Samsung Galaxy Ring review and another AI “Friend” | Engadget Podcast

[Music] Bo [Music] [Music] Bo [Music] what's up everybody welcome back to another live and Gadget podcast stream I'm Deputy oh no I am Senior editor D for hardare today joined with Deputy editor sherlin L I was thinking about your title so hard sherlin I was like keep Shin's title in mind in mind I just hey who knows when you do become Deputy editor that'll be great like you're already used to it I'm already used to it uh I have been here for 10 years uh Ben Elman our podcast producer is here hey Ben good morning everybody good morning and welcome back to the live stream folks we are it's been what three weeks or at least I don't know I don't know exactly how much from the since the last podcast and a few more weeks since uh the last live stream but man I'm really happy to be back I'm be back listen the running joke I was off for three weeks because uh my my daughter was off school like she there's a time between daycare and kindergart and we're like she has a month be free be cool I was gonna be home to help out and uh the joke is whenever I go on vacation right um somebody hosts an event some major news happened not much happened in the last three weeks right like just very little within the world little not at all not anything happened there are so many things I could list but I am happy to be back and now we can dive into all this news and we're getting ready for all this all this stuff and new events yeah to explain to the live stream folks to uh the reason well I mean when the v's out normally I kind of uh take over as well but we missed two weeks because I took a week off but somehow the the that single week like started with Thursday and ended with Thursday and our usual podcast recording is Thursday so we're like all right you know what we everybody yeah summer break enjoy the break but what's up everybody who's here this morning Mar do hello hello and hello SIM from Ireland love to see people shout out where they're from if you're just joining us please tell us where you're tuning in from because that's always fun please tell us I saw a great tweet this morning it's like what do Irish people have against Batman and like um so many of the major Batman villains recently been Irish KY Murphy Le n Shota uh Colin frell Sim tell us what's going on what does Ireland have against Batman yes I'm just shouting out names um hello everybody that I see pop up on the chat oh man so there has been it's not a super newsy week on the tech world but you know we've got a couple good topics uh be talking about yeah your Galaxy Ring review from last week so we can catch up on that what's up Galaxy Ring we have a couple interviews we're going to be plugging into the audio version of the show so just keep that in mind live stream viewers make sure you download the final episode because there's some interviews coming too yeah yeah we're talking with is it a schiffman from a sh guess yeah um I've heard it from going to like Jewish summer camp and stuff I've heard it pronounced both ways yes um but uh if you have seen the launch trailer for his device friend then you'll understand why the post I saw that just said Spike Jones will pay for his crimes he so funny oh man I didn't get a chance to uh we had a very limited interview time because he was super busy and I was running off to interviews but I wanted to ask like have you guys only seen the first half of her do you not do do you not like capture the message of that movie which was that we need humans we we need human companionship and the AI is not enough for us oh man speaking of her I recently and this is not going to be mentioned in the episode proper but I recently watched um under the skin or under yeah under the great movie watch that that movie is wonderful great St not Ireland but the way it was filmed was very like it was very um was hidden cameras and like real people who are the very gorilla yeah very interesting not it was in Scotland I think is why they filmed it um so how somewhere where like she could she could wear she could be like dressed down and people didn't immediately recognize her I think that was part of the the deal like yeah Lassie anyway uh Mark says everyone getting those new Ino devices with the silly silly trailers and like I had to watch those commercials for the Ino thing yesterday because um uh our head boss in charge Aaron supporters was asking me to like kind of fact check the the translation because it was a mandarin and I was like yeah I know that Americans will think this is cheesy but this is pretty par for the course when it comes to like an Asian commercial it's like very overly sentimental you know yeah but you those devices look interesting all right I'm just loading a name in here so we can mention in the episode okay yeah hi to Michael Coley who's watching from Nashville I and cud did we say hi to cud yet or C hi hello C okay so if you're just joining us for the first time welcome to the Engadget podcast you're coming in at a really good time after summer break is a great time to start if you've seen us before you know what's about to happen I'm going to countd down from three at the end of three everybody on the stream is going to make a sound you can clap your hands or snap your fingers this is just like Clapper board on TV and movie sets and if you want to put a clap or a snap fingers Emoji in the chat that's always fun and so let me just make a note devices on silent yes devices on silent everything I still write things by rings on silent yes rings on non vibration mode does it even have doesn't even vibrate no too what good is that what good is that come on all right so let's countdown from three to a sound so three two [Laughter] one and silence I'll let you know when the silence is over all right silence over all the claps hia Sandro carva is a new name that left a clap but everyone Michel Michael KY you you go sit in the corner and think about what you said turn your ring off turn your ringer ringer off yeah and yes Mark do I am like this all right uh once again folks we're gonna have interviews that aren't in this live stream so be sure to download the final episode subscribe or you know subscribe to us wherever you get podcasts okay let's go in three two one what's up internet and welcome back to the Engadget podcast I'm senior editor dendra hardwar I'm Deputy editor sherlin L today today we are back from a bit of a break a bit of a summer break how are you doing sterin jet lagged oh man yeah you were in Singapore right like you came all the way back over uh how long were you in Singapore uh it was under a week but including travel I was gone for about a week and basically missed two days of like recording this podcast so that's why we missed this many dare to see your family to have good food at the Hawker stands how dare are you uh that's also a really fast trip for such a long charin so you're such a trooper but this week folks we are coming back into the swing of things charlin is going to talk about her review of the Samsung Galaxy ring we're going to talk about kosa passing the Senate this is something we've talked about before the kids online safety act and we're gon to talk a bit about the uh the AI Gadget friend which debuted this week with a really I don't know cheesy trailer and had a lot of his laughing but we also have some interviews with folks too we have ai schiffman the CEO friend who talks with me about kind of what he's trying to accomplish with this device and why he moved away from making it like a productivity Focus thing like the Humane AI pin or the rabbit R1 and um let me just see here and joining us to talk about kosa is India mckin director of federal Affairs at the eff uh they're going to talk about why this bill has a huge amount of privacy concerns also uh people are worried about censorship online because of this bill and the things that can you know it can stop online as always folks if you're enjoying the show please be sure to subscribe to us on iTunes or your podcast R Choice leave us a review on iTunes drop us an email at podcast engadget.com we love your feedback we love questions and anything you send us can be mentioned on the show so if you want to be internet famous for an episode or something just uh shout us out we also typically live stream the show on Thursday mornings around 10:45 a.m. eastern uh on our YouTube channel so join us for that uh you can talk with the the chat crew you can see us do some Q live on camera today sh's going to show off the uh the Galaxy ring I guess and just boy it's round I don't know what else you can show off with that thing Sherin but we we'll talk a bit about that thing um let's get right into it actually so Sheran you reviewed the Galaxy ring this was device I was not super amped about but Samsung I feel like Samsung was really leaning on it because Apple hasn't done it yet there aren't too many other smart rings out there except for the Ura um how do you feel about this thing okay so to your point it on its own the rain doesn't do a lot and it's um it's really basic like it's a $400 device that's got a bunch of sensors on it it will track your heart rate heart rate variability skin temperature you know St $400 that that didn't C $3.99 you could get an Apple Watch for that price yeah it is expensive um so you have to be okay with the fact that you're paying a lot of money for something that on its own once again doesn't do a lot um and the thing is you with the ring you leave it there to passively col collect data on you and then you spend most of your time if you're like me and interested in those you know bits of information you spend most of your time on the Samsung Health app on the phone and I I mean I like it I think it's very comfortable to wear partly because it's so paired down it doesn't have a lot it's not as heavy as the a ring in fact it's actually half the weight the or ring is kind of a thick boy like if you look at that thing it's chunky much thicker and in fact with the Samsung Galaxy ring I felt like uh so mine is a size seven which is the third smallest size Samsung offers and that's pretty similar to my actual ring size for those who are wondering but like I would find even throughout the day as your body changes it never gets too tight in fact like my it might actually be too loose at times which is important because that affects my um blood oxygen readings at night um which I'll get into later but I first and foremost the Galaxy ring is a passive Health Data tracking device and that's you know if it's right for you and if you have the $400 you want to spend on that go for it I think there are people out there that are looking for a low-key low profile Gadget like this um Marell in the chat asked a very good question and it's something that is actually crucial in my review which is was uh or is there any reason to buy or get the smart ring if you have a smart watch I for me I found in my testing that the ideal combination is a ring and a watch if I had a crap ton of