Devindra has been writing about the way technology intersects with our lives for nearly 20 years. He started the Amherst Student's first technology column, worked in IT support for many (many) years, and eventually moved to Brooklyn to cover New York's tech scene in 2009.
Is the second time the charm for Google 's foldable? In this episode, Devindra chats with Senior Writer Sam Rutherford about his hands-on impressions of the new Pixel 9 Pro Fold. It has bigger screens and a sleeker design than its predecessor, but how does it compare to the other foldables out there? And why isn't it called the Pixel Fold 2?!
A lot of people may be getting a little tired of this at this point, but obviously the big focus again was on AI. So we got, you know, some new AI features, some new AI camera features and some other stuff.
Basically, somebody took a photo of something at was asking the, you know, Gemini, am I free for this? Can you add this to my calendar? It failed three times. It took 60 seconds. What did you think about just that demo? Because it seemed like a big failure of the whole idea of AI assistance.There's the pros and cons. Obviously, you know, anytime it's like the curse of live demos, right.
So I guess we'll, we'll see where all this goes. I really want to talk about the Pixel 9 Pro Fold, Sam. So you did the hands on, go check out the Sam's coverage of that and the video of that, I really got stuck, held up just with the name of this thing because we were all expecting a pixel fold to or something like that.
It's not a clean name. I don't think it really matters if people know if it's part of the Pixel 9 family or not, because it is a foldable. It's the newest foldable. A lot of people would assume it'll have the latest Hardaware, calling it Pixel. And then you can't just call it the Pixel 9 fold. It has that you know, almost passport shaped. Dimensions. But for the pro fold, Google actually did something really clever is like their whole goal with the original pixel fold was to make the outside screen more usable. And they did that by making it a little bit wider, a little bit shorter, a little, kind of a little bit squattier.
So by having that main display now in the pro fold in portrait mode, by default, it's pretty much like all the other foldables on the net. So it's from a developer's perspective, it's a lot easier for, you know, compatibility thing.So, yeah, so it's like more in line. Now, what is interesting about the pixel nine pro fold is that, Yeah, that outside screen, you could just live on that all the time. And then occasionally pop it open and do the big screen.
I think, how is the screen crease? Cause that is the thing that always gets me about a full I mean, it's still there.No, no company has completely gotten rid of it. there, there's some arguments on the laptop side where, you know, Maybe they have done it, but it's to me, especially like I'm, I'm, you know, I'm a little biased because I've been using foldables for so long.
I think there's some objective things you can point to be like, well, this is a little more polished than before. Even if you, even if you love the camera bar, I pixel nine because I ended up writing up that news. And then you know, we saw in like last year on November, December and into the new year, like they had to release some extra patches to kind of shore up the bugs. And so if this means that we're going to get less buggy releases of Android, especially when they come to the pixel. I'm kind of okay with it.
And they have to get, you know, by display units to put in a certain number of stores. I think it kind of makes sense that like for a foldable, most foldable people, at least me in the past, you know, if I'm going to buy a foldable, I'm going to buy directly from the manufacturer. And so I think a lot of foldable people are like that.
And, you know, when Apple does it too, it's not going to be, they're going to look at the competition may even be more expensive than everybody else. we've talked about the Z flip and how the sort of like. Portrait style foldables that flip down like the razor as well. Those are getting more inexpensive.
And I think I've been noticing more people like out in the world using foldables. And so I think there's is an untapped market, but not until they get the prices downat probably at least under 1500 because Apple basically helped push smartphone prices beyond 1, 000 with the their max phones. I think we were all like, Oh man, are we getting to that point?
For a lot of people, I feel like that's still the better option and probably will be for a very long time. Do you, I don't know, you've been using this, could you live without a big foldable at this point, Sam?I like the fact that a foldable combines a smartphone and a tablet into one device, which means there's one less device that I need to worry about keeping charged up, keeping updated, whatever.
Quote unquote, perfect. Nothing's ever perfect, but it's, you know, it has that Apple polish on it before it gets released to the world.It's not perfect, but better than everybody else, which is what I think, like even the vision pro, like for all of its fault, it is a better headset than so many others. Like they have solved a lot of like functional issues.
