Fitbit Knows What You Did Last Summer

stuff that affects you. The apps you can use, the everyday decisions you're making, whether you want to get a fire TV or a Roku or Chrome cast. These are the kind of things that we discussed on a weekly basis, so that when it comes time for you to make that decision. You remember, oh yeah, Rich did mention that the Chrome cast doesn't have that feature, or the Roku does that, but the Amazon doesn't. So you just have

this thing. I'm not saying this is an end all for every decision you ever after make, but it just gives you that basis of knowledge. Right. So an example, how to colleague come up to me here at work and she comes up to me with her brand new cell phone and she says, hey, Rich, is this a good phone that I got? It's from Verizon. I look at it. I said, oh, that's the pixel. That's a fantastic phone. But why'd you go with the original pixel?

It's like, what do you mean original? I'm like, that's the first pixel that ever came out, by the way back in twenty sixteen. You're talking a phone that's three years old, right. So she said, I don't know, that's the one that they said was like the best one. And I said, well, they just came out with. I said, how much did you pay for this? Did you get? You obviously got it for free. She goes, no, it

was like six hundred dollars. Wait what hold on? So now you bought a phone that's this this old, plus you paid this much money, and I did, you know, I just wanted to make sure I confirmed, you know. I was like, I, you know, I noticed the phone from the way it looked that it was a Pixel, but I just wanted to confirm because it's been a while since I played with the original Pixel. So I looked at it. I said, okay, and it was still nice,

the software was still fresh and everything. But I said to her, you know that Google just came out with two new pixels that, by the way, are better than this phone and cheaper. Yeah, and Verizon sells them, so why would you not get that? And I wasn't yelling at her, but I was explaining that I wanted to know. Yeah. I was just very curious what happened in this transaction at the Verizon store. Why a salesperson would lead her to a phone that is three years old versus one

that came out two months ago. You remember, we went to the Google event and I featured those phones, the Pixel three A and the Pixel three A XL. So I told her the differences. I said, well, here's the difference the Pixel three A, which is a phone that sells for three ninety nine unlocked, which is a smaller size. She complained that she got the Xcel, which was kind of big for her hands, and I said, well, the Pixel three A is even smaller, so it'd be even

easier in your hands too. So all these things added up to I said, you know what, I think you got to go back to the store. She goes back to the store. Ask her today and I said, did you get your new phone?

her device. Maybe they get more commission on a phone that's in house, and plus it's an older phone, so they make more on it.

about a new pixel phone. You may not remember the model number, you may not remember the details, but you said, Rich just talked about a brand new pixel phone a couple of weeks ago on the podcast, and I remember him saying it was less expensive. Just those two keywords in your head alone should be enough to make you realize, hold on, why am I going for a phone that's three years old? When I do remember this guy talking

about a phone that's newer and better and cheaper. And it's just that kind of knowledge base that you build by listening to a show like this that does help you out in real life. So I just figured i'd share that story because I thought it was quite interesting.

the closest thing I found is from mole Skein. They have something called the Smart Writing System, and what this is is one of their notebooks, and it says that it bridges the analog and the digital, so you can write in their little notebook and you know, you get smart Writing set and it looks like whatever you're writing in the notebook shows up in your phone on their app as well. I don't think this is perfect, and it's also quite expensive because you have to buy the

special notebooks, you have to buy the special software whatever. Yeah, but that's probably the clince you're going to get to a solution like this. Maybe if if you're listening and you have something that works for this. I would think that something like the Samsung Note would work for this because I do know that they convert handwriting into digital, so on that device you could probably use your handwriting to write into the calendar and then that will convert

into text. So that's probably the other solution, but that requires getting a whole new phone and adopting a system. But they are coming out with a new note on August seventh, So if you want to wait to see if that's the case or if that's going to work for you, that probably is your best bet. So check out mole skin as well. But if you have a solution, email me for sure. So switching gears from Samsung to Apple. Apple is going to release their new iPhones later in September.