money I would wear the ring to track passive things like sleeping lowlevel activities like meat stuff uh and then the watch I would use for tracking workouts or when I'm like out and about and I'm more likely to want to get notifications on a wrist worn screen that really like I found I found that when I was watching wearing both the watch Ultra and the Galaxy Ring to be like the best combo when I was out and about um cuz I don't want to wear that goddamn watch Ultra at home it's so huge I hate yeah I mean that that made device may not have been meant for you just like the Apple watch Ultra right like that is just a big honking thing it's so I will say the watch Ultra never felt as big as the Galaxy one because don't forget what Samsung's doing with the Galaxy watch Ultra is to stuff a Circ circular screen into a squarish body so it just adds bulk you know it doesn't need to be as bulky as it is as or it just isn't as like you know the Apple watch Ultra isn't as bulky but yeah yeah it's kind of fits the shape of your wrist more by being a little more squarish I guess that's a good question though by the way from Markell is that I think the thing facing wearables I remember when a lot of the wearable stuff when Fitbit first came out when jaone and had their early stuff people are like oh this is so cool I could track my activity I could do all sorts of stuff and the constant question was well why do I need this in addition to my smartphone right now the question is why do you need the smart ring like addition to an to a Smart Watch and then like I feel like the the uh I don't know algebra for that like the equation for that math is too annoying and too difficult for most consumers um it just seems like these things don't fully justify themselves yet I mean I for one I think that like one thing I said in my review is that this thing doesn't do much and that's PR like that's okay by me uh and I will point out that what it doesn't do um it's kind of frustrating so but to that point where like if you do have that You' decided like I I like this like setup right wearing a ring and a watch um the G the Samsung Health app is actually not bad at like parsing and putting together all of your data on the one page you don't have to keep jumping back and forth between two windows or apps um to just get all your data it just all adds up right so one of the things that Samsung introduced alongside the Galaxy ring and the watch Ultra is it's Galaxy AI enabled health you know features like the energy score which by the way Garmin and fibit has been doing forever and ever but the what is the energy score what what is that it's based on how much sleep you got the night before and how much activity you did the the day before and it tells you how ready you are to you know tackle the next day so like every morning you get a new energy score after you know Samsung's calculated your sleep and your activity from the day before and it's like today you can take it easy or you should take it easy or then you had a lot of rest and you did basically nothing yesterday you little lazy Pig you do more today it doesn't say those words but you know what I mean like your energy score being high means you can go on and like go on a big hike or whatever I I kind of love this idea by the way like I wish we had the actual Tech to make this biologically like fully accurate right like that would implant or something so you would have like a little Mega Man you know meter on your wrist like oh I have Full Hearts today I have a full life bar let's go let's pick on the world right we're all gaming characters now yeah but the thing is the main issue with this and we're coming back again to the problem here which is the Galaxy watch Ultra you mother Pizza it's like the Galaxy watch Ultra is not only a chunky boy it's like a chuner on the scale of that we've established in previous episodes of the Engadget podcast the watch itself I have confirmed with Samsung last week does not have wear detection it does not know whether it's on your wrist or not this thing that Apple watch does just does okay the Apple watch knows all the watches all it seems like a very basic feature for any smatch yes it is a basic feature and here's where the bigger problem with that is right not only is it just chilling you know when it's not on your wrist therefore just draining its own battery it's also randomly detecting workouts when you're not wearing it so if you put it like I did in my purse and I took a cab ride or something it was like oh you've been biking we're tumbling like no I haven't I haven't bro like no and the other thing is it doesn't have word detection so that one of the key features of the Galaxy watch Ultra is how when you press down that orange quick button uh for 5 seconds the emergency siren will go off yeah do you know the number of times in my testing uh where the siren's just going off in my backpack somewhere and I'm like embarrassed in the the sing aort airport I have a video of this my mom was like what is that sound sending me off to by the way like to go home to the to to us and we were like what is that sound and it's in my bag Samsung Galaxy watch Ultra slowly dying and still screaming at 2% battery screaming with the emergency SOS so that was frustrating but to back to the point with the energy score because that info from the Galaxy watch Ultra was so inaccurate and messing up my entire activity history because of those Phantom workouts that my energy score was like oh you worked out too much yesterday you know you took a lot of bike rides uh just don't work out as much today I was like huh like I'm that's weird right like it's not a problem if you like take the time to go in and read and figure out what happened but if you're just looking at your energy score and like that's all you look at you'll be like getting very inaccurate information so huh that's just that's just one of like my bad experiences during testing um it's not a Galaxy Ring issue it's a Galaxy watch Ultra eem issue because if you had another galaxy watch right not even the ultra like you would still have the same data like management issue between both of them right yes yeah so uh and Marell is like good to know that I can stick my watch on my cat to try to boost my score that's not I don't what sure boost your activity score but not your energy score or your Readiness score um but uh do name Charlie in the chat asked a good question which is something I I want to bring up to how good is the sleep tracking so I like the sleep tracking it was good it was like mostly accurate right I think as far as I can tell you how accurate my sleep stages are right it tell you how many hours you spent in rem how much time you spent in deep blah blah very standard stuff by now in the wearos and fitness uh sleep tracking Market uh I used to complain that uh companies like Fitbit Google uh even Apple didn't do enough of contextualizing the Insight you gain from how much time you spend in each sleep stage and now I think we're better but like Samsung's kind of my first experience with this improved um data so not only does it tell me like you spent 11% of your sleep cycles in deep it also will say like this is a good amount for you know restoring this restoring that Compares well to other people in this age group um ideal number ideal amount of time is this so like within one page I can get a better sense of how well I slept how much recovery I got overnight which I like I think that's more important necess than like whether exactly to the minute was it accurate about tracking how much time I was asleep um comfortable like sleep device it's always been your like complaint with sleep trackers right yeah so this say I mean maybe the fact that it's slightly loose helps right like but that gets in the way of like I said before blood oxygen tracking is pretty inaccurate because it's so loose they say in the app that you have to make sure you have like a snug fit for accurate blood Ox readings and like I noticed when so my index finger is a little medor than my middle finger so when I wear it on my middle finger to sleep my blood o levels the next day will be like 76% it's like as if I was dying of xixia just start ringing an alarm somewhere too like oh my God oh my God yeah it did not and it also did not really like flag anything huge in front of me the next day on the app so uh something for Samson to work on there but also like I mean I I I stopped looking at that variable right because I'm like I know that it's because it's a little loose um so that is a difficulty uh for now and I think I don't want companies like Samsung or a Fitbit to be like oh we're going to make these or or Aura we're going to make these tighter so they get a more accurate blood Ox reading I i' rather it be like slightly loose and then I'm like okay with not getting such an accurate reading I think that makes sense so like overall are you sold on the idea of a smart ring at this point or do you still think it needs more time to cook yeah I like I like it uh I like the idea of a passive activity tracker when I'm at home because I spend so much of my time at home nowadays um and I don't like wearing a smartwatch at home but that's me like it's such a specific use case I think Samsung will find a market of people who are like me but I don't know that it's for everyone I think it's it's just going to be a kind of a niche but like the foldables right it's not going to ever be mainstream but there are people who are fervent about it that will buy it it's a I mean the foldable thing feels like oh that's a premium cool feature that I think people will aspire to whereas I don't know what about the ring stuff feels aspirational it just feels like hey this is a cool solution for me because I hate wearing stuff on my wrist you know um I will say yeah yeah go ahead to to your point about the um heptic too so here are two things that like I think are shortcomings right one you don't have haptics you can't there's no speaker or haptics like there's very little space on this thing it's very very light so they don't want to squeeze a lot of components onto it and I agree with that choice I will just say that that means that if you've Mis misplaced your ring like I did many times on the plane I was like 15 hour flight every time I wash my hands I would take it off and put it in my pocket keep taking it off I read in your view you keep taking it off even though you're kept taking it off here's the thing then like you like yeah if you if you like where is it you can't ping it like you can ping your watch or your phone on fine my right Samsung fine my but you can't ping it all you can do it's like look at it's the last known location with theps and then flash the lights red and green so that's great if like you're in a very dark place and then flashing it helps you see it from pretty much anywhere but if you're in daytime and it's not within eyesight of ey shot of you uh good luck not not that's one uh place where it's lacking the other thing that was uh missing