Pixel 9 Pro Fold review with MrMobile + IFA 2024 | Engadget Podcast

[Music] Bo [Music] what's up everybody welcome back to another live broadcast of thead podcast I'm senior editor dender hardwar this morning I'm joined by Deputy editor charin low hey Shin hello hello and Mr tones himself Michael fiser hello Captain to hello thanks for having me cap thank you I I didn't Captain phone schol to be called Mr thank you yeah right Captain mobile Mr her two Fones that's yeah exactly we'll just all around hello hello Michael and also podcast producer Ben Elman hey Ben good morning everybody good morning for this occasion we are going to be talking about the new pixel 9 profold with which uh both Charn and Michael have reviewed and I'm sure you guys have thoughts on that and we just want to say hi to the chat room how's everybody doing this morning I am looking looking looking Simon B people time to say hi actually yes yeah so everybody watching please tell us where you're tuning in from because Simon B said Montreal represent you didn't need to tell us that because we already knew we love seeing our recurring viewers we've got Singapore in the house for ly Singapore in the house yeah AAR Zamba I guess Cleveland Vancouver Chicago Milan I know a lot of these names Eduardo Jeffrey Joseph well I don't know Jeffrey Joseph Carlo Cho oh Cho it's ch it's ch Webster UK you says Algeria love that that's maybe the first time we've had a viewer from Algeria thank you so much for watching I will not be happy until we hit Antarctica I know I know there are there are researchers working in MC oh my God and chiming Chong is a foldable fan yes hello everybody hello everybody we're gonna get right into it soon to I know Michael you got a boat to catch so we don't want to keep you true enough yes indeed I'd like to stay on brand even with my Transportation yes true we've got uh cud in uh Australia but we're in Australia cuz Darren is in Perth then we've got cut for sure said before Australia let me guess I thought Perth but I might be wrong all right James from South Africa and T Tech we' got two thirds of the old TR Nations now before they started including [ __ ] Argentino or whatever you know that's how it goes let's let's get right into syney and Perth yeah so we're gonna be talking about pixel 99's and everything but first if you are a longtime viewer of the show you know that we're going to be doing a very quick sync so I'm going to countd down from three at the end of three everybody on the stream is going to clap or snap their fingers whatever if you want to put a clap a you know movie clapperboard Emoji or anything in the chat that's always fun to see it all pop up at once so let's do it in just counting down from three three 2 one and some silence I'll let you know when the silence is over check CH while we're being quiet hit that thumbs up it helps people see us okay silence over let's get into pixels get into it as always folks we won't always be talking to chat but we'll see your comments and we'll do some Q&A when we can uh Michael when's your heart out by the way good question um I'm good I've got at least 40 minutes so yeah we won't we won't need all 40 minutes but we will go for it okay all right let's go in three two one what's up internet and welcome back to the gadget podcast I'm senior editor dinder hardwar I'm Deputy editor Sherin L this week it's all about the pixel 9 Pro fold which sherlin has reviewed and we've got a special guest on to help us talk about all that stuff we've also got news from EA a strong word for this pretty special I mean no introduction yet but we've got Mr mobile here Michael Fisher Mr mobile is here to join hello Michael hi thanks for having me again guys hello I mean you're special to me I mean Mobile's in your name so thank you Michael for joining us I appreciate it thank you it's nice to be appreciated by at least one person we'll also be talking about EA 2024 folks which also happened this week and there's a ton of stuff out of that as always if you're enjoying the show please be sure to subscribe to us on iTunes or wherever you listen to podcast drop us an email at podcasting gadget.com and also join us Thursday mornings around 10:45 a.m. eastern on our YouTube channel where you can watch our live stream you can see all of our pretty faces you could see Michael's perfectly hair it's great thank you Michael um join us check out the even if you listen to the audio podcast it's kind of fun to watch the stream because we'll do some Q&A with the audience too so join in for that uh let's get right to the pixel 9 Pro fold which I still think should have been called the pixel fold to charlin Michael you guys take it from here well names let's talk let's talk names first let's talk about names I think uh so I was actually doing the tweet to promote this podcast appearance and I got the name wrong because I was a little bit distracted but also this I disagree with you which is no surprise but I I I I agree with you that the name is wrong I just I just think that a better name would have been pixel 9fold because the pro implies things about the camera that are not true yes and the screen apparently and the outside screen which are not true oh yes wrote in her review yeah somebody did their homework not you Mr mobile charl I've got uh I've got ammo don't don't don't test got too much Mutual ammo stuff Mutual assur destruction so okay tell me about the display thing what what was the thing because we know your your your review right charlin is it the outside display is more like the nine full or just the nine yeah it's the base nine display on the outside I mean I personally like I I said in my review I was never Blown Away by either of the displays on the pixel 9 Pro fold which I called the fold to or just fold yeah whatever some other way to distinguish it I don't care what the distinguishing word is just a second fold right anyway the the outside screen I just never I found it kind of dull I guess if you're used to like a Samsung amlet sort of experience the colors seem a little muted um and it's more apparent in the pictures that you take sometimes too when you compare them to an iPhone maybe even they're just not as vibrant um and then yeah on the front the screen only only goes down to 60 Herz but the Adaptive refresh rate is 60 to 120 it is a little bit sharper than the internal display it's also a bit more pixel dense on the outside than the inside screen but size and whatnot but but yeah I wish they had put the the same display as the um nine Pro the Bass Pro which is 6.3 inches and slightly richer that would be too easy you know Google would make it easy for us just like calling the thing the pixel full too I don't know thought that's interesting I think one of the things that I that I noticed I didn't notice any of that but one of the things I did notice was how how well they achieved their goal of making this when it's closed feel like a regular phone like I agree with that though I fully agree it's crazy it throws me off because I'm used to using large format foldables that encourage me to open the phone uh because you know the inner display is just Superior and by the way great inner display eight inches it's massive but that's why you buy this thing by the way just that that's why you're buying it but but that's the thing and I I I I almost got angry at how much I was using it on the cover display because it feels so normal you almost forget that it opens and then when you remember it opens you're like oh my god well it's it's so strange go ahead I don't know what the the most common use case is I I'm not usually the person that opens it up all that much and that's why the flip style foldable phones are more my thing I want the phone that can fold down I don't need that big display because you know even in my testing because I was forced to review this thing uh I was forcing myself to like find reasons to s Shady here which people pointed out in the video they're like don't you enjoy reviewing this I was like I mean look welcome to another episode of burnout Corner yeah I know fish sure that's the title of our new podcast right yeah sounds good for now um no but but yeah I was finding reasons to use that bigger screen which you know to to Fisher point is an impressive display it's large it's you know that one goes down to one Hertz um it's the crease if people still care about that is like fairly reduced right that obiously yeah right in Asia I think they've gotten down to the point where the crease is even more minimal and not noticeable I still notied this at certain angles um but yeah I I'm not the sort of person that can easily find use cases for the internal screen I was trying to be like this game that I play which is puzzle matching and sorting might be better on a bigger screen well maybe you could run two uh mindless games side by side you've got enough for yeah yes that's what it's good for but not not but single games they just take up the middle and then they're flanked on so that was that much better anyway for sure it looks like you have thoughts I do I like I think I was saying this on another podcast this week about this very same issue I think we've all been poisoned to a degree um to be by this like app first this app Centric model of of phone interaction and I think maybe I'm a little bit less prone to it because I use foldable so much but if you actually keep tabs on what you do on a phone and if you're not like me that's fine but I was taking notes on my on my usage it's like what do I do on a phone like I read articles I skim blogs and chrome I download PDFs from Gmail I read books and Kindle I like take notes and OTE I move money around banking apps I watch YouTube damn somebody's got money okay for all of the yeah well you wouldn't have to move it around so much if um and like even like spreadsheets like there I the things that I use a phone for like 80% of them are actually made better by a larger display so when and when I come upon an app that doesn't scale well Lord knows it's Android there are plenty um what's nice is all I have to do is close the phone and then I can run them on the cover display because that is a normal phone so like it's doing everything a large format foldable has always done is giving you options I think um my problem is not that more apps haven't been optimized my problem is the cost hasn't come down