We already know that, but of course now the rumors are trickling out a speculation on what this phone is going to have. So there's been a lot of rumors that they're going to switch over from the lightning port, which is what they have now, to something called USBC, which is what's on the iPad Pro. Remember when we went to the event in New York City that they changed the or do you not go to that? Was that before your time?

latest rumors, they're still going to stick with lightning. I think that's smart for now. I know everyone wants like this changeover, but it's kind of a big deal to switch all your stuff, especially if you're in an iPhone world. Yeah, you know, I think it'll be fine because USBC is everywhere, But if you don't have other things, you're not really caring too much. Like if you just have an iPhone you charge with your cable you have. You don't want to change that cable right now.

do anything. Let me say, so, let's see if we press Yeah, see how you press hard and it brings up those little menus. So that's called three D touch. And clearly, since you didn't know about it, there's a billion other people that don't know about it either. So they're getting rid of that. And what they're doing is something called haptic touch. And I was testing this out on the I'm writing my book for iOS thirteen right now,

and I was testing out haptic touch yesterday. The way it works on the new iPhone is really weird because now when you press and hold an app on your screen like this, You no longer get the wobbly option. Oh, it now gives you this. It now gives you how do you say done? It now gives you this little hard press menu along with an option to rearrange icons. So it's like one extra step now to rearrange your icons. So anyway, that's changing in the new iPhone. And then

the camera is the big story. There's gonna be three cameras on the back of the new iPhone, at least the upper models, you know, the top models, maybe all three, but the extra space is going to have a wide angle lens. And we saw this with the Samsung Galaxy S ten. It had a wide angle lens, which is amazing. I love having the wide angle lens because you can get more creative with your pictures. It's really fun, especially if you're traveling there's a big mountain or you know,

big building that you want to fit in there. Yeah so and you just they just look unique because you have this nice wide angle. If you're a realtor, that's a great use of it taking pictures of inside people's homes where you want to get the whole room captured. So the way that. Of course, Apple likes to one up things, so they're not only going to have this wide angle lens apparently, but according to Bloomberg, they're gonna have a new feature that utilize is it called smart frame.

And so when you take your regular picture, the iPhone will take your regular picture. Let's say I take a picture of you, but it's also going to take a wide angle picture around you. So later on, let's say that I had I noticed later on that I want to include a little bit more of something to the left of you or to the right of you. Yeah, Now I can use that wide angle to kind of see the whole canvas, and you can like crop it exactly recrop. So it's kind of fun and it's a

smart idea and it's interesting. Now Apparently, according to this Bloomberg article, the extra data is going to be thrown away at it after a certain period of time, because you could imagine that in some pictures when you take a wider angle that you're not really thinking of, there might be something in that picture that you didn't think of. And I'll just give an example. Let's say I take a picture of Megan and there's a wineglass next to you right, and in a picture that I frame up,

that wineglass isn't in there. Yeah, But then all of a sudden when I go work, Yeah, at work, and when I go to the bigger picture, it's it's like there's the wine glass, Like ooh yeah, maybe don't want someone seeing that. So they're going to automatically throw away the extra data after a certain amount of time.

the living room. I don't know why you'd want that, but if you did, it would be like, sorry, we don't see the living room lights. You have nothing named living room lights because I call them living room dual lights or something. You know what I mean, like, it needs the exact way you've named things to like work properly.

Whereas with Google, on the other hand, if I'm in my kitchen and I say turn on the kitchen lights, or if I just say turn on the lights, it will turn on just the kitchen lights, because it's smart enough to know that that Google Home is in your kitchen, you're in your kitchen. It's assuming you just want the kitchen lights on. It's that smart. So that's why I

would say go towards the Google stuff. But Peter, you're saying you want this to work with your iPhone and your iPhone ecosystem, and I feel like, and I don't know this to be certain, but I feel like the Alexa products might work a little bit better with Apple because they have their own app that works on the

iPhone and you can import your contacts. I assume you can put your calendar in there, whereas with Google, it's much more like it kind of knows you're using Google products and it gets all the data from your Google products. So in this case, I would probably lean towards the Amazon side of things. And it's a problem that we're all facing right now and that's that none of these

products really play nicely with each other. So if you have an iPhone, it's like you're using Siri all day at work, and then when you get home, you've got to remember what the Alexa or Google commands are and vice versa. If you're using Alexa at home, and by the way, I've probably just activated everyone's device and I apologize for that like a thousand times. But if you're using a at home and then you have an Android phone, now you're using Google commands there. So it's like this

whole big thing. But if you probably if you have an Android phone, maybe you won't with Google anyway at home because you had Android. So I think that's the that's the kind of the differences I would see in the two products.

a two horse race. Yeah, series there and home Kit is there, but the amount of products you can get that work with it are just it's a blip on the radar, and that's why most people don't consider it because they're looking at all the stuff they want, the cameras and all this stuff, and it's just not really available in a big way through Apple. Apple's trying to change that and they're doing a lot of cool stuff.