from me and I found out like after Samsung finally unghosted me uh was to like I mean they didn't answer this question for a very long time which is that like Sam tends to do that I've had that experience too yeah never had that experience until recently anyway um the the Galaxy Ring has these like double pinch gestures right they are supposed to be recognized and can help you dismiss alarms or like launch the camera app that was supposed to be the feature that set Samsung like apart from Aura uh didn't work for me and I find out after some research that it's because this is only available on the Galaxy Z flip 6 or the zold 6 right now which are the two newest phones that Samsung launched so I've been using with an s24 and it's not working like this is one of the newest phones that Samsung has why and nothing it does nothing that doesn't make any sense what is the technical reason for that that they say the they actually have never answered this question they osed me to answer my question about wear detection on the Galaxy watch Ultra but they never answered the s24 versus Z flip 6 issue or the double pinch uh feature being missing question we found out because they gave an answer to the verge that that yeah I think you were very generous scoring this thing at an 80 Sherin like 80 for us is like you know because I like it you like I like it but every time I hear about these issues with Samsung or just like the general lack of focus with this thing I'm like I don't who this isn't even for crazy people with too much money because it doesn't really do much you know sure the Galaxy watch Ultra or the Apple watch Ultra is a ton of money but you get a big ass screen you get a lot of stuff because of spending that money um yeah I I don't know I would say like my score for the Galaxy ring I was thinking between like maybe like in the in the range of 75 to 80 which if you think about it it's about it's about the same if you think of it on a fiveo scale like a five star scale it's like between 3.75 I think give it like grades like a 75 is a c you know not even a C+ and an 80 is a b you know so I think if so I I I think like there are people I would recommend this too and that's why like I was like 80 it's like I would recommend it like I would than an uring by the way because Ur has been around for what five years and has like done a lot more you yeah I think part of the the issue for me was that I realized that some of the problems I was having is because of that very specific use case of me using the ring with the watch Ultra and the watch Ultra being problematic so I was like all right some of the problems here nothing to do with the ring I tried to like be very focused when I was thinking about the score but anyway uh I do want to point out that like the battery life uh which why in our chat was asking me about um it you know samong rates it for like seven days you know of use and the the size of the Ring changes that estimate so like if you have a bigger ring it adds one or two days days I have size seven like I said it's like one of the smaller sizes and it definitely like if you want to get to seven days you'd have to get all the way down to zero% like it's how do how do you charge it by the way does it go into a little case yeah so it comes in this pretty little transparent charging case you're gonna lose that sucker immediately and this is a dead I me okay so so this this um Case by the way looks like it's about the size of the Galaxy watch Ultras right case um and so yeah it's not I mean I didn't never I never lost it cuz I just put it at home and you can always just place it place a ring on it to charge um and it's pretty it's supposed to be F like it gets you like what 30 minutes uh will get you about 40% of the the charge and I found that like putting it in the case for like five minutes got me about 2% I don't know how that tracks really but I yeah I never felt like I was too scared about running out of juice it was good like a week is good for me charging is a tough problem with wearables like Fitbit has this problem to where you have to use a very specific kind of charger and if you lose it or if it breaks and you're on vacation you're just kind of hosed right I think the one thing about the Apple watch being so ubiquitous is that at least hey you walk into a crowd of people and you're like um I need to charge my Apple watch you have a cable and this has happened to me multiple times I'm sure you too sure like recently at WWDC somebody will have an Apple Watch cable you know or somebody will have that type of cable so like that I mean I don't I don't accessibility weird I guess I find that less like common for me like I the circles I run in the vendra are clearly different from yours not everyone has an Apple Watch it's just one of those things yeah I mean you could say the same for the aura ring right like not everyone's have a charger definitely so and and I would say also the Aur Rings charger is like more of a dock with a little like stand whereas this is a case and you you'd be more likely to maybe misplace because here's one question I have and I'm gonna ask it we're adults here okay and we talk about the role of the sex IND industry and the porn industry when it comes to Tech and I'm thinking you got a ring we're talking about haptics here we're talking about something I do Wonder there is Tech out there we don't have to be explicit but there's Tech out there that has enabled haptics in ring like devices I almost wonder but those are hopefully bigger than finger rings um there they're all sorts of devices but I'm just wondering like uh there are on the Apple watch you can tap it right and like have like a remote tap to as like like hey friend hey how's it going there's like a tap tap your brain has gone into a very specific space where oh I'm sorry we're talking about devices that we wear that are shaped like circles I'm just thinking about where the Innovation is going uh or where it's happening and it's certainly not in the I say I don't generally need vibration on my fingers but what if you could I'm just thinking how can this thing be useful right like haptics we're talking about haptics I do like the Apple watch's little tap tap because it's almost like somebody coming next to me and saying hey what's up and that is the notifications looking for different things yeah right I'm just thinking of ways to make this thing useful like how do you make smart Rings useful what more could you add to them I think some sort of haptics some sort of feedback would be interesting and that technology does exist just not in the general Tech cat yeah I mean I agree with you in the sense that I would I've I've actually been thinking about like what tech Trend have I been most excited by over the last five or six years and it is the miniaturization of a lot of components like Health sensors or like probably a heptic motor one day that would be small enough to fit inside a ring of a certain size I don't know what size you're thinking but this is very challenging I will say like a ring for my fingers would be very small uh someone else's fingers maybe would be bigger and therefore have more room to accommodate a vibration engine um this is why wearables are more useful I think ultimately like even if like Anno by the screen or by the size of them like they are getting smaller they can just just by the sheer size of them they can do more this is all part of my anti smart smart ring position it's just like and things are it sounds like you're very for a certain type of smart ring I'm for I'm for Tech that's useful and add something to our lives come on we're all grown-ups here uh I'm just putting that out there anything else you want to add about the Galaxy ring jillan I um and potential I think I think there's potential I think that like with the Galaxy ring and maybe with the Galaxy watch yes when it's improved Samsung has like to build more right where the aura ring outperforms the Galaxy ring right now is that Ora has been around for so much longer and knows exactly how to make sense of everything that it's like it's collecting and Gathering the way Fitbit had an edge over everyone else like since the early days um Samsung has a lot of room to grow and that's a both good and bad thing right it's right now at a disadvantage but in future it's very easy to implement these things through software updates Ora also has like implemented some things like you know I mean the okay by the way um the ring is supposed to do cycle tracking too which in the brief time I had it just wasn't able to see if it was accurate or not but Ora can do that too Ora can do a lot of other things like stress tracking like oh um predict when you're maybe you're feeling sick because of your body temperature that sort of thing um and Samsung could potentially do that I just think you know I don't think Hardware is a big problem right now for the Galaxy ring I think it's it's like the expanse of software room for Samsung to grow right now that's more interesting that totally makes sense would you do you think this is something like apple would even be interested in doing because I'm look at the or I'm I don't think Apple would do this I think Apple this is a category where Apple's like no no thanks folks like let's wait until the tech C something we can do yeah here's my prediction I was going to post this on threats my prediction is that 2026 we see Google come up with the pixel ring uhhuh and then 2027 or 2026 we see apple by aura or higher ex Ora Executives and then we see 2030 apple ring that's what I think but why my My ultimate question is the why of it and I don't the why of it is I think that every company in big Tech right now Amazon included maybe we'll see an echo ring for we did actually we had we saw an echo ring we never saw okay anyway yeah anyway I spazzed for a moment just very angry um my my reason for guessing this is because I I've seen all these companies invest in health Tech and health Ai and they want to make something of it and I think that this space is very interesting for everyone I think everyone's paying more attention to their own health and wants to track it while the devices right now are fairly Limited and while we do have like fairly mature things that do a pretty good job like the SmartWatches I still think there is room to grow I think there's a lot of interest and a lot of money pouring into this space so I I could see that I'm just sort of like we've been through this whole like wearable field so much and I keep going back to man I really missed the Jawbone UP I really missed the era of had like really thin little bands that had sensors and had really cool things so I could I could more like see apple um like the little like rubber stretchy bands that you do to like you know break yourself out of bad habits or something some of those little bracelets I could almost see apple doing something like that no screen but goes around your wrist is easy to wear is has decent battery life but could give you maybe some feedback can