OnePlus Premiumization

Ready for a career change? One way you can truly be yourself, gain valuable training and shine with your customer service skills? Then listen up. Sage is a leader in accountancy tech for busy businesses. Founded right here in Newcastle, we've got Geordie Spirit with Global Reach.

With opportunities to grow your career, challenge yourself and learn from the best, isn't it time that you were achieving extraordinary outcomes for our customers? Come and unleash your potential as a customer support expert at Sage. You set off on a journey of self-improvement. You practice patience in mountain monasteries. You discovered discipline running across the driest deserts.

and found your focus beneath the surface of frozen lakes, while squashed into someone's armpit on the train. There's more to imagine when you listen. Discover self-development titles on Audible. Okay, enough. Razzmatazz! But it's not every day a new scratch card drops. With the new set-for-five-year scratch card from the National Lottery, you could win five grand a month every month for five years. Pick up yours in store today and get scratching.

Search Dream Big Play Small. Rules, procedures and game-specific rules apply. Players must be 18 or over. Well, hello and welcome to Android Faithful, episode number 77, recorded on January 14th, 2025. We are your weekly source of news, hardware... Apps, emails, feedback, CES wrap-ups, everything under the sun for the world of Android. I'm Ron Richards. So many things under the sun. I am Jason Howell. I am also under the sun. At least I was before. I'm into it now.

I am not on the sun because it's... It's night here. I am Michal Rahman. It is good to be out of the Vegas sun, sir, isn't it? What was the weather like in Vegas when you were there for CES? For the first two days, it was kind of like... But since it wasn't a lot of wind, it didn't actually feel cold. But then I think on Tuesday night, the wind really kicked in and it got really cold. Wow. It was actually pretty cool.

for a trip to Vegas. All of my Vegas experiences have been awful hot and everything and just miserable. But we're glad to have you guys back from Vegas. We're going to talk about your experiences.

Real quickly before we get in the show, I just want to take a moment. I'm sure everybody's hearing this on all their podcasts and all their media they're listening to and things like that. But we just want to take a moment to kind of acknowledge what's going on in the Los Angeles area. I know we all have lots of friends that live in the L.A. area who are affected by the fires.

things like that. And so if anybody in our audience is affected by that, you know, our hearts are with you. Hopefully the show is providing a little bit of distraction from the hellscape that LA has become. I'm actually going there next week. I'm actually flying in.

orange county and then flying at lax i'm really curious to see what it's going to be like yeah but uh we didn't want we didn't want to do the show without kind of acknowledging what's going on out there and that our hearts with everyone in la and we're actually going to be taking a a portion of our

Patreon and other revenue sources and proceeds from this month from Android Faithful. We're going to be donating it to some of the relief effort in L.A. So if you are an active member of Patreon for Android Faithful, you're going to be indirectly helping out folks in L.A.

If you're thinking about making the jump to go to Patreon, if you jump this month and join, a portion of your proceeds will go towards helping people in LA. So thank you, everybody, for that. But yeah, we just wanted to make sure that we shared that sentiment. so yeah crazy crazy it is it really reminds me of the santa rosa fires back in 2017 which were

Right on the cusp of Petaluma. Sooner than 2017. Weren't there fires during the pandemic? Or maybe it was 2018. It was around there. The one that tore through Santa Rosa was 2017 or 2018. And then there were fires. Yeah, there were fires post-pandemic. i remember i remember being yeah getting pictures but the big one that like white that ran through santa rosa was 2017 or 2018 i can't remember but it was it sucked it was horrible yeah yeah that's what i feel for me

For everyone. All right. Well, that said, let's get on with the distraction. Yeah. You guys went to CES. Oh, that's right. We did. We did. And you know what? We both went to CES. We never saw each other. You're kidding me. No. Yeah. Yeah. That's true. Wow. I don't like. You guys were talking a little bit in pre-show about how you plan for CES and everything. I thought I was doing it right. I scheduled so many meetings and interviews and booked out my main solid day, which was Wednesday.

And it's fine. I had some really great interviews and everything, but I didn't see nearly as much as I wanted to see. And I was jam-packed. I don't know about you, Michelle. I know you were busy, too. Well, I mean, Jason, you were there for basically just one day. That's probably why. I was there Sunday. I went to CES Unveiled. Monday, I went to the Samsung press conference and also the Google demo, which we'll talk about in a bit.

Tuesday, the first official day of CES, was pretty packed for me. Wednesday, also pretty packed for me. But I spent both Tuesday and Wednesday in different places. So maybe that's why I didn't see you. I don't know. Where did you mostly spend your Wednesday? At the LVCC or at the Venetian? Oh, both? Go back and forth. Yeah, that's tough.

As with everything in my independent life, I'm relearning how to do all this stuff because I used to have a team to plan it. And I'm just a rookie. I'm a rookie at CESing by myself. But Jason, you've been to CES before, right? It wasn't like your first CES. It was just your first solo.

It was your first solo CES, that's all, right? Yeah, well, it's my first solo CES, which means it's my first time really kind of being responsible for where I go and when. And so, you know, the hopping between convention centers. everything you know it's not a smart move it's best to just plan a day for the here a day for there and yeah there's just a lot of a lot of cruising around right So what did you guys see? What were your best of shows, worst of shows? What made the trip worth it?

Well, let me start out, I guess, by bringing up the Google TV and the Gemini stuff that Google announced. So Google announced that they are integrating Gemini further into Google TV. And I actually covered this on Android Police. So basically – And we talked about it last week on the show too. Okay, okay. So I don't know if this came across. It might not have been clear to anyone who's reading the announcements. But from what I was told –

It's not the fact that Gemini is replacing Google Assistant, kind of like how Gemini is replacing Google Assistant on phones. It's more like they're adding Gemini capabilities onto Google Assistant. And the difference is actually a big distinction between the two.

Because like we see on phones, when you have Gemini completely replacing Assistant, they have to add Assistant functionality back in. And then you have these extensions that allow it to do stuff. Whereas with the Assistant on Google TV... you still have the assistant as the backend. But when you're doing like queries that assistant can't answer, like general voice search queries,

then you have Gemini taking over and answering those things for you. That's the big distinction between what's happening with Google TV. Gemini on Google TV versus Gemini on phones. I will say, having not attended the event or the briefing that you did and just on the receiving end, we talked about it last week. It was very underwhelming in terms of Google's rollout of that. They did a blog post that was one paragraph. I don't know. Right? I don't know. Like their summary.

of the briefing that they sent me over email was more detailed Then that blog post. The blog post. I don't know what the deal was. It was really kind of baffling. And so like – and basically what we talked about last week, what it came to it was that, oh, Gemini is going to be a Google TV. You can talk to your TV. Cool. Move on. Like it was kind of – But as you just explained it, Michelle, that has a lot more impact, I think.

I feel like they could have done a little more hoopla around it personally. I think just in general what Gemini is doing to Google TV and Google Nest devices because they also showed a demo of it enhancing. voice queries on Nest smart displays and Nest speakers in general what it's doing is basically allowing you to be a lot more vague with the kinds of things that you ask it and allowing it to get kind of vague responses because like

The way you have to formulate your queries, you know, when you're talking to a system, you've probably come across this before. You've probably subconsciously trained yourself to ask it questions in a way that you think you'll actually get a response. Right. But a lot of people don't.

haven't trained themselves to think like that to actually ask their assistant in a way that'll get them a good response you know maybe like your parents or like you know anyone who's elderly right they just don't know how to interact with it that way but Gemini kind of makes it so you can kind of just have at it, you know, just say whatever you want in a way you want and it'll hopefully understand it. And I think it probably does a better job of understanding it. And also like, um,

in terms of like general voice queries, right? Like, you know, if you wanted to, there was like a specific example. There was a couple of examples of things that they did on Google TV and the Nest displays that showed you like the kind of things you can do. I'm sure you've had this happen on your Nest display. If you have a display at home, you've asked it a question before.

And it responds with, I don't know, but here's what I found on the web that can help. I've had that happen so many times. And I have a Nest display that's turned away from me in the kitchen. It's like faced towards the living room. And like whenever that happens, I'm like... Forget it. I'm not even going to bother going to it because it's just an inconvenient place for me to look at it, right? But the idea with Gemini is that it can, in more situations, actually formulate a response.

