Amazon's Black Friday Deals; iPhone vs Pixel Camera; Uber Rewards

you should know about. And let's start with Amazon, because they are kicking off Black Friday a little bit early. Seven days of deals. They've got lots of them. They're calling it seven Days of Black Friday Deals, and now through November twenty third, which is Black Friday. Amazon is just really trying to do a lot of stuff to get you to shop on their website. And Amazon is kind of a powerhouse when it comes to to Black Friday.

They do all these exclusive deals. Prime members, I feel like have been a little bit edged out this year because now Amazon is offering free shipping with no minimum purchase to everyone, not just Prime members this holiday season, and for Prime members they're giving free same day shipping, so I did order something the other day. It was actually thirty five dollars for free same day shipping, and I saw the credit on my order where it said it will give me that for free. So if you're

a Prime member, you're not totally out. They are giving you some perks as well for that one hundred and twenty dollars you pay for the year.

fifty dollars off. So, for instance, the all new Fire HD ten tablet is one hundred bucks versus one fifty starting November eighteenth, the new fireTV Stick four K, which is kind of their highest powered stick, is fifteen dollars off, so that's only thirty five dollars. On November twenty second, you can get the all new Echo Dot for twenty four dollars. You can get the all new Echo Plus for one hundred and nine dollars, which is forty dollars off.

You can get an Amazon Smart plug for just five dollars with any Echo purchase, or you can get the Kindle paper White for forty dollars off. That's eighty dollars.

which I really like. By the way, this has Amazon software built into it. That's only one hundred and thirty dollars. Or if you want a bigger TV, you can get a Toshiba fifty inch four KTV, again a fireTV Edition, for only three hundred dollars. And if you have Amazon's assistant lurking in your house, and if you have Amazon's assistant in your house, I will not say the name starting November seventeenth at nine pm Pacific until November twenty.

First you can ask her what are my deals, and Prime members will get exclusive early access to some Amazon device deals. Moving on to Apple now, they've launched a couple of repair programs to know about. The first is for the thirteen inch non touchbar MacBook Pro. That's the computer that I have. Apparently these have an issue with their solid state drives, which basically might crash. And when a solid state drive crashes, it is not pretty.

serial number into their website. It will tell you if it's affected. But if you have an issue with your phone, like a crack screen, they're not just gonna go ahead and give you a new device. In fact, I found this out the hard way when I brought my wife's device in for a repair. I thought they would just give me a fully refurbished model, just swap it out. They said, oh no, we noticed there's a scratch on her screen. We will actually repair the device inside after

you accept our terms. And I got back the same exact phone that I dropped off there. So don't think you're gonna get an upgrade just because Apple is repairing your device. This I thought was pretty interesting. Uber is launching a rewards program, and I am a rewards program guy.

I think a lot of people are out there. I think American Airlines actually invented the first major airline rewards program, and now we know that just about every product, service, website, retailer they love these rewards programs.

mystical thing where we just keep spending. Like the Starbucks rewards program. I know it's one hundred and twenty five stars. I don't know how I get those stars, but I do. And once I get those stars, I know I get that free drink, which, by the way, always buy the most expensive drink. When you get those when you redeem those stars, because it could be, you know, the most expensive drink and you.

points you go to Platinum. Then at seventy five hundred points you get to Diamond, which is a status I want to achieve. Earning speriods are six months long, so basically you have six months to earn the points that you need for the next kind of jump in your status, and then once you get to that status, you get to keep it for the rest of those six months plus the next six months. So it's basically a rolling six month program. So let's say it's February, you reach

the Platinum tier. Six months after you know, let's say there's four months left for those six months, you would have four months plus another six months after that. So what are the perks of this new program. Well, the number one thing you get when you reach Gold is

flexible cancelations. So that's kind of nice because right now Uber has really kind of made canceling a little bit tougher because if you cancel, you meet get hit with this little fee that you can get reversed if you go into the app, into the help section and say hey Uber and you explain the situation, which I've done many times, they will credit that fee almost instantly. But still, this is kind of nice because it's it's pretty much automatic that you get those fees or you get that

flexible cancelation. You also get priority support. Now once you get to Gold, you get price protection on a route, which is kind of cool, so you can lock in lower prices between your two favorite places on uber x. So let's say that you commute using uber x from your house to work. You can use that as you're two locked in locations, and whether it is surge pricing or not, you're going to get a pretty good price on your route between those two places. So that's kind

of a nice thing as well. Then once you're platinum, you get priority pickups to reduce weight times at airports, which is really nice. I know a lot of people complain about how long it takes to get picked up at Lax with Uber. I did this one. It did take a long time. I ended up using the taxi line after that, and I have gone back to Uber on several occasions. I haven't found it to be that long, but they do. They haven't been some sort of waiting area that takes them a while to get through in Lax.