basic tracker right a super basic apple tracker but also a ring fits in so nicely with Apple's portfolio they could make a YSL LV version you know what I mean it's very them to go after a premium audience and ring seems more likely than a bracelet to to hitel are easy to wear my daughter has recently started loving Claire's and like I walk into that store and uh my daughter is like is now very very much like Sophia bracelet girly girl stuff like rainbows unicorn they've been very co-opted by the Swifty crowd well she's not she's not there yet hope um but thinking about like things that are easy to wear and relatively inexpensive to and also parents are like the the thing parents are thinking about is like kind of want to put a tracker on my kid I kind of want to do something where like I put an uh a air tag or something in their book bag or in their shoes which is the thing that's happening if Apple had made Apple makes like a $100 wristband that tracks a lot of your health data tracks your sleep is also a fine my device is also can like help $100 wristban you're joking it has to be at least 250 for Apple sure 250 like half the price of the Apple watch because let's say at least $100 less but even then1 to $200 something that is flexible easy to wear you don't even really feel it when it's on your wrist but does all this stuff I think would be a useful thing and we have the tech already to do that so that's my pitch I guess we'll see what else happens I just missed the job one up where are all those designers like they they kind of own the market for a while they owned uh Bluetooth speakers and then the company collapsed because they over invested in healthtech and we just weren't there 10 years ago so we're an interesting the Microsoft one remember or the Microsoft One let us know what you think folks podcast and gadget.com do we want to do some Q&A before we move to other stuff sure I mean there are some good ones I want to quickly point out west Jackson in the chat was like nonstarter also yes Apple choker I agree Wes that like it has to drop to like at for for you is 200 or less for me it's like 250 or less and I think two even just $299 not $400 for a ring godam not fu9 no yeah um someone said something I also agreed with Bann in so long I know implant this yeah I had to look up the jobed Mark Dell says that there are some good sensors in the Microsoft band like the UV levels and I mean L'Oreal made a wearable like UV detector so something that Rings could in future incorporate probably that thing was small as hell anyway totally was Remember The Jone up had like it has a fancy I think it was Eve Eve something like one of the fancy designers had helped work on that too let's go back to that let's go back folks we can do this yeah know um CF 542 I've never tested the ring con ring we've mostly spent time with the aura because that's like industry leader right now uh Markell has se me punch the Apple watch Ultra and I think our review video back then and no no overheating so far with the ring which is very important because it doesn't do anything it doesn't generate heat it just kind of sits there col I'm not pushing it further by like moving more it's just like P I will say I mentioned this in my review and I didn't get to talk about it uh during the episode mostly just because I forgot to mention um the the tracking the data it actually collects is actually pretty good um I would go on walks so like for the Apple watch that I wear on the you like on the regular it will be at least 10 minutes before they'll be like oh I notice you're walking shall we start a workout right the Fitbit and pixel devices are kind of like that too you can set the threshold yourself but it usually is like at the 10minute Mark it's the minimum whereas for the Galaxy ring it's like oh I walked with my parents to the nearby food market and and and it was like oh yep you walk 0 26 miles I'm like wow it's so basically my activity log is more complete I think like it's it's calculating a lot more and when I dive into each of those walks it's not only telling me the distance and time you know it's also your Cadence your pace your heart rate during this walk like a lot of more data that I thought it would provide so that's pretty cool that's cool so we've got a very important person in chat uh hell to that boy from Malaysia oh [ __ ] that boy uh I forget what's I know bagy is morning but I don't know that what's good morning good is B but not let me know that was correct that boy that boy is an eight-year-old meme now I remember it pretty vividly because it came up in the summer of 2016 was it eight years old I feel like I remember the frog from earlier but maybe like yeah the Frog was a little bit earlier I mean I just looked it up the Frog like started appearing on Tumblr in 2015 and I think that boy happened in like 2016 cuz it was kind of around like pre-election stuff harambe like everyone was like wow like the memes were great in 2016 Sal Mal I wow okay so West Jackson and uh why are both asking about whether it scratches easily uh not not that I've noticed it's is it silicon or silic I forget what the hell what the heck is this thing uh I know I realized I never even mentioned what material it was made from in my review it's okay sh nobody's going to buy this thing so our whole discussion about this is kind of moot until Samsung makes this thing for $200 oh yeah let me look I think it's aluminum but let me double check now that we are like a good amount into the release cycle for all of Samsung stuff we can go back and figure out okay were we correct about any of the Samsung predictions like connection with them and the Olympics yes in terms of the fact that they gave every Olympian a uh Galaxy flip 6 Olympic Edition and I remember seeing one video on Tik Tok of a British rower that was like my current phone is the phone I got at the Olympic Village in 2021 and I've been nursing it trying to see if I can get another phone and like she was so happy to get that other phone so congratulations to her um but no connection between Galaxy ring and Olympic ring like no colors no other colors for the Galaxy Ring no Olympic colors come on yeah no other colors so uh this watch by the way it has a titanium grade five finish uh the three colors of the uh ring are titanium black titanium silver and titanium gold uh the that's the finish right I'm trying to see where the like details are on the material and not saying anything well is it it's metal or is it flexible at all it sounds like it's just it's not flexible okay um it's I a flexible responding to why because this seems like a much more generic question than something specifically about the Samsung ring does it contribute to health anxiety TR could I mean yeah I don't think on its own it does if if for no reason other than the fact that it's not pinging you right the watch alone is not being like hey this is happening it's more like if you're if you've set it up where like you get it to inform you if you have been Idol for a while like so your stand reminders and your idle reminders those surface on your phone so if you're always tied to your phone anyway you're going to see them for me I like didn't even look at my phone so it was like you've been set still for like four hours get up and move you lazy ass and then I'd only noticed like seven hours later when I actually looked at the phone um so it's not the ring on its own doesn't contribute too much to health anxiety but why you do add on to say that like your relationship with your Smartwatch is whether you you know are doing something did you Ste okay you don't really care of its specifics I think you'll have a similar relationship with the Galaxy ring if you choose to use it okay cool can we move on yes because we got a lot of other stuff to hit most of it is interviews we're gonna throw to some interviews but I'm GNA start with friend just because we're talking about wearables so it all kind fits together makes sense yeah okay my mil is being weird so give me a second God Wireless mice sometimes they work sometimes they don't Markell you need AI on your phone to to be more abusive to you oh boy uh well not not this device okay okay so speaking of wearables what if sherlin you didn't have to wear anything at all to get some helpful I don't know notifications or something from your wearable that sounds amazing you don't have to wear anything at all don't have to wear anything at all um no so this week we saw the company friend show off its a sort of AI lising device it's basically in the promo video we see it's sort of a pendant you can tap it you can gossip to it you can tell it your inner thoughts and when it feels like it will send a text message or something like a a message in text to your phone of its own like feedback about what's happening so uh some examples are like oh you're getting ready for a meeting or something and then it may it may know that you're prepping because it's also always listening it's an always listening device you could wear as a pendant or clip onto your shirt and it will send you know like hey don't worry so much don't worry about this interview you'll be good um it's sort of like this weird sort of friendly thing um it was created by Avi schiffman who is the CEO of the company friend uh he's also somebody who's in the news for creating that covid data tracker early on in 2020 and also the Ukraine um Ukraine Refugee map to like get a assistance for that both of those projects by the way have seen a bit of criticism like if you go to Reddit and search his name like redditors are kind of pissed because he kind of used some data from their open maps that Reddit was creating crowdsource to put it on his site and he got a lot of publicity for that even though he did not create all that data similarly the Ukrainian uh website which is not active anymore but that website to help people um I believe public policy folks were like well this is a good intention but also this could easily be compromised by by people who want to like track refugees or something so like it did not have all the thoughts in it this kid is 21 years old now so he's he grown up but he's very young and this project at least from what he describes it on the website is sort of a solution for loneliness it's sort of like when you're traveling or you're in an airport or in a hotel room alone like you just feel like isolated from everybody you have a thing you can tap and talk to and it'll respond to you it is not a protectivity device like the Humane AI pin or even the rabbit R1 it's not like trying to actively do stuff I think we've reached the era of like Vibes based gadgets trillin like it is just you wear it and if it feels like it's gonna send you hey hey girl you got this don't you're you're good keep going how do you feel about this what's with you in Vibes of Endra you're like Vibes vibrations okay W Vibes and vibrations are very different things but you know Vibes are Vibes Vibes uh listen we should probably we used to have people who were covering sex