Pixel 11 and Pixel Watch 5: Our first impressions | The Vergecast Livestream

Google just showed off its next generation of hardware, including the Pixel 11, Pixel 11 Pro, Pixel 11 Pro XL, and Pixel11 Pro Fold. (Whew, those names.) There's also the new Pixel Watch 5, the Pixel Tag, and a bunch of really interesting new ideas about smartphone cameras, GPS, and wellness. David Pierce, Nilay Patel, and Victoria Song went live to talk about the state of Google's hardware, and whether there's anything worth upgrading for this year. Further reading: The 7 biggest announcements of Google’s Pixel 11 launch Subscribe to The Verge for unlimited access to theverge.com, subscriber-exclusive newsletters, and our ad-free podcast feed. We love hearing from you! Email your questions and thoughts to [email protected] or call us at 866-VERGE11. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:11Speaker 02

  Hello and welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of Quickshare, which is kind of like Airdrop, only different. I'm your friend David Pierce. I am joined by two of our friends in the New York studio. Neelai Patel, hello, sir.

• 1:23Speaker 03

  Quickshare is European airdrop.

• 1:25Speaker 02

  And Vee Song, hi, Vee.

• 1:27Speaker 04

  Hello.

• 1:27Speaker 03

  It's like kilometers.

• 1:29Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 1:29Speaker 03

  European miles.

• 1:32Speaker 02

  It works the same, but all the numbers are slightly different. And none of it matters all that much, anyway. We are here because today is Pixel Day. Google, in its inimitable wisdom, has chosen yet another deeply bizarre way to launch a bunch of its new products. It told us about these products a while back. They're launching this morning. And then there's a big event with Trevor Noah tonight that, Vee, I believe you have been conscripted into attending, correct?

• 1:59Speaker 04

  I was voluntold to go.

• 2:02Speaker 02

  I'm excited for you.

• 2:03Speaker 03

  Trevor Noah's a delight. You're gonna love it.

• 2:06Speaker 04

  He's fine.

• 2:07Speaker 03

  Do it.

• 2:08Speaker 02

  The Jimmy Fallon event last year was like, I would say borderline awkward enough that it was maybe not a great time. I feel like Trevor Noah will at least be a good time.

• 2:17Speaker 04

  I lost my mind last year watching Jimmy Fallon, especially when he held the phone upside down and then clapped his hands like a seal, saying, "Tenser."

• 2:27Speaker 02

  Oh, my gosh.

• 2:28Speaker 03

  Yeah. Look, there's a thing happening that we should just say out loud. There's the event for nerds to hold phones and write about specs. That's our event. Then there's what you have to do to get hundreds of videos that are like, "Come with me to Google's Pixel event," where Jimmy Fallon says the word "tensor" for money. These paths are diverging.

• 2:50Speaker 02

  Inside of us, there are two wolves.

• 2:51Speaker 03

  Right. There's the creator money, which maybe we should go get. And then there's like, doing the news. And I think Google is just like, screw it, we gotta split them up. Because I think they tried to do them both at the same time last year. And it drove everybody bananas.

• 3:06Speaker 04

  No, the embargo was still earlier than the event last year. And everyone thought we broke embargo. And it's like, no, no, no.

• 3:13Speaker 03

  Well, they think that this year, too. Don't worry about it.

• 3:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, I know. But we didn't.

• 3:17Speaker 02

  It's all been very complicated.

• 3:18Speaker 04

  It's...

• 3:20Speaker 04

  You know what? It's not in Brooklyn Navy Yard this year. I don't have to trek to the most isolated part in Brooklyn that is accessible by ferry and like, the F train via York Street. I can go to Hudson Yards, which is like the other inaccessible part where no public

• 3:36Speaker 03

  Well, now you know where Vee's gonna be today, everybody.

• 3:38Speaker 02

  Everybody go say hi to Vee, but be cool about it. We should talk about all the stuff that they launched. So there's a new line of Pixel phones. There's a new Pixel watch. There's a new Pixel tag. There's a foldable phone. There's a couple of like little software-y announcements we should talk about. But we should start with the phones, right? And to frame some of what we're about to get into, our friend and current contributor, David Amel, went and saw these phones. He is like gallivanting in Europe somewhere right now, so he couldn't be on the show. But he went and saw the phones and he made a hands-on video. We're gonna show it to you right now, and then we're gonna dive into these phones.

• 4:14David Pierce?