that cost agree oh oh buddy let me just say this like one thing I've noticed like just looking at photos and videos shln of you using this thing while it's closed I don't it is kind of confusing because it looks like you're using a phone box it's like it's like you're looking the box of a phone because there's such a big border around the actual display it's like is that just the box of the pixel fold I I don't know what's going on here I don't think that experience looks as seamless as maybe I'd want it to for a freaking nearly $2,000 phone but uh you you had a lot of good thoughts on the shin you had a lot of interesting metaphors early on in your review oh yeah so many but you call this glowed up and like grown up so this overall from you yeah uh I mean I think it's a good device so uh full disclosure I mean uh we've only had this review unit for a very short amount of time before the article went up so the only reason I felt comfortable going up with a full review at the time was because Sam and I Sam Rutherford our our senior reviewer um were tag teaming this review so Sam was able to do a lot more testing I was able to focus on certain things and therefore combination uh we both uh worked on it together um Sam is the one that came up with the words glowed up he thinks that that's the general takeaway and I feel like it yeah I feel like it fits the refinement and the hardware is something I've seen echoed around the internet not just you know between Sam and I and maybe Michael Fisher yourself too because we talked about this during the review period um but you know friends out there like Kwame who is watching the stream right now who themselves are uh pixel fold users buying new hardware when they received it what I saw on the internet was like General people being pleased with this device so I mean I I think it is blowed up I think it's grown up too like I said um if you enjoy metaphors there a extensive kind of overwrought one in my review but you were juggling like three or four in the opening paragraphs I'm like is it is that child it's just one listen it's one it's one one one okay so I I think that is the the key takeaway that we all had coming out of Mountain View right after you went Hands-On with this thing and you were like oh my God because when you compare it for the to the first generation pixel fold I don't know what I did with it when you compare it to pixel fold one it's like wow objective and subjective improvements across the board this is a totally different device and and you know I think that's a huge positive and I think people who actually splash the cash on this thing will see and and enjoy the benefits of all that I am a little sad though because it does Mark the kind of end of this phase of experimentation in foldables it happened to flip we saw like all flip phones look the same now with with the exception cover screen camera deployment and now that we've lost this kind of intermediate stage foldable all the large format foldables look the same too it's like I miss the little passport size the surface Duo shape the Oppo Find end shape the pixel fold shape because that did appeal to to a customer who wanted something that hit the pocket a little differently that you know treated apps a little bit differently they gave you a little bit like different aspect ratio stuff and like now that all large format foldables are essentially going to be variation of this it's you know I I guess it's inevitable but I just didn't expect it to happen so quickly we're only five years into this form factor the the experiment to AE I think by the way is just something I want to point like imagine imagine if you had one that folded down into like the little the little pocket like the flip size when it's close but then Fold It fold it once you get a bigger phone fold it again and then you open up into full tablet phone uh LG display today just sent out a release saying hey we got a flexible display in close they have embedded it in close it Folds it does all sorts of stuff yeah so we we have where does it where does it P like in the elbow it's like in the front of the shirt if you look at the uh the pictures of it like it's just like it looks like a piece of your Fabric and that's kind of wild to me yeah and while we're talking about other brands I should just give credit we Huawei is all but assured to drop a three-way foldable like next week so yeah we're expecting yeah we this is something we talked about over the weekend Michael Fisher when we were hanging out in Red Hook um I will say there are a lot of really good comments on in the chat right now uh talking about the screen aspect ratio and stuff like that for example Mark Dell who is a frequent uh viewer and listener says that the ratio in there is pretty bad for videos y uh that you know he wishes it was 169 but is good for playing Retro 4 by3 uh games and respon that please continue well yeah yeah because like the thing is this it's not for running full videos in wide screen like that's it is bad for it's not for wi screen it's for table Top Mode so you can put it down without having to like prop it up against a coffee cup like these poor iPhone users I see everywhere and it's like no no no it's it's its own tripod like that's what you I use this on a plane to watch videos this way all the time it is really great go ahead so for the for the listeners who can't see exactly what what Michael is doing on screen right now he is basically folded or the the pixel 9 Pro fold uh at a 90 degree angle and then you use the bottom half and you place that on the on the tabletop and then the top half that's slightly bent his face facing you uh therefore perpendicular to the surface you've placed it on and in that mode some apps will really like they'll become aware that they've been flexed right um similar to Samsung's Flex mode I don't know if Google has a name for it okay so so Fisher this brings me to the point I wanted to get to um about the internal display which is that this Flex Mod's kind of weird so when when you propped it up um and then you had YouTube open comments and following like videosos right yeah yeah I mean it could be different controls because Samsung does like yeah exactly controls us well so Samsung's modee I on the pixel 9 Pro fold and I briefly mentioned it in our review is that it doesn't work in portrait orientation and it only works in landscape which is the video viewing use case makes sense it a little bit for easy holding on on to drip ability whatnot I am like I wish the ad that I had the surface du tried to do that right yeah just stop for a second chat is telling us that sherin's uh connection is going bad or something and it sounds messed up I am in the oh apparently everyone went oh everyone we all went sorry it's everyone everyone let's wait a second it could it be on our end let's see when the stream says it's good yeah Sor I'm on fiber folks but there's like construction happening in my neighborhood so it's better now better now all right I think just too many of us were trying to is there any way to turn off your video B maybe that affects the stream yeah the stream depends on like all of our band with okay I mean I'm plugged into my modem so or router excuse me that's good Juni name Charlie is not your 2.5 mbbs DS so this is not your no no I think we're good for now most likely it is a thing on my end because I'm the source connection for this whole Stream So anyway oh yeah because you are like the OBS node aren't you yes take it wherever you guys I'm going back to the I'm going you were actually coming in to say the surface so why don't you pick up yeah um well I was saying um all this sounds like Sherm like your idea of holding it like a book I flashbacks to that Microsoft Event from several years ago where they showed us the surface Duo and they said a device with two separate screens and a hinge is better than a single foldable display and I was Dumb and I kind of believe them um unfortunately Microsoft uh never actually manages to like produce the things that they promis so anyway you didn't like the duo but that that idea of holding it like a book seemed like it was there yeah sorry Fisher you you seem to have a reaction again when I was talking about this because so when I when I to be clear when I open YouTube and I don't put it in lands Cape orientation the video kind of takes up the top half of the left side of the display in the inside screen right so it's like um uh kind of a quarter of the scen yeah exactly what you're sh the stream right now I'm describing for our listeners and it's not even just the top half it's actually spreading past the crease a little bit so it's actually if if you're talking about like ratios it's taking the it's like a two to one ratio of like video width to comment column width uh when held in portrait mode so I basically all I'm saying I didn't really enjoy this this sort of setup um and I wish it was split a little bit differently but then I also couldn't tell you what the better option is well I mean the better option the thing you you want to do is to like split screen YouTube right like Run YouTube side by side with with you know something else which is totally doable when I do split screen YouTube with a different app in that uh internal screen it does it it it's good it looks like a normal phone it looks like two candy bar phones side by side and it works really nicely so I ended up just doing like okay threads on the right YouTube on the left watching D'Angelo that sort of thing so I I assume does Android have like good piture and pcture support now too for like if you one like a little floating window that gives you a lot of options and of where you could put it even if you were holding it in portrait style right so you could have it up in a corner and still be doing a ton that's more do with a single phone that's cool yeah but I think a good point you made Sherin a second ago is that Samsung really does have the best implementation of like just Flex mode in anything because if an app isn't coded for foldables it doesn't matter you fold the thing halfway in half the app lives up top and then you get these kind of universal controls down low and and I don't there probably other one other manufacturer I'm forgetting about that does it but very few do it and I kind of wish Google would just build it into the system but I also think that like