New App Takes Unique Approach to Blocking Robocalls

So you literally number one, your boarding pass is a totally different color. It's like bright fluorescent. I think it was orange. Like do not Like you're letting this person on the plane, but they can't bring a bag, they don't get to check on their they don't get to like select their seat. I was surprised they gave me pretzels if you water or yeah, they did, which was surprising.

I thought I was like gonna be excluded from all that. Yeah. Yeah, So anyway, I survived, but I will say there was no leg room and when the person in front of me reclined their seat, I literally thought it was gonna crush my I thought my knee, my knee was broken because it was that bad. Oh wow, But it was all worth it. No, it's okay, it's all It was all worth it because guess what, Megan, I got to go to the launch of the one plus seven Pro.

This is a new smartphone that I've been using for the past couple of weeks, and I will tell you it is the new Android phone to beat. Now you hear me say that a lot, because you know, we had the Samsung, we have the Pixel, but this is a it's kind of a quasi flagship because it's not as like it's just a fantastic phone. Let me go over some of the specs on this thing. So number one, it's got a giant display. It's got a six point six have an inch display with a ninety megahurtz refresh rate.

Now I don't even know what that means, ninety hertz refresh rate, but it looks really good. So apparently most phones are sixty, this one's ninety. It also has HDR ten and ten plus, which means that everything looks really good on the screen. Now, personally, they really talked up this screen, but I don't think it looks better than the Samsung, which is odd. Like, I still the screen is great, but I still think the Samsung screen looks better.

I think this is a better phone. Bottom line, if you are, if you're thinking of getting a Samsung device, look at the one plus seven Pro because it's better. It's got a great great in the hands. It's a big device, but it feels great in the hand. It's got a nice fast processor. It's got up to twelve gigs of memory like RAM, which means it's really fast, like most phones have like two to four to six maybe Okay, so this is a lot more wow. And then it also has three cameras. It's got a forty

eight megapixel camera. It's got a wide angle. It's got three on the back, so it's got a wide angle. It's got a telephoto which is three times zoom, which I've been having a lot of puhne with because you can kind of zoom in really close on things. And then it has an ultra wide. The ultra wide is kind of like the worst of the three. It's it's kind of it doesn't look that good, but it still is nice to have. It's really fun to have. Actually.

It also has great haptic feedback, so when you're actually pressing on the screen, you feel like the vibration like an iPhone. Not as good as iPhone because no phone is, but it's still pretty darn good feature. Yeah, the iPhone does that the best. Like the iPhone really does have the best haptic which is basically that's a fancy word for like how it kind of vibrates when you touch the screen or when you do something like if you're scrolling through a list or something like, you know, you

just feel that tactile kind of movement. Yeah, that feedback response. This thing also charges really fast, Like I don't even have a charger next to my bed anymore, because I just charge in the morning when I, you know, get up, and then I charge like before I go out again in the afternoon. Or in my car for a little bit. It's that fast for charging. Let's see. So the cameras are good, but they're not like amazing, Like it's not like, oh my god, it's not pixel quality camera or even

iPhone i'd say, but it's still pretty darn good. Like I've been very happy with this device. And for the price, that's the best part. It starts at six sixty nine, which most flagship phones start at like one thousand dollars. Yeah, So my advice at this point, if you're thinking of going Samsung or anything else and you've got like, you know, seven hundred eight hundred dollars to spare, like if that's how much your budget is, definitely check out this phone.