  Thinner camera bar, so it's a little more, you know, edge-to-edge there. The glass on the cameras is straight across the camera. It's very edge-to-edge now. And overall, these phones are just a little nicer and a little more refined than they were previously. Another new feature on the Pixel 11 Pro that replaces the temperature sensor from last year is the new highlight feature. Highlight is effectively a little visual LED that glows when you're talking to Gemini and when you get calls from your favorite contacts. There aren't a ton of hardware changes this year in the phones, but there are a lot of changes in the software. On the Pros this year, you are getting a 30% bigger telephoto lens. You're gonna get a lot better optical quality on telephoto shots. You're also getting things like much faster night sight on the Pro, which is up to four and a half times faster than the previous Pixel. But one of the new biggest camera features this year

• 4:59David Pierce?

  is the new camera looks mode. So camera looks is Google's response to people wanting a more vintage look out of their smartphone. Smartphone cameras have gotten a little too good in the last few years, so they've added a bunch of new modes that kind of give you a Digicam-style look. There's about 10 total looks in the camera, but these aren't just filters. They're actually changing the way that they do the HDR capture at a sensor level, which is a pretty big deal. There's also a new magic capture mode, which is really front and center in the camera here. When you enable that and start recording, the phone will automatically pull out really good photos and videos from the scene around you when you wave your phone around. It's actually pretty cool. There's also the all-new Creator Suite in the video mode, which gives you things like a teleprompter, automatic clip project folder saving. You've got an audio visualizer.

• 5:43David Pierce?

  Kind of everything that a social media creator would need to make videos on their phone. Now, there's a lot of colors available for these phones, so make sure you check out the website to see all of them. But the Pixel 11 is gonna come in at $899 starting, and the Pixel 11 Pro is gonna come in at $1099 starting. If you wanna see more about all of this, make sure you go to theverge.com to check it out.

• 6:02Speaker 02

  It's great advice from David Amel. Do all of that right after we finish this livestream. Don't go anywhere until then. So, okay, we should go through these phones kind of one by one, but the just basic sort of overall information about the new lineup of Pixels. So there's the Pixel 11, the Pixel 11 Pro, and the Pixel 11 Pro Full, and the Pixel 11 Pro XL. Four phones with all different, complicated names. Anyway, the phones are all... Well, we'll get to the watch, Vee. Just...

• 6:29Speaker 04

  I have the fold.

• 6:31Speaker 02

  Oh, you have the fold on you?

• 6:32Speaker 04

  I have the fold on me.

• 6:33Speaker 03

  And now I have the fold. And Vee's never getting it back.

• 6:37Speaker 02

  Okay, so these phones... There are a few things that are sort of overall true about this whole lineup. They're all $100 more expensive than last year. Like David said, the 11 starts at $899, and they go up from there. The good news next to that is that they have gotten rid of the 128GB storage model. And now the base model of all of these phones starts at $256. The lesson we're learning from the tech industry is that like, flash drive memory is cheap and RAM is expensive. So everybody is doing less RAM and more storage. And that's fine. Basically, they all run the Tensor G6 chip. The 12GB of RAM is the baseline now. Some of them go as high as 16GB. They're promising better battery life.

• 7:20Speaker 02

  They have Qi 2.2 charging that's a little faster. In most ways, these phones are identical. And we can get to some of the ways in which they are different. But the Pixel lineup has always kind of been like this. Their big idea is about software and Gemini and AI and all of the things that they can do without needing bleeding-edge hardware. And it is worth saying, nothing about this is bleeding-edge hardware. Which is kind of where I wanna start on these phones. Just from a pure like, what's in the box here perspective, Neelai. I don't think we expected to be like blown away by what Google came out with on the spec sheet of a Pixel. But this is pretty milquetoast when it comes to Pixels.

• 8:03Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, I can probably spend the next half hour just talking about what they're doing in the camera.

• 8:09Speaker 02

  We're going to, don't worry.

• 8:10Speaker 03

  Your point that Google never tries to be at the bleeding edge of hardware specs and is constantly trying to push forward what Android can do at the software level. Obviously, you know, the amount of Gemini in this phone. There's a literal light on the Pro that's like, "Look at me, I'm Gemini." Like, that's what the focus of these phones really is. And then we can always just be honest about the reality of the Pixel line as a whole, which is that it's for enthusiasts and to keep Samsung in line. Those are... That's its job, right? And as long as those two things exist, like, job done. Which is why I think Google rolls them out the way they roll them out. Fundamentally, competing at the high end of Samsung is not the point.

• 8:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think that's right. And I think that's a mistake, honestly. Like, you look at this and the things that you just said, right? This is for enthusiasts. Like, God, you know who might care about the Geekbench results for the Pixel and all of these different devices? Enthusiasts. There was a whole mini kerfuffle around the last run of phones because the last version of the Tensor processor did horribly in benchmarks. The overwhelming feeling was that actually, it doesn't really matter. You basically can't find a game on Android that uses all of the available CPU and GPU anyway. So who really cares? But we're also at a moment where it's like, okay, we're imagining all of the new things that your phone can do for you. Local AI is the future of everything, according to everybody,

• 9:37Speaker 02

  including Google in many cases. Shouldn't you be investing in making my hardware as fast and capable as possible at this moment in time?