this is a small thing that Google has to fix right it's like it seems easy enough to fix through over the a software updates um oh yeah uh there's there's other great questions in the chat by the way like uh dude name Charlie said how does terus look in the big screen I don't know what terus what is that Terminus I don't know uh you you were getting at something by the way Michael early on um the price you were sad that Google has not lowered the price and to me that still seems like the main sticking point right because as I was reading sherin's review and looking all this coverage this thing seems really cool it it's also way too close to $2,000 and to me that seems um in this economy no thank you that that doesn't seem like a thing you should be asking people to even contemplate do you think that's a problem for this particular genre phone no question about it like it is I'm the biggest booster you will ever find for folding phones they are the only phones that make me excited and happy um but like they've been almost $2,000 for five years and the category like I understand that Google is only two generations in and you know I asked Rick osto about this and he was like yeah these components cost a lot and there's a lot in this phone of course there is I get it economy of scale but you apply that logic to Samsung and it's like still charging the same thing for a lot of the same components year after year after year and it's like oh no and and Samsung is $100 more than this one right not yeah and and then you've got yes you do have kind of upstarts coming in to disrupt but it's like techno give them all the credit in the world for their thousand large format foldable that's great but they are not in enough markets to make a difference and especially not in the United States you know so it's like I I guess we have to say that OnePlus is offers a de facto 13 $100 version of this with the with the new the new one after you do a trade in and stuff like that so it's like that's great but that's not happening enough and Google as the leader as the kind of driving force behind Android Innovation I think could have done it's it's I know they need to make money especially especially now but it's like I I I would have expected or at least hoped that Google would entertain the notion of making this a loss leader just to push this category past 1.5% adoption rate that's not how Google so like never they used to you know I do I do recall like uh I'm sure I know you were covering phones for a while Michael but a decade ago we were surrounded by decent Android phones going for $200 to $300 with no contract like just nice affordable phones that could do all you want and sure they do a lot more now the camera components are you know more powerful there's a lot more in a phone now but to me that was the ideal man we were getting to a point where we had these cool supercomputers in our pockets that were easily affordable and then Apple pushed it pushed the price higher with the first Pros several years ago and then the folds came out I was like oh past a thousand let's go close to 2,000 I just feel like there's as much as there's Innovation experimentation here I just can't help but feel like this is just pure greed guys like you're just you're going there no you're right touch it yeah I I don't I don't disagree I think I I my difference is that I didn't mind the almost $2,000 price point when it was Galaxy fold one and fold two those were just category redefining devices and the Huawei mate whatever the hell but like now again it's 2024 yeah what are you gonna do what like how many more ways are you going to justify this exactly like those prices need to come down they they they absolutely do and I am really grateful that we have the flip category because if you want a foldable for 600 bucks here it is or 700 bucks but it is a very different user experience it it has much less utility even though I still enjoy it quite a bit I love I love the flip style ones that are .99 I will say that to the to the to the end of like the pricing comparison talk um it seems like people on our chat all have very like varied experiences for example Dro 9 uh said that they only had to pay $450 after all the discounts and rebates for their n Pro XL X wow um which like initially cost I think like closer to $1,200 so that's nice and then Mr Capcom also says that you know they like the tradein um but then someone else uh mentioned that Google phones are very expensive in Canada so it just it's not a unified I think experience in terms of pricing but it I see true true even then though like uh people are mentioning like you could get a th even if you get $1,000 off of this phone it is still you're still paying close to ,000 dolls like you're throwing so much Hardware at it whereas I I practically got my 15 Pro Max for free based on like trade on trade in deals and stuff too I just don't know if we've seen like carriers offer as much for the fold like hey go for a fold maybe they don't carein in chat also says by the way dein said hi Midway through Dean says if Apple makes a photable phone just wait and see what they charge uh they $400 speaker I mean look at what they did with the VR headset you know so yeah and the 3,000 headset to a th000 headset five they do a photo it be north of $2,000 which which again like just to like be to to to to acknowledge the subtleties of some of this like I wouldn't mind that I mean like not because it's apple and they get to do what they want but like is it because you're moving all that money around or it's it's exactly right no it's because they are they haven't done a foldable yet so they have a lot of non-recoverable engineering costs they have a lot of Bill like the the all of this design work and marketing work like it costs money your first foldable should be expensive as hell I'm just and I guess then I have to walk back my criticism to Google a little bit because like yes this is their second photable but it's essentially their first photable of this type like I can't imagine that they were able to reuse almost any of the engineering from the first one this is such a different device exactly right I have right my question though is it worth paying that much more because everything you're talking about Michael like the M the multitasking you're doing sure I don't have a giant screen to do it on a 15 Pro Max that's still a pretty big screen you could still do a ton when it comes to multitasking and like watching a video or something like on a typical you know single screen phone these days it doesn't fall I got I get I I I get your point completely I just for me I think something in my brain broke when I um I I I I bought the first Galaxy fold and then very shortly thereafter I ended up in a hospital because I probably had the Galaxy yeah right you know well it exploded no um I didn't have time to stop home before I went to the hospital so I went to the hospital with like the clothes I was wearing and a Galaxy fold and I stayed there for four days and I didn't miss you know my Kindle I didn't miss my iPad I didn't miss my switch like it just I had everything I needed in in my hand yeah I compounded that with traveling and all the time and I'm sitting in an airplane seat for hours I'm like I don't have to bring any of that stuff because it's all in this thing that goes in my pocket and I really think you know look if you're trying to save money you can buy all those things and still get away paying less than you would for foldable but if you have the money for that kind of convenience I I I really think that these are continue to be severely underrated in terms of their usefulness and convenience they are I I do I I like because they're too expensive the reviews are very positive I'm talk reviews who cares I'm talking about real I'm talking about the word underrated here I I me speaking of the real people okay I think that uh again we have a diversity of opinion in the chat which is again I think a good thing and indicative of what people feel about photable phones which is there are people who are like oh yeah Tech UPS say in the chat it's like for work foldables are much more different buddy 305 Lov says for me true multitasking is on a fold and uh but then CF 542 says I hate to say this because I love Tech but the more I've use so less useful I find them over a standard slab so this is just in our chat imagine everyone out there it's up to the companies to prove why why the hell you're doing this other than I think for some people they're going to be useful I think I've reached the point where foldables are at a point where they're not going to be mainstream they're not going to replace candy bars some people are going to prefer candy bars some people are going to prefer the fold F fact I think the fact that they exist that people have an option is a good thing I think for me I would not use a a large format pable like this one I would go for a flip style one I could tell from reading your review Shin yes yes which still got a high score and I riew like 88 it's a pretty decent score but I did prefer the nine pro pro XL but okay so I will point out though that when I one thing I will bring up in my personal experience with the Google pixel9 pro fold is when I showed it to my friends they like real world people who have not who were mostly iPhone people they were playing around with it they oh my God this is so cool it's a teenager so you know the like defin of cool right she was like oh my God this is such a cool device and then when we finished playing around with features I made you look or add me my friend who's like a longtime iPhone person like everything apple right sits back down on their couch pulls out their phone and goes like oh crap my phone's so boring now and it's like that that's what I think this side of the market brings to the table that sort of sense of wonder still exists over here and that's fun and the fact that they've gotten to a point where you can buy them and say that like you can really choose between candy bar and fold now I I mean that's that's quite the progress we've made right I'm sure that's why we're so excited I'm sure about these I I want to say a couple things first of all I'm sorry you you got stuck in the hospital for so long Michael but at least you're self aware enough to know that it broke your brain to be stuck like stranded basically in a