Traffic in general has gotten pretty bad around that horseshoe if you're familiar with it, so I think that's part of the problem as well. And if you want to get to the highest level, this is diamond. Diamond gets dedicated phone support twenty four to seven, and my favorite part, complementary surprise upgrades from Uber X to premium products like Uber Black at no extra charge. And I love this. You get access to the best drivers, which I always

thought was kind of a good idea. I know when Uber first started they said that the best passengers were linked up with the best driver. So if you were a five star passenger, their algorithm would try to pair you with five star drivers. I don't think that happens anymore, just based on personal experience where I have a pretty decent score, but I can tell you I'm getting drivers that are not very good. Sometimes it feels like it's their first stage driving. So Uber Reward starts in nine

cities immediately. Those nine cities are Miami, New Jersey, Denver, Tampa, New York, Washington, d C, Philadelphia, Atlanta, and San Diego. The good news is if you're not on one of those lists, they will be rolling it out everywhere very soon in the next few months. But every dollar you spend today will actually count towards your first status when the program launches in your city, So that's kind of fun.

You're listening to the Rich on Tech podcast. This is where I talk technology and help you get the most out of your gadgets. We're talking about some of the top tech stories this week and the things that I think you should know. Moving on now, Spotify finally came out with an app for Apple Watch. So if you update your Spotify app on your iPhone, you'll notice there is a new companion app for your Apple Watch.

Apple Watch. And they do say that this is kind of the first version of this whole thing, and there will be more updates coming soon.

the most popular camera in the world. Right This is the camera that is in everyone's pocket. You pull it out, you take a picture, you're on your merry way.

artificial intelligence backing it up. Now, the new iPhone ten S has this feature called smart HDR, which combines multiple frames for one great looking shot on the pixel. They've been doing this for a long time. They call it HDR plus, and they kind of back this all, like

I said, with a little artificial intelligence. And so they're taking several pictures at once, mixing the best attributes of those pictures, and in Google's case, kind of bumping it up just a little bit with what they've learned from their computational awareness of these things. So Google does a really nice job of kind of really making pictures pop, and they are very clear. So I took both phones to Times Square couple weeks ago to see, you know,

how they performed side by side. I bought this little thing on Amazon, kind of a little holder where both phones are able to snap in side by side and you can hold it up and take both pictures at the same exact time. And so the first thing I did was take some video of me walking, and look,

the video looked perfect on both phones. Now, I used to think that the Pixel had better stabilization than the iPhone, but I'll be honest, when I was walking, I couldn't really tell the difference between these two.

things look great. The Pixel kind of looked brighter and the shot from the p pixel is slightly wider, But again, the portrait shot on both the Pixel and the iPhone was great. On the iPhone, you can adjust the background after you take it, which is kind of a nice feature that they recently rolled out. Then we took a picture of Times Square, just kind of a standard picture that you know a million people take every single day.

Pixel really nailed that picture because when you think about times square, there's kind of a sky in the background. You've got a bunch of bright video screens all around you, and then you have a bunch of things in the middle, people, places, stuff, and it's really tough for a camera to get all those things in focus and to also get them to have the right levels all at the same time. So on the iPhone, I noticed that a lot of the bright video screens were blown out, But on the pixel,

it really nailed this shot. And this is where the pixel excels when it is a complicated lighting situation. When it's a complicated shot, maybe not too much light, the pixel really performs very well in those circumstances. Definitely won that one. Now, we took some selfies. Took a selfie with my brother, and I will say that both of them look great. Selfies on the pixel are very very clear, even in lower light. So I think selfies on the

iPhone look great mainly in bright light. Right, So if you look at the pixel, I think the skin looks smoother on there. That could be what they're doing on the pixel in post processing, but they both look fantastic. The background was also more in focus on the pixel as well. But here's where I think the iPhone is better. I think faces look more realistic. So the shape of our head actually seems to look more realistic the shape of our face on the iPhone. And maybe that's due

to the lens. Maybe that's due that it's a slightly it's not as wide of a shot as it is on the pixel. But I thought that the shape of our faces definitely look more realistic on iPhone. But the one thing you can't do on iPhone, and this has always been a problem, and I've talked about this for so long, but on the iPhone, the selfie lens is so close up and everyone's taking these group self picture selfie pictures. It's really tough to get your friends in

