A TV Bundle That's Too Good To Be True

you should know about happening in the tech world. It's also the place where I answer the tech questions you send me, whether it's through email, my website, Facebook, Instagram, DM however you get in touch with me, I answer your questions right here in the show. I'm coming to you now from Brooklyn, where I just got out of the Samsung event. It's a rainy day here in Brooklyn, but it was a good show and fun to see what the company unveiled. Producer Megan meanwhile is on vacation

in Hawaii. She will be joining us on the next show. So the show must go on here from New York. And let's just start with samsung big event here at the Barclay Center in Brooklyn, where the company unveiled the Galaxy Note ten. There's been lots of leaks about the phone, but now we know officially.

eight inch screen. It just seems like if you add up all these devices that Samsung has, between the S ten and the Note ten and all of their lower phones, they have a lot to choose from, and it just seems like they are making something for everyone, no matter what your price range is or what features you want. Spoiler alert, there is one feature that is gone from the Note ten lineup, and that is the headphone jack. So there is no more headphone jack on both the

Note ten or the Note ten plus. Some of you will be sad about that, and I'm kind of mixed. I use Bluetooth headphones ninety nine percent of the time, but there are those random times when it would be nice to just be able to plug in something to your phone. But we're not here to debate whether that's coming back or going away forever. But I think it's

pretty much gone forever. If you look at the front of these devices, they are just beautiful, and the back they have this great display that just goes truly edge to edge. They really push the boundaries of just how far these screens can go to the edges. And the only thing that's really interrupting the front screen on the

Notes is a tiny selfie cam on the front. So you've got that ten megapixel camera on the front, and then on the back you've got a three camera array, which is a wide angle lens, a standard lens, and then a telephoto lens. And it's gotten to the point where nobody even mentions the megapixels on these things because we're no longer interested in that. It either takes a good picture or it doesn't take a good picture. And

these phones are taking really nice pictures. I think it's pretty much the same cameras that are on the S ten and the S ten Plus, but the big difference here on the Note ten plus, you're kind of getting everything the best. So it used to be that the Note in general was always the best that Samsung had to offer, but now it's the Note ten Plus that

has the best. So on the back you get an extra depth camera and you also get more memory, so eight gigabytes RAM on the Note ten with two fifty six storage, and on the Note ten Plus there's twelve gigabytes a RAM along with two fifty six gigs of storage or five hundred and twelve. And on the Note ten plus, if you want a memory card, it's there. It is not there on the Note ten. So again they're really dividing these two devices. So some of the main features they showed off this is more of an

evolution than a revolution. So they have handwriting on there. They've got the stylist. Now the handwriting converts the text really quickly and you can export it to Microsoft Word. They do these weird things with the spen, which are actions which you can wave it around in the air and control things on your phone, kind of like before, except way more. I don't think anyone's gonna use that, to be honest. The video stuff is really cool, so if you're a video editor you're creating videos. They did

some nice stuff there. They put a screen recorder built in, You've got a video editing app that's built in the microphone zooms in to the audio when you zoom in on the camera. And then they have this cool thing called live focus video, which is kind of like the live effect in a picture where you get that blurry background, but now they're doing that with video and that's pretty impressive as well. There's also some cool things where you can doodle on someone in three D and it shows up on them.

they've got that color, which is really cool. They've got white, they've got black, and it's gonna be on all the major carriers on August twenty third is when it's in stores.

have some good deals as well. The other weird thing that Samsung's doing with these devices is they're not putting any in the hands of reviewers like myself until a week later, so we're not going to get our hands on these things for another week or so, which is kind of different because generally you get them and you start giving impressions of them immediately, but they're not doing that. So it'll be interesting to see if that theory works

to sell more phones. I guess in the time that you don't really hear much about them, or I guess you don't really have much solid hands on time. All right, let's get to our first question. This comes from Janet McKinnon. Janet says, can you do a review on Anytime tv dot us? Is this better than a monthly cable bill? I understand it's just one seventy five a year, and could you do a review and email it? Can you recommend it or not? And also how to use it?