bed only with this uh with the foldable device yeah I'm sure in that situation if everybody could be bedridden for several days and had to choose one device I think a lot more people would see the light of like the foldables also yeah everybody doesn't travel as much either um I for year use case I see I see why it's useful yeah yeah and I think it's not it's like those are hypers specific examples but I think um maybe a long time ago a bunch of us were making the speculative uh proposition that maybe foldables are going to become the new the new Pro phone you know large format foldables and I think that's what it is and because like if you look back in time you know we having many of these same conversations about the Galaxy Note where it's like well why do you need a pen why do you need a giant screen and all this stuff it's like turns out look a lot of people didn't but at least 10 million people did and that was enough to make this little category like kind of kind of flourish and suddenly at least big screens spread everywhere the Spen not so much but you know it's it's it's a little seg and I agree I don't think large format phots are ever going to be like the the main default phone but I think for like power users the fabled power user they're a a better option than anything else I can think of unless yeah you know in the Android ecosystem the iPhone I gotta ask you guys while we are in the section what else is good what else is bad about this this the pixel 9 Pro fold aside from its name I think yeah the name's bad name B battery life good uh for a foldable anyway for in our testing um Michael's making mine wasn't great dubious you're running some kind of random software anyway I mean ours outlasted the Samsung Galaxy zold 6 by like a couple hours on either the outside display or the internal so that's why I said is good anyway um and then the cameras also in general tend to outperform uh the Samsung one I think when you do a face to like a full to fold comparison I think the the pixel fold is good uh and and I like the hardware didn't you also noted that it's the same camera sensor for the past three years though yeah no well the Sam Samsung's kept the same sensor years the F's only been around for two um but also that the the hardware is mostly the same but they've enabled macro focus on the wide the ultra wide which is nice right like it's a nice feature um but you're generally getting similar Hardware I think to the the N Pro it is very similar uh however if you take them side by side which I rarely do anymore uh I took the pixel fold and shot with the N9 Pro fold right alongside and the zoom performance is substantially better and that's purely on the back of software so it's rare that that that promise actually delivers but Google seems to have done it at least on the zoom uh at this point mhm that's a great keyboard love that keyboard floud because shine's on her normal microphone sorry Jesus I should stop I forgot about that earthquake in New Jersey work to do sorry about the real people in my life asking for typing away um so battery life okay at least from your perspective Shin good but we we run typically a video test and I don't know Michael are you doing like a multi-use multia test or something for oh no I'm I'm over here in like subjective experience land but I I've also that's great for data thank you sir absolutely I've also I'm the only person you know who's been exclusively foldable since 2020 so I kind of know what I'm talking about and uh this thing I I hit that low battery warning pretty much every day and I think the thing that annoys me about it is a is related to Google's explanation for why it made some of the decisions it did it's like hey these cameras aren't Pro level compared to the N9 Pro but but um we didn't have the space and it's like okay well no of course you didn't but you built this massive camera module onto the thing uh it seems to me you could have made it a millimeter deeper and and just made them Pro cameras Oh but we fit in a bigger battery yeah well kind of except it's smaller and it also doesn't last me all day so it's like these are the kind of compromises that become very difficult to justify when you're charging the price we we just got done talking about for for 15 minutes so like that's why I tend to like look the battery's fine but it should be more than fine the cameras are really good but they should be more than they should be the best you know especially when you're paying this much money I agree exactly um I do want to uh talk about um a question that came up early on in the chat which is what is the IP rating and I'm sorry I forget the name of the person that asked this question but it is ipx8 so not super much compromise I guess on that front uh F do you remember off the top of your head what the Galaxy Z fold's IP rating was it's IP X8 it's the oh no it's IP 48 it was initially announced as X8 but 48 is not like four is the dust rating for objects that are like a millimeter in size or bigger right so it's it's a it may as well be X yeah right exactly um and we have a special friend David ml is in the chat asking about uh mentioning that they were very disappointed in their camera that they took to the to Glacier for testing and it's pretty mid according to well you're photographing and white things so that I'm glad he brought it up I I would love to hear your thoughts on the camera sherland because I've been having fun with some of Google's old pixel features but like it seems to me that they're leaning entirely on AI features to differentiate them this year and when I just look at the photos unless I snapse them like they don't have any personality to me they hayot houman friend of most of us said like U the the pixel color science appears rather sterile to him these days and I tend to agree it's you know what's funny I had the same conversation with hay husman friend of most of us recently too um who coincidentally shot our review video for this device and actually hay mentioned that like in general he doesn't believe really like or or like um Google color science in because it's a little too processed for his liking and I think for me that's why I like the pixel cameras because they're they come out looking nice in my opinion in the past right on the fold uh when I alluded to how the displays are a little like meh when I looked at the pictures taken from this camera I think on this display they don't look great when I brought them on the same display like a laptop screen uh and compared them to iPhone I think the colors were per usual pixels style a little bit muted compared to something that might be a bit more process to to pump up the colors um but you've got I I like the clarity that you get in certain modes I like um the nighttime performance oh yeah I think that is amazing the nighttime performance all always blows away the competition I almost finished like what wait a minute that's not what I was saying look it's only 11:30 a.m. I'm not awake yet speaking of by the way we should probably wrap soon Mr Fisher has to catch boat thanks for check making me check that boat schedule yeah hang on your yeah check the boat schedule but also I know I kind of like hogged the whole like what do we like about the pixel fting so you tell me what you like about does Michael fer like the pixel 9 Pro fult I don't know I actually don't no I can't tell from this conversation at all guys this is the problem I don't know I I'm so it's it's you know what's a very annoying thing to have to say as reviewers and you can all sympathize with this it's like sometimes you get a thing and you're like I can't encapsulate this there's 80 million good things there's 60 million mediocre things and I'm like I don't know what to say I I went into this thing I I I picked up this thing at the handson when I'm filming it at Google for the Embargo stuff and I'm like I came away with that I'm like this is my next phone this is the thing I'm super stoked by but I think the combination of of of a couple of the factors we talked about has really muted my excitement and I think a part of that is a good example of why sometimes reviewers when you've been doing this for too damn long you get out of touch because holy crap I just came from this uh I don't know where it is this xiaomi mix flip that I just reviewed previously and there are 80 million reasons I don't want to carry this and I won't but it has a Lea tuned camera that gives you all this film emulation stuff and it makes me happier to film to shoot with it makes me more excited to try to get ambitious photography done and when I had to go back to the pixel after that it just it it's going to be the better choice for every normal person out there and it just reminded me how abnormal in fact I am so I think if you had to make if you were to make me choose between the pixel fold and the now much cheaper OnePlus open which is way older too um you know the OnePlus has that that hassle blot stuff in the camera that that kind of makes me a little more excited it has a more ambitious multitasking approach which makes me a little more excited and it's just it's tough but at the same time the pixel has features we didn't even talk about the all the pixel stuff we love that voice recorder the now playing I love all of the pixel UI stuff they're all so good I don't know I get what if you can I ask like can I ask you guys to help me figure it out like what if you had a gun to your head and it's like pixel fold or OnePlus open or fold six which one would you pick like You' got to car of this for the next year you don't have to pay for it say well Sherin here CU I well I can tell you Sam senser he's already swapped the I know he swapped the pixel 9 Pro fold in for his uh pixel fold original um that one over the Samsung um someone in our chat had earlier mentioned that they actually are they feel like they're in the minority for preferring the zold sixes like skinnier aspect ratio because it's easier to use with one hand I don't like typing is still really weird on that screen legit point though I get it I get it yeah a little scker than the N Pro fold like that's the thing like I think I can't over how the boxiness of the external display looks it really does look like you're holding a cell phone a smartphone box you know it's just on the Samsung or on the no on the pixel on the pixel because of the white