the shot, right. So Google now has this thing called super Wide, so you can actually take a super wide picture with the selfie camera because there's two lenses on the front. One's a super wide angle, and so you just pop out basically to that other lens while you're taking a selfie, and man, you can fit a lot of people into those pictures. It's pretty amazing. So the

pixel wins on that one, for sure. But I've seen people struggle with trying to fit a lot of people into their iPhone shots many many times, and unless you have a really long arm, it's impossible. That's why the selfie stick was invented. See the selfie stick was made for the iPhone. When you talk about the Samsungs of the world, a lot of the Android devices always had a wider front facing camera lens, and that's why you could always kind of get a better shot on the

selfie camera when you had a group of people. When it's just one person, I actually think the iPhone looks better, but when you have a group of people definitely helps have one of these Android cameras with the wider lens. As for other pictures, just kind of standard shots, I really thought the Pixel was going to blow away the iPhone, but it didn't. I think they both look really really good these days, and I think you'll be happy with

either one of them. I think slightly in more scenarios, the Pixel is going to take clearer pictures, kind of more vibrant pictures, but the iPhone is a very good everyday shooter.

is very clear, it's just not as bright. So when you look at the one that was taken on the pixel, it is very bright. And what the pixels do? They have a whole blog post about this, but they're basically making you hold the camera still for a little bit longer. And this will take a bunch of different pictures, it'll take a bunch of different data in and it is then mixing all that data and capturing all that light to sort of minimize noise. Let's see, before you press

the shutter button, nightsite measures your natural handshake. Oh, that's interesting, as well as how much motion is in the scene. If pixel is stable and the scene is still, night Site will spend more time capturing light to minimize noise. If there's more movement. Night Sight will use shorter exposure, capturing less light to minimize blur. Anyway, your pictures are gonna look fantastic if you're using that night site. But again, it's not real life. Like what I saw in real

life looked different than what the pixel captured. It was much brighter, much more vibrant. So and when it compared to the iPhone, the iPhone was kind of darker than what my eye saw. So I think the perfect picture is somewhere in the middle. You guys know, I'm always talking about two factor authentication. This is something that you must absolutely, one hundred percent have turned on for all

of your accounts at this point. If you are still just logging in with a password and a username, you must stop because you need this extra layer of authentication. And what it does is when you log into any one of your accounts, you'll get a text to your phone with a special code. You have to enter that code before the login is approved and proceeds. So the idea here is that if a bad person has access to your account, they somehow got your password, they go

to log into your Google account. Google says, huh, that's weird. This doesn't seem to be coming from the user's normal computer or the normal location that user is in. We send this code. So they send a text to the phone of the user, and the user gets the text, but the bad guy doesn't get it, and so the bad guy just sits there waiting for this to go through. It doesn't happen because that text is not entered. So again it's two layers of authentic. It's called two factor authentication.

Almost all of the major apps and websites support it. Definitely turn it on. But here's the problem. We now have the issue with two factor authentication, and according to tech Crunch, they found a major security lapse with a massive database containing tens of millions of text messages, including these two factor authentication codes. The server was from a company in San Diego. It wasn't protected with a password, and it's Voxox. I think it is the name of

the company. But basically they were able to kind of go through this database and see a whole bunch of stuff, including all these short codes that people had requested. And the idea here is that if someone had access to this database and was getting those codes in real time, they could intercept these logins and use those codes, which is very dangerous. It sounds very scary. Now, the reality is, I don't think that anyone got these codes. They could have.

And the other reality is that these codes are only good for a short period of time and they're only one time use. So when you get that code to your phone, unless it's intercepted almost instantly by a breach like this, someone would be able to use it, but not the second time. So it only works one time now for this reason, and I think we're going to start hearing more about apps like this. You probably want to start using and I know, another layer of protection,

another layer of complication. But there are apps out there that actually let you generate these codes right on the app. And if you've ever worked at a company that requires one of these little they have these little keyfobs basically that just set there and generate a different code every twenty five thirty seconds, and you needed that code to log in each Rate is a company that used to

give this out to some of their banking clients. Maybe they still do, but now there are apps that can do the same functionality on your So one of them that's very popular is called authi au THHY And once you authorize that it will generate all those codes on your device, so they're not texted to you. You actually go into this app. It's secure. You see the code and you can use it, and the code changes every couple of seconds. The other popular one is called Google Authenticator,

