spam call, it'll go red. When I get an email, it'll go green. When I get a Zelle, it'll go blue. When I get a Venmo, it'll go purple. And you have all these ideas about things you'll do with different apps. None of those things are possible as of right now. None of them. Yeah. We don't have the technology. Yeah, the 2017 Note 8, it was like yellow Snapchat, blue Twitter, green messages.

1:32Oh, the minimal phone does this. Oh, wait. Really, does it?

1:40Yo, what is up, people of the internet? Welcome back to another episode of the Waveform Podcast. We're your hosts. I'm Marquez. I'm Andrew. I'm David. And this is a jump scare if you're not in the audio-only version, because we are definitely in a different place. We are in a very different place. We skipped the Pixel event, and we're in Spain. For good reason. Great delivery. Maybe not the reason you expect. You'll find out very... Oh, we'll probably talk about it, but you'll find out very soon. We should just say. You posted it on your story. Yeah. We should just say. We're in Spain because we wanted to go watch the total solar eclipse that came through

2:16here as of the day of recording yesterday. Not only did we watch it, we recorded a podcast episode right in front of it, and it turned out pretty incredible. I'm very excited for you guys to see it. It is why you will see that very soon in not the same location, but the same country anyway. You should subscribe. So yeah, definitely. If you haven't gotten subscribed, this is a great time to get subscribed, because that will be showing up in your sub box very soon. But we still got to talk about the Google stuff. We still do have thoughts on the tech event of the week.

2:46Um, but first, did they even test this?

Gemini in Android Auto

2:50I have one. Speaking of Google stuff. Speaking of Google stuff, this is extremely relevant. I'm ready. Um, okay. So I've had this written down for a while, but this actually timing wise works perfectly. So my, did they even test this is that my Android auto has switched to Gemini, which at first I was like, fine, whatever. It's just a different voice. Um, but lately it has been not famously just a different voice, different name. Um, it's been messing up left and right for me.

3:23And I think it's partially because of that. I'm speaking to it like the assistant. I'm not like Gemini. So when I first got it, I was like, I don't like this. I don't like change, but I gave it a shot and it did some pretty impressive things. Like I mostly use Android auto, uh, for when I have an idea of something that I need to do in the car and I can add it to my task app. You guys all, Oh, I'm still a task app user. You guys Google task hard and probably the most I add to it is like in my car. Cause I'm like, I have to do this thing today.

3:54I have to do this thing when I get home. And the other day I realized like, I need to start my snowblower once a month just to make sure it's continues to run for winter. And I said to Gemini, Hey, can you set a reoccurring task for the last Saturday of every month to tell me to start my snowblower done? I was like, Whoa, Gemini rules in your car, in my car lately. I've never done anything that complicated for my car. So lately it can't get anything right. Um, I wrote down, I went back in the history because that's a fun thing with Gemini and

4:26as soon as you can see your history. And I wrote down a couple of the things I asked it to do. So in the old speak, what you would do is you'd say, Hey, gee, yeah. Remind me and would say, what would you like me to remind you of? And then you say the next thing. So I said, uh, Hey, remind me. I said, what would you like? I said, find ice cream cake for Claire. And then it said, I can't find anything right now. Errored out. It got confused. It got confused. Then the next one I said, remind me. What would you like to be reminded of? I said, message Nathan about podcast outlines. Said, I don't find, I don't see a Nathan in your contacts list.

5:00And then I did. So it was taking, okay. And then I did another one. I said, set my disc golf roster. This is something I do for a weekly fantasy league I'm in. And it just errored out. It didn't do anything. So my thought. To clarify, you do know a Nathan. I do know a Nathan. Okay. I just don't have him on text. But so what I think is happening is with the old speak, if the first word of the task is an actionable word, it's forgetting the context of the conversation that we're having and just trying to then do the action.

5:31Right. Did you, have you tried it all as one? Yeah. You want to have it instead of two? I haven't, but I'm pretty sure the new thing should be able to do what the old thing should have done. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I guess it's the new one's supposed to be like, I mean, they're all supposed to be this, but they're supposed to be like natural language. Yes. You just talk to it like a person. So instead of the old speak, as you say, first let me queue up the reminder thing. Yes. And then let me give it the reminder. You got to talk to it like a grandma who doesn't know that that's the old speak. And you just go, hey, send me a reminder to text Nathan and blah, blah, blah, blah.

6:01And then maybe it'll work better. So I've thought of that and I agree, but also the other thing new Gemini is supposed to do is understand context of conversations better. And when the conversation is, you ask me what you want me to remind you of. And I say the thing, if, if you were like, Andrew, can you, uh, after work, I really need you to remind me something. I was like, cool. What do you need me to remind me of? And you're like, go to ultimate practice. And then I said, where's ultimate?

6:32Yeah. Where's ultimate? I said, like, how would you like to get there? Like, I completely forgot that you just asked me to remind you of it. And then I'm just like talking about ultimate. That's not natural anymore. And especially when like the whole thing is like context, it's supposed to remember full conversations and we're not even, yeah. Yeah. We're not even stopping the, uh, the conversation in there. I'm answering it. That's totally valid. You know what this reminds me of though? What's that? In the Google presentation, cause we've seen this before with some demos, but the rambler thing where you will be talking to it and it's supposed to do speech to text.

7:05And I thought about this. It's, there are several things that you can do that are purely natural language where you'd be like, Hey, uh, I just wanted to say, uh, thanks for coming. I mean, uh, it was cool to have you there and you start talking and then deleting things and then saying more things. And it realizes you didn't want to say it and then like takes it back and then adds a new thing because of the way you're talking to it. And that's really cool. But I always wondered what if you wanted to, what if you wanted it to actually say the delete thing part? I had that problem already.

7:36Really? Oh yeah. I think that's what's happening to you in like a different way where it's supposed, it's supposed to hear set a reminder. Okay. And then, oh, this guy just realized he doesn't want to set a reminder. He actually wants to message someone instead of it's like one big command. So it feels like that's what's happening. I guess. In a funny, but impressive way, the one time I just like snapped, I think it was the like, um, it was like, what would you like to be reminded of? I said, send Nathan podcast outlines. It said, I don't have a Nathan in there.

8:08Would you like me to do, or would you like me to text something else? And I said, no, I want you to set the reminder. Like I asked you in the first place and they said, set a reminder for, and then it did it perfectly. Yeah. Which is hilarious, but apparently you just have to get angry. This is like, imagine if you could no longer Google things with SEO speak and you had to only talk to things with natural language, which is like using Google when you know how to Google is way faster than talking to an LL app. A hundred percent. Because you have to type out everything. And then wait for it. Yeah. And if you can just use keywords with like six keywords, it's so easy for me to find

8:39stuff. I just, I just use the main big words and then it finds it automatically. But if you have to type out everything, it's like, that's so much less efficient. That's so funny to think about though, that, so we, we learned Google comes, we learn SEO speak. Yeah. Natural language comes with Gemini. But when that takes over, are we all going to be like, this would be so much faster if we could just speak to SEO. And then we redevelop SEO speak into LL. Yeah. SEO speak is just keywords, right?

9:10Yeah. And we, if you use keywords, you are dropping all the irrelevant stuff. Yeah. But now we have to talk to it in that, although I would like to find and yeah, I wish you would also have, no, I understand that for most people that never learned SEO speak, you know, under a certain age, people are like, I don't know, I'll just ask it and it'll tell me. Exactly. Like I get that. And I totally understand that. And even with the Rambler stuff, because, oh my God, I've, I've had older relatives like try to talk to these like home assistants and stuff. And they just, they're like, hey, gee, um, could you, uh, turn my lights on maybe, I

9:46guess, like maybe tomorrow at three. And if that, if that works, that's amazing, right? That's incredible. But, but honestly, like to your point where it has about the Rambler thing, like I have, I've tested this, um, on a, on a, on a pixel. And when I'm trying to text somebody like this kind of more complex thing, it takes out like all of the, the flair of your, of your sort of conversational tone. Yeah. Sometimes you want to use like a very specific kind of like lingo and it makes it a lot more

10:16proper. That you don't always want to do. Yeah. That was not an issue, but that was something I found, which is, and I've been thinking about this a lot, that like the humanity of this is so randomly deep. The humanity is our imperfections, our inefficiencies. The personality. They kept using, they kept using the example for Rambler as like texting people. I actually don't think that's ever what I'd use it for. Cause it doesn't, it removes all of the me from the text. Yeah. I would use it for note taking. I would use it for like a really, really long reminder that I want to set for myself where it removes the ums and ahs and it's very efficient.

10:48Yeah. But for texting, which is what they kept using as a demo, it's so like robotic. Yeah. Proper. Perfect. And that's not what I want necessarily from text. Totally. Totally. I did use it to say, what up my G and it did keep that. It did. Okay. It did keep that. So I was happy. Cause that's very, yeah. I do think like for texting, the times when I would be using speech to text is when I'm like on the run doing something where I'm like, I'm not probably putting much personality

11:18into it anyways. It's just like, you need information and I need to speak it to you as fast as possible. So then in that case, I don't care, but I'm sure there are lots of people, no matter how good Rambler gets, where when you get that text message, you're like, you can tell person types, this person speech, this like periods, capitalization, everything proper. You're just like, oh yeah. Okay. They just yelled that into their phone. It's like, you put too much effort into it. Yeah. You need to put less effort because that's how I know you care. Yeah. It's also, it's everyone's always, oh, did you write this with an LLM?

11:52Did you write this with AI? If you use Rambler, is this now in the gray area of like, well, you did write this yourself, but you refined it. Kinda. You refined it with AI. You also kind of used, yeah. Yeah. LLM. They made a weirdly big deal and we'll get to the Google event in a bit, but they did make a weirdly big deal about the fact that you could add an emoji with your voice, which you could always do. I've done that a lot. I'm always like heart emoji or like heart hand. I think a lot of people didn't know you could do that before. Yeah. I guess it's just reintroducing features. It's like the Apple thing. And you can also, it's like, well, you could do that for years.

12:24Your iPhone can send text messages. Wow. Wow.

Google Assistant phase-out

12:28Yeah.

Google Assistant phase-out

12:29Real quick to go in, the first story I have here relating to the did they even test this is all people who had Google's and got this email over the last week that starting September 4th, Google is starting the process of removing access to Google Assistant on your phone, tablet, or paired devices. Once the ability is removed, you won't be able to switch back to Assistant. RIP. RIP. There are a couple of funny things about this email that I thought. One is the intro sentence says, Gemini, our next generation AI powered Assistant, is now the Assistant experience on Android.