Thank you, Janet. So I looked up Anytime TV dot us and I can tell you this number one. Do not even go near this thing. There are so many of these gray websites that are purporting to give free TV and thousands of channels and every premium movie channel reminds me of the just Scrambler boxes back in the day, the black boxes people still get those things now they're just using Amazon fireTV. I have not checked these things out.

I looked at the list of channels that they offer on Anytime TV dot us and it's just it's every channel in the world and every movie in the world. How do you offer all that for one seventy five a year. Well, it's bogus. So stay away from these things, do not use them. They get shut down all the time. So you may pay your one to seventy five for the year and it may go under in the first week.

So definitely don't do this. And also these are a lot of these things are either outright scams or all they're doing is linking to the public websites that you can stream stuff on anyway, and at the worst, they're linking to movies that are on BitTorrent sites, So you're getting stuff that is not official. It's not good, it's illegal, it's operating in a gray area. So I would stay away from these things. And I'm not just picking on

this one. There's so many of them. As people are cutting the cord and they're looking for alternatives, they're looking into anything they can get that's cheaper than cable and you remember that old adage, if it sounds too good

to be true, it probably is. Well, if you're paying one hundred and seventy five dollars a year, and when I used to have cable, it was one hundred and seventy five a month, something's wrong, especially when you're getting or promised every channel in the entire world world.

approaching the functionality of the Apple Watch. But the galaxy Watch Active two looks really nice and it has a lot of the features that you need. So it tracks your sleep, attracks your fitness, it even tells you when you're stressed. Out comes in two different sizes, a forty four milimeter and a forty millimeter And the main thing that's different on this is the signature rotating bezel that they have. It is now digital, so it doesn't actually

physically rotate. You just kind of spin your finger around the screen to navigate on the watch, and by the way, you can navigate forward or backwards. The screen is really beautiful. I still think that the Apple Watch. The physical look of the Galaxy Watch is very nice. I think that the look on the screen is not as polished as the Apple Watch. But at the same time, if you have an Android device, especially a Samsung phone, this is

going to complement it very nicely. There's also this interesting feature called my Style. You take a picture of your outfit that you're wearing, and your watch face will change to sort of match it up, which is kind of fun.

It manually tracks more than thirty nine different workouts, with seven of them automatically activate it, so if you're running, walking, cycling, swimming, rowing on the elliptical, or doing a workout, dynamic workout, whatever that is, it will automatically start to track those. The rest you have to manually track, and it also tracks your real time stress levels and the one thing it has that the Apple Watch does not is sleep analysis, So the Apple Watch does not do anything with sleep

right now, but the Galaxy Watch Active two does. Man, that's such a mouthful for that name. It also has LTE connectivity, a version of it with LTE, so you can get that, and apparently you're gonna be able to watch YouTube on here, so I can't wait to see how that works.

quote me on that. But it's gonna be a little bit more expensive, all right. Next question comes from Scott Hey Rich, I'm looking at the cord with my cable service spectrum, but that leads me dependent on internet service, of which mine is very unreliable.

area high speed Internet dot com. And so I would check that and see what you got, and I would go with the lesser of the two evils, because right now most of the time it's a lesser of two evils. I'm perfectly happy with my spectrum coverage. I think my spectrum is fine. I've got one hundred down. I don't like the price I pay like sixty five dollars a month. It used to be forty five, and it used to

be like thirty back in the day. But now that the price for Internet is going up because all these internet providers know that you're cutting the cord, and so they raise the price on the internet to make up for the price that they're losing on the cable service. But again, high speed in com is the place to look to see what's available in your area and compare them.