border and because of the border around the actual black bezel I just think I think the Samsung's size is f the screen is like as right Rao is a little too skinny for me so to to answer your question fiser uh speaking for myself instead of Sam I mean I'm I'm not a large form affordable person so I wouldn't and is a OnePlus open available here yeah yeah the it has been since launch yeah I've always been sus about oneplus's cameras I know that they have the hassleblad sort of integration thing but it's just to me I've always been a Google camera person I'm a Google colar Science fan I'm a pixel UI fan and for all of those reasons I will probably be a a fold stand but a pixel fold stand but I will point out that the difference between the Samsung and Google folds are I think software I really do think actually Samsung has managed to do better multitasking software um maybe some better like entertainment consumption uh aspect ratio issues uh also for the Galaxy C4 it might be a bit better for watching videos because it's got such a better screens and the aspect ratio might actually make more sense I don't I'm not entirely sure but that's how I would distinguish it for you if you're a multitasker yeah I I will say from my perspective of a non-old fan I the the Google stuff looks good like mostly the AI stuff in there the fact that they can get Android to do things that nobody else can both a problem and also kind of a feature for them so yeah oh and and Suki in the chat says that Zol 6 supports stylus uh and has a one terab option so it really seems like a more power users of thing where the pixel fold yeah Bill give me an Espen silo or don't talk about the Spen I know case on there no no thanks yeah yeah I understand um yeah uh and then David EML points out that OnePlus open 2 is really going to give this thing a run for its money which we'll have to see for sure no OnePlus started like that this is the OnePlus open is the strongest start to a large format foldable I think I've seen and if they continue that momentum into the two yeah absolutely agreed that particularly if there is aggressive on the price uh the price is a huge difference app her here too awesome any final thoughts Michael before you run out oh you know a little bit for change of pace a little bit of gratitude I'm sure I'm glad we have this many weird phones to talk about and we're not stuck in a world of just endless boring slabs because I would have gone to work at Kennedy Space Center as a tour bus driver already if that were the case imagine all the people that would be may have been a more fulfilling job for you Michael like right now you're stuck in your apartment with your cat reviewing phones you could be talking to people on those tour buses two cats two cats that that makes all the difference it is true the two cats take care each cats they absolutely need to all right Michael fer where can we find you on the internet these days thanks for joining us thank you uh I'm Mr Mobile on YouTube the Mr mobile t h m r m o b i e and uh Captain tones on threads the best social network for people who like to talk to each other you should join threads meta it's great it's never done anything better God do someone pay you J seriously we can trust back in the background let me put on this gold chain and get this Shadow gotta get the girls oh hey before you leave um Mr mobile do you have something to tell to viewers or listeners yeah they should go about my new favorite place to hang at Greenpoint no say the line Fisher oh that oh right oh yes coffee check no uh shush that's the wrong line wrong person who are you David kogan stay mobile my friends stupid we we'll add a a nice sound effect for you there thanks appr and uh Markell in the chat says you're Captain two cats a hey a that's another claim that handle yeah yes go do that get your Instagram handle uh drop us that audio Michael when you're good I ass you want to stick around for Q&A or you got to run for the boat I I will tell you two seconds yeah let's check your boat you thank you thank you okay so let me just jump in and start talking about viewer questions also just general comments so Simon B asks a question that I think is specifically directed at sherlin which is how is YouTube games on the pixel fold uh hell yeah uh so it's one of those games that uh I don't know it just doesn't seem to work super well on this format on the internal one the external one just behaves like a normal phone is fine and if you split screen this internal one in portrait mode you you basically get the same you know uh s show as a phone but let me just go over to the games right now just so I can show it dang okay so while you're doing that says that dust ratings are a big reason that I've avoided foldables that worries me I remember when we restarted this podcast it was just kind of at the beginning of the foldable era and we were talking about how just the extra folding hinge is another failure Point yes so I completely understand it's still is then we've got Dro 9 saying foldables are good for business contracts in person I think that Dro 9 was responding to something that uh Michael said about like opening up business documents and like downloading PDFs and such and then um Adia gup uh says that if or no Gupta excuse me um says if Blackberry were to create a foldable design for work I feel like they might have a shot at coming back um sure where is read your blackberry history yeah Rim went out of business watch the Blackberry movie and then read we've done some retro I still need to see the Blackberry movie damn it Ben it's on Hulu hul I know I know I know I was saying like oh what I I was it's actually right up your alley in terms of old Tech too like best of all it's like its accuracy is like close to [Laughter] 7% what do you have to say about YouTube games on the fold yeah I just showed it on uh screen says it looks bad and is it playable yeah I fully played it so there was this game that I pulled up to play um called tall man running and everyone's like is that the game from the ads and yeah but it's bad it's like it's anyway I just died that will not stop you from playing the game as we've all learned yeah okay and then we've got static player saying that it's just too expensive and no Pro Camera I think that that is generally what we were talking about as well then CF 542 said that honor of V is so yeah honor is it honor V or honor five it's the honor V3 H3 it was a typo yeah um yes uh really needs to come to the US it would change everything however literally right before we went live didn't we say that it was not going to yeah it's and it wouldn't matter anyway they're running like barg bin Huawei software from 2018 and they've made very little effort to modernize it it's trash but the hardware is amazing honor makes honor like Huawei has great Hardware um did you see about the the laptop they showed off at EA with the webcam that does things I I'm trying to remember when embargos live and I'm like uh the stories are up the stories are up uh anyway we're getting to that in our EA section in this episode soon but we yeah the V3 uh the magic V3 is one of the devices that was unveiled today and we we got we got to keep moving because we got a lot of stuff to talk about Michael thank you so much for joining us go catch your boat sir hey you're the best thank you guys a thank you uh we'll do enjoy the rest of the Pod bye all thanks for joining us see you thank you chat stay here we're staying yes I'm just fer is going sorry go away Fisher no I'm kidding bye all right let's move on we've got EPA stuff we've also got some other news and I think we're just gonna have to like we're gonna blast through news but there's yeah we we we'll we'll drop we'll move quickly whatever we got to do here um okay let's move on to some other new let's move on to the latest from epha 2024 um I don't actually think charin that we had anybody on the ground in Berlin right like we're all covering the stuff remotely but there's a ton of news um what I've got stuff to talk about because there stuff I've written up has anything caught your eye before I get into it I mean quite a lot uh I think uh I'll start with the honor devices that we talked about since we were just spending a lot of time talking about uh foldables right so honor also today unveiled a new magic V3 which is one of the um uh better known names I guess in the photable space although there are quite a lot of names uh in the space now but honor uh you know whose former parent company was Huawei right Huawei was one of the earliest big names in the photo space um anyway honors back with the magic V3 it's aordable that according to Dan Cooper who wrote it up uh it's a lot thinner and pocket friendlier than before it's also easier to use uh perhaps because of its size so it's intriguing but yeah honor devices don't usually come to the US in large part because they don't have great software I think is not welcome here anymore so yeah but they no longer they're no longer part of Huawei um but they also yeah just can't trust anything apparently so yeah sure um and then honor also unveiled a new laptop with a detachable webcam sure that's exactly what I want from my what I've thought all the time from my laptop my I'm I flash right back to the laptops that Huawei used to make that by the way I liked because their design was nice um but they would have like a popup camera that would pop up from the keyboard deck so the the camera was below the display in the in the bottom bezel area and made for the most flattering pictures no double chin whatsoever that's a whole Adele had that too like below the thing the thumb up nose the up God yeah I'm glad we're past that awkward webcam positioning era and then there's a there's a fin fin honor uh set of news from epha that honestly isn't as interesting and they already forgotten about so yeah there's another very interesting product out of uh EPA that I'll quickly shout out which is the Lenovo uh it's called the auto twist Lenovo is back with another concept uh or laptop prototype and it's it's basically it's quite funny it's a laptop that looks like your traditional clamshell and then it's got this hinge that is motor ized and like can rotate 360 de so the display can fully rotate a l on this it does it does what the other like uh I I see what you're saying I see what you're saying like convertible but it