13:01Gemini is AI and can make mistakes, including about people. So, great start to the email. The paragraph after that saying, Assistant will be removed, also says, if your Android device meets the minimum requirements and you're in a region where it's available, and then just doesn't say what happens if you don't meet those parameters. So, I'm not sure if Assistant will stay, presumably, or they just, it has to be that, right? It's going to be for extremely old phones. I haven't used Assistant in years because phones for the past eight years have all come

13:33out with this new, maybe not eight years, but a long time. They've all gotten updated to Gemini. So, phones with Assistant that didn't meet the system requirements for Gemini, I do wonder, do they just not have an Assistant anymore? Do they shut down the Assistant? I don't think so. I think they'll just keep Google Assistant temporarily. It's got to be so minimal at that point. Yeah. Is it like regulatory bodies? Is that the whole reason that they can't change over in some regions? Because it's sort of like how, in the EU, you can't use Siri AI yet. And I saw a tweet a couple days ago that was like, I entered the US, and I was in the US

14:06for one microsecond, and immediately I got the, you can now use Siri AI notification. Oh, really? So, my guess was language, actually. Because like, a lot of time when we see these AI things come up, it's like not available in these regions yet. But, um, so I, they obviously, if they don't have the language supported in Gemini, I can't send a forced upgrade to a region that uses that. I would imagine they'd keep Google Assistant, because like, removing a feature like that when people use it pretty consistently is, is kind of insane. It is. I don't think they do. But also has happened before.

14:37Yeah. It is Google. It is Google. We do have a notably large graveyard of Google products. That is true. That's possible. There is a public website. Um, and the pair of devices, that includes this Wear OS, headphones, earbuds compatible with Gemini, and vehicles running Android Auto. Oh, so here might be our question to the Android thing. Google, cars with Google built-in Assistant will continue to be the main on that. Oh, that's a good spot where Assistant is. Really? Full Star or something. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So they're not upgrading those to Gemini? No. Huh. Or not forcing to Gemini.

15:08Interesting. Which is. That's strange. Which means Assistant then, yeah, that means Assistant can still be running. Yes. But it is strange that that's not changing. So fragmented. Because those are so new, you would think. Yeah. But maybe just hardware specs on the infotainment system. Crazy. Teams not talking to each other? Yeah. Like, we have cars with Google built in. Um, okay.

The new embargo timeline

15:31Well, we should talk about this event. Yeah. This is a, uh, an evening event. Google did this thing where the embargoes for the hands-on for all of our videos was at 10 in the morning Eastern time. And then the event announcing everything was at 6 p.m. that day. And so there was this eight-hour gap where everyone already had seen all of the stuff and we were still waiting for the Google event. Yeah. I thought that was a choice. Um. That freaked me out because we're in Spain with the time difference. I was looking at the calendar and I saw you respond to someone on Slack like, they said,

16:01when's the embargo? You said, uh, 4 p.m. Because you're, or no. 10 a.m. 10 a.m. 10 a.m. Talking about Eastern time. And I was like, that's not it. The event is later. That's. Yeah. That's so far away. And then had to confirm it. But this is, I mean, we've had, it used to be event ends embargo. Yeah. Then it started being like event starts embargo, which was funny because you get all the themes like, why is anyone going to watch this? Because all the reviews are out. Yeah. Yeah. This now, not an hour, not two hours, eight hours before.

16:35Yeah. Notably, event end embargoes was always so nebulous because people, technically, if the public information is out there, you're allowed to report on it. And so I remember like the OnePlus 6 or the OnePlus 6T and it was so awkward because they would announce the phones, but the event wouldn't be over. And a bunch of websites would put out their information like as soon as they said, this is the OnePlus 6T. So I remember that flip being switched because I remember it would always be, let's say the event was 10 a.m. and it would end at 11 a.m. and the embargo was 11 a.m.

17:05And so they'd say, here is your hands on, you do the video, your embargo was 11 a.m. So the event would end at like 10.55 and everyone would be like, can we? And then at exactly 11 a.m. everyone would publish as we were supposed to. And then people would like start to go a little earlier, a little bit earlier because the event had ended. So then I remember getting an email for a random, I don't remember which company, but it would say something like the embargo is 11 a.m. Or whenever the feature is announced on stage, whichever comes first. Yeah. The feature? Yeah. Or whenever the, yeah.

17:36They would like have a whole list of the embargoes. Oh, yeah. And so then you would have to choose when to publish based on if your video was breaking the embargo for 11 a.m. Or if the thing that is in your video was talked about on stage at 10.48, then you could publish then. Yeah. That happened for a few years. Then, yeah, we started getting like before the event. And yeah, I think at that point it just got more and more confusing because people started sort of intentionally breaking the embargo because it was already so nebulous and like confusing that people are like, nobody's going to like call me out for this because I have a way

18:08to justify it to them, you know? Yeah. And then it became like people were publishing minutes before the event ended because like, oh, my stream was faster or whatever. And it just, I don't know. Personally, this eight hour gap, this is like one of the first times we've seen something like this. I like it because. I mean, as a publisher, I'm totally cool. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. Because like people just read all of our stuff, watch all of our stuff. And I think the fact that like Samsung, you know, puts it out, the embargo is the exact same time as the event probably hurts their numbers and hurts our numbers.

18:40So neither of us are happy. I like the fact that people are going to come consume our content and then eight hours go by. People can kind of digest what we had said and then watch the way that Google presents it. And I think that's interesting. It's interesting. I've always liked it the other way around. It felt more correct where first you would hear the marketing packaged version and then afterwards you'd hear the breakdown of what all of that really means or what people believe in what that means. That's fair. And so if I was like a casual or just a consumer of that information, I would I would see the

19:11marketing thing and then I decide in the moment, do I want to look at the marketing? Yeah. Or do I just wait until I trust these people and hear what they have to say? I think that's the way I always picture. Yeah, that's a good point. Now, I mean, that's the way it still happens that like Apple doesn't pre-brief. That's kind of the way it still goes there. Like you first see the event and then later throughout the day you see the reactions of the people, but yeah, for like the Samsung thing, what I've noticed is we'll publish our video at event start and then you'll watch the event and 200 to 500,000 people will watch it live

19:41and then when it ends, I will see traffic to our video go up. Like the minute the Samsung event ends and people start leaving and going back to YouTube homepage, they'll see our videos and then you'll see the traffic go up. So there's a group of people who are not too casual to be watching the Samsung event live, but they're not too into it to be watching our video first. Interesting. Yeah. I wonder if a lot of those people are the people who are used to the old embargo of like, we're still yearning for the days where an event surprises us.

20:13Yeah. And I wonder if some of those people are still the ones like, in my day, we watched the event. Yeah. Then we watched the reviews. This was what a release day was to me. I need to see the event. If there's anything that's going to surprise me, now all you get is some weird Spider-Man hanging up in the corner of a stage. Yeah. Or a celebrity. But like, yeah, I think David's totally right on this actually does feel in the new age, probably the best because it doesn't affect views on either person. The reason it sucks for Google on this one, and we'll get to why,

20:47is you say like, we're going to watch all the reviews and digest. Well, that means now the live stream for Google is a bunch of people with pitchforks and torches outside of the Google event because they're not happy with this release, banging on it, just ready to destroy the chat on YouTube. I was thinking about that because like the Apple events, for example, people don't know anything. And so we as like reviewers and stuff, we see stuff and then we instantly have to touch it. And then we have to make editorial decisions in the moment about what we're going to talk about

21:18and like how we're going to feel about it. But we didn't have any time to look at them, digest the information, spend time with the devices. And so it's more of like a raw reaction. And so the hype around the product is actually lower because we have more time to think more critically and think about, oh, is this actually better, blah, blah, blah. Yeah. Instead of just touching, touching, touching. I don't know if I can, I can't like give you an opinion on this yet, but here it is. Yeah, I've always found companies like Apple are obsessed with controlling the narrative

21:50around their products. So if you think of it as like the funnel of like the widest group, when they present and they show their event, that is the largest swath of people to be getting the message. So they control that one. And then afterwards, there is a smaller group who will hear a different version of the message from people like us. Yeah. With this, it was like upside down. And it started with all of us who had time to figure this out, essentially controlling the narrative in a way that seems like Apple would never want. Yeah. And then eight hours later, the nicely packaged marketing narrative where everyone goes,

22:22oh, but that's just the marketing thing. Yeah. You know? It is weird. And it's the reverse Uno card of what Apple would do. I was going to say pineapple upside down cake, but it's too early for that. Well, the event was... I was going to say, do you think part of it also... We'll talk about the celebrity who was there, Trevor Noah, this year. But with Jimmy Fallon, was that last year or two years ago? Last year. Tenser. Tenser. Yeah. It became like such a meme because it was pretty awkward throughout the whole thing. But clearly, Google is trying to bring celebrities in to try and get a little more average person

22:54watching. Yeah. My thought was the people who are going to meme up the celebrity are probably the people watching our videos. throw that eight hours ahead and maybe a lot of that audience has gotten their share of what's going on and doesn't really care about celebrity, doesn't watch, less of a chance that Twitter's filled with Jimmy Fallon yelling about random... The people that are trying to reach don't watch our videos anyway, probably. Exactly. I think the audience is so different. Now the event doesn't have to be a little clouded by the audience that's probably going

23:26to dunk on it. Wait, wait, I'm sorry. Can you describe this hypothetical person you're talking about that doesn't care enough about the pixel to watch a Marquez Brownlee video, but does care enough to sit down at 6 p.m. and watch a full Google event? Ellis, at this point, I felt like I'm taking crazy pills for so long thinking that anyone other than our videos watches these events. But every year, people swear to me that they do. So I'm just accepting that maybe that person does exist. All right, man. I also am. Are they in the room with us right now? Yeah, like Google almost feels like they're treating it...

23:59I mean, it is Google, so they could just be pushing it to people's homepages of YouTube. So like that actually, for Google, it might make a lot of sense. They're also probably doing it for social. The clip economy. Yeah, we need to think about the clip economy, dude. We think our video is big. It was interesting. Like our video had almost a million and a half views by the time the event started. So we're like, oh, great. And then the event goes on and has like 50,000 live viewers. So I'm like, okay, this is a smaller part of the funnel. But then Google is going to put this everywhere. I'm sure we'll check back in and it'll have 10 million views because they paid for ads for it.

24:30And it's everywhere. Or it's like live streaming on the homepage as you log on. Gemini will suggest it by tomorrow. Yeah. So that's their version of the wide version of the funnel and controlling the narrative, blah, blah, blah. They're just going to send it there. They're also going to just be clipping this like crazy. They're going to be putting it in social feeds. They're going to be putting it on TikTok. They're going to be doing everything with it. I will say, I think they picked the right person this time. For sure. 100%. So last time it was Jimmy Fallon. We've all talked about that episode.

24:56What else is there to be said? You know, it's a guy who hosts the show and is well-known, blah, blah, blah. Great. Trevor Noah has also hosted a show. But he's also notably like online and watches tech videos. Yeah. You could tell he was kind of into it and also was much more charismatic and sort of ad-libbed a little bit, which was funny and threw some Googlers off, but it was also like on the watch. It was really funny. Really good. So that was our host for the event. And they, of course, go through all the different Googlers who contributed to different parts of the stuff that we heard about.

