So Abner, I have literally stepped off a plane and made it home and there has been a lot of things going on this week with Google. We've had some impressive new features unveiled at MWC. I've seen some cool stuff. You've seen some cool stuff, maybe from afar. What do you think so far of the presence of Android MWC? Was wild in terms of how much news there was.
we're starting with MWC but I think literally the thing that kicked us off this week was Google announcing that Gemini Live is rolling out this month And they gave you some demos at MWC in Barcelona. They did, yeah. Astra within Gemini. What's the exact phraseology for it? The technology is called Project Astra. from DeepMind. It is their project to make a useful real-world assistant. The actual features are screen sharing. You get to share your screen with Gemini Live.
I think we'll just call it Gemini Live screen sharing. And then there's Gemini Live video sharing where you get to send a camera feed to Astra and ask questions. I think that sounds very much like that world-facing camera that you've always kind of envisaged. Absolutely. And it's kind of low-key what Humane tried to do. They fold it like last week.
But yeah, it's the world facing camera. You get to look, you get to point. It's like in so many ways, it's like lens, but in real time. And then you get to ask questions in real time. What you can do at Google Trends today is you basically record a video and then you ask the question and then that's it. It's a one-shot interaction. With this Gemini Live thing, you get to capture video of the real world.
Honestly, I think what people are going to find a bit more useful is the screen sharing capability, which you'll access from, you activate the Gemini overlay, and then there'll be a button above the Ask Gemini field to... start sharing your screen and then you can scroll and ask questions and how is that in use okay here's the thing so i saw a very on rails demo for this yes and
The demo was impressive of how it worked. Obviously, I understand that there'll be certain, like, it takes you down, like I say, an on-rails route. It's almost like being on a ride at Disneyland, that kind of thing. And I tried to, during the demo, I actually tried to ask them, can we do that again? Not so much for just any reason. I kind of wanted to see what would happen if I asked the person who was the demonstrator if...
if they veered off script or anything like that. And it managed to handle it quite well, all things considered. The demo that they showed with regard to the Astra was... I mean, you wouldn't, I don't think I would do it. It was something along the lines of, I think it's even in Google's press release for this. It's like, what glazes would you choose for a specific interior design style?
I get it. It's kind of cool. But I think that with regards to that, I would use that more for like cooking and that kind of stuff. Like what can I make with these items in the fridge? But the screen sharing demo, they didn't actually show me that in person. That was just what was available at the press release. They talked about it, but they didn't actually show it, at least as far as I can remember. But bear in mind, it's all been a whirlwind this last couple of days, so it may have.
Apologies if that sounds stupid, and I do come across as what's stupid on this podcast most of the time. The screen sharing thing, to me, feels very much like circle to search on steroids. Absolutely. A really big step forward. Yeah, it kind of feels like... you would get the context from things or you could ask questions about the screen sharing. But I'm excited to see it roll out and test it properly myself. I know that...
Google's going to get that real-term data feedback that they probably need for these features as soon as it hits devices. But they didn't really give me any sort of... true indication as of a specific date. They just kind of said end of the month. So maybe that implies a big Gemini. Well, this by itself is a big Gemini update. It's coming first to Gemini advanced users on Android subscribers. Yeah, this was due last year officially. It was previewed at I.O. in May.
Google said it was coming by the end of this year, by the end of 2024. We missed that. And now it's coming in March. Honestly, I thought this was going to be the main IO announcement to Google. the feature that's available day one of IO. So to me, this is coming in particularly... I'll interject you there. What if they do it for free users?
What if they say at I.O. free users maybe? Yeah, that sounds right. That does sound right. And that gives people, they get to improve the experience in the next few weeks and then something a bit more solid day of. Yeah, that's a good point. That's a very nice try our new stuff immediately. I'm actually excited for you for this because I know that you're the kind of person who is...