Like it'll be a little more modern. So maybe that'll be a thing, but yeah, now that you bring it up, Sam, I do think an Apple flip style foldable could be good, but we've also seen the rumors of Apple also wants to be like, let's go impossibly thin, like they did with the, the latest iPad pros. If you combine the impossibly thin.
And so this is something that like, I'm sure Lynn has definitely been on that bandwagon about You need to provide all the features that Apple and Samsung offer without the Fitbit subscription. And then if you want to have you know, really specialized coaching or stuff like that, that's what the Fitbit subscription is for.
And I don't mind sacrificing a bit of screen space for that stuff. So anyway, we will be looking at all these devices soon. Keep an eye out for more coverage on our reviews over the next few weeks. Let's move on to some other news and. You know what? Something similarly related to Google, by the way, is Eric Schmidt, former Google CEO, had a talk at Stanford where he said a lot of things.
Like they, they will be the sharks about this, IP, who cares? A little legal issues. We will deal with that when we have billions of dollars. So just funny to see somebody say it out loud. And then immediately his response was he asked Stanford to take down the video and he's saying, he misspoke. He's saying, yeah, he, he did not actually mean the things he's saying.
The core issue to me is that for Google, the big thing is search, right? They kind of have a monopoly on search. But the thing is, is that it's not because there's, you know, they're hurting competition. People just don't want to use Bing.
I think that's what they're really railing against. And the thing about Microsoft is that, you know, way back in the nineties, the Microsoft antitrust stuff was about Internet Explorer being a part of windows and people being forced to choose Internet Explorer. Internet Explorer was not like dominating the browser market back then.
basically according to bleeping computer, there's a data dump of 2. 7 billion records of personal info for people in the U S that includes names through social security numbers, aliases, and physical addressive, that people are known to have lived at. From what I've seen, like some people have confirmed, like it does have their information.
and this kind of, you know, tags onto like a bigger issue of, like I said, security breaches are so commonplace. And then now we're getting into the point where there are entire, Hacker protocols where their whole goal is to gather a bunch of leaked data or breaches, and then decrypt it later once quantum computing becomes more available in some, like a lot of the current security practices.NIST encryption standard to kind of sidestep this in the future.
And I can't help but think like how much of a distraction, a lot of that stuff is like, what, what life coaching is he getting to be like, don't worry about the global consequences of your actions from your companies. Just be chill, Mark Zuckerberg. because in thetiming of this This seems a little bit weird because Zuckerberg himself has been talking about, we want to be more transparent and, you know, be, give people more insight into how meta works.
final story for us is that Apple is opening up NFC functionality to third party developers and iOS 18. 1. this was a thing that was going to be coming to the EU, but now it's coming to everybody looks and. People can use it to do tap to pay functions, functions that rely on the secure element, Sam, like you, you're the mobile guy.
It's going to be like a bigger security risk for Apple to do this. But yeah, it's, it's a good thing. I, I love tapping NFC stuff. Like I feel like I'm in the future when I can just tap my phone on something and just pay for groceries. Yeah.And so it's Oh, Hey, this is kind of nice.
No, I don't know about that. So these are the things I'm more annoyed that Apple does. And when it just seems petty, when it's not really about security, it's just about you, like almost punishing developers for going outside of your ecosystem, I think that's a big problem. But yeah, we'll be following all these stories, folks.Let's move on to what we're working on.
So good luck. Enter the chaos zone. Enter the chaos zone. Everybody sends Sam your well wishes and everything. Let's move on to some, some pop culture picks for the week. Sam, what do you want to shout out? There's a new TFTset, team fight tactics. This is the game that I've been playing a long time. I play the double up the two person mode with my wife.
So, yeah, good luck with that, Sam. Some things from my end, something good and something terrible. Alien Romulus, I think is fantastic. I have a review up on the site. this is a Fede Alvarez film set between Alien 1 and Aliens. And it has the like cool retro tech and style of the original films. it feels like very much an old school alien movie.
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