• 9:46Speaker 03

  Oh, I can make an even stronger argument. You made the price go up. This thing should last a long time.

• 9:53Speaker 02

  Very true.

• 9:53Speaker 03

  Right? If you're gonna charge more money, then I should expect this thing to last longer than usual. Now, it's not a huge jump the way that we've seen laptops take huge jumps and other phones take huge jumps. It's $100, and you need to get more storage. But I would say value for dollar is expressed now in time.

• 10:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 10:11Speaker 03

  Right? If you spend a lot of money, you don't want it to just last two years. You want it to last four or five. And I don't know if this hardware has that longevity in it. I think your point about AI is interesting, but all of Google's AI is in the cloud. Like, the real action here is the camera and like, being for creators and like, making a lot of things more automatic in like, interesting ways in terms of content creation. I don't think there's another big set of ideas here that you're not gonna get on another phone.

• 10:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think that's right. Vee, you're less like CPU-pilled than some of our phone people. You also, you know, just saw the new Samsung devices. Like, is this... Were you disappointed by the hardware here at all?

• 10:57Speaker 04

  Uh, not really. Well, you know, I, I usually am pretty far down on the list of getting a phone. So I'm just enjoying opening.

• 11:06Speaker 03

  That, that color is very pretty.

• 11:08Speaker 04

  It's a very pretty color. And I was like, ooh, I get to play with foldable and pretend to be Allison today.

• 11:15Speaker 02

  Is that the pistachio fold?

• 11:16Speaker 04

  This is the pistachio fold. Yes. Or olive, or, you know, the green color.

• 11:22Speaker 02

  It's lovely. It's really nice.

• 11:23Speaker 04

  It's very pretty. I've been like, it matches my nails. I love it. It's, it's a good, it's a good little fold. I, I did wear it as a hat.

• 11:33Speaker 02

  See, that's what else do you need to know? Trevor Noah, take notes.

• 11:37Speaker 04

  No, but it's, it's, it's, it's nice. Like, um, actually, you know, uh, as the premier color obsessee on, on, on staff, I was looking at the colors very intently at this.

• 11:50Speaker 02

  Do you need us to make space for you to have a 10 minute crash out about the name of one of these colors as you want to do on this show?

• 11:56Speaker 04

  Listen, that was only about the Fitbit Air and it made a lasting impact. Okay. Uh, we had, I had many discussions with, uh, various Google people about colors and what we named them.

• 12:08Speaker 02

  Happy to hear that.

• 12:08Speaker 04

  Uh, but no, they're great. I really love the hibiscus color, which is a very bright, bright pink.

• 12:14Speaker 02

  That's the magenta one? That is clearly the best color, right? I feel like in every one of these lineups, there is a color that is just obviously clearly the best. And in this case, it is the, the magenta color, which I think is gorgeous.

• 12:24Speaker 04

  I fully agree with that, though David Amel does not. We, we had, uh, he was like, are your eyes not bleeding looking at this? And I was like, no. They're crying tears of joy because it's a saturated color, which some tech companies don't love.

• 12:40Speaker 03

  Yeah. Even Google, even this color is kind of a muted army green.

• 12:42Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's a very muted green, but you know, like, I like that there's options. You can have the aggressively pink phone, or you could have the muted green phone. They're both beautiful colors. Wonderful palette, wonderful palette this year. Um, it was really funny because when we were at the content capture, uh, for the, uh, you know, the regular 11 phone, I had like a Google guy run up to me. He's like, if you put the case on, it'll lie flat on the table. And he's like, put the case on. So I put the case on. He's like, doesn't it lie flat? Do it on both sides. Does it lie flat?

• 13:13Speaker 03

  This is because there's a viral video of somebody cutting the camera bump off as you fold it with a razor.

• 13:17Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 13:18Speaker 03

  They're just letting you know that you can spend more money to make the phone lie flat.

• 13:21Speaker 04

  Yeah, basically.

• 13:22Speaker 03

  It's good.

• 13:23Speaker 04

  And it is like, look, it's flat. And I was like, he was so excited. And I was like,

• 13:28Speaker 03

  You know what, you know what's not true about this phone though? And it's expensive. I think the fold is what $1,900?

• 13:35Speaker 04

  Uh, yeah, I think it's about $100.

• 13:37Speaker 03

  This, we're in, we're in the time of no creases, right? Samsung really got that crease to go away. All the rumors are Apple's gonna get that crease to go away. This is one of the creasiest crease phones in quite a while. And I think it's because of the durability. Like, Google's like really very proud of how durable this is. You can't crack it, all this stuff. And I, I think there's, uh, there's at least one hardware compromise here. It's funny because $1,900 is not cheap. It's not like,

• 14:03Speaker 04

  No, I did.

• 14:03Speaker 03

  The Z Fold Ultra is $2,100? Like, I think I can see $300 here.