25:30And it was pretty informative. It was also still marketing speak, but we got to get some questions answered on the spot, which is kind of cool. We got three phones. Four. I guess four. Pixel 11, 11 Pro, 11 Pro Max, and 11 Pro Fold. We also got 11 Pro XL. And 11 Pro XL. Thank you. They're all the same. Sorry. And then we got the watch five. We got Google Tags. Yeah. Google Tag. Google Tag. Google Tag. It's Google Tag? Wait, it's Pixel Tag. Sorry, Pixel Tag. Pixel Tag. It's Pixel Tag. You're right, it's Pixel Tag. Okay.

26:00Guys, we're running on like four hours of sleep. It is. Yeah. We can talk about all of that stuff. We should probably just start with the phone. Should we take a break and then come back and do the phone? Let's just do the one so we can talk about it before the first ad break.

Pixel 11 Highlight feature

26:11Okay.

Pixel 11 Highlight feature

26:12Let's just talk about the big feature. This is the feature that, to me, exemplifies Google in 2026. This is only in the pros, right? This is just in the pros, but it's called Highlight. And what it is, is it's a multicolor or RGB, whatever, LED on the back of the phone that is just, well, it's two things. It's the flash, and it's also multicolor to be a notification light, sort of, for exactly two things. Yeah. One, for while you are actively speaking to Gemini.

26:43While your phone is faced down. While your phone is faced down. Only, because people do that. Oh, like on a surface. So even if you're holding it. Not when you're holding it. And you might be facing the back. Yeah, only while it's faced down. It's got to be faced down on the table. I just want to, we're going to talk about it, every new thing I learn about this feature makes me more mad. There hasn't been a part of this feature that I've been like, cool. Yeah. Okay, so it's while you're talking to Gemini, it'll light up and it'll glow in this little multicolor orb. Or two, while you're receiving a phone call from a contact that you have assigned a color to, specifically.

27:19Favorites, yeah. So you go into the contacts, you have a favorite, you assign them a color, there's five colors. That? Five colors. Just learned that this morning. Five colors? Five colors. You know what, can you name the five colors for me? I think it's like, what was funny is they actually said at the event, there's no red. There is yellow, blue, purple, white, and like some other greenish. Five colors and white is one of them. Yeah. It's white when it's turned off. So it must not be RGB then, because it can't do red.

27:53I put RGB in here just assuming. If it's white, it's RGB. So how does it not have the ability to do? It probably has the ability, it just didn't put it in, yeah. Why not? Why not give it? Okay, yeah, this is good. There's no logical. It can do white, which is all the colors. It can do orange, okay? It can't do all of the. No, it can't. No, they just don't let it. They just don't let it. They just don't let it. Why? Okay. Okay. Yeah, so yeah, notably, no text messages, no custom app assignments.

28:24Like, when you hear that this new phone in 2026 has a custom RGB notification light, I wouldn't blame you if your first thought was, oh, great. When I get a spam call, it'll go red. When I get an email, it'll go green. When I get a Zelle, it'll go blue. When I get a Venmo, it'll go purple. And you have all these ideas about things you'll do with different apps. None of those things are possible, as of right now. None of the, yeah, just. We don't have the technology. Yeah, the 2017 Note 8, it was like yellow Snapchat, blue Twitter, green messages.

28:56Oh, the minimal phone does this. Oh, wait. Really, does it? The minimal phone, too, is a notification. Oh, yeah. We were talking about that. It's the thing I've wanted back most, and partially because it's so simple, I'm surprised. So when I saw this, I was like, yo, it's not the glowing bar, but like, this is going to slap. This is such an opportunity for such a win. I remember the first, like, the Nexus, what was the Nexus 1? Had a trackball light. Yeah. I missed those. Dude, on my Nexus 6, with Cyanogen mod, you could design this RGB LED that wasn't even

29:27officially part of the phone, which is something they put in the phone that wasn't used at all. I forgot about that. Like, in the earpiece, right? Yeah, in the earpiece. And you could just use it for whatever you wanted, in any color, any notification, and we don't have the technology 15 years later. We forgot how. We forgot how to do it. We don't have the machining anymore. Yeah. It's crazy. I, to me, this exemplifies Google right now, because if they were cohesive and all talking to each other and were thinking this through, this all seems very obvious to me, that they

29:58would have done all this. They would have given us the ability to set it to certain apps and messages and lots of other stuff. Yeah. The fact that you can't. Trevor actually asked during the event if they would let you do other stuff like messages, and I think all they did was confirm that they're working on it being for messages as well. For messages. Why do you have to work on it? It seems pretty strange. I also thought that in our vibe code economy, you could just tell Gemini to make this work and it would happen. Yeah. It is funny. But apparently not. Especially because if you're setting it for the contact, then you have the color.

30:30All it needs to do is be that color for more or less time. One blink or multiple blinks, and now it is message versus. I feel like I can see their vision, right? Because their messaging around this whole line of pixels has been, let Google. Handle the complicated parts of your life. Get back to your normal life. A lot of the things in this event have been like, stop staring at your phone, use Gemini for things, and then let AI do things for you. So I get the vision of like, leave your phone face down on the table, except for when you

31:02really need it. Except for the base phone. Except for what? The base. Except for the base. Except for the base phone, unless you're poor. But really, it's just not built out at all. It's just like they need to actually deliver. It reminds me so much of the Fitbit Air software UI, where it's so bad that you don't even need a future promise of an update, because we all have to assume it's going to get fixed.

31:34Like, you almost have to assume it's broken. That, yeah. This is just so not fleshed out. The current and especially early Fitbit Air actual exercise UI, when you were doing an exercise, looked like my computer science 101, like, first Hello World project. Where you just like, put text on the screen on a big white box. That's all it was. And all of it was misaligned, and there was like, multiple different dark backgrounds. Yeah, yeah. It was bad. Okay, two updates on Highlight. There's updates. I'm on their website right now.

32:05I'm prepared to get more, Matt. Updates. Two really, okay. One is it's not on the Pro Fold either. What? It's just on the Pro and Pro Excel. But they told us at the event. I read a different article this morning that said it was on Pro Fold. Well, that's because they told me that at the event. Same. They told me it was on all the phones. I'm reading the website. It says on Pixel 11 Pro and 11 Pro XL. So that's my update. Two is the reason it's able to do white but not red is because it's not really RGB. It's using the flash, which is still in there, for white.

32:37Oh. Oh, it has a color wheel. Yeah, it has a color wheel. It's a weird color wheel for the rest of the colors. Yeah. It doesn't include red. It's like a filter. Flash in the middle for white. It's like a filter. And like blue, cyan, and orange to combine to make the Gemini colors. Oh. Red. So no red. But that has to be more expensive than an RGB LED. Yeah. Can they just put an RGB LED in there? Yeah. I have someone in the comments corrects me if I'm wrong. But there's really only two ways to get a white LED. You can do three diodes, a red, a green, and a blue, and fire them all at the same time.

33:09And then you get white because they combine. Or you can do a blue LED that fires at a coating that has like a phosphorus that emits white, like when the photons get activated. They're not clear about if this is a filter. I mean, I'm just going by the animation. I can't go. No, no, no. Totally. But like there's a 50% chance that the flash underneath there is an RGB. If they just fire the red LED already. Yeah. I don't quite. I hope someone in the comments comments. I'm sure I'm missing something, but this still feels like they just went way around the

33:41block. Surely there's no one clever enough at Google to think of a way to make this turn. Yeah. I think that they're probably thinking about the highlight thing as like a screen because it animates for Gemini. It kind of like waves around and moves and it's supposed to be sort of like a little bit Yeah. So you're saying this is all they wanted to actually do. Was Gemini. Was Gemini. Was Gemini. I think, but they threw us a bone and gave us the most half-baked. I think they knew that if it was only Gemini, people would be like very angry about that. Well, that backfired because I'm more angry now. Yeah. Here's a question though.

34:11When you get calls from anyone who is not part of your favorites, does the dot do nothing? I don't think it does anything. It doesn't do anything. You have to assign and it has to be the favorites. Can I assign a color to everyone else? You can go through your contacts one by one and give everyone a color. Oh my God. Wait, you can give multiple people the same color? It can't just be phone call yellow and then mom blue. No, it is. It's like family. It is in the contacts app specifically. Yeah. So it's not the phone app or the messages app. You go into contacts, you select that contact and you give that contact one of the colors.

34:44And then when they call you and only call you, you will see that color. Yeah. Carl Paye is laughing so hard. He's like, I nailed this. Let's try one shot. I could tell that Google felt very mixed about this feature in general with like how much they wanted to promote it because at our hands-on event, they had constructed a giant pixel camera bar on the wall where you could hit a big red button. It would glow. Notably a red button. Red button. And it would make the giant pixel highlight kind of glow and do the Gemini thing.

35:16So they had a big stand that was like, look how cool this is. But then they didn't talk about it at the hands-on event at all. Yeah. And so. It was deep into the event itself. Yeah. And it was very short. Yeah. As well. So I don't know. It seems like the hardware team like went kind of hard and then the software team was like, oh, I forgot about this. We were supposed to do that. Yeah. They didn't use Google Tasks to actually realize that they're supposed to map it to anything. Anyway, we got a lot more features to talk about and we don't have very long in this

35:49hotel. So we should probably take a break. Let's take a quick break. Do we also have?

35:54Whoa. We sure do. Bienvenidos a Preguntas de Waveform. Pregunta numero uno. Estabas atento? Were you paying attention? Is this to the event last night? Indeed. By the way, we watched this event at midnight. Yeah. That's when it started for us. I watched. We got back at 11.47. I listened to most of the event at 2x speed while cleaning my room this morning. Then you're going to crush this. I'm so sorry. My head hurts. Trevor Noah was surprised by Liverpool legend Stephen Gerrard.

36:26But before he came out, Trevor wondered if it was actually him or Gemini speaking in what regional British accent? Oh, I'm going to write. I don't have my whiteboard. So there are regional British accents. Yes. This one is the Liverpool. Really? The UK is so small, man. No, it's so it's so complicated. The UK is so complicated. What I'm essentially asking is, what is the Liverpool accent called? Yeah, I got it. This is one of those things where I know one name of an accent and the opportunity of how

36:58many people are going to get mad when it's wrong. It's probably Tagalog. I'd rather probably just not get the pose. I'm kidding. Well, we'll think about it. We will probably have to guess some accents. Answers at the end, like usual. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Framer. So Framer is a complete website platform, not just a builder. So teams can launch and keep improving their sites in one place.

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39:34Get free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK too. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E dot com slash wave. Support for this show comes from Glaze. Imagine having an idea, and then a few minutes later having a working, well-designed desktop app. That's exactly what Glaze helps you do. With Glaze, you can build your own desktop apps just by describing what you want. No coding needed. If you have an idea for an app or even a specific problem that you want to solve, Glaze is for you. Think a tool for your hobby, something hyper-specific for your workflow, or even a fun little game.