tech more our own Dan it's very very popular every time he writes about pornh Hub we're grownups we could talk about cover vibrators yeah uh forign Gadget especially um but to to to FR CO's point it sounds like you still have to wear this pendant so just not something you have to like wear it like a necklace wear it like or have it like you know clip to your clothes or something it has to be like on you so it can hear you um and also when you say always listening is there is it always listening for a hot word or always it's always listening it's just like a little device that's always listening it's running its own like little I think it's one of the cloud uh Cloud models uh for AI so one of the like small scale uh I don't know what do you call that slm and so and so the privacy issues here are are it's not sending anything the privacy issues are H are huge yeah it's always it's always listening but the work it's doing is local so it's local and sends you little texts it's not uploading anything to the cloud at least according to the company so it's not backing up that also means if your little friend um dies one if you crush it if it goes in the wash your friend is gone for good because there's no backup of this data so that is the basic concept of this thing what just let me know Sherin like you were interested in the rabbit because it looked really cute you tested and reviewed the Humane AI pin does this seem like an AI Gadget you would be into I like that it's a whole different approach sure right but I think it's going to run into the whole thing the problem that the Amazon Halo band initially had where it's always listening um and it's not like it's this it's a different approach from Amazon's Halo stuff in the sense that it's not telling you hey your tone sucks like you know cheer up it's more you sound stressed but Amazon tried to do that too so I'm saying that this is not brand new in terms of the like approach or the idea I do think it's a little bit um Amazon wasn't using AI like the same like level of AI models it was using their own like homegrown stuff I'm sure I mean like we've debated the reason definition anyway um yeah so it's yeah yeah it's a different model of uh language uh LMS language models but um I I I just think it's a little sad it it is a little sad yes I asked him this directly so the these the idea of this was to like stop loneliness right like what if I had a thing that could keep me company um do you think a device that you talk to in lie of human contact or friends that actually care about you do you think that does help to solve loneliness or does that make you lonlier I don't know right like I I couldn't tell you if it's yeah I just think the rationale is sad right um but okay hang on sorry let me finish this um I I think the motivation is well-intentioned but kind of sad right like it's it's it tells me that there are people out there that are lonely that think that something like that will be helpful it always reminds me of all those people on Reddit that are like talking to Bots and talking to bots is not what I see as like a healthy productive it's very similar to that way to connect right so I'd rather be but I see the point of something that will motivate you I just think it's empty motivation right like it's a a it's like those people who have girlfriends that are manga characters that are M characters boyfriend you're so handsome today yes yes but is it real is that is that a real does that solve your loneliness issue or are you better served with something that could maybe help you engage with the world a bit more in a more productive way I don't know that's where I asked Avi this question directly to like is this just a a cheerleader like you're super optimistic friend says yes and you're you're great for everything and he says that it's not just trying to be that Che leader in the promo video it shows uh the the friend sort of like shitalking you after you're doing bad in a game it sends a message to somebody so that's kind of I don't think that's necessarily like very like critical um I would love to see if like oh you were really shitty to that person or like your attitude right now is not so great maybe you should yeah right the definition of friend is not someone that's only rah rah cheerleading you to your point it's they need to give you real advice too so it's like or or give you reality check sometimes and if the algorithms not actually programmed to do that then they might not and and is a being that is entirely built to serve you right and has no thoughts or motivations of its own like as it's responding to you it's just it's just you it's just you talking back to you it's not like actually you're not actually like working with another like conscious being or something so I don't know I think that's that's kind of the thing uh one thing I'll also mention here there's a story at 404 media that found out um so friend bought the friend.com domain how much do you think that domain cost you think that domain is worth I was like girl got to be a lot of money because that's a good URL that's a good Ur that's a really good URL so friend spent $1.8 million to buy the friend.com domain and let me tell you it was actually useful as I started researching this company because I was like how do I find this company again oh friend.com that's why they spent $1.8 million to buy it this company has only raised $2.5 million so far so make that how does that math work out I don't know that's like startup math that's like I asked ABI this too like do you have the actual money to build this thing like he has one he has been using prototyp y for months it seems but yeah they're going to need more money to scale and to actually produce Hardware um this is just where we are right now yeah I'm getting Humane aiin Vibes I'm sorry I just yeah but at least so Humane AI pin before anything happened right they had raised hundreds of millions of dollars right like based on the these people are coming from Apple's all this right they're not 21 years old yeah yeah in the grand scheme of like I think a VC is just like hey you want uh $2 million to do what you're just going to buy the domain he's talking about this device he also wants to build like a social network of people using friends at friend that's slightly different if he's doing a social social network is different right like I just I don't know it's it feels like I don't know so lots of thoughts are in the air we have a lot of thoughts and I like as soon as we saw this I wanted to reach out to AI just to hear his side of the you know this story so I got to sit down with him talked for maybe like 15 minutes it's a short chat because we both had to run to appointments but I kind of asked him all the pressing questions we had so here's AI shiffman CEO friend okay dindra can you say let me queue it up and listen to it again yep I think I said H AI wel you know yeah can you say AI thank you so much for joining us on the end Gadget podcast again because there was a little stumble on that okay AI thank you so much for joining us on the Engadget podcast excellent thank you for doing that cool no I figured that would be helpful I'm still fighting in my mouse God damn it God Dam there's must be like another radio receiver that's killing my mouse or something que up the Costa interview I will do that next can you say delicioso is that did I say that right um c542 rightly points out that even Google bombed trying to create a social network from scratch remember goog plus I mean nobody remembers go+ yeah exactly nobody uh remember Google wave I loved Google wave Google I loved Google wave I miss Google wave that was a cool and a lot of that was like eventually put into it was the yeah skeleton for docs yeah okay let me pull this yeah I said delicioso correctly delicioso okay I'm going to go right into this next one moving on to other news uh we saw this we that the kids online safety act or kosa uh has passed the Senate it is on the way to the house we don't know what's going to happen there but if that happens uh the president could end up signing it into law we've talked about this before and we've talked about a couple bills from lawmakers aimed at the goal they say is to protect kids online and there is overwhelming support for this in the Senate passed uh by 91 to3 it seems um just overwhelming support uh bipartisan support for this thing the idea is that um you know it's coming off of all these stories we're hearing about um terrible things happening to kids because of social media and because of online interaction so these are kids committing self harm there is there are stories of suicide there stories of bullying there's all sorts of things kind of pointing to social media and basically the lack of ability we have to control it um so let's talk about what kosa means uh just reading from our report here by chrisell uh kosa requires social media companies like meta to offer controls to disable algorithmic feeds and other addictive features for kids under the age of 16 it also requires companies to provide parental supervision features and Safeguard miners from content that promotes eating disorder self harm sexual exploitation and other harmful content the thing that is really getting people up in arms and that is people like the ACLU and the eff and other privacy Advocates there's an aspect of the bill called duty of care and it means platforms are required to prevent or mitigate certain harmful effects of their products like addictive features or algorithms that promote dangerous content and the FTC would be in charge of enforcing that standard there are also aspects of this where um basically lawmakers would be able to say uh this as you know some of this information could be harmful to kids and it should be blocked on the internet so that is that could be resources for lgbtq students it could be all sorts of different resources like the free flowing ability of just having information on the internet could be affected because of this thing um and that is an externality that I don't think lawmakers are fully thinking about right now so yeah what do you first of all what do you think about the the initial goal for the shin are you worried about like potential crackdowns on information online and the chilling effects that could have I think there's some important context here for my my personal view on this which is I just came back from Singapore yes and Singapore the par the place my parents live in right now they use face recognition to access all of their locked gates and doors and they have no problem with that singaporeans are very much less sensitive to these sort of privacy fears I think uh than maybe other parts of the world are not that they are completely not scared they're just less sensitive because I think they there's a bit more trust in the government but also because like there has never been the sense of free flowing information right like full fre speech and things like that right come on right the freedom of speech argument not one