• 14:09Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, I went home and I was like, I finally got my hands on a foldable. Cause Allison is out until next week. And, uh, my husband went, he went like, oh, yoink, opened it. He's like, there's a crease. Yoink, passed it back to me. So I was like, okay, well, I'm still having fun. So, yeah.

• 14:28Speaker 02

  So I, I think we can, we can dispense with the specs of this phone fairly quickly, but I do think there's, there's one thing that Neelai, as the resident display enthusiast, uh, I have a genuine question, which is that, uh, one of the big upgrades on the Pro is that it has a brighter screen that this time, instead of being 3,300 nits of max brightness, is 3,600 nits of max brightness. I, I, I mean this absolutely sincerely. Is that a, does that matter? Like, is that a, is that a real upgrade that you will notice?

• 15:00Speaker 03

  It is hard to say without trying to get it to hit peak brightness in sunlight for more than five minutes. Cause what they all, they can all hit their peak brightness and then they get hot and then they throw. And like, we've all had this experience now.

• 15:13Speaker 02

  It probably Pixel famously have.

• 15:15Speaker 03

  Yeah. Uh, so who, who knows? I, I like it. Everybody wants more searing HDR content. When they're watching a movie on a plane, as Christopher Nolan intended on the back of their phone. Uh, but it, the real question is the point of that peak brightness is not HDR content. It's sunlight viewing. And sometimes these phones can hit it and then they pull back pretty aggressively and we just have to find out.

• 15:40Speaker 02

  Okay, okay.

• 15:41Speaker 03

  But it's great if they can do it. I mean, they're also claiming vastly improved battery life. These are ideas that are in total tension with one another.

• 15:50Speaker 02

  Right. Yeah. I mean, there, there's a lot here that is Google trying to convince buyers and users that raw specs don't matter because what they've done is actually make things more efficient, right? That night sight will run faster. They're not saying we have some shocking new low light camera technology. They're just saying we can do this thing more quickly now. They're saying the thing is more efficient, which in theory should be good for battery life. It should mean it doesn't run as hot. There are a lot of upsides and downsides to Google's spec race here.

• 16:24Speaker 02

  But the thing, the thing we have to talk about, which I cannot believe we have to talk about before we get to the software, is the temperature sensor, which is gone. And, and I think the temperature sensor to me is like, I, I honestly could not have told you why it existed, but it turns out that in the, what, couple of hours now since these phones have gotten launched, there has been a, an internet wide mourning of the temperature sensor. I want to talk in a minute about what it's been replaced by. But V, I think this, this feature existed in theory to let you tell the temperature of things. Like, this always struck me as a weird feature. Why are people worried about this feature?

• 17:02Speaker 04

  I don't know. To be quite frank, I feel like it came, like, sort of after the COVID era where, you know, you might want to take the temperature of things. I vaguely remember testing it and being like, sure, okay.

• 17:18Speaker 03

  Wait, refresh me. This is an ambient temperature sensor or like a point and click infrared?

• 17:24Speaker 02

  It was, it was, as I understand it, it was a point and, and search temperature gauge. That you could take the temperature of a thing by pointing it.

• 17:31Speaker 03

  Oh, sure. Like every single person who's like, I'm making a brisket on my trigger grill is like pointing the thing. I get it. I understand these people. You're my people. I love taking the temperature of things. What are you talking about? That ruled. Instead I got a notification light? Get out of here.

• 17:46Speaker 02

  Okay. So this is the problem. They, they replaced it. There, there have been rumors about the Pixel for some time. This, again, in Google's infinite wisdom, it loves to just launch its own phones months before it launches its own phone. This thing has been leaked to death and there was this feature, I think people were calling it Pixel Glow or the Glow Bar or some, there, there was this idea that there was going to be some cool new light feature. What it actually is, is a feature called Highlight. Uh, H I L I G H T. Hate that. Uh, it's a light that says hi. No, thank you. But anyway, what, what this thing is, is it's a little light on the back on the camera bar that does precisely two things. It glows when you're talking to Gemini

• 18:29Speaker 02

  and it will glow when you get calls, phone calls only from favorite contacts.

• 18:38Speaker 02

  That is, that is the least interesting feature you could possibly launch in this space.

• 18:42Speaker 04

  I don't know. I think it's kind of cute. I think it's cute. Uh, I, I don't really see the point of it lighting up while you're talking to Gemini because it's like, I, I feel like we're trying, or at least some people are trying not to advertise that they're using AI as much or whatever, unless you like to have a robot book, book club.

• 19:03Speaker 02

  To that point, actually, I think, I think you just answered your own question, which is that the, the whole idea here is that you can do this stuff with your phone facing down. And I think you are going to get a lot of people who want the tiniest little indication that Gemini is working.

• 19:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 19:15Speaker 02

  Without actually having to look at their phone and talk to AI.