One of the things they announced with iOS thirteen and home Kit is that if you want to offer a smart home camera with Apple, they will give you it's like free iCloud storage for your clips, so for like they require like a certain amount of time. So basically they're gonna challenge these two incumbents based on like some of the services you get out of them, like privacy number one, and also like free storage. Like right now, if you buy a Ring camera or a Nest camera,

you're not getting any free storage with those cameras. You have to buy that and that costs money every year. Wise came that's a twenty dollars camera, they do give you storage for free. The Amazon Cloud Cam they do give you some storage for free for fourteen days. So Apple is really going to push these companies, which is good. It's a little bit more competitive that way.

it out. So here's what they've done. The top protective layer of the display, which a lot of reporters peeled off by accident, they're making it very apparent that you don't peel that off, So that's number one. Then some other reporters had problems with little crumbs and things getting behind the screen and ruining the screen because it got in through the hinge. So they said that they're going to reinforce the device so that you can't get external

particles under the screen. And the way they're doing that is they're putting extra top and bottom hinges, like protection caps on the hinges, and then additional metal layers underneath the display, and then they also made the space between the hinge and the body reduced. Now I'm not an engineer, but I don't know how you when this phone was supposed to launch, How do you have a million phones sitting in a warehouse do all these changes and now

you have to retrofit these phones. I don't know. Yeah, seems like I don't want this thing. I feel like it's just not gonna go well, like especially for two thousand dollars.

you have any recommendations for these devices? And then she says, want you to know how much I appreciate all you do for us olders as she calls them, get an understanding of all that technology has to offer, Vicki Vicky.

so think about it. Yeah, there's GPS and a lot of these devices, or if there's not GPS on the fippit you get, they sync up to the GPS on your phone. So in that way, fipbit is getting a very good picture of who you are, what you do, where you go banking. No, they're not getting your banking info as far as I know, what was the other one? Shopping, shopping, shopping. That's an interesting one because theoretically this is just theoretically,

I don't know the fippit does this. But if you go into a gap and you have your fippit on, they know that GPS and they know that you linger in that little area that they geos, you know, sync to your GPS. They say, oh, we assume that Vicky went to a gap yesterday. Now they could be selling that data. We don't know, they could be collecting that data. We don't know. Yeah, but it's very likely because you are handing over GPS data to them. So shopping now,

shopping online probably not so much. They're not looking at your web browser. They're not doing that kind of stuff. But it's an interesting thought, and it's I'm glad that you're thinking this way, Vicky, because the more that we do, the more we have to think this way. And what is the implications of these gadgets that we welcome into our lives. Right and you think about the Google Home in your house that's listening all the time. You think about an Apple Watch. Believe me, the Apple Watch is

collecting a lot more data than it's displaying on its screen. Yeah, and Apple is looking through that data. I remember one time that and this is pretty common. But these apps and Apple Watch and things, they can see what you're doing on your watch, how you're using your watch, and how you're scrolling through your watch, and how you're you know, how do you get to the stopwatch? Do you Siri? Or do you scroll through your apps on the watch?

You know that kind of stuff that all goes into their internal reports and they say, we noticed that every single person in America and they wake up, they start a stop watch, So let's put a shortcut to a stopwatch on the home screen when they wake up. Let's just put that on there. Those are the kind of things that they think of. And I'm just just an example, okay, but it's the kind of stuff that, like, you might not think about as a random person, but the developers

are thinking about ways of making our lives easier. Why do you think every night before I go to sleep, my watch tells me what my resting heart rate is. Because it's at the end of the day, and they're saying like, okay, well you've had a whole day. Like here's just kind of some stats that we might think you find interesting. And then this morning when I woke up and said, here's your walking heart rate, which I thought was interesting. So yeah, it's like all these little

things that you just don't think of. But I like the Vicky's thinking that way, because too, you have to.

like millions of downloads and everyone said yeah. And nowadays, if you've got a flashlight app and you downloaded and said we want to access to your photo library, you'd be like what for?

is creepy. This is an issue that Nintendo Switch owners have been experiencing, and I've seen it on my kids Nintendo Switch and it was really bugging me, really bugging me because he would hand me his switch, which he's obsessed with, but I would get it and I try to do something on it, and everything on the screen was just moving without me touching anything. I'm like, what is going on here? This is like the weirdest thing. And so I said Justin that's my brother's name. I

said to my son Parker. I said, look, I'm like, you got to clean your hands before you use this, because you know kids and their crumbs and dirty hands and all this stuff. I go because it's getting all messed up, like this thing is either gummed up or there's like stuff underneath the controller whatever it is. And he's like, h no, it's clean, it's fine. So I cleaned the whole thing with alcohol, like wiped it down, and still same problem. I thought maybe the screen was

messed up. Here's what was happening. It's a problem called the joy Con drift, and apparently a lot of people have had this issue where when you're not using the controllers, the screen, the stuff on the screen still moves. Now, people have kind of narrowed it down to it's something with the controller. It's still being it has phantom movements basically inside of it. Whether that's from use or a