that's been made in Singapore almost ever because the government just clams that there is heavy government censorship yes we we just don't get lgbtq content on our national media at all basically um that context laid out I think uh the idea of kosa is good I think it's nice to see bar bipartisan support for something like this when it comes to children when it comes to teenagers and their mental health it's good to see people come together for this and I think that there's you know much needed scrutiny of social media and its effect on the younger more vulnerable parts of our population yeah but I agreee with you that the duty of care part is is potentially could be exploited by like bad players I just don't know I think it boils down once again to execution right like I think the intention is good I think in general the idea is good I just don't know how it would be executed and I don't know that you can trust the government bodies that have been like handed the the control here to actually execute it well I as a Singapore I don't even fully trust the that's exactly the problem right like if you sign this thing into law like it is then a very powerful tool that bad actors could use and turns out our government Right Now full full of plenty of Bad actors so there is a piece at the eff called the kosa internet censorship bill just passed the Senate it's our last chance to stop it by Joe Mullen um I it's a short read but it's a good read because it dives into the things that could um that could potentially happen here so let me see here uh specifically he says COA to people who make online content about sex education and lgdp lgbtq plus identity and health being persecuted and shut down as well um one of the supporters of the bill uh has said that widely Ed educational materials that teach about the history of racism in the US causes depression in kids therefore we should block that information about the history of racism in the US uh we are in a really weird chilling time right now like we have um uh I live in the state of Georgia and there's this thing I think it's called the divisive um Information Act or something like that it is something where like divisive information the state is not allowing that within schools or something like that and be partially because of that um a state representative recently said that an AP black history course cannot be cannot be done in schools it's not allowed in Georgia schools this is a state you know with a deep history in the history of like slavery uh it has a huge African-American population it is very important that the people who live here learn about this history and learn about like what America has done to African-Americans but our state legislation says that history is dangerous it's kind of dangerous to teach that and I think like this is part of like where we are right now I don't know if you've seen any of these uh there's some Tik Tok videos or articles about this Shin about people in like Iowa and Idaho who're just trying to go to the library right uh there's one I saw from a Tik Tok mom who's just like I went to the library today it was very weird I had to present my ID to go upstairs uh her daughter wanted to get a book that was in the like you know under 18 category but because this woman uh this mom was traveling with an infant does not have an idid that cannot get access the mom couldn't go to the floor because the infant didn't have the identification to access the restricted information in this library and therefore her child her kid who's like seven or eight or something could not even go to that section the library I think the Librarians ended up helping the kids kind of find what they want but the Librarians don't want this they're like they're trying to they exist to give information to people but these weird Draconian laws that we're creating which in many states especially red states in America are about restricting inform prob that they don't want people to know about um it's scary it's chilling so I kind of see this as part of like where we are right now it's gross it's scary um I don't know so IAL yeah go ahead Michael Coy um in the chat mentions if we're Banning anything that makes students uncomfortable then why is math still taught uh yeah I think that it it just makes me feel like yeah people are bad and that's why we can't have nice things but people are going to be bad kind of no matter what like no matter like I I'm trying to fure question is you you the question is like who says who is bad who has the power to say who is bad right and so it's like there's no I don't know if there's a perfect solution is I guess what I'm getting at like can we need to be protective for sure of like prevent the obvious loopholes from being exploited whenever possible maybe blocking information though I feel like is is the the thing privacy yeah is the potential problem so we've talked about this before when we've talked about kosa and Capa Capa 2.0 by the way also passed the Senate and that is a far more um I think straightforward Bill uh it is uh that was an expansion of the 1998 children and teens online privacy protection act um it would prohibit companies from targeting advertising to children and collecting personal data on teens between 13 and 16 it also requires companies to offer an eraser button for personal data to delete children and teens personal information about a platform when technologically technologically feasible that's it it's not like a whole rule to be like oh you can just pull this we can force this website to take this information down it is a set of standards of how it treats people's data privacy advocates for a long time have been saying what we need is like a widespread actual Privacy Law we need data security we need privacy protections and we're not having that just yet so yeah sherlin I agree there is no like perfect solution yet um you know what uh I rang up the eff and I talked to India mcken the director of federal federal Affairs at the eff about their position on this whole thing like the is firmly against kosa uh there was a lot of push on earli versions of this bill as well um and this is even a revised form of it but let's hear what they have to say okay I'll go back into other news now yep and again live stream download the final audio we're gonna have these interviews built right into it okay okay if youall keep see me turn it's because I have I'm extremely gassy just burping off to the side I'm not like move away from the mic to breathe in breathe in yeah to not not me trying to laugh at kosa or anything Jesus anyway where's the smart device for that the the device oh o the device that could neutralize burps and farts where is that device well I mean there is there is charcoal underwear to neutralize for it yes it passes neutralize the smell not the sound right yes noise cancelling bodily noise bodily noise cancelling BNC device BNC okay moving on to some other news uh another story that I missed while I was out on vacation was uh apparently the entire internet around the world or at least many many PCs and devices ended up being shut down because the crowd strike outage uh crowd strike is a company that offers like online security protections and Cloud protections to company their job is to prevent outages like this um and because of a bug in crowd strikes uh a recent update that they did it ended up crashing 8.5 million Windows machines around the world which has affected corporations like Delta uh a whole bunch of folks I just saw the news this morning Delta um says that the crowd strike issues which led to delays for days on it like even after crowd strike fixed the problem people in the Atlanta airport where the major Delta Hub um were stuck there for three or four days unable to rebook flights people were living in the airport for several days Delta says this whole issue cost them about half a billion dollars so kind of a big mess um charlin you had some stories because of uh because of crowd strike oh my gosh W I was on a close to 20 hour flight uh right before crowd strike I think it happened while I was in the air and then when I land yeah yeah when I landed I found out and uh my friends were all like oh my God you landed everyone was like oh my God like good thing you made it right before all the like drama with air travel happened I was like what huh I truly you had did you not go on mine at all on your flight I did but I didn't see anything about Crow strike why was I actually no I I actually managed to only keep to like fun and social stuff not that's very brave of you I was on I was on the beach outside of Savannah in in a little beach house and I saw this new and like the news incoming was like widest internet outage ever I'm like I'm on vacation once again I miss one of the big stories but let me tell you I do you remember the rise up to um to Y2K and like the yeah I remember yes you were we were all gonna die I was well the stories the media was like oh yeah all our computers are going to shut down Society will end civilization will halt to a stop right and what ended up happening is that people were aware of the bug for a long time and a lot of work behind the scenes by IT workers and Engineers went in to preventing that so ydk didn't actually end up being a huge problem right this is very close to what people were expecting with the Y2K bug which is a single bug that affects computer systems globally across multiple corporations the problem here and this is something we talk about sometimes is like consolidation of the internet so a lot of companies rely on crowd strike for data protection for online Cloud protection for all sorts of stuff a lot of companies are using this one company so if this one company fails it's like a cascading effect that screws everybody around it and that that's ultimately it like this is such a an example of us relying on a handful of companies on the internet and it's like when AWS goes down you know how many companies expected or yeah it's things like that so so do you think we learned anything from this like do you think companies are changing what they do because of this I don't I don't know I don't really know the the other the other weird thing is that a lot of companies are incentivized to use crowd strike so like when you're building up your it operations or something or a startup or something uh they're like oh everyone's using crowd strike let's use crowd strike and I hear from some companies too that they're like I think it's like their the people working on their data side people push crowd strike because it is kind of the way uh Regulators like it every the government knows how it works so like it ends up being the de facto solution for a lot of people because of that so this is another example of we're not having a competitive market of solutions um ends up biting Us in the ass uh there is a good story Southwest everybody's favorite cheap airline ended up avoiding the crowd strike outage because it's still running Windows 3.1 across the systems okay are you surprised