and Microsoft has an authenticator app. There's several of them out there, but you basically link them up to your account. The danger in all this versus the text message is that if you somehow lose your log into that app, it is kind of a pain to reset up all those authentications because you have linked that app to your account, and the accounts don't necessarily like when you get rid of that because they see that as a potential security

flaw so or a security hole. Anyway, check them out and definitely turn on the two factor authentication for sure. There's so much good stuff happening. I got a demo of these the Roku TV wireless speakers, went to Roku's one of their satellite offices, I guess it was in Santa Monica. They gave me a little demo of these things,

and I thought these were such a great idea. So these are wireless speakers that Roku has come out with and they're plug and play, so you literally just plug them in behind your TV, or you know, I guess, I guess you would plug them in on the sides of your couch or maybe on the sides your TV. Either way, whatever your setup is, if you want to use them as in the front or on the back, whatever.

But the reality is they're usually two hundred dollars. Right now, they're one hundred and fifty bucks from November sixteenth through Cyber Monday November twenty sixth. So my advice, if you have a Roku TV, think about getting these because they will They will make your sound experience from that TV so much better. And even the best TVs these days still don't have good speakers. Think about it. A TV is like ninety nine percent screen. The speakers aren't afterthought, right,

so you're not gonna get good sound quality. Personally, I use Sonos and I've got the sons bar and I've got the two speakers behind me on the either side of my couch. That's actually a recent thing I set up. It just came to me. I was like, wait, can I use surround sound with Sonos? Sure enough, you can, and it's just fantastic. You hear the little nuances of

the surround sound behind you, everything just sounds better. So if you have a Roku TV, this is a way to get that without setting things up, and the sonas was pretty darn easy. It's also plug and play. But if you're familiar with the concept of a standard surround sound system, I have never ever recommended one of those because they're so complicated. Who wants to run wires from their TV all the way to the back of their couch unless you are an expert in home wiring. I

don't even know how you get those wires there. It's always been such a pain, not a clean setup, not easy. This is super easy. So once it's paired, all the audio from your TV is going through these wireless speakers.

into if you have a Roku TV. I hope Roku is somehow able to figure out how to do this for all the Roku users out there, because this extra speaker system is just so much nicer to have.

create these little graphics very quickly. And they say they wanted to focus on the foundation of a good story, which are simple elements that keep your attention, which is basically graphics, text, and a background image or color. So you can basically choose kind of a template that they have. You can add your picture, you can add you know, your background image, like I said, some graphics, some text, and then you can download them and share them to Instagram.

They have over twenty five different fonts, alignments. You can even add a background highlight to make it stand out. You could even use PNG, which is cool because PNG a lot of times you can't really do that from the iPhone, but you can do it from.

none of your elements are blocked on these stories. So all you have to do is create these things and you can download and you know, air drop them to your phone or however you get them to your phone, email them to yourself, and then you can post them to Instagram Stories. Now, this is a very simple tool. I've kind of tried it out. It wasn't exactly working properly yesterday for me when I first tried it. That

was probably because it was the first day. But I do think that these kind of things are good to know about. So again the Buffer Stories creator, and also check out the Buffer app as well. It's a really

handy tool for scheduling tweets and things like that. I've used it to kind of space out some of my tweets since I don't want to bombarde you guys with everything, but I know I don't want to forget to tweet something, so I'll just kind of put them in my queue and remember to tweet them later sometimes.

people don't necessarily care, especially for what I'm posting. I think if you worked at a business or a brand, maybe people would care more. But for me, I'm just trying to get my stories out that I work on in various ways, and it doesn't need to be super super duper pretty. But again, I've used this in the past, and it's called Adobe spark Post. The other thing that I've been looking at with Instagram is this new app

called story locks. Well it's new to me, but this actually gives you some templates for your stories very very simple, but they do give you some templates that you can add some pictures in make them look a little bit better than what Instagram gives you. And finally, the other Instagram tool that I've used in the past, and I'm not a big hashtag person, I probably should be for discoverability of my posts, but the one that I like

is called lee Tags Lee Tags. So again, if you're doing any sort of social media for yourself, your company, a business, a product, a brand, these are some of the tools that you can use to kind of up your game. All right, Thanks so much for listening to the podcast. If you want more information on anything I talked about here, you can go to my website richontech dot tv, or you can check the show notes. Thank

you so much for listening. Hope you enjoyed this and have a fantastic day, night, weekend, morning, wherever you are, whatever you're doing however you're listening, Thanks so much.