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40:39Go to glaze.app slash waveform today to try it out. New signups get a free welcome pack of credits. That's glaze.app slash waveform. All right. Welcome back. Quick update. We continued reading more Google websites about Highlight. And it does seem like they have also said that the 11 Pro Fold has Highlight. So I'm throwing it back on the table. Base phone doesn't have it. Not enough room? Question mark. I don't know. Pro Fold does have it. Pro and Pro Excel also have it. Yes. Yeah.

41:09I guess we'll find out in the full review. Yeah. I guess we will.

Pixel 11 specs and design

41:13Anyway, let's talk about these fonts. Yeah. There's a bunch of new phones. There's a bunch of storylines going around about these phones. I think the main storyline is one of the silly ones, which is, oh, this isn't a big upgrade from the Pixel 10. Yeah, true. Phones are incremental nowadays. I agree. But the Pixel 11 has Tensor 6. It has a brighter display. It has slightly faster wireless charging. And it's $100 more because memory is expensive. And that's basically it. It's a thinner camera bar. A new thinner camera bar and a new primary camera sensor.

41:46Does it charge quicker? Yeah. Yeah. It charges wired and wireless quicker. It's funny. There was one feature I saw that I didn't even get briefed about, but somebody tweeted a screenshot. Maybe I missed it during the event. About, like, an extreme charging mode. I was trying to read about it really quick. Yeah, I read about that, too. Do you know what it is? It seems like it's a software thing that can just prioritize charging over, or, like, pause tasks that are going on on the phone to prioritize charging. It was just funny to me because it's probably, like, 30 watts, which is, like, not extreme at all. But they're calling it the extreme charging mode, which is their fastest possible charging.

42:20Which is, you know, it's better than not having a faster charging. Well, it said it can charge the Pro XL to, like, 75% in 30 minutes, and the Pro and the regular 11 to 55% in 30 minutes, if you use the extreme charging mode. I'm coming from the OnePlus 15, where I would look at the charger, and it would go to 100% in seconds. So, yeah. Yeah. It's, I, you know, welcome small incremental increases. You know, Tensor 6, we don't know that much about, but we'll benchmark it. We'll see if it's dramatically better at anything. I'm sure it'll be slightly faster with CPU, better with AI performance, more memory bandwidth,

42:52with the classic stuff we look to for Google Tensor, not necessarily an using GPU or performance otherwise. Yeah. I have a hot take about Tensor. Can I talk about Tensor? Hot take. Hot take. Yeah, please. Okay. I think that people think about, like, SOCs and CPUs differently than Google thinks about SOCs and CPUs. I agree. And I think that people always look at Tensor, and they compare it to, like, a Snapdragon chip, and you can't compare the chips very much. I know. I mean, you can in certain ways.

43:23That's what I'd say if I was losing. You can in certain ways, because, like, obviously, the gaming performance, the FPS, whatever. That's all whatever. But Google's been hyper-optimizing for TPUs for, like, a while. Like, ever since Tensor 1. That's part of the reason they made Tensor in the first place, was because they were like, oh, we need to do AI performance, AI performance. Notably, in Tensor 6, it's 2x the memory bandwidth for Gemini. So they're just, like, hyper-fixated on this world where your phone is, like, automating things for you, automating tasks, doing things, you know, natural language processing, that kind

43:57of stuff, Rambler, local model, yeah, Gemini Nano, that kind of stuff. And I know that Qualcomm also optimizes for this stuff, but it's not the 100% flag post thing that Google is thinking about for. So when we look at Tensor 6, it's, like, 2x the memory bandwidth for LLMs and stuff like that. You know, like, 2x the TPUs. Big deal for them. There's a new ISP in there that allows them to do new image signal processing stuff that enables the things like the 30x zoom in the regular Pixel 11 and the 120x zoom in the 11

44:32Pros. Pro zoom. So, I don't know. I think Google just thinks about when we make these things new every year, how can it enable more AI stuff? Whereas every other company is just, like, faster. That's the main. I agree. And more efficient. I wonder if that approach is yielding better AI performance in a noticeable way. The same way Qualcomm's approach is yielding faster graphics than Tensor. Noticeable is a great way to put it because I think that Google is sort of optimizing for

45:06the future and thinking about we don't want to hit a cap. We don't want your phone that is having seven years of updates to one day not be able to meet the AI standards that we're shipping in software. And Qualcomm's like, I don't want you to ever drop a frame. Yeah. Mobile. Yeah. Like Genshin Impact at 400 FPS. Yeah. My counter to that would be that Qualcomm is doing what people want, though, right now. I feel like one wants AI features. I'm not saying that the Google approach is correct, but I think that what Google wants

45:37out of its devices for the future, that's what they're optimizing for. I also think, I think you're right in the sense that people who watch our stuff want, I think 95% of people buying a phone couldn't tell the difference between any of these processors and it will just run exactly how they think. 95% of people buying the Pixel phone are not even going to use most of the AI features. A couple of years ago, I think you could tell the difference between a Tensor chip and a Snapdragon chip in performance. Yeah. Not a, not a, not a. I bet most people could.

46:08It's a small one. You're right. It's not, it's most of us. It's us eyeballing it. But the fact that I could eyeball it means there's some amount of people you can tell. Yeah. And then you play a game and you'd be like, oh, it's heating up a lot more. It's actually a way worse performance. Yeah. So that's, it was interesting. Now I just wonder how noticeable, like, are we going to hit a cap with Qualcomm chips where they're like, oh my God. Yeah. Look how far AI came. Yeah. We're focusing on frame rates. Like, we'll see. Yeah. But. I did get an email last night from MediaTek's PR agency. Hilarious. That said, by the way, MediaTek cannot confirm this, but here's a bunch of articles that

46:41infer that MediaTek is now the modem in Tensor. That's. Which was really weird. It was like, MediaTek is saying that they can't say, but that they are. Well, I would like to say that. I can, I can't announce this, but I personally handcrafted every modem. I'm inferring this, of course. So there's, the efficiency thing is interesting because, you know, people always shat on Tensor before having a terrible, like, modem efficiency performance because the Samsung modem in Tensor

47:11was terrible. And so now we have a MediaTek one. Allegedly. Allegedly. Potentially. MediaTek is telling me that they can't tell me that they are the ones making it. It's a guy with a media, hello, I'm MediaTek, handing you an anonymous letter. Yeah, literally. Wink, wink. Super weird. It's like when there's a rumor about you, but it's a good rumor. Yeah. So you're telling all your friends. Anyway, they do say that the Tensor G6 chip is quite a bit more efficient, and maybe that's why. But, yeah, maybe people won't be as upset anymore.

47:42I don't know. I do think certain regions of the world, like China, where everyone plays a lot more mobile games, it'll probably matter more. But they should be buying the phones they can charge at 400 watts. Yeah. There will be phones for them. This is not phones for them. Yeah. Yeah, maybe that's why the batteries didn't get bigger on any of these phones. Yeah, they got actually smaller on the Pros by a little bit. Yeah, bigger cameras, smaller batteries. But anyway, on the base Pixel, new colors are honestly the most noticeable thing about them to most people. The fuchsia color is so unbelievably saturated. All of my footage of it, it looks like I'm peaking their red channels.

48:15It's so bright. It reminds me of Rabbit R1, where you're like, impossible to color. Your eyes. There's something wrong with this. Yeah. And it looks like that in real life. It's really, it's fuchsia as hell. It's great. So we'll test the cameras. We'll see if they're actually better. At least the primary camera's different. I didn't get to see it, but I think the thinner camera bar looks sweet. It is a thinner camera bar. Agreed. Yeah. I have a hot take. Yeah, we were fighting about it. We were fighting about this. So now Google offers three levels of camera bars. And depending on how much money you're willing to spend, you get a thicker camera bar,

48:45which is interesting. That's so backwards. But Apple, Apple kind of did this with the iPhone. Yeah. Triple camera is the big boy. Yeah. The bigger the bump, the bigger the bump, the more money you're spending. I think that's how most people explain the difference between the pros and non-pro. Pretty much. Oh, this is the one with three cameras. Yeah. Yeah. I get that. I just feel like if I'm paying more money, it should feel like the more premium device, which is the smaller camera. I kind of disagree with that because the Pixel 9a is flush.

49:16And to me, that feels like the cheapest phone. Well, that's because the phone itself is super cheap. If you put that on a metal glass, beautiful hardware. I don't really think so because then it's just a rectangle. Yeah. I think people associate the bigger camera bump with the more capable camera. Here's the other thing. The pros have the shiny rails and there's that rail around the camera bump as well. So you get that premium shiny around the camera bump. Yeah. And it looks more premium. No, no. I get visually why that is the case.

49:46And it being more cameras and everything. I agree with you. I feel like if I'm picking something up and I'm holding it, like the iPhone Air. When you pick up an iPhone Air, it's so thin. It's like, wow. Like this is a premium device. You know, it's- Yeah, but it also has titanium. It's like super, super thin. It's more like the thinness. That also has a big camera bar, by the way. Well, yeah, but- It's an everything bar. The whole phone is a bar. Everything, yeah. The whole- It has a phone bar. Yeah. The whole phone is in the camera. It's more so like the bump is not like it-

50:16I never got over it. Like, I know we've had it for so long, but I'm still like, this is annoying that we- You're gonna have to get over it. I know. There's something there. I see both sides of this where I can understand smaller camera bar means more engineering to shrink this thing, therefore better. But then I also see like bigger camera bar means- Better cameras. Yeah. Better camera. So that, yeah, I see- I associate just purely flush phones that are just rectangles with being cheap phones. I don't know- With the worst cameras. Yeah. But it's not a rectangle. It's like a squircle thing.

50:47Like it's- Brother. I will say, I like this thought of, uh, they're physically building the price ladder of flush step-up Pixel, step-up Pixel 11 Pro. Then I so badly want XL to be a little bigger and then fold to just be like a quarter inch off the back of the camera. Oh, yeah. That'd be incredible. New inch I'll just drop. Yeah. I mean, there is a reason that they associate it with a better camera is because if you have a bigger sensor, you have to have more Z depth. So they have to make it bigger.

51:18But, uh, yeah, it is funny. It is funny. 40% thinner though, uh, on the regular 11. When you- It's the bar. When you like hold it, feel it, it's interesting. It's kind of, it's that in between- Yeah, the bar. The camera bar. The camera bar. The bar. The camera bar. Just the camera bar. Just the camera bar. So the protrusion itself. That's a protrusion number. The premium protrusion. Yeah, the premium protrusion. You're paying for less Z depth. The bass did the thing I asked them last year. I was like, Google, you messed up. All you have to do, 256 bass. And praise Google, they did it for a hundred extra dollars.