Of course, it's debatable how good that response will be given what we've seen with generative AI, the AI overviews in Google search results. But it has been getting better and better. So I do think by the time this rolls out widely, this is still in like...

early access and i was told that they are kind of limiting the verbosity and like what kinds of things that can actually answer for you you know i do think it should be pretty good at least much better than we have right now with assistant on Google TV devices and Google Nest devices. Assistant on Google TV devices can be really confusing because even the onboarding on Google TV... says you know ask it these questions and then when you do

it never really gives you an answer to those questions. It just, these are videos we found on YouTube that are related to the thing you asked about. And it's like, why did you have me ask that question? I didn't even get an answer. I just got a bunch of random videos that have that. And so hopefully, as Gemini integrates more, it'll actually give you what you're kind of looking for. And there were actually three specific...

features that are coming with the change to Gemini on Google TV. The first is that when you ask questions, in the response that you get, you can actually get relevant YouTube videos that it poured through and it thinks are relevant to your answer. Thanks. It thinks are relevant, right? Relevant. The second one is that you're getting a Google TV news brief. So this feature will allow you to basically get a...

AI-generated summary of the top news story of a day, the top three to six news stories. Of course, I asked him, what are you guys doing to make sure that this is not going to be a disaster like Apple Intelligence summary of news? This is a teaser for the patron pick, by the way. Because we're talking about the New Daily Listen thing on that, which is, I think, very similar, right, Michelle?

Well, I mean, I guess like the big difference would be that since this is, you know, like they're generating this on the cloud, they have a lot more context to work off versus like Apple intelligence is literally just a summary. of a headline in a notification that's all the context that it has right yeah there's probably a lot less potential for it to majorly screw up like apple intelligence has um but we'll have to see how good it actually is in practice

I did get a demo of it that I can share a video of soon once I write an article on it. And then finally, the last AI-generated, I guess, improvement was the... What was the last one? All right, well, you think about that. Yeah, yeah.

So did you get to see any hardware? Did you get your hands on any of this stuff? Did you see the TCL stuff that everybody was writing? I really don't. That hardware is coming later this year, so they didn't announce any specific devices. But speaking of hardware, actually. They did also mention, I don't know if you covered it in the blog post that I published last week, is that future Google TV devices will have far-field microphones so you can say the magic hot word at a distance.

walking up to it. And they'll also have proximity sensors so that you can just walk up to it. And then it'll show, it'll transition from the ambient screensaver to a new widget hub that'll show you basically like your current weather. That's like I have that on the tablet now. I've got the widget on the tablet. Yeah, yeah. Cool. All right. Well, any non-Google hardware?

Yes, actually. I didn't get it, as I mentioned in the pre-show, I didn't get a chance to check out the TCL booth because the CES app just would not take me to the right. Sorry. They wouldn't take me to the right Lenovo booth. I didn't get to see Lenovo tablets. But I did get to see the TCL devices, their NextPaper 4.0 devices, specifically their smartphone and their tablet.

And we covered those announcements last week on the show, right? But how are they in real life? I will say in person, in real life, the smartphone, for only $199, it actually looks and feels pretty premium, which will surprise me. And also the tablet, just a basic tablet. There's nothing to write home about it. But the display, they've really improved a lot since the first generation. I remember seeing the next paper at CES.

I think before COVID, and then also last CES, I also saw their 3.0. And it just feels like they've gotten so much better over the generations. And it feels like it's at a point where it's still not like... exactly on par with e-ink but it's pretty dang close and i would say you might genuinely get a lot of benefits from switching to this kind of display because you get the high refresh rate up to 120 hertz on both devices

but you can switch to a maximum ink mode that basically makes it look like e-ink. And you can switch between that and also a color mode where colors don't actually look too bad. You know, that's one of the issues with color e-ink is that... Sure, you get colors, but they're really washed out and looks terrible. They actually look pretty decent on this device. And if I can pull up, I have some images here. Oh, here. I can show this quickly.

Here's an image of the phone, the TCL 60XE, I think. You see you have a max ink mode, ink paper mode, and color paper mode. And I think I have, here's a tablet. You have a regular mode, color paper mode, and ink paper mode. I think I have. Oh, yeah. Here's our Android faithful article.

So for our audio listeners, these are all shots Michelle took at CES of the TCL devices with the next paper and seeing our lovely website at androidfaithful.com in black and white in the paper mode. This is one of the things, it's hard to... come across in photos, it's something you've got to try out for yourself. And I think they did a really good job in making it feel like e-paper, even though it's not actually e-ing.

I really wanted to see that in person. I didn't get a chance to do it, but I have to give TCL credit because they continue to do, you know. make developments and progress on this next paper technology. And I think it sounds like they're starting to kind of see the benefit of all of that. continued work and it's certainly a differentiator for their hardware and i gotta say that 199 phone like

That's a pretty good phone. I mean, amazing price point, but also what you're getting for it. I feel like that needs to be folded into our bank of recommendations for when people are like, I'm looking for a mid-range or a budget phone. You're getting a lot with that phone and you're not giving a lot out. Especially if you're worried about your eye health and fatigue. That might be worth looking at. Yeah. So Jason, what did you see at the show?

Oh, so what I was there for was kind of a mixture of AI and wearable tech. So really trying to find the ARXR stuff. Dang, I'm suddenly blanking, but there was this wrist. It totally was there, and then it just completely dropped out. But it's basically like a bracelet that you wear that taps into the nerves that pass through your hand. So as you... do like hand control gestures for not just for ar and xr but for your computer it

picks up on the neurons firing, and you can do these kind of advanced control mechanisms, which is really interesting. I don't like that. That sounds creepy. Mudra is called mudra. M-U-D-R-A. That's very interesting. I'm actually going to get one of those to play around with, so I'm looking forward to that.

A few Android embedded devices, like devices that have Android in there that you never would know because it's not like they feature it as a thing. They've just built their platform on top of it. GrandPad, which is a tablet designed for... elderly people but literally like 70 80 90 100 years old people who might have never used you know they might not even own a computer but these are tablets that have been created

to allow them to kind of do things like photo sharing and video calls and stuff like that with their families and their friends and stuff. I thought that was that was interesting. The Vasco translator, which is like a handheld. single-use device that uses AI for audio translation between just a ton of different languages. What was cool about, and that was running Android underneath, but what was cool about that is you can read a two-sentence blurb into it.

and it will create a voice model of your voice so that all of your translations end up in your voice going outward so when you speak to it in english it translates into polish and it's your voice with a polish accent speaking polish you know on the translation side of things so Interesting kind of stuff there.

Very cool. And a few other things, like a smartwatch for kids called Pinwheel. That had nothing to do with Android as far as I know. But yeah, I think in retrospect and hindsight, I would... plan for some of these meetings in advance and then I would also just have more days there so that I can have some accidents happen, you know, where I'm just in a hall.

wandering around have the time to schedule a visit to lenovo and tcl i just you know it's my first time back to ces since like 2017 so i'm a little rusty but it's good i also One other thing I had to see was a live demo of satellite connectivity on the Pixel. Sorry, not the Pixel 9.

but from Skylo Technologies, a company that we interviewed a couple shows ago. The satellite texting people, right? Yeah, the satellite texting company. They're actually like a network provider, kind of like the T-Mobile of satellite connectivity. They had like a... a samsung exynos dev kit and they had it in like this box and like like a custom os build that forced to connect to satellites and they demonstrated actual regular sms texting

from this satellite phone to, you know, any of our phone numbers. I can't have a video. I don't have a video to share because like the people who are demonstrating it, we use our own personal phone number. So like, I don't want anyone's personal phone number showing up on these videos.

But yeah, it was pretty cool to see how quickly, like it took a few seconds for it to transmit the SMS from the satellite phone to the satellite and then have it actually pop up on the receiving device. It wasn't that long. It was like... 15 seconds, 10 seconds, you know? And we were able to actually send messages back and forth. And they even demonstrated like an AI chatbot. If I guess for some reason you're in the remote area, you want to ask it about golf questions. You can ask it about golf.

Or whatever else. If you want to ask it about, are these berries poisonous or something? I don't know. And you're waiting for the response. Waiting for the response. I trust you, chatbot. Oh, you say no? Okay. Okay. That's too funny. That's cool. I love Skylo. So I guess one of my favorite things coming out of CES is trying to see what was the best stuff coming out of it. And Wynn and I talked about it last week.

got some perspective from the CES at home, but you guys were there on the floor. It seems like TCL and Lenovo both had very good shows, as well as OnePlus with the launch of the OnePlus 13. Although for some reason, I don't feel like the OnePlus...

13 was a CES announcement. It just happened to be happening during CES, right? But it seemed like those Lenovo tablets went over very, very well as the TCL stuff. Did anybody else hear anything in the last week that you would think is the winner of CES or something that you're like, ooh, I want that or anything?