twists the other way okay right you can you can voice command it basically it's like you can say hey like get up or whatever I don't remember what the voice commands are supposed to be but you can basically get this laptop to open its own screen uh and then the screen can turn around to face outwards and then the screen can come back down to rest on top of the keyboard so it turns itself into basically a tablet or a touchscreen surface what what's fun is that when Sam who wrote up our hands on with this device um saw it Lenova also had a demo where they had this screen part dancing in tandem with a ballerina it was displaying on the screen so it's like the ballerina would do a bow and the lid would also bow like it was quite wacky and very interesting uh is it going to ever be useful I mean maybe there are use cases I think no well according to Lenovo there could be like ease of use type things there could be like Point of Sales be listeners cannot see this right now charlin but my head is in my hands because I'm like what the hell are you doing Lenovo convertable laptops have been around for pretty much 15 years now and yeah you do it manually yeah you have to rotate the screen all the way back manually you get all these same modes and you don't have to sit this thing also takes forever to do anything like it's taking yeah it's very slow it's not like moving fast yeah I can I just point out Tom Rogers and CH like nose hair camera which is really the best call those laptops but okay um CF 542 motorized screen what could possibly go wrong with that I'm looking at this thing and as it's turning I'm like yeah somebody drops that off a table a kid just like slightly nudges it or it get stuck it's gonna break it's a we've talked about Lenova build quality in general um we don't know this is not for sale this is not for sale it's a concept so that's the one Saving Grace but buddy5 love is like rotating screen laptops are so 2005 most that's super cute and then Tom Rogers comes back with another burn saying Lenova should make automated toilet seats next well noo should make devices that don't die within a couple years how about that start there start with durable laptops can better but I don't know yeah yeah anyway that was for me the the EA highlight so far there are others which I'm sure you tell us about I mean if you're going to talk about uh silly Concepts there's also the Acer stuff uh which we want to talk about real quick and then there's stuff I'm really excited about but uh Acer it's called project dual play it is a laptop a gaming laptop that has a controller embedded in the like Palm rest area and you could pop the controller out and turn it into a full-size gaming controller or split it apart like the Wii controllers and like play two-player games this is it this is also very dumb but you know what you know Acer you're on to something here like I I could see the kernel of something here whereas I don't know the hell lenovo's concept designers are thinking of here or it's like yeah a thing let's let's create a way to do the thing that laptops have been doing for the past over a decade um but let's make it more confusing like more complicated with a motorized switch rate thingy let's make it slower let's make it more expensive most likely too so anyway as project to play does not exist but it could be a cool idea I could see people wanting to buy like a a a computer where you could just like pop out some fun controllers or something because right now if you want to travel with your gaming uh laptop you're going to have to like put a p put a gaming controller in your book bag or something too so I think most people would rather do that the the actual controller looks like garbage doesn't look like something I'd want to hold for very long I don't know what happens to the Thum pads like they do they go down do they collapse down I have we don't see this in action so we don't know but uh check out our post Lawrence Bon WR up for us acers project dual play would you want a laptop with a buil-in controller I don't think it's that that hard to just bring the controller you like along with your laptop to me that it doesn't solve a huge problem at least it solves some sort of vague kernel of a problem unlike freaking Lenovo what the hell are you doing over there guys anyway um Intel score Ultra 200v chips talk about bad names uh Intel debuted the core Ultra chips the these were their first aipc chips like last December the PCS with those chips started shipping earlier this year now we have the second generation of those ships are in and now those computers are starting to ship this month so I were to go check out my report on the Intel Core Ultra 200v these are a major upgrade over the original core Ultra uh specifically because they this this ship does not work this is what they used to call lunar Lake that's the code name for this one right this chip does not work in any way like an Intel chip has before it has memory on board built in so kind of doing the Apple M series thing which is supposed to reduce um late and also reduce like heat and stuff too also means you can't upgrade the RAM um but also has completely reworked PES and E cores like it is supposed to be much more power efficient uh they claim higher battery life than the Snapdragon X Elite uh let me see here Intel says in the UL proon office productivity Benchmark um the core Ultra 7268 V lasted for 20.1 hours um the qu chip lasted for 18.4 hours so this is an x86 chip that doesn't have the weird compatibility issues of all the windows on our machines like the Qualcomm chips do um that runs everything has better battery life claims to be faster and also has oh it has a new mpu as well a 48 tops mpus so it can be as capable as those Snapdragon X Elite chips we talked about for whenever the really like compelling AI features arrive we're still waiting for those but uh you know Intel points to stuff like Lightroom and uh a bunch of adobe Adobe apps that use some AI capabilities they're not always using the mpu sometimes they use the GPU for those AI features but still it's it's a big win uh these processors are really interesting it also means if you bought an Intel Core Ultra laptop within the past look in here nine months you're kind of screwed like Dell Dell just announced an XPS 13 with these new chips for right I remember we reviewed the core Ultra XPS 13 in April so yeah Sor all I can say is I'm sorry to everybody who bought those computers because those things got swapped and upgraded really quickly those are still good computers the original core Ultra chips were but they have slower mpus or not be as like future proof um we'll see we'll see what goes here um yeah so hey we got new Intel chips we got another Qualcomm chip uh an8 core Snapdragon X+ chip which means we'll be seeing cheaper you know co-pilot plus systems Microsoft revealed that the co-pilot plus features for x86 chips like Intel's amds are coming in November so that that kind of came alongside all this stuff um basically like EA is usually where we see a lot of PCS and a lot of TV stuff too and this seems like a pretty wearables yeah yeah and wearables um this seems like a pretty big one like this is now now the shape of whatever the aipc market is seems a lot more compelling and honestly like looking at it on paper I don't know why people would choose the Qualcomm Snapdragon chips even though they're much faster than they used to be over like these new Intel ones do you have any thoughts on that charlin or any prefer I mean the compatibility issues for sure are are a problem I think that uh Qualcomm has the I mean I think what Intel is promising on battery life is something that remains to be seen I I don't tend to trust like in-house testing numbers uh so I would like to do our own testing for battery life type things um but yeah I I generally think that Arm based systems last longer right like we've seen the MacBook with the M3s or the series chips last forever I think those are usually the the advantages they have um and then you know 52 used to be one of the things that quom was like all hype about and they're like yeah we're good at this and now it's like H do people really need 5G their laptops I don't know um but I I think that I think for broader compatibility uh AMD and Intel's like x86 type chips are better I'm still I'm still leaning there personally I don't think like the lead whatever they believed in Snapdragon I just reviewed the XPS 13 with the Snapdragon chip with theil plus version has all the app compatibility issues we're talking about here it is funny like um maybe we'll see the cor Ultra the next core Ultra XPS 13 to review soon because we kind of want to get those benchmarks in but this is the third revision of the XPS 13 within nine months so that is kind of wild too if you go to their like buying page it's a little confusing so there's that a lot of stuff happening at EA let us know folks uh you could find all this all our reports on this stuff over in Gad bis know if you find anything particularly Cool com what do you think of aips is this confusing or compelling or what let us know what's up I see you guys' notes uh on the stuff um I I just want to mention it really quickly because this is freaking we can drop the remarkable completely but the the other thing I mean the remarkable is the one thing I didn't want to draw from that part but go on then we can just we're just gonna move quickly because I this is all big news unfortunately uh okay let's move on to some other news and something that happened last Friday that is is kind of hilarious is that Brazil has officially banned X Twitter for using for refusing to comply with the supreme court order and it it was like uh the blip over there it's like the the MCU blip happening with all the Brazil accounts uh this all happened because uh what was it Brazil courts were ordering Elon Musk to comply um let me see here uh musk refused to appoint a legal representative for his case and to comply with uh the judge Alexandra de his order to shut down X accounts he deemed harmful to the Democratic process and basically like El musk was not taking the seriously they didn't listen to what Brazil was saying and this is like another example of what happened with the telegram CEO right of a country just being like okay well we're asking you to like help us out here because your platform is producing