Your dream product is something related to Google's AR glasses, Google Glass, that one day video. This is what you're using on Glass. I genuinely think, I feel like this is going to be the first steps into helping. create that consumer generate consumer grade product i can't even say it um create this consumer grade product by basically allowing people to to effectively test drive it in in not in
a whole day scenario, but like those individual incremental phases. So Google will get this probably some anonymous data feedback and be able to work out, okay, did this work well? Did this work well? And have a huge potential... test base before they eventually or somebody eventually has this product that you've, I know that you were lucky enough to test it for yourself. And I'm very, very jealous of that.
And it did feel like that even in the demo. Like I say, closed demos are not always a great way to ascertain what something's going to work like. But like I say, I wanted to try and... keep the demo people on their toes. And I know they weren't very happy about it, but I said, can you do that again so I can get a recording of it? And I think it kind of just threw them off, but it still managed to do... I mean, it was a similar demo, don't get me wrong, but...
I kind of would have liked to ask some questions myself, but Gemini was really responsive. The camera seemed to pick up things really quickly, and I asked for some of the other options that we could have done, but... Sadly, we didn't have enough time, but yeah, as soon as it's out there, I guess we'll know for certain, but it felt like one of those things that you see and you're like, it might not necessarily be the huge thing.
right now, but I can definitely foresee it later down the line helping develop those products. Yeah, and I think screen sharing is the key there. yeah i think yeah it's it's just i don't know it's like you said circled search and steroids that's what people are so familiar with right now and i think there's it i just think that's what people naturally graduate gravitate to over the camera. So what else did you see at
The show. MWBC, I saw some... Well, let's go over the Google things first. Let's go over the cool... The Android presence this year felt like... And I haven't been to MWBC for a while. I've watched, obviously, remotely and we've had people go... Ben has been a couple of years in a row now. It definitely feels like Android was a really front and center this time around. It felt like it was more so than it has been for a long time. We've seen a lot more like...
Other OEMs introducing these Gemini features. What I will say is I went to the Techno booth. I got to see that super slim phone. As a concept, I really liked it. But what I will say is that they are running all of their Ella. I guess it's just a cheap... knockoff. And that's a really rude way of saying about a really cheap knockoff version of their AI assistant. It's powered by Gemini 1.5 Flash, which I didn't know until their keynote. Their introduction or...
of Ella into their software was actually really well done. It felt like a really good step in between what we're seeing with other OEMs out there, trying to do things with like, maybe not under the Gemini branding, but it is under the surface. I really love that they've introduced Circle to Search to their new cam online. I like to see that we're seeing these Chinese OEMs introduce these features that we kind of associate with Western devices.
And I really like the animations and stuff. That was just one thing that stood out. A few other things, some of the concepts, sadly, I wasn't able to see some of the Samsung concepts like that kind of crab foldable. I don't know why. I don't know if the device broke or if it was just overheated. It left. I went to the Buoy, went to Samsung Display. It wasn't there, which was a shame. I'd like to see some cool stuff like that. But in all honesty, it felt like...
the biggest announcements had already been done ahead of time. And I do wonder, I mean, being, being slightly negative, I do wonder how long the bigger OEMs are going to use this as a launch pad for their products. I think Google can do it because.
It's almost like all of their partners are there in one space and they can announce these things. And it felt like Google was doing a little bit more, how would I say? They were being really diplomatic about the stuff they've announced. It's all Gemini focused, which definitely... in some respects now just in the cold light of day having come back and seen it all it feels like
They're using Gemini as a vehicle to push Android more heavily because Gemini can be updated incrementally more so than these huge Android updates that we may be used to before. So I am probably more positive about Gemini.
than I have been for a long time, having seen it. And now I feel like I understand it a little bit more. And maybe that's one of the benefits of going to these events that you kind of get an overview of where... things are going or heading so in that respect yeah sadly i didn't see that many i didn't see that much cool stuff all of it feels like it's been announced before and you can get hands-on with it but for the most part all the devices are available
I don't know. Maybe I'm a negative person. No, no, it's absolutely... Well, in terms of something more physical, ironically, we had the feature drop the day after Tuesday. So... March, Android QPR 2. This is when stable. This is the final major release of Android 15 before 16 in June. I think modes is the highlight here. There's some other tweaks here and there that people notice, like your picture, your fast pair devices appear in the Bluetooth quick settings toggle.
that's something people notice um but yeah otherwise modes is the headlining feature and i think people will like the customization of it A lot of it seems to be focused towards Pixel 9 though, right? This time around, a lot of the new functionality is coming, which is a little bit of a shame because I do feel like maybe we could have seen a little bit more than just, is it connected cameras? Is that one of the new features that is only going?