If you are trying to spend a lot less, like let's say four hundred three hundred, go with the Pixel three A.

be fantastic. It's got a bigger hard drive, it's got a better processor. Everything's better about it. But see a lot of these companies, these tech companies play pricing games with people, especially Apple, because what they do is you see that eleven hundred dollars model and you're like, oh cool, I don't want to spend more than that, Like that's perfect. But what they're not telling you is like for an extra one hundred, two hundred dollars, you can get a

way better system. And so to me, the way I think of it is it's like running a race. It's like if someone asked you to run five miles, you'd be like, all right, fine, I can do that. But if someone's like, okay, can you run seven, You're like, no, no,

that's crazy. Well that's only two more miles than you are going to run, right, So that's the way I think about when you're spending money on these gadgets, Like if you're going to go the eight hundred dollars for a phone, spend the extra nine hundred to get the better memory, which is like usually triple the amount. So my other advice Christina is to go to Costco and usually Costco has two all in one desktops that are basically from some company, usually HP or something like that,

that are a fantastic value. They're usually around five hundred dollars, but if you bought them anywhere else, they'd be a lot more expensive. So that's my advice is to look at the iMac or look at Costco, and I think you'll find something you like there. So yeah, that's that's a very common question. I get Apple TV, by the way, this week got a big update, and it's not really just Apple TV. It's the Apple TV app. And I know it's very confusing because it's okay, let me rephrase that,

it's Apple's TV app. So I don't know why they came up with this naming convention, but it's really confusing and not very good. But the TV app is the app you have on your iPhone that says TV, right, it's like the one have you ever used it? Probably not,

no one has. So it's also on your iPad, and it's also on your Apple TV if you have one, So if you have any of those three devices, Basically what they did this week is they came out with a major refresh to this TV app that now brings in a whole bunch of content from all the places you subscribe to. So it used to do that, but now they're doing it in a bigger way because now you can actually subscribe to things like HBO, Stars, Showtime, Smithsonian, Epics,

Taste Made, and more right through that app. So let's say you open up the TV app, you see an HBO show you want to watch. You can subscribe to it right through Apple, so you don't have to like put in your credit card or anything separate. You can do it right through Apple, and you can also cancel through Apple. Now, the benefit of this is that when you go on the TV app, it shows you recommendations

based on kind of your viewing history and preferences. So theoretically, what Apple's trying to do here is they're trying to build an ecosystem where you only have to go to one app to get all your stuff right right now, what do you do you bop around between Hulu and Netflix and all these different you know, cable company apps, you know, like a Bravo app or an ESPN app. Apple's ideas to have everything in one place so that you can just literally go on that screen see everything

that's available to you for the money you're paying. Is it working No, because Netflix is not on board, Hulu is not on board, and in the future they will have CBS All Access and MTV hits. I mean, he doesn't want to watch stuff from MTV hits, like, come on, what are we in like the nineties here? So that's the big update. It is cool. I like what they've done because you can start watching a show on your TV and finish it on your iPad and it kind of like synks, which is kind of cool.

let's see Sony. Never mind, it's only coming. That's confusing, you know what.

I'm afraid to delete some things, most things can. I push the link that says return to original defaults. I don't know what I did, but the phone wallpapers it offers are horrible. What do I do to take me back to the original?

the phone, everything we get screwed up. This does not happen on the iPhone, it really doesn't, but it happens on androids all the time. So the screen, the ability to kind of like move things around another screen to get it into that kind of like mode is a lot easier. If you hold your finger on the screen for like two seconds, it just goes into that mode. And then then of course if your hand is brushing

up against it, it's like all messed up. So that's what happened to him, and I think what he needs to do, and this is what I different my mom. You download a new launcher, and so there's two that support what's called a locked desktop. And so once you set up your desktop, you go in, you lock it and nothing can move around, you can't move your icons around. If you need to, you can unlock it, but it's a much more manual process to unlock it, so you

can't accidentally do it. So the two that support it are Nova Launcher and Apex Launcher Scott. So those are the two that I'd recommend. You will have to pay to get these features. It's usually like three four bucks, big deal. And the cool thing about this too, once you set this up, you can save your settings, and if you get a new phone, you just reimport your settings from Nova or Apex and all your icons and

everything will be there the way it was. So it's kind of like what iPhone has had, but this is a feature that's not really built into the eye phone in the same way, so you can add that to your device. So that's my advice is again, just go with Apex or Nova, And those are two great launchers in general. So I really like both those launchers, and I use now that I'm using the one plus, I don't really need a launcher because I really like theirs,