51:50They didn't do it at all. They didn't really do it. Worst barrier of entry. Yeah. Come on. So to be clear, last year, the 10 started at 128 gigs, which felt a little bit late to do that. And it was $799. This year, the phone starts at 256 gigs. So we started to clap. And then they said, by the way, it also starts now at the price of last year's 256, $900. Yeah. And then we stopped clapping. So yeah, memory's expensive. This is probably going to be a trend. This is not the only phone that's going to happen to, but that was one of the headlines

52:24about this phone. Yeah. I'm very interested. Sorry. No, it's fine. This is happening to every phone in the market. Like we've seen this across the board. And that is what I wanted to say is the reason last year, 128 base at $799 felt so bad is because the iPhone base was $256 at $799. Everyone. Everyone. And when Apple is the better deal than you. Yeah. Rough. Yeah. So Google almost needs the base new iPhone to be a $100 increase and same base. What is crazy. Which most likely will happen.

52:55What's so crazy to me, and I know that they have to make their margins and whatever, but a lot of these companies, especially Google and Apple, some of the richest companies in the world, if they really want to be competitive, like especially Google, if they want to grow market share, it's a pretty big win for them. And I know that they might have to sell these at a slight loss, or maybe they're not even selling them at a loss, but they're just making a little less money. And I know that's not great, but if they can sell way more phones because the PR of the phone being like, oh, it's still, it's super affordable. It might be better for them in the long run.

53:25I think everyone watching this intuitively agrees. But when you said, make a little less money, all the shareholders went, huh, what? And then it didn't. But maybe they'll make more money because more people will buy the phones. Yeah. Short-term gains would be nice in like the things we care about, but they got to make the number go up every time. It's just like the Nexus 7, like the Nexus 7 tablet. They literally lost $50 on every single tablet they sold so that they could get Google accounts. Dude, even a couple years ago, the like base pixels were great deals.

53:57They were like incredible deals compared when the Pro started being like $200 or $300 more. $300 more, yeah. And I'm interested if now in, you know, the market's going to have to catch up. But we did start seeing, I mean, a Pixel market share increase is like a couple percent, but that's like doubling percentage wise in US. So like we did see it go up a little bit. And now I wonder if being the same price as everything else, we're going to now in two to three years, see it start to not be as good. We'll see. It's true. We'll see what the rest of the year happens to do with phones.

54:29But yeah, I never thought I would see a $900 starting Pixel. Yeah, it's a lot. That is pretty high. That's a lot. So we got the pros as well. Yes. Slightly less muted or less exciting colors. I will mention, we mentioned the rails of the phone are glossy, except for the new matte black one. So they are listening. Somebody somewhere at Google did a little extra work. This is definitely the MKBHD edition. The matte black phone has matte black rails. A hundred percent. We've complained about this every year. We've complained about this for years.

55:00Yeah. They were so hoping the title of the hands-on impression was going to be like matte black everything ABN. Yeah. So the Pro XL, the Pro and the Pro XL came out. Same size as 6.3, 6.8. Again, brighter displays. I think we may be able to save any phone. Yeah. 3,600 nits is the highest we've seen for peak brightness. Yeah. Legitimately extremely bright in person and on camera. I was turning them up and actually I was mostly turning them down for my footage because they were really bright. Well, and what's crazy is like you're not even hitting peak brightness when you turn

55:31the brightness all the way up. It only does peak brightness when the sun is shining on it and it knows it needs to be brighter. What if there's any clips? Then it'll get darker. Indoors, it was probably not hitting 36. No, probably 24 or something. But yeah. Awesomely bright displays, which is great. Same resolutions. I think we have a new primary camera and a new telephoto, I believe. Yeah. Yeah. So the primary camera and the pros is the same size as last year. They told me that the main reason they swapped it out is because it uses less power than the one last year.

56:02And if it uses less power, they can fit more. They said, no, it can fit more AI features in it. Well, sort of. Yeah. The camera head, I talked to him about the camera stuff and he said, some of my favorite pixel computational photography features ever you can fit in 100 milliwatts, which is the amount of power that they saved on the primary camera. I see. I see. I see. So I think that's the way that they think about these things. Yeah. But the telephoto camera is bigger and gets 30% more light intake. That's nice. So that's nice. That's good. So we'll be testing the zoom on these news, on these new cameras.

56:34Tensor G6 as well. Less RAM. On the base. On the base, Pixel 11 Pro, last year it was 16 gigs of RAM. This year it's down to 12. Yeah. But if you upgrade from 256 to 512 or a terabyte of storage, you're back up to 16 gigs of RAM again. Yeah. So that's notably less RAM on the base Pro, which, by the way, is more expensive. 100 bucks more expensive again. So they start at $1,100 and the Pro XL starts at $1,300. So crazy. What's the jump from 256 to 512?

57:07In price? It's 200 bucks. It's 200 bucks? Yeah. I was going to say, that'd be really like, if it was only 100 bucks, you would get the four extra gigs of RAM and the double storage. But it's wild that... Wait, I might be wrong. Hold on. Hold on. But like dropping... This is the most RAM again thing I've ever seen, which is increased price by $100. Give less RAM than last year. While you guys look this up, I just want to put a little bit of context on something David said earlier.

57:37Google does not report what percentage of their revenue actually comes from Pixel specifically,

Pixel 11 Pro and Pro Fold

57:43but they do report a category of their revenue called subscriptions, platforms, and devices. Yeah, they loop it all in. Yeah. And the numbers I'm seeing for the past few quarters seem to hover between 9% and 15% of all revenue. But subscriptions is a big bucket. I don't know what platforms means. Platforms and devices, it's like Android, Chrome. It's like... Okay. So I guess Pixel is somewhere between 0% and 9% of Google.

58:15Yeah. This is what companies do when it's either something they want to hide or it's too small to matter or both. So it sounds like they can shave a little bit of a price off the... Like, sometimes we'll want to know, how much money did Apple make off of this random small thing? Like, how many keyboards did they sell? And you can never find this information because it's always just going to be looped in with Macs or whatever. It's the best-selling keyboard of all time, Marcus. They'll say that on stage. All the time. And they'll put a little asterisk and the fine print is like, trust us, we know. Yeah. All right. Well, I guess we'll just have to believe that.

58:46Yeah. So that's, you know, that's the story with the pros. I'm still going to be trying it out, still testing it, still doing the thing where I believe this is going to be the phone that I use. But there's so much software stuff. You don't look happy about it. It's a matte black pixel. We do have to talk about all the software stuff, though. Yeah, there's plenty of software. But real quick, the new Fold, just to get that out, the new specs. So there's a couple of interesting new things with the Fold. It is a tiny bit thinner. I think it's one millimeter thinner. Did you see why? Because of the new hinge? Because one side is thinner than the other side.

59:19Oh, that's also true. Already? Yeah. I saw that on video. They said it's almost a millimeter thinner. And they said nearly a millimeter. Nearly one millimeter safe. Big deal. It still will have, I think, the same-ish size battery, but some new camera. And then the back material is now this glass fiber composite, which they made a strangely big deal about to me. They were telling me, oh, yeah, it's unbreakable. You can't break it. It's impossible. This is never going to shatter. I was like, what are you, why are you telling, this is a very confident way of telling me

59:52this material. Zach would like the word. Yeah. We're going to find out. So we'll see. I like that it's still IP68. Like, they have gone hard with the durability factor. Yeah. Like, Samsung's are still IP40 something, I think, IP48. You can get them wet, but you can't. They're not IP68. Okay. So full IP68 still, and harder to crack, and Victus on the front. It's a supposedly very durable full. Yeah. I'm so sorry. Is glass fiber composite different than just, like, fiberglass?

1:00:24I guess they're not going to tell us. Yeah, it's glass fiber. I mean, if you ask, because this is, I don't know if it's Gorilla Glass or not. This is, like, Gorilla Glass is already a composite. Yeah, it's Victus 2. Which is Gorilla Glass. The back material is some other composite. I put a milk cream composite in my coffee every morning. You don't hear me. All composite means is it's mixed with something. Yeah. Well, what did it? You guys got to feel it. Did it feel like glass, or did it feel different? Yeah, the same. I wonder if that's it. Fiberglass doesn't feel like glass. I wonder if it was attempting to replicate. Ceramic in there? Who knows? They said the durability was, like, 3X that.

1:00:56That was front screen? The front screen. No, the front screen is 2X scratch resistant. But I also saw someone say the front display was claimed to be 3X more durable, and the back, they just said, nearly impossible to crack. Something about it would have to, like, fold around the phone in order for it to actually break. That's, yeah. I'm impressed by that claim. I need to feel the phone again and figure out. Yeah. You have to be super confident to make that claim, or just lying. Yeah. They also made the ultra-thin glass thicker, which is really funny.

1:01:27They told me in the briefing, we made the ultra-thin glass thicker to make it more durable. You know what's funny? This is, I think we, would you all agree this is the most durable fold? I don't know. I mean, that's what they say. It's supposed, it's like it is. Because the only fold that's ever exploded in Zach's hands during a Jerry everything test is a Pixel Pro fold. I don't think it has anything. I think everyone can understand what Zach did. Was, like, not something that's going to happen in extreme, like, it had nothing to do because

1:02:00it was a Pixel. The video did blow up, and sometimes that affects the way they market the next year's phone. And so maybe they'd change the back material so that the glass wouldn't, like, shatter. Was it last year? Maybe it was two years ago. Yeah, I'm going to need to wait for the Zach video to know if this is the most durable fold ever. Yeah. Yeah, well. I could do it for you, too, in New Jersey. I don't think Google's as worried about Zach's incident as, like, Samsung's worried about, like, Note 7 explosions. Yeah. So it's clearly Samsung's fault, whereas Zach's was, like, such a specific thing that happened that will never happen to a phone.

1:02:32Yeah, it was a lot of chance. This was last year's 10 Pro. It was last year's 10. Some Samsung executives sitting there just like, God, they're still talking about it. Yeah. Yeah. Forever. But yeah, in general. $18.99 for that one. Expensive. Yeah. Obviously, still. But all your same stuff, 16 gigs of RAM, Tensor G6, slightly larger interior display, slightly thinner bezels, slightly brighter screens, all the Pixel stuff. Yeah. It's all still here. So looking forward to testing. Two new made-you-look animations. Yay. Oh, really? Yeah.

1:03:03Nice. If you don't remember, made-you-look is, uh, on the, on the screen, when you have the phone open, the front screen will have, like, little animation guys that are, like, hello. So if you have kids, they'll, like, stare at it and smile. I did watch it work for, I saw it in real life. I went to the aquarium with my friend and his daughter and, um, we sat her and Lane on this, like, little turtle statue and getting both to look at the same time. And he just walks up and goes, and then he told me that he hates the camera so much most

1:03:34of the time he does it, he uses that while his wife takes the picture with her iPhone.