And I think that a lot of this is going to change when five G comes out in a big way because now the wireless companies like the AT and T's of the world and the Verizons will be able to deliver home high speed internet through wireless, which means they can blanket the entire nation in high speed internet, which is going to drive competition with the wired company. So suddenly you're going to see a premium for the wireless or you're going to see lower prices for the

wireless perhaps. But then of course as time goes on and more people switch, things will level out. But when five G comes out, we will see some good competition, which will be good for all of our pocketbooks and wallets because the prices will drive down just a little bit before they level out later on. Speaking of cable, Disney has unveiled a bundle which includes it's Disney Plus, which is their upcoming Disney streaming service, along with Hulu

and ESPN Plus. That is all going to be bundled for twelve ninety nine a month starting on November twelfth, thirteen dollars a month.

I'm not a sports guy, so I don't really know what that's what they have on there, but I'm sure they have a lot of games and things like that on there, and a lot of documentaries and stuff. I don't think ESPN Plus will have all of the best games, like you're not gonna just survive if you love sports on ESPN Plus. But for thirteen dollars a month, this is very compelling, and my theory is that they are starting out very aggressively to compete with all the other

offerings out there. So, for instance, you have Netflix, You've got Direct TV now, all these other things that people cobble together for their cable nowadays. But this is a This covers a lot of bases. You've got Disney for the family, You've got Hulu for mom and dad. When the kids go to sleep, they can watch the primetime shows. Then you've got ESPN Plus for the weekends when you want to watch some of the sporting events. So for

thirteen dollars. That's not a bad deal. My thought is that that price will go up as time goes on, But for now, I see a lot of people kind of ditching Netflix if they can go to something like Disney Plus or this bundle, which gives them a lot of options for cheaper than when I'm paying for Netflix. I pay sixteen dollars for Netflix. This is thirteen for what's seen.

There are a lot of apps like Mint and Clarity Money that will connect to your bank account and slice and dice all of your information. I've used Clarity Money. I think that it's really nice. It is it's sort of aimed towards millennials, and it's really clean looking, so it looks really good.

but I found that I got bored with it. The thing that I'm really liking right now is called Personal Capital, and Personal Capital does a lot of these same things, but it you know, you put all your accounts in there, so you put your four O one k's, your investment accounts, checking account, your credit cards, any assets that you have. And this is much more powerful. This this kind of gives you a real snapshot of just how much you owe, how much you have, where your money is, how you're

doing compared to the stock market. So it's it's geared a little bit more towards the investor. But it is a fantastic product. And that's called Personal Capital. And again, all these products, including Clarity Money, personal Capital, they all use the same kind of encryption. They all connect your bank account. A lot of them use a service called Stripe to connect your bank account so it's it's all very similar. So is it safe? I mean, is anything safe that's online. We are only as safe as the

precautions we take and the things that we do. But is the app a scam? No, So if you trust the app, you can sink your information to it and go from there. But check out Personal Capital, Clarity Money, Mint. I don't recommend anymore because I feel like I just I don't see the value in Mint anymore. I feel like they've really switched from being interesting and helpful to just trying to sell me credit cards and stuff I don't need, and I just find that I just don't

get the value out of Mint. In fact, I think I deleted my account with Mint, but I was one of the first to signed up. I remember I was working at cakew when I signed up, and I thought it was so cool to see everything on one page. And now there are so many services that offer this financial snapshot, including like your own bank. A lot of banks will let you do this right through their website. But check it out Clarity Money, Personal Capital, and there are others out there. If you have one, let me

know if you like it. All right, So back to the Samsung event, one more thing, and that's it. I'll just talk about one more thing. If they announced this is the Galaxy Book S, and I actually kind of like this. This is a laptop that it's very powerful. Well it's not as powerful as your standard laptop, but it's got everything you need if you just need kind of a in between things. So maybe you don't want to buy a tablet, but you want your smartphone and maybe a nice laptop that you can type on.