Yeah, as far as the Pixel 8 and not even the 8a, which is disappointing again. Like, I mean, it's the last update before, the last major Android update, as you alluded to, Android 15 update before we get 16 potentially. in June. I'm, I'm, I'm wondering if we're going to see more, um, tangible stuff in the next couple of months. Like I'm like, I genuinely don't think we are like, I've been.
I must admit, I think I've been quite negative about the Android 16 beta, and anyone who's listened to this podcast probably agrees to an extent. It feels like we, maybe later in the year, we're going to get some huge feature changes. I don't know. Admittedly, I think the protracted launch of Android 16 makes this all the more confusing.
I don't know. I don't know. Have you managed to install it? I actually didn't take a Pixel with me to MWC this year, which is a first. So I haven't actually managed to flash it on my devices. Yeah, it's, again, it's, as somebody was telling me, the best part of it's going stable. is so yeah again modes but in terms of the feature drop stuff yeah like you said connected cameras which i didn't
I didn't expect this to happen. So it's officially one of the cross-device services, like with call casting and internet sharing. Okay. Once you open one of these streaming apps, YouTube, Facebook, Insta, you get this floating pill that lets you add another camera, which can be another Pixel 6 or higher. or a GoPro 10 and newer. I think we're on the 13. But yeah, this was an interesting feature. It's definitely geared towards creators, which...
Maybe there's a reason they launched it, but yeah, kind of out of left field here. I like the UI. The UI that I've seen from it looks really, really like... I mean, it's almost like the... the textbook pixely design and you can see that which devices are connected and stuff. I don't have a GoPro Hero device, but I'm going to try this with a Pixel 6 or vice versa. I'll try it one way.
or the other and see how it works. Because I think this is one of those features that like, maybe if you have a multi-camera setup, you might want to use this. I know if you have like an action cam or something, it's going to be kind of nice to be able to... to connect it to your device and get a live view like that. I don't know. I'm not an action camera user, but maybe if this expands out and Google makes it available to more other brands, I guess it could be quite useful.
democratization of this technology. This is something that I'm sure creators have their own solutions for and bringing it to more people. That might be interesting. boosting the pixels camera bona fides. Yeah, but at the same time, it's kind of strange, isn't it? When you think about it, so... The Pixel camera has been almost like the hallmark of stills on Android for a long time, a mobile period, right, since 2016. Yeah. So I'm really wondering if this is Google in some ways admitting that...
Certain creators, they're never going to switch to video on their smartphone and they just want to use a dedicated camera. And at the same time, does this... Like, yeah, does this diminish the video on Pix a little bit? I'm not sure. Or is it just a way to help people? Like you say, maybe the term creator is not right. Maybe his creator is going to use it most.
readily though, I guess. But if you're going to have a GoPro Hero, do you want to stream it to your phone and then put it straight onto your platforms? Or are you going to stream from your phone? I don't know. If anyone out there is...
someone who would do that, let us know because I'm fascinated because I'm not the kind of person, I'm a dedicated camera guy and I keep all of it on the dedicated camera and using something like a GoPro to stream to my phone, to stream to the internet feels like insane to me. So that's the camera stuff, the main one anyways. So I think the other 10th poll is satellite SOS expanding beyond the US.
Outside of the continental US, you have Alaska, you have Hawaii, you have Canada, you have the UK, and you have Europe. Yeah, it's a nice thing to have. Being able to contact emergency services. It is. I think that was the one thing where I was like, I was a little bit worried that, not worried, that's the wrong way to describe it, but.