1:03:40Ooh. Ooh. Oh, God. Google was about to clip this out of the podcast. Like, yes, yeah. Oh, no. Cut back. That did work. It did work very well. But Trevor said that the Pixel is the best low-light photography in the industry. That's rough. Yeah. I'm sure those animations will never come to older Pixel folds. Yeah. Um, they forgot how. You need the RAM. Yeah, you need the Tensor, for sure. Yeah. Um, all right. Yeah. Well, I want to talk about all the, the camera stuff and the software, but I think we need

1:04:10to take one more break. We also got to talk about the Pixel Watch and the Pixel Tag, which is the airdrop competitor. I can do that pretty quick. You want to take a look at the Pixel Tag now?

Pixel Tag and Watch 5

1:04:18Should we do it real quick? Let's do it. Okay. You guys have heard of, uh, AirTags, right? You know, the, like the, what's the little, what are they based on? AirTags? AirTags? Oh, Find My? Circles? No, but they're based on tiles. Yeah. So you've heard of tiles. You've heard of AirTags. Well, now Google makes one. Same price, same concept. Same thing. It's a little longer though. You can find it with Gemini. Yeah. It has a Google G on it. Yeah. It's a very small. Yeah. What does it, it's a wider. Gemini mean? It just means you can be like, Hey, Gemini, find my luggage tag. And then if you named it luggage tag, it'll be like, it's in Nova Scotia.

1:04:51Somebody stole it. That's going to be so good. Because people use these for like kids at amusement parks. So it's going to be so funny. Like Gemini, where's Lane? You know, you know, the smudge tool in Photoshop where you can, it's like the finger thing. And you smoosh the thing to the, it's like if you took an AirTag and use that tool on it, you smooshed it in a direction. Does it? Yeah. Because it's elongated. Like there's an area where the battery can go in on the back and that's a circle. And that's basically the size and shape of an AirTag. And then for some reason, they just elongated it by like almost twice the length.

1:05:22It's thinner. It's thinner than an AirTag, but it is longer. It kind of looks like the Fitbit Air thingy. Yeah. It's a little, it's a little, a little wider than the Fitbit Air. Yeah. And yeah, it's 30 bucks. Can you replace the battery? I was just going to ask. Replaceable battery, yes. Oh. Yeah. It's the same as an AirTag. It's an AirTag, basically. Cool. You can replace it. This is cool. I'm probably going to get pissed off the back. You just. What? Yeah. How? What do you put it? It's a coin battery. Oh, watch battery.

1:05:47It's a coin battery with a little casing on it. That's literally all it is. Swag. It's pretty awesome. Four pack for a hundred bucks. I'm weirdly the most excited about the PixelTag out of everything here. Yeah. Well, the MotoTag has already existed. The MotoTag is good too. Yeah. So then, then there's the watch. But does it have highlight?

1:06:05No. Then there's the watch, the Watch 5. The Watch 5 did get some interesting, substantial improvements. Much more accurate GPS. They actually name dropped the Apple Watch Ultra and Garmin Phoenix on stage. This is more accurate GPS than both of those. Which was kind of crazy that they did that. Usually you don't name drop like that. We'll find out. They name dropped models. So it's a better, it is more expensive, but it is more accurate. It has more, more tracking, generally more data collection, but obviously for more accuracy for all the health tracking stuff. They said 15% better sleep tracking, which are more accurate sleep tracking, which is a

1:06:39really, really hard metric to actually contextualize. And that also makes me think, damn, how bad was the sleep tracking before? And I guess like what part of sleep tracking, like falling asleep, waking up, REM, deep, blah, I think that's probably what it is, the falling asleep and waking up parts. Whenever I read that, I just kind of read, they're sampling 15% more frequently. Maybe. That's kind of what I assume is happening. I don't know how else you make the claim of 15% more accurate. I mean, it might just be like our algorithms to create this score is better in some way.

1:07:12I don't know. Maybe. It's mostly saying nothing. Yeah. I mean, design wise, it looks the same. It has a slightly higher clocked Snapdragon W5 Gen 2 chip inside. Yeah. Better memory bandwidth, more on-device Gemini capabilities, which I know that you wanted in your watch. Insulin resistance detection. Yeah. It's their big new headline feature this year. Insulin resistance trends. Yeah. Specifically. And what was the other trend? There was another trend. There was a blood pressure. Blood pressure, oxygen levels. It does.

1:07:43Well, so there's a- Like breathing emergencies. Breathing emergencies was one of the other things for like choking, toxic inhalations or drug toxicity accidents. If your oxygen drops, it can call emergency services. Yeah. Yeah. By the way, a friend of mine's dad got in a bike crash recently and he got knocked out in the bike crash. Oh my God. He had a Pixel watch on and it did call 911. Oh. And it actually did help him. That's great. Crash detection? Yeah. Crash detection. Yeah. Okay. That's cool. So this stuff does work. Yeah. You know? That's why they use it in the ad every single year for the Apple watch.

1:08:13They're about to ask you what is- When the bear comes in your house. Yeah. Yeah. The bear's in your house and your watch can call 911.

1:08:19Yeah. It was three gigs of RAM from two gigs, double storage to 64. I was thinking about more RAM in the watch, huh?

1:08:27For Gemini. I also- How much is it? Did we say? $3.99. $3.99. Oh my God. Well, to give them credit, and I hope I'm right about this, just to leave it in if I'm wrong and someone will tell me, I think this is the first increase on Pixel Watch since the start. Of price increase. Oh, price increase. I think so, yeah. Fine. Five generations in and you raise it 50 bucks, I think? Yeah. Okay. Blood pressure. I don't think that's as bad compared to all the other things. Yeah. I agree. They're fine. $3.99 is in line, I feel like.

1:08:58Does it have highlight? It does not have highlight. It does also have blood pressure trend. No, it just tells you who's calling you. It's a screen. It has a whole screen. It has a whole screen. It has more than highlight. It has a whole screen. But yeah, that's essentially it. Yeah. The better fitness tool. Oh, we also got a new color of Pixel Bud, and they're pushing an update to it. Pixel Bud Pro 2, which are really old now, and I don't know why they haven't released it to Gen 3, I guess, because they just think that it's fine and they can make new software updates, which is what they're doing. They're pushing a big software update. It's supposed to have better anxiety.

1:09:29It has sleep detection now, so that when you fall asleep and music's listening, it'll pause and stuff like that. It has something to do with matching up with your watch to do something as well. I thought the watch is what detects if you're asleep. Maybe that was it. I think that was it. Oh, and then pause the sound of music. The buds had something. Were you paying attention? It was 1 a.m., so I don't know. But yeah, I don't know. You don't need to buy new Pixel Buds, but they did have the new olive color. So, it's the same color as the Pixel Pro green.

1:10:03Are any of us fall asleep with earbuds in? I sometimes. Really? I stay in? I live in the cellar, notably on the busiest street in my neighborhood, and sometimes there's construction that happens in the middle of the night, and it's really loud. I also have my AC running right above my face, and that can get annoying sometimes. So, sometimes I do wear noise-canceling earbuds to fall asleep. I also use them on the plane to fall asleep. Same. Yeah, the plane is the big one for you. They do not stay in. Really? And then I lose them, and then I find them.

1:10:34Are you a side sleeper? I sleep every direction. I am a side sleeper. Sometimes I go backwards. I can't imagine your body's in side sleepers. I would lose those so fast. No, I'm a side sleeper. I sleep in them, not like every night, but if I'm somewhere loud, I'll use them as ear plugs, and they stay in all night. Wow, you're lucky. I'm a big white noise-while-sleeping person. Are you? I slept, so I lived in Hoboken for five years, and my apartment there had, right outside, there was a bus stop, there was a hospital, so I always got ambulances, blah, blah, blah, so I always just put a fan right in the window and just turned it all the way up, so I would

1:11:04always fall asleep to that noise. Now, in a hotel like this, it's too quiet, so I would play White Noise Machine or something. Wow. I do so much better. Actually, no one cares, but I hate White Noise, because we have to play it for when Lane was a baby sleeping in our room, and now Owen, and I can't wait until the White Noise Machine goes. You're more of a pink noise guy? Dead silence. Brown noise. Brown noise. Dead silence is crazy. I love dead silence. Better than live silence. I can't. Actually, you know what's funny? This is so off topic. What? Okay, I had a, this is so stupid, I had a Spotify, I just looked up like rain sounds,

1:11:39there's like a 50 track like rain sounds thing that I was playing, so like last night, we're super jet lagged, I started the rain sounds thing, and then I went to sleep, and then I woke up, and the rain sounds had stopped playing, and I was like, that's weird, that stopped playing, so I went over to turn it on, and right before I turned it on, the shower just started like making noise of like random water coming out of it, and I was like- My shard of that too. The hell's good?

1:12:10I was about to play water sounds, but then water, I was freaked out for like five minutes. I was like, who is in this room right now? Who turned off my water and made water? So none of you guys watch YouTube ever to fall asleep? I've never. I do. I always turn it off. I use the sleep timer. Okay. The autoplay algorithm when you're sleeping? It's crazy. Land show. It's completely different. Yeah. Yeah. Dude, they will show you things that you did not even know. Um, there's a really good Reply All episode where, spoiler alert, this person was playing

1:12:42like white noise, but it happened to be this one like white noise thing they got had like footsteps, and then like a person like mumbling, so the person was living in the like basement of a house and thought someone had broken in in the middle of the night and like freaked out, yeah. Yeah, that would freak me out. One more slight tangent. While we're here. My friend is a musician and makes decent money in his band, with his band, it's a full-time job. Dude, shut up about Streetlight Manifesto. That's not, they do not make decent money.

1:13:12I'm sorry, David. He probably makes more money than they do. Anyway, um, and he recently, a few months ago, started making like ambient sleep music to go to sleep to, and he's put out like five ambient sleep albums. That's probably a good hack. He said he makes like 30 to 50,000 a month, it's like with ambient sleep music, but he's like, I know for a fact that Spotify in the next like year is just going to start AI generating all this music, because why would they give that money away to other people when they could have it for themselves?

1:13:43And it is the, it is the easiest like money hack ever. Um, anyway. Yeah. Jeez. His ambient sleep music is good. I actually use it. So. Oh. Yeah. He doesn't need a plug. He's making plenty of money. Well, I'm not, I'm not plugging. I didn't even say. Listen to waveform when you're sleeping. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Do that, do that. Yeah. Which, okay, one more slide. I had a friend tell me that the, the YouTube algorithm, he falls asleep to YouTube every night and every single night he wakes up and it's playing our Halloween episode from last year.

1:14:13Really? And it's always the Halloween episode and he always wakes up and finishes it. And he says it's every night. You can probably recite it as he's gone. It's just crazy. I know. I know. That's amazing. Anyway. One where I'm a minion? I don't know. We're all dressed. It was the, it was the, it was the year before this last year. Oh, the Hamburglar. Yeah. When I was a large language model. You were. I might've been dressed. Oh, no, no, no. So I don't think you were there and we made you a zombie in the thumbnail and people called it clickbait because it was a joke that you were sick, I think.