because you're not connecting to some sketchy network. And I'm not saying all Wi Fi networks are sketchy, but sometimes you're desperate and you just find one that works and you're willing to connect to it. So having that LTE connection is nice and it's funny because as I saw this, it just makes so much sense that all these cellular companies love the trend of LTE in everything. You've got LTE in your phone, You've got LTE in your car, You've got LTE on your watch, You've got LTE on

your laptop. Now you've got lt on your tablet. Theoretically, you could be walking around with your phone, your watch, and your laptop all connected to LTE. That's three devices that you're paying for now for an LTE connection versus the old days when it was just one and you could have more. You could have your car, you could have your tablet. It gets a little crazy. You could have your kid's phone. So it really is a little

nutty at this point. But you do have a thirteen point three inch display, Like I said, that is a touch screen. They say you get twenty three hours of continuous video playback with one charge.

is nice. I mean for nine to ninety nine starting price. It's kind of aimed towards the person that just wants something that works, like a laptop has Windows, does everything they need, but doesn't have to be the most powerful laptop out there. This is running a qualcom mobile chip inside, so it's not not the standard chips that you might find like in an Apple laptop or a Windows laptop.

All right, let's get to another question from Debbie. She says, I have an iPhone six S and I'll be traveling to Europe and don't want to carry along a camera. Can you tell me the best app that is going to provide a better picture quality. I don't think that any camera app is going to provide better picture quality than the built in app on the iPhone. There are apps that take advantage of what they call the iPhone camera APIs, so they can be built specifically to take

advantage of the photography built into the iPhone. The app that I would recommend if I had to is called Halied Hlid, and the only reason I recommend it is because it gives you more control over your pictures. You can do a lot with this camera. There's a million cameras for the iPhone out there. I wouldn't recommend any of them, but the Halied one is pretty decent. It was invented by a couple of guys that know a thing or two about cameras because they were movie makers,

or they still are. I'm not sure, but there's a lot of different features built into this camera that works.

out side of my camera. I mean, I've taken some like go pros and stuff like that, but I've been everywhere and I just think that the phone you have in your pocket is going to be the best one. I know people that want to bring DSLRs and SLRs, but if you're a true photographer, you're gonna have one of those. But if you're telling me you have an iPhone success you're going to Europe, you don't want to carry a camera, Just carry your iPhone.

wasn't doing a lot of online shopping. I wasn't doing a lot of shopping at all, and I feel like a lot of these students probably just latch onto mom and Dad's Amazon Prime account. I know it used to be easy to share your Prime account with other people, especially those outside your household. Maybe Amazon has clamped down on that just a little bit and made it tougher and also made it more interesting that you can get this Prime Student benefit. So the Prime Student membership plan

is I think it's free for six months. So you can get a six month trial of Amazon Duck at Amazon dot com slash Prime Student, and then you can get the or hold on this. I'm trying to figure out, is it. Yeah, college students can sign up for a six month trial of Prime Student and enjoy fast free delivery from Prime Plus movies, TV shows, and then the music for a dollar extra per month, and this gives you access to fifty million songs and the latest releases,

so sort of like Spotify. I don't know, I mean, if you're paying for Spotify, I don't see a lot of college students switching, but maybe if they are on that Spotify subscription for five dollars a month, they would rather have the ninety nine cents a month, and it's definitely a savings but I feel like there's also a cachet that comes along with having Spotify. It's sort of the gold standard of music services, and I think a lot of students, I don't know, maybe maybe they don't care.

But personally, I'm using Apple Music because it's free with my Verizon account. So I switched from from the Spotify plan when that came out to be free, and I haven't really looked back because you know, to me, they're all the same as long as you've got the playlist that you like, I don't really see a difference. And to me that the playlists on Apple Music are just fine. They're not as far reaching as the ones that you

can get on Spotify. Spotify has a playlist for everything, whereas Apple Music is a little simpler.

country mix that I really liked. And then when I switched to the Apple Music there is no mix of those two genres, but to me, a lot of the country, the new country, I should say, is very poppy. So but I used to only listen to indie music and you know, like Lumineers and all that stuff and Cage the Elephant, But now I don't really listen to that anymore because I got into the country stuff. So do

you care? Do you care what I listened to? I don't know, but I'll tell you what I don't listen to, and that's hard rock, heavy metal, or I should say heavy metal. I don't really listen to that stuff. But the rest of it, I'm pretty open to a lot of music. I like the coffee house on the weekends. I like, you know, some classical. If I'm trying to work, I like study beats. I like some of the chill music. I'm kind of a fan of all music except for

the head banging stuff. Question from Darlene. Darlene says, I I like to check things. I like to check off things on a list. Currently, I use a notes app to make my list, but there's no way to check them.