a lot of garbage can you help us out with the garbage and they say no and now this has happened so uh the snap from the MC is what this essentially was this led directly almost directly to 2 million new users heading to Blue Sky because we have learned that the Stan accounts that are all over Twitter are pretty much from always online Brazilian super fans uh Taylor Lauren did some good reporting on this too like she points out that this is essentially the death for huge fan accounts and this could fundamentally reshape social media and marketing like the marketing world for entertainment for music artists for movies for everything for TV shows like these Stan accounts were out there sharing the gifts sharing the memes like getting hype up for all their the things that they love um they don't exist anymore they're they're just blipped out of existence who knows like who knows what can happen to the entertainment industry because Brazil is no longer online so that's just kind of kind of wild charin like I'm sure you engage with some of these fan accounts like do you have thoughts about this at all you don't I refuse to engage with fan accounts I don't engage with fan accounts um you are your own fan account as as we will never I will say that Mark and Buddy 305 love are like sorry Mark and de9 in the chat are like Brazil gonna give it to you finally get wrecked X which is I mean that's the sentiment I'm taking away from this right I'm like I'm glad someone something's actually being done I think uh what was it Brazil was uh had said it was going to freeze the the assets or the finances uh was it not X but like aing starlink service starlink thank you yeah and so they're doing things they're trying to give ual repercussions um it's just funny add this another to the domino effect of Elon Musk buying Twitter like the domino effect of stupidity just cascading throughout the land goodbye like I mean X could eventually come back to Brazil but I think a lot of those accounts would not feel like it's stable or safe to be there so they'll probably try to re-engage themselves somewhere else so anyway that was hilarious we saw the news this week that safe super intelligence uh Ilia setk startup the executive from open AI who left has raised a billion dollarss it's billion with a B we don't know what this could all they have a crappy website up saying hey uh we're building directly for safe super intelligence that that's the goal they're not selling anything like open AI does this seem insane to you sherlin because to me I read this news and I just kind of again put my head in my hands and thought what the hell are we doing as this Society because all these investors who are real people real investors including a16z Sequoia dstc Global and SV Angel have given this company which is essentially a pitch to create God that's what they're saying developing super intelligence um they've given them a billion dollars does that not seem weird to you I don't think it's necessarily just weird I just think people are way too excited to give like non-proven Ventures money I think that sure but this proven open AI person is pro unproven person I just don't like the like whole the boner everyone has for AI right now I guess and also it is a lot of money I wish they could throw this to philanthropy somewhere lit literally anything else anything else would be useful it's not just AI though it is specifically the idea of super intelligence so it's the idea of AI as we've learned in like the the Terminator movies or something so they want to make a safe Skynet essentially a self-aware AI oh man I don't know in in other news too we saw that the Department of Justice has charged two RT workers over building a right-wing Russian social media influencer campaign hey by the way this includ includes uh right-wing influencers such as Tim p and Benny Johnson who were working for this Russian outfit they were working for tenant media and CNN says that oh by the way uh yeah the Russian RT essentially wanted to engage social media influencers to spew pro-russian bias and anti-American news so to disrupt things like news around the Ukraine the war in Ukraine you know um these these fellas happily did it so that's fun I don't know there there's going to be some percussions all that too a lot of news this week too about um secret uh spies working for other companies or other countries by the way Shin including some representatives from New York who turned out to be like working for China and we did not know that's a whole thing you want to shout out about this remarkable paper Pro which is cool I mean actually have um more devices to shut out that weren't necessarily related to um epha but they were very actually uh fun to see so yeah the remarkable is one of the tablet that has like a color e ink and is a writable tablet that people are big fans of uh Dan Cooper this week wrote up the remarkable paper Pro which is their first colorful by the way yeah yeah I think so is for them the first colorful and like can imagine writing on it in color anyway just go check that out I think I want to really power through it does look really cool uh the other two gadgets I want to shout out uh the GoPro Hero 13 black was announced this week uh Matt Smith on our team wrote that up that was uh I mean he the it comes with now some of these like new lens things that really changed the experience so go check out the details on his Hands-On and then I think just this morning uh we saw that DJI has announced the Neo which is according to Steve dent on our team uh a powerful and lightweight drone that only costs $200 like he even asked me he was like CU that he was like I was editing he's like actually would you be tempted by I'm like yes I would throw $200 down to get a drw because this area everybody yeah yeah it's gonna look great it's not like the it's like according to Steve it's like um similar to what the footage quality you'd get on your iPhone for example a recent iPhone so not bad at all I I think drones cheaper drones will be a compelling thing to kids and like a lot of people like yeah yeah I will say DJI he one of those Brands where it's like hey we're shutting down everything Chinese right like why are why why are we allowing them they are they are unfortunately the best drone company like when it comes to Optics and Hardwares but yes also we worry about the Chinese Hardware there uh I want to sh a couple things I do want to mention this it's uh the game Concord which has been in the news for a while for being a very like a well-funded Sony shooter that had very like nobody playing it apparently on Steam over the last couple weeks it's officially going on the fine two weeks after it launched on the PS5 and PC and what a disaster what a like it's it's like making the new Call of Duty Sony spent hundreds of millions of dollars on this thing years and years of development for two weeks dead I just I don't know at some point like maybe J cond and I will like dive into what the hell happened here but that's just kind of wild also we want to shout out the Minecraft movie movie teaser finally got a look at this thing um it looks like a nightmare I don't know if you saw that teaser sh in but nope not not a fan Jack Black is in another way editing about a zillian things yesterday barely had enough time to breathe so Jack BLX in another video game movie so that's just I love jackbox though I love jackbox Jack Black but Jack oh I saw the I saw the meme of him I sorry I heard jackbox I saw the meme of Jack Black uh like they were like oh first uh What uh look at Jack Black as this person from Minecraft and then it was him on the left and his character on the right it's like they look nothing like it's the same well I don't know his his character in Minecraft looks exactly like Jack black dresses in real life it's just it's just normal stuff anyway we've got a lot of stuff going on we're prepping for the iPhone event anything you want to shout out in terms of what you're working on reviews still haven't seen any reviews where I'm still writing things there's there's more reviews still writing and also the iPhone event is on Monday so I yeah somehow we will survive that folks stay tuned for all our coverage out that's not the only thing happening on Monday but y'all will see we'll see we'll see all right I got any pop culture picks you want to shout out charlin oh don't remember doing anything beyond the last 48 hours maybe charlin you shouldn't work so much like uh I feel like all st stop just just take a break what I'd recommend to you Shin is maybe check out Terminator zero which is the new anime on Netflix which is fantastic uh this is a sort of like it's a Terminator story set between 2022 where the machine war has already happened in 1997 it's set in Japan it has like a really great cast of uh of uh voice artists or like actors involved too like on the English side there's uh I believe Andre h Holland is in this one rosar Dawson Z Muno who I love um it is sort of like yeah it is about somebody building safe super intelligence to fight Skynet and uh who knows what's going to happen there it also comes from production IG which are which are the that's a studio that did Ghost in the Shell so it's kind of wild to see the Ghost in the Shell folks come around and essentially doing a literal Terminator story so I'm digging it it's a really cool show also want to shout out Star Wars Outlaws we did uh have we to cover that I forget I I'm enjoying it this game has been contentious because people are like open world games are boring now and in general a lot of people want to hate on Star Wars stuff um I'm you you get to be a rebel in Star Wars it's fun it's fun there's no lightsabers but you get to go pew pew and do stealth missions and you have a cool animal that steals stuff for you I dig it I like Star Wars Outlaws another game I'd recommend to Shin is shin will ever play a game Beyond whatever YouTube has all right we can wrap cool well that's it for this 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 very own o our Alro music is by our former managing editor Terrence O'Brien this podcast is produced by Ben Elman you can find dindra online at vindra on Twitter blue sky mastedon I'm on thread sto but don't ping me there please also tweet about uh or I podcast about movies and TV at the filmcast at the filmcast tocom you want to send me a way