1:14:46Right. And people were really mad you weren't in the episode. Damn. That's really funny. All right. Well, we really have to take a break and then we got to talk about some new software stuff because I really want to ramble about, um, about camera stuff, which means it's time for tensor. I mean, trivia.

1:15:03There you go. Notable delay. Tenser trivia. Trivia, dude. So we spoke about highlight earlier. Marquez stopped looking at my tablet. We still got the highlight feature, which is the new Google way of letting you see that you got notifications on your, on your pixel phone. Uh, notification. No, not notification. Yeah, you're right. Notification. Notification. Yeah. Uh, but HTC already solved this years ago with a case that protected the screen. Oh yeah. Do you remember what this feature was called? What it was called? What was it called?

1:15:33I made a whole video about this. Yes, you did. Oh no. And I was in Barcelona when I made that video. Really? Yeah. Which is also in Spain. In Spain. Wow. Very topical. I wish I remembered the name. I have an idea. I could describe it in such detail. It was cool. Dots. But I don't think the details include that name. It was Dots. That's a great word. I'm glad you said that. No. It's in the name for sure. Damn it. That's for sure in the name. Oh. Okay. I was going to say, Matt, I gave you a hint, but I didn't know it. So I may have inadvertently given myself a hint. It's like a portmint. Was that like a Halloween candy joke?

1:16:04Because Marcus likes Dots. Marcus does. I love Dots. Well, David's friend knows. This will make much more sense when we hear the answer. Yeah. Okay. All right. We'll either learn something new or remember something incredible at the end. We'll be right back. Like the HTC? Incredible. Two. He said some great callback. Thanks. Thanks.

1:16:31I've got a text. The summer might be almost over, but a new bombshell has entered the villa. Meet the voices of DeepGram Flux TTS. I'm Drew. Low-key casual. I'm Alexis, an upbeat morning person. I'm Haley. Always cheerful. Flux TTS has some real personalities that are ready to speak. You can interrupt, pause, and keep talking without losing the plot. Fancy a chat? Come try all the voices free through September 12th at DeepGram.com slash keep talking. Terms apply. Support for the show comes from Google Gemini.

1:17:04Want to take your sports fandom to the next level? Gemini is a game changer for staying in the action and turning up everything you love about the game. Let's say you want to create a custom leaderboard that compares your fantasy picks with upcoming trade prospects. Or cook up step-by-step recipes for the ultimate watch party. Just ask Gemini. Download Gemini, Google's AI app, or visit Gemini.Google.com to learn more. This episode is brought to you by Accenture.

1:17:35When your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales, using automation, analytics, and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business. The result? Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn more at Accenture.com slash Spotify. Okay, welcome back. We do have, believe it or not, some software to talk about from the Google event.

1:18:07One last segment here. Do we have any favorites? Do we want to, any like highlights from the... Don't do it, Marquez. Sorry, that's a pun. I meant to say any things that we think are worth talking about from the software. Yes, yes. Go on.

Camera looks and magic capture

1:18:22So I have a few camera things I want to talk about. Go on. Okay. Google added a thing called Camera Looks. Oh, I saw this. Yes. So Camera Looks is kind of like the Fujifilm film simulations in a lot of ways. I did an interview with Isaac Reynolds, Google Pixel camera chief. Last time I interviewed him was for the Pixel 4. So it's been a while. That was their prime. It was their prime. It was, well, except for the whole Sully thing. We don't talk about that.

1:18:52Yeah. But, but at the time when I interviewed him in 2019, it was wild because his, their whole mentality at Google was, if you are tapping anything on the screen except for the shutter button, it is error. That's what he told me in 2019. All input is error. All input is error. The Elon approach. All input is error. This year, notably extremely different. There are so many settings now in the Pixel camera. You have pro modes. You have like manual settings. You got everything. But there's this new mode now called camera looks.

1:19:23Camera looks. There are four defaults for sort of like the original camera look and then you have vanilla, which makes it a little more kind of like warmer. And then there's a classic. I don't know. There's a few primary and then there's a bunch of basically film simulations. So you've got the digicam simulation. Oh, it has these built into. Yeah. It's also built in called digi. There's a minimal one, which basically removes. So, okay, the coolest thing about all of this is that the way that they are doing this is

1:19:53that they are doing less computational photography dynamically, but in the most Google way possible, depending on the settings that you change with the contrast and the options that you pick, because you basically pick one of these film modes, like the digicam mode, whatever. And then you can change settings like contrast. You can change settings like sharpness, like all of these things, depending on the settings you change, the processing will dynamically do less HDR or less sharpness, things like

1:20:23that. So when you do, you know, when you're taking an HDR photo, it's compositing a bunch of sampled frames on top of each other to give you better noise reduction, things like that. And the Google camera team is very, very sure that this is the best possible way to make a photo. So I disagree. And apparently a lot of people have disagreed because now they have this camera looks thing. And now when you take a photo with one of these modes, it's using less samples to actually have less sharpness, make it a little bit softer, make it have a little bit less, less detail

1:20:56in the shadows, things like that. Imperfection. Imperfections. They are using machine learning to dynamically give you less perfect photos, which is the most modes, right? But only in these modes. Not like by the default camera. No, the default camera is the same. Well, you can set it as a default. You can set four modes as a default. Annoyingly. This is very annoying. You can't set like the digi simulation as a default. You can only set the only defaults you can set are like the vanilla, the like minimal. There's four options. Okay. And then there's a bunch of film options.

1:21:27But it's the most Google thing in the world to use machine learning to dynamically decide how much computational photography they should be doing at all. So that's very funny. And I think it's really cool because it's what people have been asking for for a long time. It's clearly a direct reaction to people using a lot of third party camera apps that give you these features. So that's pretty great. I think it's nice. Yeah. That's good. I will definitely be messing with these. It almost opens a can of worms into a much bigger conversation, which is I'm not going to

1:22:01do it. So don't take the bait. Don't do it. But are we at peak smartphone if like most of what we're trying to do with new smartphone cameras is give them some imperfections back? Yes. But don't take the bait. Don't. Well, that's another episode. Okay. We'll do that. That is a great separate episode. One hour later. I do think it's amazing that we're making cameras worse because they are too perfect. And Isaac Reynolds was like, no, we've solved the camera. Which sure, if you want it to look like ass, but you know, anyway, so other end of the

1:22:34camera spectrum. Yeah. Because I noticed there's a lot more when I was doing my hands on, there's a lot more buttons in the camera mode. Yeah. Another one when you slide over to the left is just this magic capture feature. Yes. Which is, and they showed it at the event as well. All you do is, again, this is about living in the moment. So don't even bother snapping photos and videos. Whatever's happening in front of you, just open up magic capture and start it and point it at the scene. And then whatever happens, happens. And at the end, Google's magic capture will have decided on some photo frames and some

1:23:06videos to capture for you that are the best, the highlights from that scene. And they give some examples which are interesting. I think a nice example would be like, I don't know, a solar eclipse is happening in front of you or something. And instead of like pointing your phone at it in front of your face, you should just like enjoy the thing in front of you. And so just start a magic capture and whatever decides is happening, it'll capture it. But the example they use is much more action packed. It was like people playing basketball in front of you, different poses, different people

1:23:38looking at the camera versus not looking. It will smartly take tons and tons of frames, sift it down, pick the best ones and give it to you. Yeah. Magic. Yeah. You sold me on that feature. At first I was like, this is the dumbest thing I've ever heard. Yeah, no, it's funny because in the keynote, the example, they said it was a live demo. Their example was that he was at a basketball game and he's like, you want to live in the moment. So he has his phone just recording while he's watching the game. I've tried doing this before and it's really hard. If you're not looking at the screen, your hand kind of lost your hand kind of just drifts

1:24:11and it's really difficult frame. Yeah. Hard. You're not in the moment. Things don't need to be in frame. I don't. You need to keep looking at your phone. It's difficult. Yeah. It's notably very difficult. Yeah. So we're going to have to really try that out. What I found very interesting is that it's one of the three modes now because previously you had you had photo mode and video mode. Now there's photo video and magic capture. Yeah. It's like that's the first thing I noticed when I was right up there. I was like, wow, a new button. This must be a big deal. Yeah. Magic capture. Yeah. Which I think is interesting.

1:24:42But I could see it being useful for like the group photo that you have to put the camera down and go on the timer. And then every time you go back and someone blinks, you just like throw magic capture on everyone get in and grab a frame or or give a tripod. You frame the video first and then you hit magic capture and then you go do the thing. I don't know. You want to be in front of your daughter as she's blowing the candles out of her cake. You don't you want to be like the vision pro guy who's like doing this, like filming here, you know, which is incredible.

1:25:12That's in the moment. Technically, I guess just through a screen. Yeah. So there are some uses for it. It's going to be interesting to see if it actually works. You took it out of my mouth, though, because I was going to say, isn't this a video? It's video. But so it's Google Clips. Yeah, exactly. If if you guys don't know what this was many years ago, Google sold a small clip on camera. You could either just like put it in the corner and mount it somewhere. But the whole point was it would it was a little clip on camera that you'd clip to things and it would just record for like two hours or whatever.

1:25:43And it would just find random frames throughout the day when it noticed you were smiling or whatever. And it would send you like these updates of like, oh, look at all these photos of you and your family having a happy time. Now, I don't think we would ever put a camera made by Google in our in our houses that we're constantly recording. But this is effectively what Magic Capture does, which is funny. At least you are manually turning it on instead of just letting it do its thing whenever you whenever it wants. I think it sounds useful and fun. I just don't believe the live in the moment because then you're going to get a bunch of

1:26:18videos of people's feet in the ground. Yeah. Unless you have a tripod or something. Yeah. Or that's what you're going for. That's, you know. Hey. Hey. Use their own. Okay. I have a really, really crazy what is a photo slash what is a video thing. Oh, no. David. Gosh. We can't do an hour on this. You don't have to. This is a small can of worms or a medium can of worms? We can make it small for now, but I want you to chew on it. Okay. And later we'll talk about it again.

Gaussian splatting video stabilization

1:26:43All right. Okay.

Gaussian splatting video stabilization

1:26:44So they haven't. So if you remember, there is now there is a mode where you can upload your footage to the cloud and it will do a bunch of things like upscaling it to 8K and video boost. And it makes the low light video, it will like brighten the shadows and do all this stuff because it has to run on Google's tensor cores in their server centers, whatever. Still a really weird thing that you would do that. And it's like, I guess you're just doing it with the videos you want to and it takes up a lot of storage, et cetera. There's a new thing in it inside of video boost called a pro stable video.