Oh, I did want to mention that the Legion tab sold out in 48 hours. I don't think we'd have to mention that. Oh, wow. I did want to see that. That's a good sign. It's an 8.8-inch tablet. It's basically an iPad mini. but with Android. I just couldn't find where they were at CES. Come on. It's like the white whale. I know that Android Police did their best of CES roundup and the Legion tab was on that list.

I thought it was not surprising to hear that it's sold out now. I heard a lot of people excited about the Anker 25,000 milliwatt. hour milliamp hour 165 watt power bank with the retractable cords and here's what sucks about that because i went to the booth and i and i saw it i was like oh this is really rad i wish i wish that i could get it

Because literally a day before going to the Consumer Electronics Show, I bought an anchor power brick that is like the previous version of it that doesn't have the retractable dang cords. So I'm there at the booth. holding them both side by side i'm just like seriously a day separated me from getting the new the latest and greatest yeah so this is this is for those who are watching the video here's a picture of the anchor 25k 165 watt power bank with the little display

showing how much percentage is there and the retractable cable. It's real nice. Both my husband and I have one too, Jason. I can't show this to him, otherwise we're going to have another battery bank in the house. No, that's the kind of people we are. Just like, ooh, retractable cable? That's so much better.

Totally. When we're both like Android developers and we have 15,000 cables on us at all times, it's really not necessary, but that is pretty freaking cool. But it has it and this one doesn't. Exactly. It's all about what you don't have.

Yes, right. One really cool product that was at CES that I didn't get to see, but I would really love to try out someday, is the OSnap, or the MCON from OSnap. So this is basically one of those... telescopic gaming controllers for your phone but I think it's like the first one that I've seen that uses MagSafe so if you have a MagSafe phone or you know like a MagSafe case like this you can just snap it onto your phone and quickly pull it off and pull it on like

If you use any of those gaming controls, you know it's kind of annoying to extend it, make sure it's in the right position, getting your phone in. This one is just snap on and snap off. I have photos of it. They only had one unit, but it was in a glass case, and I couldn't actually... play around with it. I love, oh, snap, my little pop socket cue. They actually gave me one of those sockets. Yeah.

I figured it's fairly affordable. I think it's like $20. I think depending on the model, it could be $25 or $20. It is surprisingly durable for a little piece of plastic. And me just being me and waving my phone around. I fidget with mine all the time. I guess if anything else, I would trust that the MCON would be me. a fun, semi-adorable accessory.

Cool. I always look for the weird at CES, and I was bummed to see there wasn't a lot of like – and I don't know. Maybe I didn't dig deep enough, but I didn't see a lot of reporting on like any concept phones or any like – crazy foldables or like we've seen in the previous years. But Lenovo drafting off all those great tablet announcements, Lenovo did have a rollable laptop. Yeah, totally. The ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 rollable.

While this is an Android and it's not running Chrome OS, you know, that sort of thing, it's still a rollable display on a laptop, which is, you know, I love my rollables. Yeah, yeah. And then I should also mention... from the digital trends article from joe maring he featured a phone that has an embedded um Wearable in the camera housing, which is just ridiculous. It's an Ocatel WP200 Pro. And in the large, ginormous circular camera housing is this little like rectangle.

wearable thing that you could just pop out and... It looks horrifying. The Ucatel is like, I'm so mad at both of you for not going to check out these Ucatel or Ucatel phones because the... Smartphone with the built-in wearable is just fantastic. I mean, come on. This has Ron written over it. Exactly. And then Ucatel, who are like the leaders in ruggable, unruggable, in durable or whatever.

came out with the biggest battery. I feel like this is something we hear every time, but we're looking for our audio listeners, we're looking at a picture of it. This is a phone that... looks to be, that's at least two inches thick. Like it is an enormous 30,000, 33,000 milliamp battery. It's almost as thick as Joe's thumb. Yeah. Like from, from. Like base of hand to tip of thumb. Yeah.

Not like width of the thumb, but like from the base of the hand to the top of the thumb. That's basically the depth of the thumb. Yeah. It can cause some blunt force trauma, y'all, if you get smacked with the thing by accident. It is a brick. It is a brick. It is called the WP-100 Titan.

Uh-huh. Yeah. Oh, yeah. The backlight. There you go. The backlight. Yeah, I was like, can you even bring this one on a plane? It's so big that I'm honestly looking up. Such a good question. They might not believe you that it's a... might not believe you that it's a phone they might think it's something that's not a phone that's a battery

Yeah, that's what it looks like. It looks like a really massive external battery pack. But, I mean, it has a 33,000 milliamp hour battery in it, so it kind of is. Correction, Jason. It's a 33,000 milliampere battery with a phone on it. Yeah, exactly. And a projector. I love Ukatel so much because they have committed to rugged devices.

They've got all these insane kind of phones. And then on top of it, they also sell a portable solar panel, which is a solar panel generator that you can use. Like, Ucatel is, I'm on board for Ucatel. I like them. In 10 years, there will be a ruggable and it will be a rugged foldable, a rugged rollable that doubles as a projector and probably like as a tent. You know what I mean? It could like build a tent. So ruggable, just wait 10 years from now on.

now we'll be talking about the latest ruggable from all right well so ces thumbs up thumbs down would you go again would you worth the time oh yeah I would definitely go again. I would plan more time, though. I need to go two days earlier than I did. It was a very last-minute planned thing. I'm happy I went, but I'd do a lot of things different next year. All right. And Michelle, you gave a thumbs up. You definitely would go? Yep. Yeah, I'd go again. All right. Cool.

Awesome. Well, that's going to close. Is there anything else in CES we got in touch? I don't think so. All right, cool. I mean, it's such a big show. Yeah, probably, but we can't talk about CES. I could talk about, but we don't want to pick up the whole show. Yeah, for sure. Well, I'll close the book.

CES 2025, and in a year from now, we'll be talking about CES 2026. I don't know. Maybe I'll go one of these years. I don't know. If I don't have to pay for anything, then I'll go. I don't want to have to wait in line either. So Ron's never going to CES. I know. I'll go because then we can all go to a buffet together or something. We got to do that. We got to do that. All right, cool. Well, moving on. away from CES. I did see some news coming after CES around Google Home devices.

We all know that Matter is a pretty big deal in terms of when it comes to these in-home IoT devices coming up. And Google announced that they've added full local control of Matter devices to Google Home Hub. which basically means that if you've got a Google Home device at home, you can view and control your Matter devices.

So you don't need to go up back to the cloud and back down to the device. You can connect the devices directly to Google Home Hub and control them, which has better speed, no latency, and also better privacy and security. Matter is opening the doors to the connected home even more now with this integration with Google Home. Pretty cool. Yeah. Matter was all over. That is another thing about CES is that matter was everywhere, which is wonderful for the smart home ecosystem. We're kind of...

Thanks to Matter and its adoption, its wider adoption with every day, you know, the smart home is becoming a less kind of difficult thing to set up, you know. to find uh compatibility for and everything so that's good news Well, matter matters and so do numbers. Do they matter? And we like numbers here. So just to kind of wrap up the reporting of 2025, CounterPoint has really kind of like their, I guess, year end analysis and kind of just.

It just summarizes a lot of things that we talked about all through this year, where 2024, we basically have recovery year for smartphone sales. And kind of after a two-year decline in 2022 and 2023, 2024 overall, so a 4.0% year over year growth. So smartphones are back, baby. Don't expect pre-COVID numbers again, but they are very much telling us as a turnaround for the industry.

The top five OEMs for the year, of course, by market share are not surprising. The first two slots held by Samsung and Apple at 19 to 18 percent. Not a lot of difference. And then following it up is Xiaomi at number three with 14% of the market. Oppo and Vivo both have 8% each. And then everybody else is in the remaining whatever the math and that is 33%. But look at that Xiaomi percentage growth. Yeah. So that is a thing, though. And that is...

kind of like the big deal is that whereas, you know, it's hard to kind of topple Samsung and Apple, they honestly were kind of plateauing with Apple losing about 2% share, Samsung only growing 1%. The big news is, of course, Xiaomi has been making a lot of moves. 12% and that's super impressive because for example Xiaomi was able to do or to have that growth without you know

Us over here. Without access to the entire world. The entire world market. So that's very impressive. It also is worth noting, though, that, you know, part of, again, what is also making Samsung and Apple's growth relatively flat is that there is aggressive competition. just from Xiaomi, but Huawei, Honor, and Motorola.

Um, and those all make up the fastest growing OEMs among the top 10 brands. So, you know, it's kind of hard to topple them right now, but everyone is making a really big effort and making some weight. So we'll see there. Um, I wish our friends, sorry, when to interrupt, but where, Where does Ukatel land on that list?

in others it should be it should be higher though come on um they did they did mention transient which is like the parent company of one of our favorite uh brands techno uh is also you know doing quite well as well and a lot of it also is again like A lot of these companies focusing on non-European, non-US markets, so Africa, Asia. So yeah, good all around there, spreading the smartphone wealth.