• 19:18Speaker 03

  This is the same exact concept as any Echo Dot, any Soho speaker with a voice light, like the HomePod, right? The phone's upside down on your table. You say, hey, big G. I'm trying to be polite to our audience. Hey, big G. And then it, it boops at you and now you're talking to your robot girlfriend.

• 19:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:38Speaker 03

  Right? Aaron Rodgers is gonna talk to his wife.

• 19:40Speaker 02

  But it's trying to be really subtle about that.

• 19:41Speaker 03

  There's a conspiracy theory that I'm hinting at here that I want everyone to latch on to. I want everyone to understand what I just said. But right, this is the idea that we're gonna have a screen free future. And there's a class of devices that are totally natural language operated. And maybe your phone can be that if you just replace the extraordinarily useful temperature sensor with a little light.

• 20:02Speaker 03

  And now you're gonna have that thing. And it's gonna be, I guarantee you, the, put all of your meeting notes into a notebook LM happen in some way with this light.

• 20:11Speaker 02

  Yes, the idea of being able to do things with your phone down and get some bit of information without looking at your phone. These are all good things, right? V, this is the stuff everybody's doing in wearables, right? How do we give you this like little bit of ambient information about what's going on without making you look at a screen or pull out your phone or do whatever? Even if this was just a light that there was a settings menu for, that you could be like, make it this color when this happens. Make it this color when this happens. Make it blink Morse code at me. Like, you, and Google sort of intimated to David that it's planning to do these things, but right now it basically does none of them. And this is a, just a useless feature in my, like, what a weird, incredible miss from Google on this to me.

• 20:52Speaker 04

  I don't know if it's a miss. I, I just, even if all you did was have like it light up when a certain contact comes, I think, I find that kind of useful. I keep my phone face down all the time anyway, but like, if I know that a certain special person is calling that I've allowed, I will pick up the phone. Otherwise I don't. So, I don't know. I find it kind of useful. Maybe I'm in the minority, but why are we measuring things with temperatures?

• 21:16Speaker 02

  What if, what if it could be anything? Well, sure.

• 21:20Speaker 04

  Like, I just find that infinitely more useful for more people.

• 21:21Speaker 03

  I'm gonna get you a cheap temperature gun and you're gonna, you're gonna, your whole life is gonna change.

• 21:25Speaker 04

  I have a temperature gun and it's just like, oh, 98.6, just what I expected for a human. Like.

• 21:33Speaker 03

  I'm just saying. Look, we live different lives. I live more of a data oriented life.

• 21:38Speaker 02

  Neelai, was your experience of getting a temperature gun like my experience of getting a label maker? Where it's a real, like, once you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail situation?

• 21:46Speaker 03

  That's right. You're like, how much, what are these children? Oh, they're a little bit under. Like, it's fine. It's good.

• 21:53Speaker 02

  Just diagnosing strangers' children at the park. That's not weird.

• 21:57Speaker 03

  You don't walk around the park with a IR temperature gun? So there we saw the comment is like, you can get the $20 gun off Amazon. Yes, that's what I have. And I patrol my local playgrounds.

• 22:08Speaker 02

  Good lord.

• 22:09Speaker 03

  I'm just saying, okay, I want to get to the camera. It's very important to me to wave the camera. The one thing I'll say about the light and the flipping the phone over and the whole point of flipping your phone over in social situations is to indicate, to communicate to everyone around you that you're not paying attention to this thing. Because otherwise you just keep it in your pocket.

• 22:25Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 22:25Speaker 03

  Right? But if you're like me and you just carry your phone, you're looking at all the time, I'm actively gonna not look at it. Is a thing you communicate by putting it face down. Putting a light on the back that has your robot wife on it is the opposite of that. Right? It's now the phone can interrupt you and you can interact with it, even though it's upside down on the table. I'm not saying that's good or bad. I'm saying it is a change to the etiquette of putting your phone face down on the table. And I'm very curious how that plays out with this device in particular, given how much every AI company wants you to record everything all the time. And that, that is the point of this light in like a very important and meaningful way is to make sure the AI is present,

• 23:09Speaker 03

  even though you've done the thing that says your phone is not present.

• 23:12Speaker 02

  Yeah. And, and Google is at, at the forefront of, we want you to record everything all the time, right? Like the Pixel Recorder gets ever better. Gemini Notebook is very much an incredible input machine that is gonna want all of this stuff. Like the, the, everybody is doing AI notes thing, like good lord, is that coming for Google Meet at some point? Like, Google is going to do this kind of thing. And I think, I think you're, you're right at it. But let's talk about the camera. This is fundamentally the thing. The, the specs are slightly different on the phones, but the big new stuff here is all about the hardware. And in fact, Google is shoving a bunch of new stuff into the camera app specifically. Not doing stuff in Google Photos, not putting stuff sort of at the end of the imaging pipeline, like actually changing the way that you are supposed to use and interact with

• 23:58Speaker 02

  your camera. And, uh, Neelai, can you just explain what Camera Looks is? We, we on this show spent, I don't know, 30 to 40 hours talking about the, the photography styles on the iPhone when that launched. This is like that only much more so.