to let them disappear. So you make your list and then as you buy the things on your list, you just check them off and they disappear. So instead of having to keep going through your list one hundred times your head mentally remembering what you've gotten, already, everything's gone that you've gotten, and I believe there's a way to take it back. But why would you need to? So I would just check out Google Keep. It's a great app,

it's free. There are a lot of other apps that can do this, but most of them are a freemium app, which means it's going to be free for the basic use, but they're going to be nagging you to switch to a paid version of that app at every step of the way. So anything you want to do with this app, all of a sudden, they're gonna be like, well, can you pay three dollars a month? Can you pay six bucks for the year? Can you pay ten dollars for the year? Whereas Google Keep is totally free and they

don't try to upsell you on anything. Verizon Verizon, Verizon, Man, I don't even know where to start with this. Verizon has new plans. It's so funny because unlimited does not mean unlimited in today's world, and they have four new unlimited plans through Verizon. How do you have four unlimited plants? Unlimited should be unlimited, but no, it's unlimited with the craziest names that make no sense. Let me go through

these names. Start Unlimited, play more unlimited, do more unlimited, Get more unlimited, The start unlimited starts at thirty five dollars a month. Hold on, let's go down to just to Oh my gosh, let's just go to the single plan because the other thing that these plans do is they say one hundred and sixty dollars for four lines, but not everyone needs four lines. I just need two. But let's just go with one line. Start Unlimited is seventy dollars a month. Play More Unlimited is eighty dollars

a month. Then it gets really confusing because Do More Unlimited is also eighty dollars a month, and then Get More Unlimited is ninety a month.

then it might slow down after that. Then you have unlimited hot Spot, which is actually not unlimited because it's only up to fifteen gigs of four g LTE. So yes, it's unlimited, but not at high speeds. This is so crazy. Then you get seven to twenty HD streaming and Apple Music is included. Then you jump up and do more Unlimited its eighty dollars a month. That gives you five g axs for ten dollars a month extra unlimited four

g lt E plus fifty gigs of premium data. So again, I think you get fifty gigs before it might throttle and slow down. Unlimited Mobile hot Spot up to fifteen gigs of four GLTE. Now you're going back down to DVD quality streaming, and then you have free music for six months. I just don't understand why this plan would be more. And then you get five hundred gigs of Verizon Cloud storage. Now that's actually interesting because I've not used the Verizon storage, but that's not a bad amount

of Verizon storage. If you're trying to put all your pictures or something in the Verizon cloud, I wouldn't recommend that, but I'm sure some people do that, then you have the top of the top, get more unlimited. This is ninety dollars a month. Five g access is ten dollars extra a month free for a limited time, unlimited four g LTE, but you get seventy five gigs of premium data. So again I think this will give you seventy five gigs a full throttle, and then after that they might

slow you down. Then you get unlimited mobile hotspot up to thirty gigs at four GLTE and you get back up to seven twenty HD streaming and Apple Music is included again, plus the five hundred gigs of Verizon Cloud storage.

You took my checking card number because I have to give my debit card number, and you just took the payment out of my debit card. I didn't have any option because am I really going to give up ten dollars a month over a year. That's one hundred and twenty dollars a year to pay just to see my bill before you take it, or for me to pay my bill at my leisure. No, that would seem silly. So you're not thanking me for anything. You kind of

forced me into it. Then there's one other plan called the Just Kids, which is fifty dollars a month, which seems insane for a kid's plan. You would think a kid's plan would be twenty dollars a month. By the way, the Kid's plan is terrible. It includes five gigs of four GLTE data, DVD quality streaming, unlimited talk and text to twenty contacts, and parental controls. That to me sounds

like a twenty dollars a month plan. I don't know how they're getting fifty dollars a month for just five measly gigs of data and calls to only twenty people and DVD quality streaming. That is a terrible deal. This makes me want to switch from Verizon immediately. But I don't know where i'd go. I guess visible maybe, But I kind of use I use my Plan a lot, so I shouldn't be talking so much garbage about them, because I actually do use a significant amount of my