They kind of talked about some other factors just to wrap it up. And I wish Juan Bagnell was here because last time we talked about counterpoint numbers, he rolled his eyes a bit at their enthusiasm for AI. And I wish Juan was here to roll those again because a counterpoint does continue to believe in the promise of generate AI.

Internet of AI. And I don't think you need to necessarily be bullish on Gen AI to... maybe believe in the prediction by counterpoint that by 2028 nine out of 10 smartphones over 250 will be gen ai capable we're kind of seeing it already the mid-range the the lower premium to mid-range are definitely getting those chips, SOCs and Jenna AI features. So they're just saying they just don't see it stopping.

something that I think is worth noting is that while counterpoint sees, you know, the volume of smartphone sales, not really much increasing, just kind of like steadily increasing, they do see profits increasing and that is because of new favorite word. I hate the concept, but new favorite word, premiumization, which has been happening a lot. And premiumization is basically a strategy.

by increase by justifying increasing prices for products through increasing the perceived value of that same product so you throw in some ai we get to charge you a little more for it use some like different features give you this or that we're going to charge you more for it And to kind of back that up, the fastest growing segment of smartphones was the ultra premium.

smartphone ban which is a thousand dollar plus price range that actually was a fast growing segment for better for worse for all of us premiumization is working Unfortunately. So while we kind of talked previously about how things like, you know, obviously consumers and right to repair and kind of like cut costs and as well as the growing secondary market are gaining strength.

Companies are just making money because they managed to make us pay more for slightly better phones. Obviously, I have opinions about that, but I thought that was just worth noting that these are the two trends. We've got AI and premiumization.

in the years ahead. Interesting. I hadn't heard that terminology. I hadn't either. That's a great square to add to the bingo card now. Premiumization? Premiumization, yeah. It's a thing. It's not even just a thing that Counterpoint made up. I found way too many Google reserves. results from many, many different marketing and research companies that are using it. So there you go. It's a thing. Interesting.

Premiumization. There's a show title there was one. It's really hard to say. Premiumization. Premiumization. Yeah, it is. Well, if there's someone... in this world who can work that into a title, it is our patrons. It's actually all of our fans, but our patrons especially. And if you hear a dog whining in the background, it's because my dog is laying there whining at me right now. So apologies. We can't hear him.

Okay. He's going to get louder. Just you wait and see. And you all have done a really wonderful job of sending us art. for the show, for this segment, where we kind of talk a little bit about your pick for a story that we should talk about. So first and foremost, we have this art, and I gotta say, I love it. It's by Kyle Veach. He submitted this.

Kyle sent in a batch of like video game themed ones. And this car, this is a, you know, the bug droid looks like playing pitfall on a, on a game artwork on a cartridge is awesome. Very reminiscent of like an old school. And what's even great is that the cartridge, the AI that he used to generate this misspelled the word Android. It's Adroid news. And then underneath it, it says Android news. It just has a cold.

Adenoids. My adenoids are swollen. Adenoids news. Thank you, Kyle, for the wonderful artwork and of the stories that we were voting for. were, let's see here, the losing story was YouTube TV subscribers no longer have to guess what's available in 4K. No one cares, because who cares about 4K anyways, right? 14% voted for that. In second place, OnePlus rumored mini flagship could be the final nail in the coffin for small Android phones at 33%.

And winning this week's vote is Google experiments with audio summaries of your daily news. And we kind of hinted at this a little bit earlier. Now's the time to talk about it a little bit if I can be louder than my doggie. Now we do hear the dog. I mean, he's like literally just laying there, like staring at me. Maybe he doesn't want audio summaries, Jason. What would the dog audio summary be like now? This is pretty...

I got to say, though, when I saw this news bit, I thought this was pretty cool. I mean, Michelle, we were talking about this earlier with the Google TV summaries. If it is good, this could be very neat, right? Yeah, so it's an experimental feature through Search Labs on the Google app. And yeah, it's personalized AI-generated audio summaries of the day's news and topics. It's tailored to your interests as all the Discovery feed content is.

Five minutes or less, you get full playback controls, transcripts, links to the stories, all that kind of stuff. So basically, an audio version of your Discover feed, which is a feed that we've talked about in the past. I don't really use it. Ron, it sounds like you use it.

I don't know about the rest of you, but yeah, there you go. I use Discover Feed all the time. A couple of weeks ago, I was trying to listen to articles more often than not. When I was getting ready in the morning, I'm like, oh, let me listen to that article. all the advances with notebook LM and with all the, with, with all the stuff that, you know, that, that they can do now. to basically how you can make a podcast out of all this sort of stuff. This is just an extension of that.

and Discover knows what I'm interested in. I mean, again, I'm, like, looking at my Discover page, like, you know, the first spot in, you know, it's from The Verge. It's about movies. I got maths. I got, you know, like, it's got all the things I like in here. Very rare. Rarely do I see something on Discover that I don't like. And if I do, I tell it to stop showing me that stuff. Like for some reason, it was giving me local weather reports from Kansas City.

which I don't know how that happened. But so I just said, don't show me news about Kansas City. And now it doesn't. So, yeah. Yeah. I'm obviously not in the habit because as I look at it right now, I mean, it's got stories I'd care about. One plus 13. DJI Flip, OnePlus Buds Pro 3, Chromecast with Google TV. So it's Elon Musk. So it's...

You can't win them all. But yeah, so it's showing me some good stuff. So maybe I just need to remember it's there and use it more. But getting an audio summary of that, I definitely would use the heck out of this. Yeah. Cool. Well, thank you for placing your vote for us to talk about that. And also a special thank you to Philip Ruh and Ben Hobb, two patrons that we want to call out and just say, no, you're awesome.

I am excited to report that we've gotten through the majority of our patron thank you. So we're going from thanking five an episode to thanking a couple. Are we going to hit a point to where we don't have anyone to thank? That's what I'm trying to not have. No. I hope not. Yeah, new patrons come up. You want to get thanked, get in there. Yeah, get in there. Make it happen. Yep. We'll gladly thank you. All right.

We're going to talk about some hardware. We've only just begun this show, apparently. That's coming up. That's begun. In a second. Ready for a career change? One way you can truly be yourself, gain valuable training and shine with your customer service skills? Then listen up.

Sage is a leader in accountancy tech for busy businesses founded right here in Newcastle. We've got Geordie spirit with global reach with opportunities to grow your career, challenge yourself and learn from the best. Isn't it time that you were achieving. extraordinary outcomes to our customers. Come and unleash your potential as a customer support expert at Sage. You set off on a journey of self-improvement.

You practice patience in mountain monasteries. You discovered discipline running across the driest deserts and found your focus beneath the surface of frozen lakes. While squashed into someone's armpit on the train. There's more to imagine when you listen. Discover self-development titles on Audible. Subscription required. See audible.co.uk for terms. Okay, enough razzmatazz. But it's not every day a new scratch card drops.

With the new set-for-five-year scratch card from the National Lottery, you could win five grand a month... Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. It does help that we started like 25 minutes late, so that's pretty good too. By bad, by fault. Michelle, I saw you looking at your Discover feed. On what device were you holding there? On the new OnePlus 13. I've had this for close to a month now.

I did get to attend that cruise where I took the majority of the photos. You jerk. I was going to say, is this where we get to shame you for going on the OnePlus cruise? I hate all of you cruise folk. I live in a very unphotogenic city, Houston, Texas. Wow, I've never heard a city described as unphotogenic. Houston is an unphotogenic city. Anyone who lives here will tell you that. I will take any opportunity I can to actually go to photogenic places, and I got some amazing photos.

out of the OnePlus 13 while I was there. That's great. Well, yeah. Well, so we talked about the OnePlus 13 launch last week. I showed it off. I have the OnePlus 13 and the 13R showed it last week. But I know, Jason, you published your video on the 13 last week. Michelle, you posted to X your thoughts around.

around the OnePlus stuff and from the cruise. But I thought it'd be great for you guys to kind of share with us, you know, just in your own words, kind of what you think of both phones coming out of the launch. And if you're loving OnePlus as much as all of us are these days, because it seems like they hit a home run with this phone.

with these phones? I think OnePlus is doing a lot of really great things right now. Any of the doldrums of their brand from a few years ago, it seems like they've moved past that and they're generating authentic excitement. I think the one thing... about the OnePlus 13.

uh that i noticed like it does a lot of great things like yes it's it's like smack dab in the in that flagship category i feel like for a lot of reasons the battery technology is is different and massive you know it's that silicon uh nanostack battery technology that's neat, excellent display, the camera improvements, all that. But now you're paying upwards of $900 for this device. And it really is firmly in... What was the word you said? Premiumization?