• 24:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 24:17Speaker 02

  And I'm very curious how you're thinking about it. But can you explain like what this actually is first?

• 24:22Speaker 03

  Yeah. Camera Looks is a way of altering the imaging pipeline on the Pixel itself at the sensor level to basically compete with, well, I don't know, what Fuji does with film looks on their point and shoots. It's their recipes for HDR to make them look like, I think there's one called Digicam. There's another one called Vanilla, which I think is just a very funny name for a photo look. And you, you are altering how the, how the camera itself captures light, captures information, does the HDR merge? Thinks about sharpening to get drastically different looks off the sensor. I would compare that to Apple, which runs their whole photo pipeline the same way every single time. And then lets you sort of adjust how the software cooks all that sensor data at the end.

• 25:08Speaker 03

  There's two approaches. I really recommend reading David's interview with Isaac Reynolds, who runs Pixel Camera. We've been talking to Isaac for years. He's very sharp about this stuff. And there's some stuff I want to call out from the piece. But I would just say Apple's approach lets you do non-destructive editing. So you take the photo and you can re-edit that photo all kinds of ways and whatever you want, you can make a mistake. It, it appears the Pixel way is, is like a runtime decision, right? You're gonna take the photo and that's what you're gonna get because you're not capturing all the frames of HDR. I think this is one of the smartest moves Google could make with its camera at this time.

• 25:44Speaker 02

  Really?

• 25:44Speaker 03

  Yeah. And there's a few reasons for that. One, Apple and Samsung are the volume players and they both have a pretty basic problem, which is they can never get a photo wrong. Right? If you're the average customer of the average iPhone and you are like, family, we're at the restaurant, stand in front of this giant window on the way out to get the group shot. You cannot underexpose the faces. You cannot blow out the window. You just gotta get that right. That same camera has to take a picture of like a receipt and not get it wrong. That same camera has to absolutely get the video of your kid singing at the recital. Like the camera can never get it wrong. And so they produce what we're really used to,

• 26:28Speaker 03

  which are these ultra averaged out, pretty clinical smartphone photos that are over HDR. And then there's some settings you can go in and screw with if you want, but they also really don't want you to make a mistake. So the settings are non-destructive and there's a limit to what you can do. Google doesn't have the volume problem, right? Like they don't have to ship a phone to 10 billion people that can never get a photo wrong. They know what they're doing. Like they know they're playing a much smaller market. And so they've gone and said, look, we have the ability at HDR capture to not take as many frames, to blow out the window, to have 50 different looks, right? In the HDR. And instead of picking the default that will always get it right, we're gonna let you pick.

• 27:13Speaker 03

  And maybe you got it wrong, but that's an artistic choice that you've made. And now that will attract people who want more control over their camera in ever more dramatic ways. And I just think back to the Pixel 2. The Pixel 2 had a look and people chased that look. Apple had to react to that look. It was contrasty. It was, they talked about Carvagia, like they were talking about painters and they got away from that. And they got to the same averaged out look as every other camera over time. And the last time I, I'd sat and did a really intense camera review with Alison over a last iPhone. My, the point I got to you is all these phones are the same. It truly, you cannot tell these cameras apart anymore unless you have a sickness in your mind like I do.

• 27:58Speaker 03

  And like, but on a phone screen, they all look the same. And I think Google's saying, nope, we're gonna be really different. We're gonna let you take better photos. And when people on Instagram say, what camera is that? The answer will be the Google Pixel out of the box, not I shot raw in halide on an iPhone and put it through Lightroom. Which is my answer all the time. And I think that in terms of just differentiating this phone, saying, actually, there's a lot of different ways to do HDR. You can get a lot of different looks out of computational photography. And we're not gonna pick the average. So we're always right. We're gonna let you pick a literal artistic interpretation. Like in the smartphone camera market right now, there are very few players doing that.

• 28:44Speaker 02

  The thing I love about this too, is that Google is implementing this feature by just giving you a bunch of knobs and buttons.

• 28:51Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 28:51Speaker 02

  Uh, like there, there's a great moment in, in David Amel's story where he's talking to Isaac Reynolds about this and, and they land on essentially, we are going to give people so many settings that it made Google uncomfortable. Like we are just, it seriously, I mean, he says it in the story very directly that he had to have like an escalation meeting with PMs at Google because they were going to do something that is considered so anathema to software design now, which is you can't expose how things work. You can't give people choices. You have to just make a bunch of decisions on people's behalf and then sort of obfuscate the way that everything actually works. What they said is literally, we are just going to give you the controls. We, we are going to give, make it so that you can actually do all of the things, or many of the things at least that you would do

• 29:35Speaker 02

  on a camera. And we're gonna do it at the very beginning of the image process. I have no idea if people will use this. My sense is most people don't even use the photography styles on the iPhone, which are designed to be vastly more approachable. Like I don't even think people use the camera control on the iPhone for God's sake. Like the, the, it is hard to get people deep in these menus to do things. But just for Google to give you the option that if you are somebody who wants to, uh, and a lot of this is being aimed at creators, particularly sort of small and new creators. And I want to talk about that approach in a second. But the idea that just you can, if you want to, is so nice and refreshing and rare at this moment in time that like, I just love seeing that from the Pixel.