by this I just find it so funny it's so they got the last lap I guess I guess they got the last lap I mean they were retaining some customers because of they're like very strange and bucking the trend system of like non-reserve seating and just you get a assigned a seating timing or seating order you go in and grab whatever seat you want so they didn't need Super sophisticated seating software I guess and windows1 was enough they also they've also modernized to Windows 95 on some systems so I gotta say though I gotta say though so so some part of my stories around this was uh I lurk on some uh Airline subreddits and Southwest Apparently after all of the crowd strike stuff has recently announced that they are changing over to yes aign seating um for at least on some level and uh I I I guess this was say change or Evolution from all of that uh but Delta like you mentioned in our uh podcast notes the it was royally screwed for most of the week they were like struggling to keep back up and I also saw very interesting post by uh someone who said they were a pilot uh on Delta Airlines and one to share kind of their perspective as a crew member and um like the system situation right crowd strike outage uh also affected them like in the way that like they wanted to get on flights they wanted to fly out and help people get on planes and get to their destinations but they could not because of the issues affecting them as well like this person on Reddit was saying that um the system due to the crowd strike outage thought that one crew member was missing and therefore wasn't able to like let the flight go but actually that crew member wasn't even assigned to the flight to begin with or something like that so it just if it's so deeply entrenched into all parts of a lot of the businesses that it's really important to like fall backs fallbacks and more fallbacks right like I think Marell in the chat says don't just rely on multiple companies for your infrastructure if you rely on AWS Azure clown strike um now you're affected by every outage so maybe diversifying has always been like well that is exactly it like yeah yeah diversify as much as you can I ran into issues where like I would just go to a store and they were like um sorry we can't take credit cards today or we can't take tap toay because our entire payment system is down because of crowd strike you're gonna have to swipe your credit card so that it's another also example of like how delicate our modern infrastructure is like what one stupid company one stupid update a very small update that trigger like all these Global repercussions what a mess um fallbacks Falls Alternatives and other Solutions well let's run through some of this other news um yeah hey the the Democratic Presidential nominee since we last went live and recorded this podcast is no longer Joe Biden it's Camala Harris shout out to Camala Harris who was just here in Atlanta had a huge thing um unsurprisingly Elon Musk the owner the you know the owner of X Twitter is been going insane online because of that and one thing he ended up doing is sharing a doctored video an AI doctored uh Harris campaign video where she talks about being a Dei hire she like um in this video the fake Kamala Harris talks badly about Joe Biden things like that too what is interesting about this is that I see a list of like Community notes under it that are pending to be applied to this video but if you actually look at it without clicking into that and I don't think everybody has ebil like it's only the people who can add Community notes can see the pending stuff normal people will see no Community notes or Corrections because of that there's no label that this is AI information um even though I believed X has a policy that you have to clearly label AI produced media so of course because it's Elon Musk he doesn't have to follow his own rules right he owns the site so yeah he also by the way this is even more recent of a development uh took down uh the profile or account for wd4 white do for Harris um and then reinstated it after a lot of public outcry but like yeah they were having the white for Harris call they were raising a lot of money A lot of people are raising money and ra a lot of money El musk is so mad so mad um magically that uh that account was deactivated this also happened to another account I forget which one but another account like tied to raising money and supporting so yeah I am echoing commentary on Reddit that I agree with which is that like didn't he totally just buy Twitter because he wanted to for free speech for everyone but then now only for him remember remember when any of these folks especially like the right-wing folks who are all about Free Speech they are the first ones to limit speech and censor things and Change speech to their own to their own like whatever they prefer instead so I just yeah yeah yeah um just want to point this out uh be be careful out there on Twitter because I still I'm still spending time there because that is still where a lot of the conversations are happening right like and that is where the people I trust and follow are also I'm also on blue sky I'm also on Macedon but I see a lot of people leaving those services and going back to Twitter because that's where the community is and part of me is like I don't want Elon to just like take that you know he can he can manipulate it we're g to be there but yeah uh there's also a story recently that um musk admitted to Jordan Peterson that he bought Twitter to get at the woke M virus that he thinks made his daughter trans so that is that is Elon Musk right now not a good fow unfortunately um just just a mess but we will have our Elon updates every week as much as we can just pointing out all the the crazy things he's in did you try out Apple intelligence Trin something every week we have apple updates too right umle updates Apple intelligence is here in the iOS 18.1 developer beta not any other betas just that specific beta um but like the basic capabilities of Apple intelligence are here uh I've been playing around with it for a while the only thing I've noticed is um I really like the full screen effect for Siri I really like when the whole screen border just like lights up and it's all shiny um this is like the weird I know Tech aesthetic sides of me it is so much nicer than the little Siri ball yeah like I think I just like to see that but functionally you can ask Siri multiple questions now you can I think the some of the text input stuff is a little better have you been testing it have you noticed any differences Shin I have test I have been testing iOS 18 uh the beta but I haven't uh gotten the Apple intelligence features just yet I will say I'm pretty familiar with what's new in this one because took the briefing and saw a lot of the demos so yes the glowing oops the glowing border is very nice it's a little bit reminiscent of Google in the sense that like the color scheme is like a rainbow aesthetic uh but anyway uh the yes and then a new feature is that you can now type to Siri if you ever want to um double tap the bottom of your screen to do that yeah which uh I have seen it get tripped up because tapping the bottom of your screen sometimes triggers uh reachability which is where it brings the rest the top of your screen down to the middle it's not a great gesture right now I think they not great there has to be a better way to do this uh I get what apple is trying to achieve because it's putting everything within reach of your thumb so bottom half of the screen but there has to be something better um and then I am excited to see uh gen Emoji but gen Emoji is not yet here image playground is not yet here uh but you know we've been hyped about Apple intelligence for a bit there's some writing related uh features that are here too I don't know if you've tried them out but what I have seen and this is fun what I've seen around um threads people have been testing out the Apple intelligence update is the summarizing of your notifications in mail and messages and that is hilarious because like the way I mean I think it seems really smart right like I saw one before and after where like before it would just be like Groupon deals on blah blah blah it pre- summary would just give you a preview but with apple intelligence it would just be like the coupon code for 40% off is six or something you know it's just it just gets to the point and that's actually pretty useful that's how I handle my personal mail by the way like I have a personal Gmail that I've had since Gmail came out and I don't I don't go in there and trying to clear that inbox I just lit there and sit sit and watch a pile up and in the morning I'm like hey I take a glance out the in inbox anything interesting no keep moving I don't even do Marcus red I just like Let It pile up because that's the only way to manage that Onslaught mail right right it's it's smart it's nice to see so anyway um right now because Apple intelligence is still a developer beta it's not as widely available as a public beta which in both cases you be running beta software so if you were Keen to try it out definitely make sure you back up your data before installing or updating anything um but if you have tried it out or even if you haven't like what feature are you most intrigued by let us know podcast and gadget.com uh I will also point out the the really cool Apple intelligence glow up thing also happens in carplay so like if you ask in carplay because carplay is just mirroring what is kind of your phone is projecting so it's cool it looks good I just love the effect it makes me feel like oh we are these are future assistants this isn't just like visual refresh that's what everyone kind of wants yeah um I want to play with the new lock screen and the new like uh grid uh or your app grid um too so and the photo changes are kind of cool too like there's a lot of like in like individual cool stuff here uh one question I asked AI from friend was just like I I feel like everybody is trying to make these AI assistants right that are going to be helpful and we love and no our AI friends it's our smartphone the the device we rely on the most the one that holds all of our memories and is important to our daily lives it's our smartphone stupid so we keep trying to we keep trying to add things on top of the smartphone to like I don't know break out the smartphone experience but no no it's it's the smartphone it's always going to be the smartphone like as more AI enabled features and personalized features come to the come to our phones like I think yeah more we will like our devices anyway let's move on uh couple quick things from Google Google's making it easier to remove explicit deep fakes from its search results that's a good thing it's also going to stop them from uh from even appearing too in the first place or at least do more work to stop that so that's something good there uh there's some followup news on Google's third party cookies Shin I'm sure I gotta I Gotta Laugh at this one yeah I've been following