If before OnePlus was sitting outside of the premium category because they were priced low enough to just get by from like that upper mid-range category thing, now they're in the premium and they're chasing premiumization. Based on what we were talking about earlier. This is not a discount budget phone anymore. It's $900. That's a lot of change. That's not a bad thing. But then you've got the 13R at $599, which is...

Yeah, for sure. Which is affordable, but still, that's the top end of the mid-range. Yeah. $599. Yeah. And the 13R is beautiful. I just have to say, like, it's one of the things about this phone that I love is that white kind of like polished swirl. on the 13R is so pretty in person. Actually, I saw, Jason, you were holding up the 13. Which color did you get? Because I have the Midnight Ocean, and it has this faux leather bluish.

Right. So you've got the faux leather thing. I can't remember what it's called. It's the black version. So it's glass. and you see a little bit of like a wood texture. That's the one I got. I got the black wood one, yeah. And then for the 13R, I got the white... Kind of pearl or whatever. Pearl-y, ceramic-y, yeah, whatever it is. I don't have a...

review of the 13R. I'm not quite there yet. I hope you have that in a couple of weeks. But I will say it's pretty dang impressive for the price especially. This is where OnePlus can continue to retain its kind of initial glory of we get

you a lot for a little i mean i thought honestly i at coming out of last week's show and after playing with both those phones i was like man do i switch to the oneplus 13 as my daily driver like do i move off of the pixel 9 pro like i really considered it and then i was like oh well then then do i lose What do I lose not being on Pixel? This is the constant, do you get off the Google track or not? But the OnePlus 13 is very tempting.

So yeah, let me just give you a rundown of some of my favorite features, of my favorite aspects of the OnePlus 13. Because you can read my full review on that X thread. And I am planning on porting that over to AndroidFaithful.com. Don't worry. Just haven't had time to do that because of CES and everything else going on. The camera, as I mentioned, is very solid across the board. The main camera takes great photos. The telephoto camera, it's only 3x optical.

But their AI algorithm for upscaling and denoising is really, really good. I've got some incredible shots at 30x and beyond. On my Twitter thread, I have some really great shots. And what really impressed me is the... the lack of shutter lag and like the ability to take really good shots with their um action mode so like you know there's like if you're if you're watching like a show watching people dive i'm watching people surf which is

you know, all things that I did on this cruise, you can get some really good shots, like still shots, even when they're in moving really quickly. So if you have kids or pets, I think that kind of action mode will do a really good job at. actually making them in focus when you take the photos. Portrait shots are also really good if you're taking photos of people from afar, especially with a 3x, the telephoto camera.

In general, as Jason mentioned, overall, just a very solid device. Big, beautiful display, 6.8 inches. 120 hertz, super fast and smooth. I haven't had any issues with lag. It's ultra bright. It has an ultrasonic fingerprint scanner, so it's very fast in contrast to the previous generation with an optical sensor.

So this one now works when your fingers are wet or even in the dark. You don't need the area around the screen to light up like you do with optical sensors. Oxygen OS, of course... you know the software is the same between generally the 13 and 13r but there are some useful unique features on the 13 including that global search feature that basically allows you to

search through your PDFs on device and your photos and your settings and things like that. And it can even like generate responses to questions that you ask about your files, which is pretty cool. The battery life, as Jason mentioned, is 6,000 mAh. It easily lasts me over a day every time and then some. So I've gotten minimum 6.5 hours screen on time to 12 hours, depending on what I'm doing throughout the day.

And then the charging is just ludicrously fast. I ran through charging speed tests. In general, I've gotten just, let's say, with the 80-watt wired charging, I've gotten like... 42 minutes to charge from basically zero to 100%, and about 83 minutes to charge from zero to 100% with the 50-watt wireless charger. And speaking of the wireless charger...

Um, before the OnePlus 13, I actually, I'm going to switch over to my camera quickly here is I have this case on here. I did not know how much I would actually like. G2 slash MagSafe accessories until I got the OnePlus 13. Because, you know, as an Android user, MagSafe is not really a thing unless you actually, you know, get like a third-party accessory. But now that OnePlus is offering these cases for it...

I've just had so much fun trying these various accessories like this OSNAP MagSafe attachment that goes on to MagSafe cases. And also their 50-watt wireless charger is just magnetically attaches, right? So it's super convenient, super fun. And thankfully, we'll be seeing this a lot more often on smartphones in 2025. Very cool. And some other stuff.

Yeah, just in general, it's a very solid phone. Did you put it in the dishwasher or the washing machine? I didn't, but I did see it. I did post a video on that thread that shows the OnePlus 13. going through the ringer, going through a portable dishwasher, portable washing machine. Someone on the show did.

Mr. Howell. That's true. Not just a dishwasher man. Oh, you actually did it? Jason put it through the paces. You've got to watch his video, Michelle. You're a braver man than I am. I put it into a cocktail. I put it in the dishwasher. Unbelievable. Oh, dude. I put it into the washing machine. And can I tell you how in my bones we put it in the toilet?

The visceral reaction I had to you taking that phone out of the dishwasher, just like the cringe of like, oh, God, it's never going to work. Or the fact that you put it in the toilet. Thankfully, clean toilet. Yes, clean toilet. Let me reiterate.

there it's oh god it's sitting in the toilet you're a braver man than me man you put it in the washing machine too right the laundry washing machine oh my god yeah maybe i'll do it after i switch off this phone but like i just can't stomach the idea of like What if something goes wrong? It is IP69 for viewers, listeners who don't know.

It's IP69 rated, which I did not know was a thing until – We talked about that on the show. You might have missed the show. But yeah, we talked about IP69 like as a punchline. And then like a week later, we attended the briefing – the OnePlus briefings about these phones. IP69, I'm like, oh, my God, they're really doing it. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's not just IP69. It's IP68 and 69. And 69, yeah. Technically, but yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, they're solid devices for sure. Yeah.

Yeah, OnePlus is doing good things. So real quickly, one bit of programming. We did get an email from Antonius Petridis. I apologize if I misspelled your name. But last week on the show, we were talking about the OnePlus 13. And Mateo, you guys missed Mateo Dhoni, by the way.

We got Matteo back on when you guys are on. But we were talking about the OnePlus, and Matteo made a reference to what he perceived as the lack of support from OnePlus on their phones. Antonis wrote in to correct us, and he said, was listening to the latest podcasts.

Surprisingly heard Mateo stating, while speaking of OnePlus 13, that they only offer three years of support. That's straight up misinformation at best, since they offer way more than that, even on their previous models. The 13 series will get four major updates, six years of security updates. So Mateo was incorrect in that.

Wyn and I didn't catch it. I was getting sick. It was a rough week last week, actually. So we apologize for that. So I just want to make sure we corrected everybody and everyone knew that with OnePlus, you are getting six years of updates, which is great.

That is something that I mentioned actually in my thread. It's not class-leading support. You have Google and Samsung offering seven years of OS and security updates, but I'd say six years overall security updates, that's more than enough for most people. A lot of people are probably going to be upgrading their phones after six years. Yeah. Cool. Good stuff. So OnePlus off to a good start. Now we just need that open too.

We looked at the leaks on that last week about the OnePlus Open 2, so we're excited to see that become official. Well, later on, we'll actually talk about something relevant to the Open 2. Yep. But first, talking about leaks. um we did talk last week we got the confirmation on uh samsung galaxy unpacked is going to be on january 22nd which is next week next wednesday man january is flying by um and so we're getting excited for that and then last week was

leak-a-palooza when it comes to Samsung. Talk about leaky-peaky. First, we got some very, very good renders of the Samsung Galaxy S25 along with kind of a glimpse of what the... You know, the most important thing whenever a phone launches, what does the wallpaper look like? Where we saw a very cool. And it's an S. It's an S, yeah. It's a very cool kind of, you know, what, Rusha, that artist. I'm trying to think of this.

the, the, the artists, but you know, kind of like using light and shading to give an S in the background. Um, but, uh, so we got that kind of sense of what it would look like. And, um, those came from, uh, win future.de, uh, which was the sort of. for these renders. It gave a good sense of what it would look like. And then the dam broke shortly after that when all of the Galaxy S25 specs leaked.

which kind of takes away the excitement of the news of the launch at Samsung Galaxy Unpacked. But sure enough, there it is. We've got all the information for it. So what we're looking at for the... for the Samsung galaxy unpacked is we're going to have, um, uh, basically the Samsung galaxy S 25 and S 25, uh,

Plus and Ultra are going to be there with minor tweaks to the design, some thicker camera rings and things like that, but will look very similar to the previous models. All S25 phones are good. We're expecting them to be powered by the Snapdragon 8 Elite for Galaxy SoC. And then moving further down the line into the specs.