1:27:19And this is basically optimizing the stabilization of your video. So if you're walking, you know, you're running, whatever, it'll, it'll stabilize it. If it thinks it needs stabilization, what it is actually doing, this is so crazy, is that every frame in the video, it is using as information for a Gaussian splatting 3D model. So it builds a 3D model of the scene and it uses every frame to then Gaussian splat the

1:27:50scene, which is a relatively new technology where you basically create 3D stuff out of 2D images based on micro camera shake and things like that because you're seeing around the pixels, et cetera. And what it does after it creates the 3D model of your scene, it then creates a virtual camera track inside of the scene that flies the camera through and, um, and I'm not kidding you. And then they told me that they actually had to add some camera shake back because it just

1:28:22looked like a literal drone shot and people felt uncomfortable with it. So they had to, they had to add artificial camera shake a little bit back to make it seem like it wasn't. So now my, like what's crazy is like, because it's using your frames as reference material for the 3D model for the whatever, you're still technically getting the same video back, but there is a 3D model of your scene that a virtual camera is flying through. And what you're getting back is kind of a 3D render of reality, heavy mix of reality and

1:28:55interpreted things. Yeah. Huh. Can, can we just appreciate that Google can take a video 3D map every single frame? Yeah. Create a fake camera track you. Yeah. Add shake back to make it look good. Yeah. And the RGB light on the back colors and can only do calls. Yeah. And one of them is white. What planet do we live on? I know. No, this, this is just the most like, what even is a video anymore?

1:29:26Like you're giving me a 3D base. It's almost like I'm getting a 3D animation back of the reality that I captured. Yeah. That is very Google. Okay. I will chew on that. I'm going to try that as well. I'm going to pretend that never happened. It's, it's so crazy. I can't wait to see it. They said that they only, the Apple one's already really good. Yeah. They said they only do the Pro Stable video when it thinks it needs it. So you can't force it, which is annoying. Okay. So I think you should like go on a run with your phone or something. I'm going to sprint down the street. Yeah. I'm going to try it. Yeah. We got to like force it.

1:29:57Samsung Stabilization though is pretty good. Different. Yeah. It doesn't do this. It's very different. It has EIS and OIS combined and it'll do as best as it can with the information and it'll like crop in. So it has way more room to do the Stabilization. But you'll see that it's. This is the most Google thing in the world. It's like use software to just completely eliminate the need for hardware. Whoever thought of that was like, how many Tensio chips we got? Yeah. What an idea. Gaussian Splatting is a new rapidly evolving technology. What if we just really took advantage of it?

1:30:28Wow. So. So crazy. I think that's just crazy. I just wanted to talk about that. Yeah. That's the main stuff.

Creator suite features

1:30:33So.

Creator suite features

1:30:34The future.

Creator suite features

1:30:35The rest of the features on the phones themselves is Android 17. It's like you've seen this on. Yeah. Pixel is like there's not that much stuff that I saw on the Pixel 17 that I tested that I was like, oh, this is definitely not coming to the Pixels. Yeah. From last year. Yeah. That's the big question and that people keep asking me about too. Because there's another feature called Creator Suite that is also in the video. Yeah. In the video sections. Built in. It's built into the Pixels only right now. We'll see if it comes to Android 17 later because for some reason they added the like TikTok cutout reactions feature to Android.

1:31:04But the Creator Suite is a section in the video. It's a part of the video section that gives you a teleprompter. It gives you audio enhancement features. It gives you frame guides for like if you're doing nine by six, you can pick your aspect ratio. Social media. And UI guide. Yeah. My take on this is that they're trying to capture the UGC crowd, which is user-generated content. It's the people that are like opening 20 boxes a day and just making like fake ads. Yeah. That's a growing huge amount of people, by the way.

1:31:37So, I think that Google really wants to capture those people. Teleprompter worked pretty good. I'm not going to lie. Yeah. Yeah. Teleprompter, you just input and you can speech to text, whatever. You can input a couple paragraphs of whatever and then you start recording with the feature on and it hears you so it can advance the teleprompter as you speak. And it was pretty good. Which is Google's bread and butter. Pretty great. Voice dictation, understanding your voice. Wait, we should use that for the freaking... I was just thinking of that. Yeah. If we were to record our ads on a Pixel, it would look great. Can we not just like put it in the tray of the two-way mirror and then just have it advance?

1:32:11I don't know if it would hear us. That feature, yes, would work well. No, it would hear you. I guess the idea is it's showing that text at the top of the display right under the selfie camera. Yeah. So, it looks like you're looking at it. It looks like you're making eye contact, but you're reading. Yeah. I'm vibe coding this for the iPad. I'm surprised. It probably exists. There's probably a way to advance the teleprompter based on talking. Yeah. I'm tired of standing up. Yeah. For those who don't know, we've been manually advancing. Like everyone has done since the history of time. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The caveman manually advanced their teleprompters.

1:32:42This is perfect for AI. Perfect for AI. Yeah. So. Yeah. Otherwise, it's a Pixel. Yeah. Otherwise, it's a Pixel. I just wanted to talk about those software features. It's a Pixel by the Pixel 10. The big question, the huge, huge question in the room that I, for some reason, didn't think to ask, which was really obvious, is like, what, which of these features are coming to Pixel 10, if any? Yes. Yeah. Well, they're not going to have answered that question. That's probably true. Yeah. What they will say is, either, we have no, we have no scratch at it by the Pixel 11. Yeah. If you want it now, Pixel 11.

1:33:14Or we have no plan. We have no future plans, or we do not disclose future plans. Yeah. Or, they'll say something like, for the messaging feature for highlight, they'll be like, we will work on this. Yeah. And then you'll go, okay. When's that going to happen? We'll see. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, I don't know. I like all those features, but if they come to the Pixel 10, it's almost like, I like them a lot more. What is this phone? Pixel 10. Yeah, but does it have matte black rails? That's true. Just get some spray paint, Marquez. It's fine.

1:33:44You're going to give up your insane battery life for matte black rails? No, I do. The OnePlus 15 is still. You can charge at 1,500 watts. It's fine. Yeah, that phone is killer. You're just charging at 2,000. The OnePlus 16 in the United States? I want the OnePlus 15 with the Pixels, camera chops, and some of the software features. I don't even think the Pixels. It's not going to happen.

1:34:10Anyway. Anyway. That's not going to happen, so. Yeah. I think we should go right to the end, which is our last segment. Trivia. My laptop was muted. Do it again.

1:34:23We're back. We're so back.

1:34:26I'm never going to forget this podcast. This is crazy. Question number one. Trevor Noah was surprised by Liverpool legend Stephen Gerard, but before Mr. Gerard came out, Trevor wondered if it was actually him or Gemini speaking in what regional English accents? Wait, are we shouting it out? Oh, yeah. Wait, wait.

1:34:52Do we want to?

1:34:55Liverpoolese. Hold on. We could slap him. Do we want to do a rapid or do we want to slack it to me?

Tech trivia and sign off

1:35:04I think that's the whiteboard equivalent. I think you're the only one that knows the answer, Marcos. Really? I think he knows the answer? I might know the answer. How confident do you feel, David? How confident do you feel, Andrew? Are you going to say Cockney? No. I'm starting to worry it's not a British accent.

1:35:20What are you going to say? I don't know. Wait. David, are you going to submit an answer? All right. Andrew Marquez on three. Say what you're thinking. One, two, three. Liberty. Neither of you said it. Dang. Were they reasonable? What did you say? Welsh. No. You're closer. Counts. Points. I think this accent derives from a Welsh accent, but it is not. Would Welsh people be really mad that I said that? Or would Liverpool people be really mad that I said that?

1:35:50I don't know. Would Trevor Noah be really mad that I said that? I don't think so. Okay. With the football. Mark, as you said- That's all I care about. I said Gaelic. No, that is not correct. Gaelic is a whole language that is not English. Yeah, whoops. David, do you want to just throw something out there, man? He did. Liverpoolese. That is technically correct, although not the word I was looking for. The word I was looking for was scouse.

1:36:17Yeah, you know, scouse. He said that? I have heard that in the event. He said, is that Liverpool legend Stephen Gerrard, or is that Gemini speaking with a scouse accent? I think I'm going to get the next one right. I told you we would learn something new. All right. Question number two. Yeah. HTC had a case that would cover the screen of their phone and show you little notification graphics and stuff underneath. What was it called? Should we yell it out? No, Slack it to me, because I don't like it when you all yell, because I can't hear.

1:36:48Okay. Slack it to Ellis or Adam? Me. Also, there's no way to, like, if I have you guys do it one at a time, then it kind of defeats the purpose of the purpose. I think it's that, but I'm pretty sure I'm right. I think I'm right. All right. Let's go around the room. David, what did you say? Dot matrix. Dot matrix. Andrew? I wrote quick dots. Quick dots. I only wrote dots because Marquez said dots.

1:37:19I wrote dot matrix. Dot matrix. Definitely. The answer is dot view. Really? Oh, dot view? Dot view. So, is that the name of the tech, but it was a dot matrix case? I believe so, yes. Oh, the case was called the dot matrix case. The case itself was a dot matrix case. I knew that. That's why I thought. Well, no one got any points. Dot view. Marquez still with one. Andrew with three. David with three. I thought this video on this was really short. It was a four-minute Marquez. Yeah, well, it was just a case. Oh, the dot view case. It was a feature of the dot matrix?

1:37:50It was, by the way, this is one of them. That is the one of the first, like, three videos I ever shot on a red camera. Really? I think it's actually the first one I ever shot on a red camera because it was a rented red scarlet. And it was the first video I ever published in real 4K, first video I ever shot in RAW, first video I ever shot in Spain, and first video I ever shot in Mobile World Congress. Wait, this is cool. Yeah, I remember a lot of stuff. It is cool. No, no, no. Sorry, sorry, sorry. That's not in Spain.

1:38:21That case I shot in my college, I first got it in Spain and brought it back to my apartment. So it was on the red, but it was not in Spain. It is dot view, by the way. Dot view. Dot view, yeah. This is sick as hell. Yeah, right? And if you managed to screen record what was happening on the screen, it was just a bunch of blobs. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it was a really clever feature. Wait, why? Phones? Phones used to be cool. Dude, we've gone so far backwards. It can't do red.

1:38:50And that is the end of the podcast. Thank you for watching. Obviously, stay tuned and get subscribed if you haven't already, because the reason we are in this hotel room is because we shot this crazy other podcast that is in the works. So stay tuned for it. It's amazing. I can't overpromise, but I really think it's amazing. He's overpromising. It's so good. But yeah, we'll otherwise catch you very soon in our regularly scheduled programming. So see you then. My head hurts. Peace. Wait, it's produced by Adam and Alina and Eclipse Rovin. We were partnered with Vox Media Podcast Network and our intro after music was created

1:39:22by Vainstil. Eclipse! That'd be a point. And Brandon Havard. Oh yeah, and Brandon Havard. It's behind the camera. Oh yeah. Turn the camera on, Brandon. I can do all of David's talk in one. Camera look worse, but better? The two-week pay period, invented in 1938 and still making us wait until daily pay, where

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