But generally I'm a Nova launcher guy. I think my mom was using Apex with hers, but once I locked her desktop, she doesn't have to worry about the things messing up anymore because they kind of stay in place.

put them in iCloud, you're like, well are they really there? Like, how do I know what's going on with iCloud? You put them in Google Photos, what happens Google goes out of business, which I don't think they will be, but you never know. And so the reality is a good backup plan always has your pictures and at least two places. Number one a physical copy somewhere. Number two a backup in a cloud that's off site, right, and number three might be the picture that's on your device. But sometimes

I can get deleted or whatever. So ebe is a kind of a hard drive that's connected to Wi Fi in your house. So it's this little device. It's kind of like a little box with a hard drive inside, and once you connected your WiFi and set it up on your phone, it ingests all the pictures from your phone, It takes those in and backs them up to this drive. But then it goes a step further. It can connect to all of your social media services and all of your cloud services. So if you have Google Photos or

one drive or dropbox. It will go in and grab all those pictures and save them as well. The one thing it does not do it does not DeDuplicate these pictures. So if you have a bunch of copies and you upload a picture to Facebook, it will save both. But at the end of the day, it's not so bad, right, you'd rather have more than less, right, So to me, I personally want to build like the perfect photo collection,

where like there aren't duplicates in a perfect world. Yeah, but I also have like seventeen hard drives laying around my house with old backups of my photo collection that I don't want to throw out in case there's a picture on there that I missed, Right, So I think it's better to have them all. This stores five hundred thousand pictures or two hundred hours of video, or a combination of both. But it's just the idea is it's simple,

it's easy, it's safe, it's in your home. And some people said, well wait a second, number one, it's one hundred and seventy nine dollars. They're like, that's too expensive. Well, you know what you pay for eCloud. You pay Look, if you lose one picture of your kid at birth, Like I went through this scare where I thought I lost all the pictures of my kid, Parker at birth and I was freaking out. And I think that that's worth,

you know, one hundred and seventy nine dollars. Yeah, So anyway, you can find the full review at rich on tech dot TV. We're gonna try something new. Okay, We're gonna try to take a We're gonna try to take a call. You ready, We're gonna see if this happens works live on the podcast five six two. You're on with Rich.

Virgin Mobile, it is very specific. So that's number one. So if you're willing to ditch Virgin Mobile, you can really go with a lot of phones. Now, with that said, most of the big phones i'm gonna recommend do work on Virgin Mobile. So there's there's a couple of phones i'd recommend. Number one is the Pixel three A. This is brand new from Google and it's four hundred dollars and I think I'm not sure if that's how much you want to spend or a little bit less, but

I would say spend the four hundred dollars. That's going to be your best bang for your buck right now.

I thought it was d D like the sorority. Okay, So here's the thing, and this is imagine in your head a action camera that looks like a GoPro. But here is the difference, and go pro Shame on you for not thinking to do this a long time ago, because you know Marcus shares down and you really should have thought about this, because this is what was missing. A simple screen on the front that lets you see

what you're recording. So what does that mean if you're a vlogger or you're on a family vacation, you can hold this thing at yourself and you can actually frame it up properly and see what you're recording. That's a huge difference. And that's one of the reasons why I've never really vlogged, is because it was just too complicated. Right, you can your cell phone, it doesn't look as good. But at the same time, this is like, now you get professional quality that you can frame yourself upright and

you can see yourself and it looks awesome. It's waterproof. It's got a big screen on the back and the front, so you can again see yourself and frame yourself up. And I'm not just saying that's the only reason to get this. You know, this is a nice action camera in general. It's got power on three buttons, power on, initiate recording, and you'll also go through the video and

capture modes with three dedicated buttons, which I like. It has snapshot, which means you can turn it on and begin recording under two seconds by pressing the shutter button once. And that's one thing I've noticed. All the things are saying here are kind of directed at the GoPro because they're all like kind of the pain points. Go Pro takes kind of a while to start up, battery doesn't last very long. Four K video. It can records see what else?