Um, the, the S25, uh, is the one that looks the kind of the, uh, you know, kind of the, the most kind of adapted with more of a, uh, with, with its rounded corners, uh, and the fact that they're sticking with the flat display. It's going to have a 6.9-inch AMOLED 2X WQHD 120Hz display. So you can look forward to that. The Samsung Galaxy S25 Plus is, again, going to look a lot like the S24. It's going to be slightly thinner and lighter. It's going to have a 6.7-inch AMOLED 2X display.

with a 3 120 by 1440 uh resolution 120 hertz refresh rate um which is the same as last year's phones um from there and then the galaxy s25 um is gonna have the the same panel the same display panels last year as the s24 with the amoled 2x panel 120 refresh rate refresh rate um so yeah so basically and you can go to you know we're referring to the article on android police pretty much every

Android outlet covered it, covered this leak. I'm trying to see where the actual source was that came from, the actual leak that came from it. It looks like Android headlines broke the news last week with the full leak. And it's all there if you want to go find it. But still a little bit of thunder from Samsung, but I feel like this happens all the time.

Right? It's par for the course. It's just how it goes. And there's nothing really terribly shocking here, right? I mean, you know, like a little bit of a design evolution on some of the stuff, but not dramatic. You know, the Snapdragon news.

is interesting uh but mainly you know kind of being status quo moving everything forward i gotta imagine that a lot of the juice of their presentation on pact is going to be around uh make sure you drink ai and how that and how they're moving that forward maybe

with fitness, with the stuff that we've seen from the ring and like health and fitness and the stuff they've been focusing on. I don't know. Jason, Michelle, are you guys going to the Samsung event or what are your guys' plans around Samsung? Yep. yep yep i'll be there i'll be there cool my first first time actually attending the event i'm super excited awesome um when are you see you this time actually uh yes i have a feeling we'll see each other at this event we'll be in like a building so

When historically you get the checkbook out and pre-order, are you lining up for these or no? Are you off the Galaxy line? I'll wait for the next one with the foldables, the next event where they actually have the foldables, which is, I'm definitely a foldable person these days. I wish I had paid more attention to the Galaxy in the pre-foldable area.

But no, I'm good. I'm curious. See, I think we did hear someone say that they might be announcing the watch too. And I think the watch too has had a lot of positive press. The aura has been doing a lot of good work this year too. So just kind of seeing if they continue the focus this year as they had last. on health. And yeah, whatever Galaxy AI has to offer. My favorite. I think you meant the Ring 2, right?

Yeah, sorry, not the Watch 2, the Ring 2, my bad. The Galaxy Ring 2, my bad, my bad. The round thing, you put it on your hand. You put it on your finger, yeah. It's MagSafe, right? Totally. I will say that the case on that is pretty sexy. It has the best charging of any smart ring for sure. Smart ring. Ring, ring, ring, ring, ring. The one that goes on your finger.

Yeah, so there's a lot coming out about Samsung, but of course, another one of our, I think, phones that we've definitely kind of covered a bit in the past is the Asus Zen phone. We don't have any good leaky peekies for you, but we do have Asus actually announcing the launch. for the Asus Zenfone 12 Ultra, the successor to last year's Zenfone 11 Ultra. And that will be launched on February 6th. Asus announced it on a post on Twix.

And of course, what flagship phone in 2025 would be complete without AI? And in fact, the post announcing the launch of the Zenfone 12 Ultra. definitely puts a point on AI, saying that the 12 Ultra will unlock the power of AI, but specifically for throwing the Asus Zenfone 12 into the ring even more in terms of computational AI-enhanced photography.

And as that, that as a kind of like, you know, selling point. In fact, the post is hashtag AI snap in style, snap in style, snap style. I don't get snap in style. Snap and style. That's all we know. The actual launch will happen. So we're US people. So for us, it will happen at... on February 5th at 10 30 P Pacific time, 1 30 AM Eastern. If you happen to be in Europe or Asia, whatever the math on that is, but more in the morning to afternoon.

And yeah, AI camera focus, and we'll see what else we have to see about it or what other leaky peekies might come out of Zenfone between now and then, but there you go. Yeah, they didn't share many details, but if they're going off of past history... It'll probably be based on the ROG Phone 9 because the 11 Ultra was basically a variant of the ROG Phone 8. It looked almost identical. It just didn't have the display on the back.

and it didn't have some of the gaming features. I think it didn't have as big of a vapor chamber or whatever. But it'll probably just be a rebatched Phone 9, which is pretty nice. I did get to see it briefly at CES. going back to ces um but yeah we'll have to wait and see we're only like what three weeks away from it from its launch

I mean, talking earlier about the death of the small smartphone, I was really excited. I think we talked. I mean, a lot of people had a lot of buzz for this. Was it the Zenfone 10 or 9? Both of them were smaller. The 9 and 10 were the 8, 9, and 10 were really small. 8, 9, and 10 were like the lovely small phones. And I think that was a selling point.

You know, with last year, they changed that. They went to like, you know, as you said, they mulled it off more of the RG phone. So I'm a little sad. I really did like the 10. I had a 10, but I won't. Probably just, you know, it's hard for them to have like multiple different, completely different phones. So they just like have kind of one base design, which is like the ROG. And then they have the Zenfone is the consumer version. And the ROG is the gamer version.

But some of us, it's harder to stretch our birth-given hands any longer than this. So I don't know. Only so much one can do. Okay. Yep, indeed. Well, you might want to know, because who knows? Maybe the Nothing Phone 3 will be a short, squatty phone. I don't know. I doubt it. But is it premiumization happening? Yes, is premiumization coming to the Nothing Phone brand? Well, that remains to be seen. I don't know because this leak says nothing about premiumization, but it does say that...

The Nothing Phone 3 is set to release in the first quarter of this year. Initially, it was meant to release last year, so it got delayed. And I'll give you three guesses why. No, I'll only give you one, and you'll guess it. Artificial intelligence. The advanced AI features apparently were not up to snuff. And so they had to push it so that they could get it just right. But Ed Leakes leaked an internal email from Carl Pei to confirm the impending launch. There it is, just to prove it.

If you're watching the video version. So Nothing Phone 3 coming sometime in the first quarter? And they're saying it's the first flagship, right? I mean, like, that's the, you know, like... Yeah, so, okay. So Nothing 1 and 2... What does that mean? Well, I mean, flagship to me means expensive. Is flagship synonymous with expensive or is flagship? See, flagship to me could mean two different things. It could mean that.

Or it could mean that this is our best phone. In our portfolio, this is our flagship. So according to Google Gemini AI overview search results,

A flagship phone is, quote, a high-end smartphone with the best features a company can offer. Flagship phones are more expensive than other phones and have the latest technology and premium features. Okay. All right. There you go. My general benchmark is if they have... the latest-gen Qualcomm MediaTek snap, like Samsung or Tensor or whatever, then it's a flagship.

That's an easy definition. Obviously, there are phones that blur the line. I always assume flagship is the $699 to $1,000 price range. Well, actually... There's a lot of phones that are now above the 1000. Ultra premium. Yeah, ultra premium, yeah. The... Words don't matter. Words are a matter. They used to matter. I think I used to have more of the definition that Jason had and that you could have maybe a more affordable budget.

brand still have a flagship phone because it would be the best best one But I think with premiumization and all the other thing else, the flagship and the high-end slash premium are basically the same thing now, for better or for worse. But I do think traditionally flagship could just mean a really great... phone that didn't necessarily have to cost X amount of dollars, but not the reality we're living in.

See, how-to geek says flagship is used to describe more than just phones and ships. It's typically applied to a company's main product, the product that's been around the longest. So, yeah, it's a... That option is not going to work for phone companies considering we get a new phone every year, basically. Yeah.

Well, yeah, I don't think that it's necessarily that a phone has been around for a long time. Like a model brand. Yeah, the kind of brand of that phone. Like the S24, S23, S22, whatever. That's all part of the same kind of Samsung brand. I don't really think that a, that a flagship phone is, I guess I'll go, what is TCL's flagship phone? I guess, I guess I just always assume flagship means expensive. Yeah. Yeah.