• 30:18Speaker 03

  So I'm, I'm guessing we have mostly Android users listening to the Pixel live stream. Just a shot in the dark. But if we have any iPhone people, a thing you can do with camera control to just get a taste of this is you can set it to control tone, which is tone mapping, right? And tone mapping is, are the highlights and shadows gonna be the same? Or are they gonna be really, are we gonna have more contrast basically? And more complicated than that, but that's what, that's what it is. And I have it set to that and I slide up and down on tone all the time. Because when I'm taking the big backlit photo, you want tone to be 100. You want the, everything to be exposed at the same level. And when you want to take something more, already set it down to like negative 50 or whatever it is to get more contrast back in the photo.

• 31:02Speaker 03

  This is a wild amount of control over HDR compared to cameras, smartphone cameras past. But you can see if you use it enough, the limits of it become totally clear to you. Right? You're like, I basically am just letting things blow out. But, and, and that looks less like a robot took this photo. It looks less like CGI than the normal iPhone photo. You see that with Google and you're like, oh, I get it. Like you're, you, in addition to giving people all these additional controls, you're gonna make, let people make the photos look so much different from the beginning that maybe they will come back and pick the Pixel again, which is a real problem for Google.

• 31:41Speaker 03

  And if all this run at creators, everybody wants to be a creator, you know, like we, we see it. It's in the data, right? Young people want to be YouTubers, making a little, a phone that out of the box is we're gonna shoot clips, we're gonna shoot great Instagram photos, we're gonna auto edit the clips and put them in folder structures for you. All of that is to me actually compelling if what you want to do with your phone is use the camera. Right? In a way that, you know, Marques Brownlee runs around being like, if you want to start a YouTube channel, just start shooting on your phone. And then you're like, my camera roll is a disaster. My plans to be a YouTuber have come to an end because my camera roll is bad.

• 32:24Speaker 03

  And actually the first step of being a video creator is considering file structures, right? Like, no. Like there's something here that I just think is very smart in terms of what people are actually doing with their cameras and how to make those cameras look like anything other than the most averaged out, ultra-processed HDR photos that we see young people turning against at pretty rapid clips.

• 32:46Speaker 02

  Yeah. See, what do you make of all of this? I, I think about you in this context also as somebody who has spent a lot of time with smart glasses, trying to figure out like, is this the new camera that people want? Is this the camera that I'm gonna start toting around with me? Do you look at things like Camera Looks in these new tools as, as a big win for Pixel owners?

• 33:08Speaker 03

  That's a hard no. I don't.

• 33:10Speaker 04

  I don't know.

• 33:11Speaker 03

  You just choked.

• 33:12Speaker 04

  It, no, I didn't choke. It's just more like, you know, I, I, I've played around with it on the iPhone before and been like, okay, cool. But no, I'm just gonna do it myself in post if I want a nice picture. Um, I didn't get around to playing with it as much on these because I am the wearable lady. So I did focus more heavily on the Pixel Watch, but um, I do, I do kind of take less photos on my iPhone than I used to in the past, just because they do look very boring. And so, you know, I am looking forward to playing around with it a little bit more. I'm a little more interested in the Creator Suite that they kind of released.

• 33:51Speaker 04

  Like I, it's, it's kind of like a thing of our job where having to remember what I'm gonna say in a social video. Sometimes I'm just like, a bleh, sorry, sorry, guys, gotta do another take. So the idea of having the teleprompter there, I was like, oh, that's useful. I might actually try doing that if, if I could think of it as a, like I, I said it multiple times before. I've never really been into foldables, except whenever I see Alison at one of these events, just doing maximum productivity and blogging on, on these things. And so I'm so excited to try and be Alison later tonight with this. Uh, but also I was thinking like, oh, you know, if I had the expense for a work phone

• 34:30Speaker 04

  that did have Creator Tools and I only ever used it to film social video standups for The Verge, that would be useful because usually in my camera roll, when I'm doing like the social videos, it's like 4,000 takes of me going, and I forgot what I was supposed to say. Because the script that I wrote is over there and you can see my eyes moving over to the script. And I feel bad, they'll just cut that in post, but like it's, it, you know, I get it. And uh, my like 11 year old cousin has told me that she wants to be a better version of what I do, like creating stuff on YouTube. She's like, I could be so much better than you.