defect in manufacturing, nobody's really sure. So these people have been talking about this on Reddit and online and game forms forever. Nintendo has not really publicly acknowledged this, but there was a lawsuit I think it was last week, let's just say a week ago recently, depending on when you're listening to this, that said, hey, this is a class action suit. You guys know about this. You got

to stop this. Well, now Nintendo is saying, according to a leaked memo that Vice got a hold of, that they will fix this problem for free, even if your JOYCN controllers are out of warranty. Now if you're not familiar with what a Nintendo switch is like, are you. It's got the middle part and it's got the two controllers that snap on the sides, So theoretically you can just fix the problem by replacing those two controllers with

a fresh set. Those controllers are eighty dollars. So I planned on just buying a new set of controllers for my son for his birthday. Yeah, now, maybe I'll just call Nintendo and get them replaced. I'll probably just buy them because it's easier to goat on Amazon.

support dot Nintendo dot com so we can help. Kind of a little cop out right now, there's no formal replacement program in place. My suspicion is that that will change depending on how widespread.

what it's worth. A a out of warranty repair is forty dollars, but it's easier to just buy the new pair for eighty I think for most people instead of getting the old ones, especially when you don't know what the issue is.

have you heard of those? Western Union so a lot of people use it, but Western Union is like an old school like it started out as like a telegraph company where you would literally go into a store verbally say a message. Some would type it out and you know, or send it somehow over wire to another location in the US and they print it out and send it and give it to you. Okay, Now they're using that to transfer money, but again these are old school ways.

They're also going to cost you more money. So Money Graham looking at their website, if you do it online, it's five dollars. Now if you do it in store. I don't know how much it is. It's probably more than that because you're going in store, so it doesn't Let's see if there's like a I'm sure there's a price list online. But the reality is, why put yourself through all this trouble.

or I'm not sure, is Chase one of them? I don't. I bet you they're the one that's they hold out.

Then if they say can you venmo me, just say, hey, will you accept Zell? A lot of people will say yes. And I just had to pay someone the other day and they said, you know, except Zelle And they said no. I said, well, how about PayPal? I'll do PayPal, but not Zell? Sorry, but not but not.

associated with Zel from now on. When someone zell's you, that money goes in your account like within minutes, and it's really.

bank's app. So I think you can sign up, okay, So it's saying yeah, so I think that app that you're looking at is for as. If your bank doesn't support it, you can sign up a third party perfect, So either way you're covering. I think she just do Zell. I think just go at Zell and it's built into your bank. So just you got to sign up for online banking. It's safe. I've been using it for ten years now. I mean it's been fine.

just to see kind of what it was like. Well, inside that article, it came out how the tipping works for DoorDash, and that's the main thing that everyone retweeted about. The article, and what the guy says is, here's how it works. Your DoorDash courier, Megan, you turn on the app. It says, hey, we're gonna pay you seven dollars guaranteed to deliver this salad to this address, and you say,

do I accept being I'll accept. You accept that job, and next thing you know, you get a tip of five dollars from the person that you deliver it to. How much do you think you'd get from DoorDash.

the day it was not very good. So I was paid whatever, maybe it was two eighty five, whatever it was, it was two dollars in something. But the way they got around it is they said, will you make a certain amount of money in tips every hour that brings your hourly wage up to five or six or eight or whatever it was. And I was like, that's weird.

So when I got to California and I worked at CBK, when I made whatever it was minimum wage back then, I think it was five or six or seven dollars, I couldn't believe that I got that in addition to my tips at CBK, because California is very they're a little bit more progressive than the rest of the country when it comes to like new laws and stuff. New Jersey is too nowadays, but back then, clearly they weren't.

So I thought it was like the most amazing thing back in the day when I got all this money for my base hourly wage and I got tips. Well, nowadays, when you think about DoorDash just taking that money, that's not very nice.

bonuses by doing both. So the way that like these companies get around it is like with Lyft and Uber, they want you to keep the app open or do a certain amount of drives in an hour because they know that the average driver who who is just doing Uber can do let's say six pick up and drop

offs in an hour. But the person who's shifting between both trying to make the maximum amount of money, you know, being a little sketchy or looking out for themselves, I guess I should say, is not going to hit those targets, so they don't get the bonus. So the way that they entice these people to be loyal is by offering bonuses that and according to the New York Times article, are kind of tough to hit. But again they're there, right,

so anyway, that's anyway. So the guy who started DoorDash, which I've interviewed, Tony Schue a couple of years ago, by the way, he said that going forward, we're going to change the door dash earnings structure so that it will increase by the exact amount of customer tips on every order. They didn't share specifics, but the fear is now that instead of guaranteeing a minimum of seven as in our original example, they would now guarantee just a minimum of four, based on the fact that we'll assume

that people are gonna tip. So now, two things I learned from this. Number one, always tipping cash. Yeah, even if you're tipping through the app in the future, it still seems like it just seems better to do cash.