We'll see. Interesting. Why don't you tell us what it is, oh, fans of Android Faithful? Yeah. Contact at AndroidFaithful.com. Let us know what you think. Yeah, definitely. We want to hear what you think. How do you define flagship? Indeed. Cool. Alright, we got one more. And our last story, circling back to the rumors of the OnePlus Open 2, we actually have a teaser from OnePlus's sister company, Oppo.

teasing the next flagship, there it is, that word, book-style foldable phone, the Oppo Find N5, is being teased as the thinnest foldable flagship phone. And they have this photo. of the phone, presumably unfolded, and a pencil laid next to it. And you can see it's even thinner than a pencil, which is pretty crazy. You don't know exactly how thin this is in terms of like...

but it's got to be crazy thin. Or how thick that pencil is, because my kids have some thick pencils, right? It could be a chunky pencil. Right. But the interesting thing about... this phone is is it could be even thinner than the honor magic v3 which is already insanely thin and it's the thinnest um bookshelf foldable available today

And if that's true, that's going to be insanely thin and probably hopefully really light as well. You know, that's still one of the biggest challenges with Ubisoft multiple phones is that they're still generally kind of unwieldy to use. especially the older Samsung foldables, where they've gotten better. But these are just in another league on their own. And also, the other interesting thing about this is this device may very well become the OnePlus Open 2.

if it launches in the US, because the OnePlus Open, the original one, was based on the Oppo Find N3. And the reason we're going from Oppo Find N3 to Oppo Find N5 is because of the superstition around the number four in China. Just go look that up with Google search. Or ask Gemini. It'll explain it in a nice way to you. Is that like why we don't have 13 floors in hotels? There's more about the way the number four sounds close to late.

It's the same in Japanese. They sound like death, so they avoid it. Or you use the other pronunciation. In Japan, you do anyway. So interesting. Cool. Well, yeah, I love getting a glimpse of what OnePlus will do by seeing what Oppo is doing. And if, hey, if the Find N5 is super thin and that means the OnePlus Open 2 is super thin, then... I'm all for it. We win, yeah. I mean, it's...

Like we were talking earlier, it's a pretty big time for OnePlus right now. They're proving themselves in a lot of ways. I wouldn't be surprised at the OnePlus Open 2. ends up being you know impressing a lot of people and then this would be a really great start to have it incredibly thin like that you know cool and are they and actually now that i think about it are they using the same silicon nanostack battery technology in order to achieve it

that they have in the OnePlus 13. I bet you anything they do. They have to. Why would you have that and not apply it and not use it? That's part of what made the 13 thinner than the 12. Oh, yeah. Yeah, that was one thing that I meant to mention was just how ridiculously thin it was for how much battery you have in there. It's noticeable. Yeah. So I bet you we see that in the fold.

All right. Well, that's going to wrap up hardware. And we got some app news that we wanted to go over before we get to your emails. First and foremost. It is very funny because we see at a breakneck pace, Google has been making updates to various apps from Google Photos to the Discover feed to things like that. And Google Messages is not alone, but very rare. rarely do we see things that were changed come back.

And here we have a case in this case, and I'm hoping this means that there are more stuff coming back, but we'll see. Google Messages brought back the ability to customize your contacts in the Google Messages app back in 2020. they made a change where you were forced to inherit the person's Google account.

profile and name. So if someone that you're messaging with had a Google account and they have a, you know, an image for their avatar and the way they formatted their name, Google messages sync that because clearly. You want to see the person as they want to be represented in terms of what they told Google. But.

Turns out a lot of people like to be able to change the picture and the name of somebody in their own contacts. It's like the question of like, where do my contacts end and syncing with Google begins, right? So they brought back the ability for you to customize your contacts. Google messages. And I just hope this means that they're going to bring back the inbox and the, the OTP and promo filtering functionality that they took away from us a couple of years ago as well.

But hey, you never know. They keep us guessing. There's no way you'll get everything you want, Ron. No, I know. They'll give you just enough to give you hope. Well, there might be, if you could get an undo-redo button, Ron, then you could just redo the inbox filtering. But, I mean, I don't know if that's going to happen for reality, but if you're on Gboard, the Gboard beta specifically...

typically version 14.9.06 is finally rolling out that a new button that was spotted by folks at nine to five Google back in July, 2023. If you are a G word fan, it will be available as a shortcut kind of.

along with the other shortcuts that you currently have, like with GIFs, themes, you know, the settings that you can drag up into the row toolbar that lives above the keyboard, undo will become kind of one of those and you can drag it up. So the way... that undo reader works is that generally you're probably going to be undoing a character at a time unless you delete like a whole world word or whole sentence via like selection and stuff like that um the

undo redo history will survive even if you close the keyboard it's tied to the app process itself so the history so once that application that you know you're typing in with that undo redo history is either closed or maybe the process gets killed by Android operating system, that under redo will be reset. But again, if you are just closing and opening the keyboard in the same app, you should have that under redo history, which is pretty freaking handy.

So yeah, if you're on Gboard beta like me, make sure you're updated and let us know what you think about the undo redo button. I'm actually really excited for it. So there you go. Yeah, I got it that same day. I was walking back like... between halls at the LVCC and someone texted me, hey, is this feature new in Gboard? I'm like, yeah, it is. I have it too, the undo redo button. Nice. Cool.

I seem to be pretty lucky with getting these early rollouts. I don't know why. Getting the features before. I'll shake it and see if I have it. Get on the whitelist. Install it. Install it.

And finally, Google is apparently redesigning the Gemini overlay window. So right now, when you fire off Gemini on your mobile device... on your smartphone you get this like big squirky rectangle whatever you want to call it rectangle with rounded corners and you know it takes up a lot of space type talk or share a photo it's got all the buttons and everything um

And now some people, not many, but some people are getting an update where they're seeing this smaller trimmer kind of... elongated pill box appear and it gives you just a you know a couple of these functions embedded in the box so it notably takes up less space on the screen, but still gives you basically the same functionality in that.

It makes a lot of sense to me. It's just it hasn't hit many people yet. It's definitely either being tested or on a very slow rollout. Well, we're also seeing this kind of that with the Google TV stuff at CES, right? There was like the Gemini kind of box. at the bottom that was similar to the assistant kind of thing. I guess they're going to unify what the Gemini UI experience is going to be, and it's going to evolve, clearly, because they're going at a very fast pace with this stuff.

Although it is kind of, I guess, kind of interesting that this overlay, this new overlay kind of removes functionality because the previous overlay, at least on like unfoldables and some tablets, actually had this handle you could drag and like open. gemini in a pop-up window but now this little smaller overlay you don't have the ability to open it up it's just this tiny overlay on top of any screen there's no handle you can drag anymore right would you drag that so that you could see the full

content, like the full command that you've given it? Is that why you would do that? It was like, so you could have Gemini open in one split screen window and you can have another app open in another one. You can drag and drop between the two and continue your queries.

This is actually something Google announced at I.O. And I think they talked about it again at the Made by Google event because it's available on the 9 Pro Fold. And I guess now it's just going to go away once they roll this new UI out. Maybe no one was using it. Yeah. Interesting. All right. Well.

Well, that's going to wrap up our apps. But we want to hear from you, as usual, the Android Faithful audience. You can email us at contact at androidfaithful.com. We're going to get to your emails after this. Ready for a career change? One way you can truly be yourself, gain valuable training and shine with your customer service skills? Then listen up.

Sage is a leader in accountancy tech for busy businesses founded right here in Newcastle. We've got Geordie spirit with global reach with opportunities to grow your career, challenge yourself and learn from the best. Isn't it time that you were achieving extraordinary outcomes to our customers? Come and unleash your potential as a customer support expert at Sage.

All right, it's time for some emails. Michelle, you got the first one. Yeah, our first email comes from Charles York from San Antonio, Texas, who writes in to say that I have a Samsung S10 for work. We just got new vehicles for us that has Android Auto. I have to use a cable to use it. My issue is my phone doesn't have the Google app installed and I can't install it from the Google Play Store. Does anyone have any thoughts on how to fix the issue? Thanks for your help. So...

I'm kind of curious. You have an S10, but it doesn't have the Google app installed? How does that happen? I dug into this a little. So basically, if you don't have, if you've got Android... 10 or higher, the Android Auto app is part of your system, right? The Samsung S10 shipped with Android 9. And has been end of life and is not getting updates. So there's a good chance that.

that you would need to download, you need to install Android Auto because you'd already have it on your phone, but Android Auto doesn't work on Android 10 or below. So you might be falling into this gap, this kind of no man's land zone where. It all depends on what version of Android you're running, Charles. I don't know what you're talking about, Ron. Android 10 and later, Android Auto is pre-installed in the operating system.

Before that, it's an app you had to install and granted a whole bunch of permissions. I don't know if current versions of the Android Auto app support running on Android 9 and earlier. you may be able to get away with sideloading an older version of the Android Auto app and still using it with your car's head unit. I don't know if that'll work. So the minimum Android version for Android Auto is eight?