and forty nine dollars. It's available right now and yes, I cannot wait to get one of these things because I here's my plan, Megan, Okay, my plan is to My plan is to start vlogging or recording throughout the week of my week and then putting it all together on the weekends so I can spend less time with my family.

phone number. So number one, stop giving out your numbers so many times. Now, not blaming you for all of this, because blame me. We're all getting robo calls. But when you're getting that many to both your lines, that something's wrong. You're giving out your private info way too much. So get a burner line, get a Google voice line, whatever you want. Give out that.

robo you lave, So that's number one. That's there. Then, whoever your carrier is on your cell phone, whether it AT and T, T Mobile let's see, or Verizon, they all have free services that you can activate to turn off or to hopefully, you know, get rid of some of these robo calls. So I think they're all doing it for free at this point. At and T's is called a call Protect Verizons. It's like call filter. T Mobile is like spam protection, and I think it's built

in automatically. Yeah. The only one I'm not sure about is Sprain. I think they still charge, which not nice. So the other thing I just heard about this app. It's called call Hero, and this is kind of cool because it's an app that once you set it up, when you get a call, you can screen. If you don't know who it is, you can actually send it to their AI assistant. They will ask the person, why are you calling, what's your deal? And they will text

you back with information about that caller. I like that, so that's kind of cool. I don't know if it costs any money, but it's kind of a new solution. I have not tested it yet. It just came out. It's called call Hero, so it's basically if you're familiar with the Pixel, it's kind of like the same technology that's built into the pixel, right, that call screening technology. Let's go to the phone lines. We've got seven oh two on with Rich and Meghan seven O two. You're on with us? What's up.

disadvanced fast. Okay. So I want to tell you something that's very exciting to me personally because I'm a big fan of Uber and i've been I've been using Uber since literally day one in Los Angeles. I'll never forget. I tell this story all the time to my friends, but like, I'll never forget being invited to a party in Santa Monica. This when I first started at KTLA, and I came from New York, so I was familiar with the concept of like a town car service, like

a black car, because we had those there. It's like, you know, higher than a taxi, right, It's like this was like for super elite nights, you know, it would like be very expensive. And I told my wife. I was like, you're never gonna believe this, but they're gonna pick me up in a black town car. My wife is like what, And it's like, and get this, it's all inside an app, so it's all on demand and by the way, it was only like twenty five dollars

for the ride. She couldn't believe it. Because in New York City, a blacktown car would be like you know, black car service was like, well, it wasn't very far. I lived in West LA at the time, so it wasn't very It was like half a mile. No it was you Yeah, no, it wasn't very far. So long story short, I tell everyone this story. I couldn't believe it, and we couldn't believe it because we're like, there's no way this is going to work. Well, clearly Uber has

become huge. Anyway. I had two ideas for Uber. The first is a quiet mode, right, like a do not disturb so or I don't talk to me, Yeah, exactly. Sometimes you get in the car you don't want to be talked to because you're just It just depends on my mood, right, Sometimes I just want to focus and I just want to relax, and I don't want to have to hear so what do you do and all this stuff? And I don't mind talking to people, but sometimes you just don't want to, especially if I'm focusing.

I'm going to like a big event or something and I'm like stressed out, I'm gonna speak. So that's number one they now have and they listen to me. I always tweeted about this, saying they should add this in the app, like a little toggle when you get your ride turn off talking like this. So the driver's season they pick you up, this guy doesn't want to talk, and then they're basically like, f you. No, they're not they respect it, they don't care, right, they pick up

a thousand people exactly. So this now they now have a thing called ride preferences where you can now say I don't want to talk, and there it is. And so that was number That was my number one idea, which by the way, I tried to find my tweet about that and I couldn't, so but I know I've publicly said that they should have that. So thank you Uber for taking that idea. Number two idea I had. I was at the Hollywood Bowl, and the Hollywood Bowl insane because at the end of the night, what happens