to help me with my life and work and or detachable webcams because I love those uh you can hit me up on threads at sh Instagram c h r l i n n s t h r m or on X Twitter but not in Brazil um email us your thoughts about this podcast at podcast engadget.com leave us a review wherever you're listening or tuning into to this and subscribe on your favorite podcast platform all right do we want to do any Q&A or you got to run chin I gotta run I'm three minutes late now so I'm gonna go do your thing we'll talk send yes you guys can talk I will be out but it was really nice to see everyone on chat and I'll see oh yeah come back next week for a podcast special on F lifeone event byebye yep bye okay what's up chat room yes uh average average 3D Jo my room is messy normally the camera does not see the full extent of the mess but I'm using a temporary camera with a wider field of view it sucks because the stuff I try to hide is not there Ben you're muted yes I am indeed muted sorry about that uh Tom Rogers said Ben hope you enjoyed your vacation thank you um it was kind of a working vacation I've been taking a lot of working vacations recently but it's always nice to at least be producing the podcast from a different room uh there it goes so kill my I think the biggest thing that I want to talk about more because I had not heard very much about Concord at all is Concord goodness that's a disaster like abject complete disaster especially coming off of what's the other game that they had uh the the other shooter that actually worked out really well for Sony um its Name Escapes Me Now talking about Killzone well no you were playing it Ben weren't you playing what's the thing you just play oh yeah hundreds of hours on Hell divers 2 hell divers 2 I bought hell divers 2 I played like a couple hours of it it's fine perfectly fine I will probably play hell divers within the next couple of days I've been busy recently but I love it it's so good and they had like a huge success there they kind of had their own Force failure by like having the like PlayStation Network restrictions I think around all that stuff too and they just walk that back and Concord is like hey here's our okay you're talking about hell divers with the PlayStation Network stuff yes that stuff too maybe they could have helped themselves with um Concord if they did that too maybe but yeah Sony uh I don't know I don't know so this is like really a box office bomb that's crazy yes it's insane it's it's kind of crazy uh we are not fully a video game site but we've covered some of this stuff and just like the sheer amount of money and effort that went to this and just like I imagine the the sort of like uh management decisions too like somebody okaying this thing for years thinking that this could compete with something like valerant or OverWatch or any of the other like team based Shooters just wild to me fascinating fascinating failure apparently yeah uh and they've been really going all out to show that valerant is available on um consoles now like so many of the subway stations in New York that I walk past or or walk through to like transfer trains they're like valerant now available and I'm like congratulations Atlantic Avenue barklay Center for um for uh matriculating into a computer science degree at one of the UC schools um I mean Val is also free you know that's that's the main thing conord was a $40 game and I think that that barrier was too much for a lot of people their friends weren't playing it so they never really got the user base and just like a really this is going to be like studied in business schools for for forever like a really interesting failure of like what the hell went wrong here oh man Mark Dell says I feel bad for the devs that worked on that for so long absolutely same 100% um Jack Black in jackbox also from Mark Dell would be a probably better idea than Minecraft the movie he would maybe be too much too much Jack Black and like that been a little bit spoiled when it comes to like intellectual property being transferred into or or um adapted into actually good movies in the last few years I think Borderlands showed us that yes you can still mess up on that and maybe Minecraft will continue that um Trend Minecraft is from the Napoleon Dynamite guy so that's kind of really yeah Jared H and the thing I like that director I like um what's it called Nacho Libre which he did with with Jack Black too and that movie is very cute and funny like I think Jared H is a good director but this movie that the Minecraft thing looks like a freaking nightmare because they made like the horrific AI versions of you know those images you see horrific AI versions of the cute Minecraft uh you know pixel creatures and they look bad they look so bad uh my daughter's obsessed with Minecraft so I'm finally playing it more and get trying to understand uh what what the hell is up with this game and the aesthetic of Minecraft is wonderful because it's like very chill very blocky almost like pixel art in 3D form nothing about the movie captures that so that's a shame I remember talking online with some people uh saying you know where I we were talking about like ambient music and we were saying like oh has there been like a major ambient musician Minecraft post Brian Eno cf4 Wait no that's uh CF 542 is one of our um commenters what I'm saying is Minecraft composer got to look it up but the guy who C418 C418 okay yes bunch of numbers but C C418 is the biggest ambient composer of the era now because he got his music into the game that every kid under 10 has played for by the way he's pronounced C418 as I see on his Wikipedia I will remember this so I can interact with the kids yeah talk to them about their favorite musician who's created all their like this guy is the coji condo of this entire generation basically well okay let's make sure that he continues like he might just you know go off and do like weird ambient music that doesn't find its way into video games he's doing he's doing that too from what I've seen but I don't think you can call him COI condo until he like goes back to video games and has a broader body of work sure sure now now you're just like poking fun at my metaphor Ben but yes sorry yes uh I totally agree there was a great uh Dale North who produced our podcast theme music uh had a great tweet Thread about like why the music in the new Zelda game which I'm not sure is actually coji condo but like why it's so good and riing on those koi themes uh anyway I love c48 like this music uh I have like ambient electronic music playlists while the kids are playing and now it's not just like video game remixes it is just stuff from Minecraft because it Cals my daughter likes it she finds it very soothing and it's actually really good ambient music so yeah yeah it's something that you could listen to at dinner and the kid is like oh this is the Minecraft music and the parents who haven't spent that much time is are also just like oh okay this is nice and calming and um it's something that you could play for a baby play for a baby some some of it like there's one track called subwoofer L lullabi which I think is perfect as like a wind down nighttime song but so cud is also talking about valves deadlock that's something that I've seen more and more stuff about online and I would really love to talk to let's try to get Jess on in the next few weeks to talk about deadlock and Concord we had mentioned like the hell that the stupidity that happened over deadlock like that was a game where tens of thousands of people were playing in The Verge got in trouble for like saying hey uh we also played deadlock um that was hilarious and it's also kind of funny that deadlock exists because I was a big Team Fortress 2 person yes when Team Fortress 2 was a big deal then OverWatch came out and I was like oh okay OverWatch is just kind of like Team Fortress 2 except all of the character design is a little sexy like way sexy well it's like anime sexy yeah yeah and now valve is taking it back and it's like actually we can do that too and now it's like Team Fortress 2 was the original uh OverWatch is the copy OverWatch 2 copy of copy whatever and now deadlock is like copy of copy of copy is deadlock apparently like a DOTA basically a DOTA fps2 so it's like it is a cross between kind of like Team Fortress and DOTA because you have like little Minions that you are helping you know in the tug of war in the like um that kind of Arena style I can I cannot wait to play that like I've had a little more time to play games recently so deadlock is uh it looks really cool I think the stuff they were doing around like keep trying to keep it secret or like I don't know retaliating against people for writing about it is really stupid but whatever yeah whatever all right okay so I think we're done with the stream if you want a shout out uh put something in the chat but you know bye to Mark Dell bye to dr9 by bye to Buddy 305 love who says that his son is also really into Minecraft but trying to get him off it hey mcraft is not first game that your kid be playing let's be real at least it's not freaking Roblox like that stuff is a nightmare and looks like garbage I mean looks like garbage and also just like you can have a kid just have all the fun they want on their own in their own Minecraft seed versus all of the problems that uh Roblox being online has come up with uh that there's yep there's some predators on there I play uh Minecraft when my daughter plays Minecraft on the iPad I can jump in on my iPhone and we play together see what she feels it's really cool she plays with her cousin who's in New York she he can jump in Via her you know gamertag so all that stuff is good good stuff all right thanks so goodbye to cud goodbye to Dean I saw you there by a Dro n Tom Rogers Simon B let's scroll all the way up as high as I can go um Misha C Daniel Diaz yes goodbye everybody goodbye thank you all so uh video comes to you via oh God I'm so tired I'm sorry okay we're done video comes to you comes to you via uh Dev on OBS I'm doing better camera switching every single week and we'll see you next week thanks folks we're out uh be sure to like up the stream subscribe reviews on iTunes yeah and if you enjoy watching the show on YouTube give us a download just go to your podcast app and download it even if you saw the show live why not more numbers are good thanks folks we're out