If you look at the way that Apple allowed satellite SOS, I'm guessing it's globally on their iPhones, but don't quote me on that. We saw in the previous developer beta releases for QPR that it did enable... satellite SOS or at least the onboarding process. So if you're in the UK, I think, UK and Europe, I think that's a really nice thing. In Canada specifically, I feel like it seems a bit weird sometimes that some things come to the US.
and then don't go to Canada, there must be some crossover with cell services and satellite services there. So that's kind of, I think that's nice, especially if you're doing a lot of hiking or anything like that, you can kind of, at least you have a backup on a potential backup. which is a good thing. Do you know if it's still limited in terms of the years that you get it, like you do with the Pixel 9 series? Two years, oh, that's good enough for most people, I guess. Yeah.
There's no plans about fees on that. I feel like I'm asking you. Nobody has talked about it. I don't think Apple has talked about it either. What Apple ended up doing is they extended it. Yeah, I believe. rather than get into how people want to pay for it so we shall see um yeah emergency sos and i think scam detection in google messages and google phone is probably the next big temple it's
It's pretty straightforward. And I've seen people excited by Pixel Studio getting the ability to generate images. It's obviously live in Gemini right now, but I do think that... A dedicated app is so much better.
Yes. Yeah, well, I mean, sorry, you mean generating images of people there? Sorry, you didn't allude to that. Yes, yes. People generation. I figured what you meant. You said image generation. I was like, I'm pretty sure they've been doing that for a long time now. Yeah, I mean, are you the kind of...
you use pixel studio for a while i gotta say i don't think i've used pixel studio in about four months i use it as a gallery because it's kind of fun to scroll to it every it updates every single day but uh the I think the actual feature I'm using is the sticker clopping. You get to pull things out, make a sticker, access it in Gboard, sticker pane. That's, I think, probably the most gen-wide case use case.
I would like to see how this works. Again, I need to flash this OTA on my device and just work out how it's going to work for me, basically. I think there's a lot of things where they seem just like... those quality of life editions. In general, though, do you think this feels like a feature drop that, I don't know, for people to get excited by? Because obviously, just looking at what... functionality is going to come to older devices does feel like a little bit like
The 8, specifically the 8 series feels like a little bit left behind. I don't know. They really should have. I'm a little bit soured in my mouth. The taste is a little bit soured in my mouth with that. Yeah. So the issue is that the 8 series is running Gemini Nano and the Pixel 9 series is running. Gemini Nano with multimodality. That multimodality is the key in terms of being able to do all this visual stuff. Yeah. But yeah, it's... I don't know. This feature drop is...
I don't know, par for the course, I'd say, in terms of it's nothing too major. There will be some features that people benefit from, but I don't know. It could be... Again, it's modes. It's ironically the big aspect of this feature is the Android OS itself, and even Google dodged it this time. I guess with any major...
This is probably something that in some ways is a strength and a weakness of the feature drop system, in my opinion, is that we have these updates where people expect huge sweeping changes. massive amounts of features, and maybe Google did that initially, because it, when did we first, when did we first have the feature drop? So we had the first Pixel feature drop with Pixel 4. If we look at it, this is mainly for...
For anyone out there who's wondering, why do we not get anything with feature drops? This is my theory at the very least. So when the Pixel 4 launched, we had Android 10. I think when you compare Android 10 to Android 15, the amount of functionality that has...
In theory, the amount of functionality you can add has diminished year over year over year over year. So I feel like we're at a point now where the functions that we're getting are almost value adds. So maybe looking at that connected camera feature. They're nice value adds. They're not necessarily those killer things that people really think that they want. And then at the end of the day...