Everyone's trying to get an Uber. It is an absolute mess. And so I said, the Uber should be lined up like a taxi stand, and when you get there, you just scan a QR code on the driver's phone with your app and it links you up. Because the whole thing about Uber is it's supposed to link you up with like a driver, right, and that's why they do it the way they do it, so it sends a driver. Well, guess what in Portland they're launching that feature. They it's

a pin feature. So basically, you have a pin on your phone. You just walk up to the first available Uber driver. They're all lined up, You give them your pin and boom, it connects you to their app and you're off. Two of my ideas taken by a company worth billions of dollars. And I'm not saying they stole them. I said these. I tweeted these out. I did find my Hollywood Bowl one and I did tweet that out and I'm telling you I find it. Yeah, I mean,

I'm not going to read it. But my point is you can predict I can I have some good ideas.

Now here's the scam part. After the guy told me there were no fees to have my listing on Google, but that he needed my credit card for for a one time yearly payment of ninety nine ninety nine dollars for the maintenance or else my listing would be taken down from Google Business. Once I questioned the guy about the fee, he hung up.

work for them. It's bogus, right, anyone can work for Google or work you know, with them or whatever.

work with. Okay, So that's number one. Number two. I think the scam that this guy was doing is a scam that he went and verified because Google lets you verify your business to claim it so that you can change the data on there, which is all free. By the way, it's called Google My Business. Okay, so let me get you the Google my Business. Have a small business, definitely go to Google dot com slash business and manage

your listing on Google. So if you run like a little you know, jewelry shop or whatever you run, go there and claim it. So I think what this guy was doing was he called Peter claim he was on the website to claim his business. He put in his cell phone number and next thing you know, he got the code. If the guy, if Peter would have handed over his code, this scammer would have been able to take over his business listing and then he kind of

hijacked him. So anyway, it's just unbelievable. You have to deal with out there, that's for sure. Yeah, it's totally sketch. So that's that's kind of like my advice is to just kind of yeah.

they will repair it. So if you come in like I did with my wife's phone, she was on a repair program and she had a little scratch on the screen. The guy was like, don't think you're getting a new phone. I was like, darn it, Like I thought they would just give me like a new phone. Oh yeah, he totally knew he was like that scratch, you're gonna have it. So first thing I did, I was like, no, they'll

have just replace the whole phone. Sure enough. No, they replaced the part inside it was a battery and gave me back her exact phone. I was like, I thought they were gonna give me this. You know, isn't it easier just to hand you a new refurbished device that's like all fresh and clean. No, they don't do that.

to fix it, you can get reimbursed for that. So the way to figure this out look on the back of your phone. If you have an iPhone seven and it says a sixteen sixty on it, that's probably one of the affected models. You can also go to the Apple website and you can pop in your serial number and see if it's one of that's the best way to do it. Just pop in your serial number and it'll tell you immediately if it's affected. Then you can bring into the Apple store get it fixed again if

you want to find that. It's called the iPhone seven Repair program for no service. So the other iPhone news, Megan, since you asked, is.

to show this up. You know that's going to do it for this show, which, by the way, has been the best show since we started doing the new two point zero version of the podcast, or if you've been a long time listener, probably like the seven point zer version because you've seen me try to do this at my house at all these places. But anyway, this has been so far the best, and it's not just because

of Megan. It's also because of this new soundboard we have from Road which has really been helping us out. So thanks Road for forgetting me that because it has been phenomenal for the production. Thanks to Facebook for that working or me vo Cam for there's a lot of moving parts here, Skype for the calls producer Megan. But at the bottom bottom line is thanks so much for listening to the show. If you haven't already subscribed, you can do that. Just search rich on Tech in your

favorite podcast app. That's Apple Podcasts, pocket Casts and Overcasts. Those are a couple of good podcasting apps. My book is called one hundred and one Handy Tech Tips for the iPhone. It's available on Amazon in paperback, and I also have a newsletter, so you can go to my website richontech Dot TV. You can sign up for a newsletter. I basically send it out every Friday. And you've read the newsletter, what do you think?