So it should work, but I wonder if Google is blocking it for some reason because they don't want it to work. I guess the larger question here at Play, Charles, is why are you using a Samsung S10 for work? Can you get a newer phone from work? Yeah, sideloading might also be an issue, I just realized, because if it's a work phone, they might not even be an option. Yeah.

Yeah, I guess the question is, yeah, did he get the phone from work? Right. And if so, can they update it? Because it's already almost five years, six years old at this point. If it's yours, I have a great... solution for you the next galaxy unpacked is literally next week and if you go to the site right now and just put your name in on a reservation or you know to say that you're interested in the next

one you get a credit I think of just like $50 Samsung credit but you get enhanced trade-in value for your device so if this is your device Maybe it's time to upgrade it. Then these problems almost assuredly will not be there anymore for you, and you'll get a good trade-in. But I don't know if you're financially able to do that if it's your phone. But it's good to know it's an option. I did find that... Back in... Sorry. Back in November.

It was reported that Google was ending Android Auto support for older phones, but using Android 8 as the line in the sand. So Android Auto listed version 9 or above as a requirement. So you should be able to if you're running Android 9, but I wonder if Google is just blocking it. That's, I guess, the big question. So, yeah. It's a tough one. Whew. All right. Next email, Wynn? Oh, you're muted, Wynn.

That's why we didn't hear you. My bad. I'm sorry. I took you forever to find that mutant, but I'm so sorry. Yeah, and our second email of the night comes from Mike Reif. I just accidentally placed my Pixel 6a on top of my Pixel Watch 2 while sitting on my dresser. I noticed a ta-da type of sound played on my Pixel 6a. No app or notification popped up on the phone nor watch. What is that tone? Is it some kind of NFC tone? What does it allow me to do? Mike Reif in Ohio.

I can hear it in my head because I hear that all the time because I think there's like an NFC something built into my desk. I don't know where, but I hear it all the time now and I put my phone down. That is almost surely the NFC sound, like the NFC tag scan sound.

But what is it doing when you're touching the phone to the, is it like confirming a connection? It's just a tech thing that there's a tag and it's trying to get some data, but there's no actual data being sent probably. There's no action assigned to it. So it's like, I've made a connection. Like I've scanned something. But I have nothing to do with it. I get nothing. Oh, I think I've had that happen in the past.

Yeah, and then sometimes you used to get a toast saying like no action, like something like that. Yeah, sometimes you get this like blank white screen and it's like no action or something like that. Cool. So NFC is enabled on one of the devices or both of the devices. NFC is usually enabled by default on most phones that have it. Exactly. I love NFC.

I wonder which of the two devices is sending and which one's receiving, you know, in that regard. But I had a great earlier today in a meeting. I spent about 45 minutes talking about NFC and like how NFC. passive tags and active tags work and readers work and like getting into the hardware aspect of it. And it's fascinating. It's so cool. It's like, you know, so yeah, I don't know. I love it. NFC. Very cool.

I use it a lot now for payments and stuff. I mean, I can't live without it now, to be honest. It's awesome. Yeah. So just real quick, I have this case. What is it? A Spigen. Spigen? Spigen? Spigen. Spigen case. And I won't open it too far, but it opens and I can store only a couple of actual, like... Cards in there. So I put like just my driver's license Just a little like health care card and then a single credit card

But I never have to use a credit card because the wireless payment always works now. So happy with that. But I feel better having it. By the way, but I think the person who sent us the first email is actually in our Twitch chat right now. Oh, is he? Yeah. Oh, cool. We've never actually had a live follow-up to our response. Which username? I'm sorry. Morbius65.

In Twitch. Oh, there you go. There it is, yeah. Answering their S10. It's running Android 12. But for some reason, they can't. I was curious what they said. They can't install the Google app. Like, that was the part that tripped me up.

They must be blocking it at the administrator level for some reason because they want to make sure that you don't install. It's Android 12. For some reason, I can't install the Google app. But the Google app, that is literally pre-installed. I'm pretty sure that's always been pre-installed. I don't know what's up with that. Google App is literally what Assistant has. It's what powers Google Assistant, Google Lens. It's pre-installed on all Android phones.

So I don't know where or how that's not, why it's not available. Because yeah, if you don't have the Google app, then Android Auto probably won't. Android Auto should still work because it's independent from...

Right, do you have the Google Play app? I guess that's, yeah, I don't know. Well, we can talk about this afterwards. Yeah, that is very, very weird. I'd love to have more. Well, Charles, I'm crossing my fingers for you that you do get a new phone from work, and then this problem will go away. You deserve a new phone. For real. Let that S10 rest. Yes. And if you tune in, if you're listening to this podcast, if you tune in live, we live stream on Twitch and on YouTube on the Daily Tech News Show.

channels, you too can talk to us live to solve your tech support issues or not solve them, as the case may be. We do that every Tuesday at 8 p.m. Eastern, 5 p.m. Pacific. Cool. Well, that's going to wrap up the show. Thank you, everybody, for your emails. Again, you can email us at contact at androidfaithful.com. We do love to hear from you. But that's going to wrap up the show completely. It was great to have everyone together because I know that we won't.

the next couple of weeks. Cause when I think we're losing you, right? You're going to be away for three weeks. Yep. I'm going to be away later this, later this month. So, uh, so this is our, Last time in January, all four of us being together. But until then, when, where can people find you on the internet?

You can find me on randomlytyping.com. I am an Android developer. That's my day job, and I like talking about it. And I do talks sometimes, like proper talks, not just like rambling on the show. And you can find my talks, associated code, and video on my website, randomlytyping.com. typing.com and find me on Instagram at queen code monkey and on blue sky at queen code monkey.dev. I almost forgot my own handle. So, but.

I think that's it. So try to find me there. All right. Jason, tell us about your world of putting phones in the washing machine. The world of Jason, where I run my devices through dangerous objects. It's the first time I've tested a phone like that. But you know what? They said IP69. It can withstand all this stuff. They gave examples.

I was like, OK, well, then I'm going to put it to the test. So anyways, you can go to YouTube.com. Just go to YouTube and search for Jason Howell. You will find me. I also have a Patreon, patreon.com slash Jason Howell. And, you know, if you want to support me directly. you can do that there. And I just really appreciate all of you and all of your support in 2024 and looking forward to an even better 2025. So thank you.

Excellent. It's going to be a fun year for 2025, that's for sure, with all the stuff we all do. And Michelle, where can people find you to spend 2025 with you to get even closer to your heart? If you want to keep up with the world of Android in 2025 and find out what's going to happen in the next big update, Android 16, you can find all of my social media channels at my Linktree page, which is on screen right now, which is at Linktree.

slash Michelle Roman. I've posted, I'm getting back in the swing of things. I took like a brief break because of the holidays, but I posted some Android 16 stuff this week. I got a lot more in my backlog. And with Unpacked and all the stuff happening in Mobile World Congress, I've got a lot of things to cover. So please do follow me on all the social media platforms or whichever one you prefer. I'm on a lot of them. All right.

Where in the world is Michal? That's the game I like to play. And finally, you can follow me on social. I'm at RonXO on Instagram, threads, Blue Sky, Mastodon, et cetera, et cetera. That's where you can find my. stuff there, but excited to have the whole team back tonight. Jason, Michelle, look forward to seeing you next week when we will miss you next week. But until then, you want to tune in, go to Android faithful.com to get all the awesome.

articles and stuff like that that we do in covering the world of Android. You can email us at contact at androidfaithful.com. Subscribe on your favorite podcast apps, do whatever you need to do. We are on Patreon at patreon.com slash androidfaithful where you can support us directly if you'd like to. because we're ready for another year of Android. We're excited, and thanks for joining us. We'll see you next week on Android Faithful.

You set off on a journey of self-improvement. You practice patience in mountain monasteries. You discover discipline running across the driest deserts. and found your focus beneath the surface of frozen lakes, while squashed into someone's armpit on the train. There's more to imagine when you listen. Discover self-development titles on Audible. subscription required see audible.co.uk for terms

Hi, Gemini. The football transfer window's open. How are my team's stats looking? Well, your team definitely has a lot of star power. Do you think we're going to have a good season? It's going to come down to consistency and a little bit of luck. on your side I'll let you know if we win I'll be keeping an eye on the scores yeah me too now we're talking transfer to Google Pixel 9 with Gemini Live today

Sequences shortened. Gemini Live available for ages 18 plus. Internet required. Results are illustrative. Check responses for accuracy. Feature and account compatibility limitations apply.