For most people, these updates are only going to be fixing bugs that they potentially had anyway. So, yeah, I don't know. Sorry to put a negative spin on it, but I think a lot of people maybe necessarily have their hopes up. And it isn't necessarily going to work like that indefinitely because there's only so much you can do before we end up. Every single phone is exactly the same. Every feature set is exactly the same. And it definitely feels like we've reached that point.
at least in my opinion, probably since Android 14. And so the feature drops feel less, not important, that's maybe not the word to describe it, less weighty. I don't know. It's a quality of life stuff that, again, like he was moving to, that it's a nice, I think, 10-pole headlining features. They'll always be reserved for the new phone. That's just a gift. That's how any of this works.
But, yeah, it's always nice to see updates, though, obviously. Of course it is. Of course it is. But, I mean, the best thing is that... We haven't even talked about it yet. The Pixel Watch managed to get some features as well. Yes. And I think that's pretty important that we get Pixel Watch features because there's not many of the smartwatches that can get updates like this because they don't have their own equivalent of a feature drop.
Yeah, so again, the OS is probably reading. Well, so that's sort of the feature drop. We already knew loss of pulse detection was coming to the US. The Pixel 3, we get menstrual health. Then we get... pixel watch 2 auto bedtime mode and all of them get improved step tracking that's clear health focus that kind of stuff but uh we're getting where os 5.1 it's a pretty weird rollout in that it's not coming it's only available for the Pixel Watch 3 and Pixel Watch 2 in Wi-Fi right now
They haven't released any of the LTE model updates or the original Pixel Watch. They will all be getting the S5.1 eventually, but just not yet. And I think the... I don't know. We've seen some tweaks here and there, but bringing it to Android 15 feels like a nice modernization. It's no longer a year behind, that kind of thing.
5.1. It's... There's some... It's probably weighing the groundwork for some upcoming other stuff. It doesn't appear that any... media apps streaming apps take advantage of the on-device speaker yet so I'm curious to see how that works Do you think you would use that? Do you think you'd use that? I'm laughing because I know that you probably would and I 100% would never Blair.
youtube music or spotify or whatever it is out of my out of my watch screen okay because i remember testing it with a third party app and it sounded horrendous okay so yes i've used it on a galaxy watch 4 The fact that you're able to load MP3 files to the Galaxy Watch 4 on our Galaxy Watch is remarkably amusing to me. And I did use it to play music while on a hike once. Yes, it sounded pinny. But, you know, it was there. It was nice. It was better than the phone in my pocket, I guess. But, yeah.
So the thing to keep in mind with this, it's battery intensive. Speakers, they're just battery intensive. You don't want to do this all the time, but I don't know, it might be nice in a pinch and you just need sound. Yeah, I mean, you're probably getting a wider problem, I guess, with... With smartwatches in general, and I've taken the odd call on my wristwatch, but it always sounds horrendous. It looks foolish. It never sounds good.
It does. Sometimes it's nice if you're like, like I did it, I've done it on a bike before, which is kind of nice because you can kind of like do it. It's less, it feels less dangerous. Is that the way to describe it? Yeah, maybe. Less dangerous. You can kind of like speak into the wristwatch and sometimes getting feedback from maps was kind of cool, but the speakers are so bad. So maybe that's something that this might help benefit as we move forward. Like we'll get different hardware.
better speakers, but I disagree if anyone should be listening to music out of the wristwatch unless they really have to. I'll allow you the hike one because you're probably...
isolated and there was no one around you getting annoyed by it because there's nothing worse than someone blaring music out their phone on like public transport or whatever they're the worst people in the world so you became one of those with your wristwatch luckily the speaker wasn't good enough to to kind of drown out there
The nice surroundings, I'm guessing, but... I'm surprised about the loss of pulse function. That's already... Am I right in thinking that's already available in the UK? Yeah. Yeah, it's... Well, touch wood, like... at all of the luck in the world, I'll never ever have to worry about that function being activated. But I guess it's kind of strange. Was that something that was related to FDA approval or? Yeah, it's just, I don't know why it took so long, but we finally have it.
But yeah, I guess the other thing to talk about the Pixel Watch is how it's now Google, well, the last update was in November and Google previewed that it won't be coming until March. And the next one is in June. So they're... confirming that pixel watches are moving to a quarterly update cycle, which does make sense because the security aspect of these updates, monthly updates.