Mail is totally encrypted. It's made by the Swiss, so you know that they're I don't know, Swiss just seems sophisticated, right, like I don't know anything about that, but yeah, I've been to Switzerland and it was very nice. But they're the use well, okay, people have bank accounts in Switzerland because it's like yeah, it's it's like protected or whatever. So according to their website, the user data, all the servers are located in Switzerland. This means your user data

is protected by strict Swiss privacy laws. So proton mail is the one that you want to use if you're doing the secure route. So and it has end to end encryption. I don't know why you need it, but you never know. I don't know what PAM does. I'm looking a basic account is free, but then you probably want to go with the plus. You probably want to try the basic and then switch to plus plus is four pounds a month, which whatever the math is a

couple bucks whatever, five dollars a month. Who knows something like that. Let me talk about two apps before we close out the show here. Number one is for travel nerds. It's called a flight y. This is really cool as you download it. Yet I told you about this. Oh my gosh, you have to download this for your flights to Hawaii. So it's a iOS app, only iOS right now, And it's a flight tracking app, and there's a million of them out there. But what I like about this

one is that it is all about the data. So you get so much data about your flight, including delays. It has delay predictors, so immediately when you type in your flight number and you kind of put your flights in there, or you can do it automatically if you pay. But for the average person depends, this app is really not for the average person. It's for the person who really likes to fly as a frequent flyer. So you've got all kinds of alerts on if your flight's gonna

be delayed. You get all kinds of data on your flight, like what kind of plane you're gonna be on, what the history of that is and it just is really cool. So download it. It's called flight e fl I g h t Y. Now there is a fourteen day trial, but after that it is pricey nine bucks a month or fifty dollars for the year as an intro rate, So you have to be serious about flying.

features and it's beautifully designed. Yeah, for me, an app when it's I can tell if an app is going to be good when I launch it for the first time and I see the design and the effort that a developer puts into the beautiful design and the thoughtfulness, I know that's gonna be a good app because if they're putting that much thought into what the app looks like when you first open it, and the homepage and

the flow screens and all that stuff. The app is going to be really good, and so this one has a ton of data. They're saying the developer nine to five Mac talk to the developer. They say, we never need to we push They basically they say that the Flighty is unfiltered and unbiased. If you think about it. Airlines don't really want to tell you the truth, because

I've been where they don't tell you anything. When you're waiting at the gate and all of a sudden, I'll get a trip alert from like Trippet or something saying your flight's delayed. I'm like, wait, why am I getting this from a third party and not the speaker system

here or whatever? And so these are these are little things that do help when you're traveling because in the case of a flight being delayed or changed or something, if you can be first in line to get like to the next flight that's going out, that can make

all the difference. There might only be three seats, and so if you have the heads up that that your flight, that your current flight is canceled and the next one, everyone's gonna be trying to jump on there, those three minutes that you get the word before everyone else can really help you get them on the next next flight. The other app I want to tell you about, pretty basics called the Costco app. But the Costco app has gotten an upgrade and you can now use it as

your digital membership card. Now, Megan, I don't see you as a major Costco persons, do you really?

So you can now use your Costco app as your digital membership card iOS and Android, So no worries there. I was not able to verify mine. I tried to set this up last night, like maybe my ZIP code is wrong or something, maybe they have my old ZIP or something. I don't know, so I couldn't successfully set this up. But it's in the app. It all works and you just have to verify who you are sign up with the log in, all that good stuff. The big question I got on my Facebook page was will

this work with Costco Gas? A lot of people like buying gas there, and the answer is not at this time because you need to swipe your card or insert your card at the pump, which this is a scan. But for me personally, this is awesome because I don't carry around my Costco card because I don't It's like one of those places I go once a month if that, and so I'm not carrying around a card to my

wallet just for that. Women are a little different because you carry around a larger wallet that you carry in a purse. But for me, I carry everything in my back pocket. So the less I have, the less thick my wallet is. I don't want like some guys don't care they have like this giant thick wallet. You ever see that.

up at the top of the page. And don't forget to sign up for my newsletter that is at rich on tech Dot TV as as well. Right near that contact button, it says newsletter producer Megan, did you enjoy this week's show?