Plan when I'm using it a lot. I've used up to like seventy five gigs a month. So anyway, that's the new Verizon plans, which are overly complicated. I don't know what's going on, but I will tell you this, the four G LTE plans will take a nose dive once five G comes out and everyone's promoting that four G networks will be a dime a dozen. And I hope prices will go down a little bit in the future because everyone's going to be so fixated on five

G and charging us more for those plans. You're already seeing that these are going up ten dollars a month additional for five G, so hopefully the four G plans will get just a little bit cheaper. Amazon is starting autonomous robot deliveries in Irvine, California. I reported about this on KTLA and on my social media a while back. This Amazon Scout device, which looks like a little robot kind of like a little Amazon Prime box on wheels.

It rolls around the neighborhood and it delivers packages to houses. So originally they were doing this up in the Seattle area, and I believe it was a city north of Seattle. Now they're doing Irvine, California. So I have to get out to Irvine to test this out because I want to see how this thing delivers. I'm so curious to see it in action. The video that they show you online was recorded at Wisteria Lane at Universal Studios on a backlot, which is highly controlled and clearly not real life.

So in real life in Irvine, it's going to let's see, what do they say. It's going to occur Monday through Friday during daylight hours, and there's going to be an Amazon Scout ambassador to make sure that deliveries go okay, at least initially. But I can't wait to see this thing in action because it just sounds so cool and so futuristic to have a little autonomous robot dropping off

a package at your front door. I saw this thing at CS called the Animal, which is very similar to this, except it looks more like a dog with a what would you say, a basket on its back and it takes the package out of the truck. The idea is that the delivery truck pulls up at the end of your street, package is loaded onto this little robot. Robot walks down your street, goes up to your front door.

In this case, it can walk up the steps with this animal, and then it rings the doorbell with one of its arms and it falls over to the side to drop your package. So it sort of leans over and drops your package on the ground and then walks away. That's the demo I saw. It was really cool. It's on my Instagram if you want to see it. This is a little bit different because I haven't really seen how this drops off the package if it rings your

doorbell and then pops open. But at this point the Amazon delivery drivers are just leaving all the packages on the front step. Anyway, I would say for ninety nine percent of them, unless it's a super high value item. I think they've ring your doorbell and then wait for a signature. But remember the day when you had to

sign for everything. Now, I think the way Amazon does it is they have a value li so if something is under a certain value, they don't care they're gonna eat it if they're going to eat the cost if it gets stolen, or if someone claims it was stolen, because they may say that they leave it on your doorstep, and you may say, oh, I didn't get it, and I know that the delivery drivers are also taking pictures,

but that still doesn't really hold up. If you say didn't get it, you didn't get it, if you didn't sign for it. There's no proof even if you're lying. And I'm not saying you should do that, but I think that Amazon just used an algorithm to kind of figure out whether this thing is high value and whether they can leave it there or if they really need to get a signature. And I'm not even sure they

get signatures for it. I can't remember the last time they required a signature on anything that they've delivered.

news kind of thing. So yes, WGN runs. Thank you so much for watching out there. WGN, I would say, is probably number two after KTLA for the most viewers of my tech segment, But we're on in different places like San Diego and Indianapolis and all kinds of places, and who knows what's gonna happen when nextar see where it goes. Thanks so much for listening to the show.

I'd love it if you subscribed. If you're just listening to this on a website or someone sent it to you, just go into your podcast app and search rich on Tech and hit that subscribe button. That could be Apple Podcasts, pocket casts, or overcast.

Megan who's on vacation. She'll be back next week. I hope that you have a great day. I will talk to you real soon.