It's not a large attack vector or anything like that. So just switch to quarterly. Maybe it allows Google to do more testing, rest bugs, that kind of stuff. Porto is fine, I don't think. I think it makes sense for a smartwatch to do quarterly updates, specifically the Pixel Watch. If it means we're going to get bigger updates, obviously you alluded, you mentioned it slightly earlier that going from Android 14 to 15 is important.
If it means that potentially there's more time in between these updates for the dev team behind Wear OS to work on it, I think that's a really good thing. And I hope that... Well, I hope that we get more robust updates like this one, potentially. Because I know that there's a lot of Pixel Watch owners out there who do worry that when are they going to get updates until and all that kind of stuff. And maybe it does make, I mean...
This is just me spitballing. I wonder if this means that the next generation, I don't know if this generation will be included like the six and seven. Might mean longer support windows. I don't know. Just something I would like to see maybe. Yeah, it comes out of the processor because the thing to keep in mind is that these are still constrained. These chips aren't as good as smartphones. I think it's still running 32-bit or something like that. It's...
Yeah, these chips, I think, I don't know, wireless chips. I think the big update in the distance is, yes, Qualcomm. I don't know if they can bring their Alliant calls down to a smartwatch yet or whether it's financially feasible to make sense to do that. We're still probably on generic ARM calls. I think that's like in the long-term future that could be exciting. And I think, yeah, I think we're overdue for a new Qualcomm chip, actually. It feels like it. It definitely feels like it when...
I mean, I'm wearing the OnePlus Watch 3 at the moment, and that definitely feels like the Pixel. Sorry, not the Pixel Watch. It feels like the OnePlus Watch 2R, but kind of supersized and made some improvements in specific areas.
Yeah, performance. I think performance since the Snapdragon Wear W5, hopefully not. Yeah, yep, that's where they're on. I'm actually getting that one on. And the W5 Plus, they feel very, very, very good anyway, but it'd be nice to see just an uplift so that we get a bit of future-proofing. Yeah, great to see that the Pixel Watch is getting updates with this feature drop. I think it makes sense to have feature drops every time. Like I say, those four times a year.
Do people want extra features on their watch? I don't really know. I feel like I only use my smartwatch as a basic fitness tracking tool and for a notification bridge. Yeah, interesting to see. I thought we would have Gemini on the wrist, but I guess... Okay, Gemini replacing Google Assistant on the wrist is probably pretty straightforward. Maybe the most exciting...
thing we get is access to extensions, which have been renamed to apps this week. Neither here nor there, I guess. But yeah, I kind of thought that would happen by now, but I guess it's a Pixel Watch feature at this point. It makes sense to me. But temper your expectations on what you can do with Gemini on your wrist. At best, you get extensions slash apps. At worst, it's just a rebrand, a new icon, that kind of stuff.
Yeah, perfect. I think, yeah, everything's rolling out right now. All of these updates are available. If you've had any problems, actually, let me know. I always like to know if people have problems with these updates because... It's something that does happen. It introduces bugs. So if it's resolved some of your things, I know that there's been quite a few things resolved with this particular update as well, with the February bulletin.
February? March. I'm going back in time. I'm not wishing the time away. I'm not wishing we could go back. But yeah, hopefully it has improved your experience with the Pixel. I think for a lot of people, Pixel 9 series devices... It's great to get new features. I do feel sorry again a little bit for Pixel 8 series, specifically those that maybe picked up the 8 Pro at the end of last year and we're now getting this shunted release cycle. But yeah.
I don't have anything else really to add. I think we've had a really nice dive into these updates. This has been a whirlwind week for me, straight into the podcast, straight into telling you about these updates and what Google is doing.
currently, industry-wide. I want to say thanks for listening and joining me this week. Everyone, this is PixelAid44. Thanks again to you as well, Abner. It's always nice to spend time with me and speak to you. But yeah, thanks for listening. I'll speak to you soon. See you next week. Bye.