right Google's like decision to deprecate third party cookies from the browser and from the internet at large for a very long time for years we've been writing about this yeah right remember when we had oh they're announcing flock which is Federated learning of clusters I'm not wrong yes uh then they moved to something else another bird name and then they did privacy sandbox it was another and then after all of that Halo I think that's how you pronounce that word yes it decided no no no we're not getting rid of third party cookies and chrome after all and it's like Google graveyard again you know but also I'm not surprised like it's google cot toing to advertisers basically to the ad industry who don't want their lives to be made harder it is that I think the one thing that Apple does better than Google on this is that yes sometimes Apple takes a very long time to deliver some new feature that everyone else has been doing but when Apple does something drastic and makes a statement like that it tends to stick to it um and does so seemingly like thoughtfully having thought through the process before implementing something instead of making an announcement making all of this stuff uh all of this work happen and giving a lot people all of anxiety and then kind of pulling back again and yielding to Advertiser pressure I think one thing also that Apple has been good at doing is to be like nah we don't care about letting your apps track users you know it's like we because not like it's they get part of that business but it's not the entirety of their core business model which is on ad Revenue yeah um so I don't know I mean I like Google's approach on some things I think this is just strange and hilarious I don't know that I agree or disagree just yet I think there has to be a better way I I would love to be in the meetings like as say talk about all these like complicated Solutions like okay how do we how do we really get rid of third party cookies but also still keep making life easy for advertisers and at the end of the day somebody comes in it's just like how about nah how about how about we don't do anything how about we just keep going the way we've always been going because it makes us a lot of money that is Google today uh they are not the don't be evil company now they seem like they well how about evil it's okay how about I don't think I mean it's not great yeah I think I'm not as personally invested in the third party cookie sort of situation whether or not advertisers can serve me personalized ads as well uh I am more invested in like the SEO drama and what happens with that and how are AI search results and AI you know generated content going to affect publishing because that's my of that's my totally all interrelated right like it is another sign that Google's like okay we got you at industry we got your back publishing industry media editorial industry what are you paying us yeah yeah what how can we'll take all your money though please we'll take all the money you're making though real quick let's mention some stories around and Gadget Matt Smith reviewed the Galaxy flip 6 which looks really cool he kind of digs it even though he thinks Samsung's playing it safe so I agree it looks really cool um Samsung's also marketing them as body cams for police so that's uh I guess that's uh talk about like unintended consequences for your technology but because the screen can flip up I guess a police officer can put them in a front pocket and that's a body cam I don't know that doesn't seem standardized I just think it's funny because look at Samsung marketing this thing okay I'm at the risk of this episode running longer than it already is running quickly to shout out that uh basically what Apple uh Samsung did here is like show some like pictures and video uh footage of uh people dressed in what appear to be police uniforms and then with the Galaxy Z flip 6 kind of like clipped onto the pocket with the camera facing out and therefore like a body cam right um I guess it's a good use case for a foldable if you notice my pitch going higher is because I don't believe it um I will say I have seen the surface Duo Microsoft Surface Duo uh being used by Microsoft employees at like who have disabilities as a more like accessibility like friendly piece of tech or device so there's something better that you can think about with your product Samsung uh but this doesn't seem to be it yeah uh yay police is basically what Samsung's doing I want to shout out just cond it wrote about Star Wars Outlaws which is the new like um open World Star Wars game that I know a lot of people are excited about uh the title is I really want to like Star Wars Outlaws so I think Jess is a bit conflicted on it like she her story is like she is not super into Star Wars recently I really want to get Jess into Star Wars acolyte um but this game so far I think she had good Impressions with earlier demos and now it just feels kind of big and a little aimless I've seen other previews that were more hot on it too so I think overall it's like a positive look at this game but Jess has concerns I have concerns too I am less of a fan of big open world games these days especially when they don't fill them up with stuff to do so there's that let's move on to what we're working on uh on my end just more AI laptops are coming in I'm coming off a vacation so I'm going to be reviewing some of those Charan what's up with you yeah still doing a couple of watch related things to Galaxy watch Ultra I'm still testing that as well as still spending time with the watch 11 uh beta and then um August in case y'all didn't know it's going to be the month of Google so that's what I'm my life I mean that's what they say that's what they want it to be before it's the fall of Apple you know or Apple's Autumn I guess not fall exactly apple apple fall we'll see apple fall uh yeah so big we're we're prepping for all that stuff let's move on to our pop culture picks for the week what you got charin all right so this past weekend I saw in theaters Deadpool and Wolverine yay I it that's good um I liked it because I'm a Marvel fan I watched it with someone who's not a Marvel fan and didn't enjoy it as much I think that um name names Shin I know their criticism is put them on the spot yeah uh uh their criticism is fair sorry I lost my train of thought when you said that um their criticism is is fair in that they think that um the the PO movie relied a little too heavily on a lot of these Marvel type tie-ins but that was exactly what made it fun for me so I will say that like it really depends going into this movie what sort of History you have with these franchises if you like Wolverine you like the X-Men you like even the other MCU stuff you'll have a stuff I think what pre MC so much there like I think that's part of the fun of it too like how long have you been on watching Marvel movies and how much have you stuck with this company there have been bad times there have been good times I'm talking pre-phase one prease one as well enjoed I really that that there was one surprise I'm assuming you've seen it um that there was one moment that I was like I shouted and I saw it at a Critic screen there were multiple points where this is a group of like media SE are movie critics behind me people shouting and clapping like hooray we're doing this hell yeah um yeah excited throughout yeah so it was a really good time but you need to have some like historical knowledge and appreciation for that sort of gag I think to be really enjoying uh the this movie as well as I I did um yeah good time good good times I also agree there a lot of film critics who are like well there there not much of a plot it's not much of a story actual character very confusing it has a good villain I do like the villain uh is played by Emma Corin uh they were in the show I recommended a murder at the end of the world and they were just fantastic and creepy um love them because it's sort of like they're they don't look like a typical villain either like not not like a big muscly dude or a crazy aliens it's just like skinny girl with psychic powers that's weird that is something I want to shout out a game I I feel like I've been waiting for a game to really hit me for a while I have not been fully into anything but I started playing kugami path of the goddess and God to say freaking love this thing it's on Game Pass right now it is sort of a tower defense game it's sort of a game where you are protecting this uh I don't know a priestess who has magical powers who you're trying to save it's it's very much like old Japanese folklore type stuff too so like this is a game from Capcom it brings to mind things like Okami and some of their earlier games um yeah you're you're sort of a spiritual Samurai trying to cleanse these areas you control the vill uh villages you give them jobs you set up like where they stand and how they attack oncoming things I am really digging it I just love the systems I love the game and I love how kind of weird it is um it feels very much like a PlayStation 2 game and I just kind of miss that Vibe so I'm digging it kitagami path of the Goddess we'll probably be writing about it a bit in gadget too so keep an eye out and I think that's it for this week in yes that's it for the episode this week everyone thank you as always for listening our theme music is by game composer Dale North our outro music is by our former managing editor Terence O'Brien the podcast is produced by Ben Elman you can find D vindra online at dindra on Twitter Blue Sky Mastadon and I podcast about movies and TV at the film cast.com if you want to send me the weirdest Health metric you want the Galaxy ring to track you can send them to me I'm sherlin low on Twitter SLX or just email me at sherlin engadget.com email us your thoughts about the show at podcast engadget.com leave us a review please on iTunes because that helps people discover us uh And subscribe on anything that you're listening to your podcasts on all right yay welcome back everybody my daughter is screaming for dinner she wants to forun she wants restaurant so I'm GNA have to do you want to do any quick Q&A think we're good we've already run late so yeah thank you all for joining us happy to be back on the live stream this is fun I love where these conversations go I love the quote my best friend is already my smartphone exactly this is true what what is with all day every day morning and night all right for everyone that's here quickly get your shout outs in we want to say bye to you bye to Michael Coy Ben do you want to do your little credits yeah so this video stream comes to you by us dender does OBS I do the camera switching I'll be it lazily you saw sherlin for a little bit longer than she was actually talking one time okay it's okay but it's really powered by everyone in the chat you remember things that we forget you bring in context that we didn't even think about so thank you for making this show better and we'll see you next week later folks thanks everyone c542 Mark bye