• 35:09Speaker 03

  Look, the Google Pixel is a phone for every aspiring real estate influencer in America.

• 35:13Speaker 04

  Uh, yeah.

• 35:13Speaker 03

  Now's the time, now's the time to make your walk, take your walkthroughs to the next level.

• 35:17Speaker 02

  You, you say that like it's a joke, but that is a way bigger market than anyone thinks. It turns out, um, we, we should actually pivot and talk about the, the Pixel Watch and the Pixel Tag and the other stuff that's coming out. But first, we have to take a break. So here's an ad, then we'll be right back.

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• 37:43Speaker 02

  All right, we're back. V.

• 37:45Speaker 04

  Hi.

• 37:45Speaker 02

  Pixel Watch 5. I was, I was gonna say, because you just talked about your video prowess, I'm gonna, I'm gonna play a video of V to V, but that seems cruel. So instead, I just want you to explain what's up with the Pixel Watch 5.

• 37:59Speaker 04

  Well, not much in terms of hardware. You would be very forgiven for thinking this is the same thing as the Pixel Watch 4. But there is a lot of uh, software updates this year, like uh,

• 38:11Speaker 02

  Wait, to that point though, real quick on the hardware thing. That seems fine, right? Like, I feel like the, the story of the Pixel Watch 4 is like, this hardware's very good. I, I don't know that anyone came out of the Pixel Watch 4 like furious about the way that it looked. I, I like the Pixel Watch quite a bit. Did we have big hardware dreams that didn't come true?

• 38:25Speaker 04

  No. Um, I think, well, I think some people want the Pixel Watch to have like Sapphire Glass to be more durable. Um, you know, the big thing last year hardware wise is that they made the Pixel Watch uh, more repairable, which, you know, Chris Welch, God rest his soul, because he's dead to us now. Um, he cracked the first one. Uh, we still have the mystery of how my Pixel Watch 2 got scratched up to hell and back. The theory is it was Patel, my cat, as a kitten, did something to it, even though he had baby cat teeth at the time. We don't know. They actually took the scratched up Pixel Watch 2 from my house to a lab to like, discover what happened to it. We don't know. It's still just a-

• 39:07Speaker 03

  Like detectives or?

• 39:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, like detectives, because they were like, they didn't detect cat hair in the, in the thing, but they were just like, all we can tell is that there were abrasions. And I was like, I don't know how it happened, but um, you know, that hasn't happened since then. But it, it was a, a thing that a lot of people had issues with at the time. So, you know, they did the repairability last year. So, you know, hardware wise, you have a slightly faster Qualcomm chip in here. Cool. Like an itty bitty little battery boost, like we're talking 10 milli, milliamp hours, depending on the size. So nothing too crazy. Um, there is a new pyrite, a satin pyrite finish. Cool. Sure.

• 39:46Speaker 02

  Those are words that I've heard before.

• 39:48Speaker 03

  None of this, none of this is making your heart race, is what I would say.

• 39:53Speaker 02

  And we know that for sure.

• 39:54Speaker 03

  I, it's, it's very obvious to me how excited V is right now.

• 39:58Speaker 04

  No, because I did bring up the, the heart rate on there all of a sudden. Yeah, no, so hardware wise, you know, the Pixel Watch has finally reached a point where it's like, okay. And, you know, I would say that most smartwatches have reached a part, point where like we've, we've hit kind of max smartwatch innovation in, in, in a lot of ways, like the hardware. Unless they figure out a way to make things even tinier. You know, like the hardware is, here's a new sensor, here's this, it's more efficient. So like right now, a lot of the hardware bumps in smartwatch land is like, we figured out a way to cram more battery life in there.

• 40:34Speaker 03

  I mean, that's what everyone needs. Let me ask you this then.

• 40:36Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 40:37Speaker 03

  We, we've been talking about the, the whoops of the world for quite a while.

• 40:40Speaker 04

  The screenless.

• 40:41Speaker 03

  Uh, obviously Google just launched the Fitbit Air. The opportunity for the Pixel Watch, unlike the Pixel phones, is to go get the whole Android market, right? They work with all the Android phones.

• 40:52Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 40:53Speaker 03

  That, that, at least that's what it says on the tip. So you could, you could go much bigger and you could say, well, we have the Google Health Platform, we have the Fitbit Air. If you don't want to wear the watch, you can wear the Fitbit, it's gonna catch on our platform. Like, there's a whole argument you could make, especially to the wider world of Android owners, why this ecosystem, this watch, this health, fitness system is the one. And it doesn't feel like Google is making that argument.

• 41:19Speaker 04

  I actually think they are.

• 41:20Speaker 03

  You think they are?

• 41:21Speaker 04

  Yeah, like it's so like, when we were talking about the phones earlier, about how like, Google knows it has a niche phone audience and like, you know, they're not catching up to Samsung. It's opposite in the wearable land.

• 41:31Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 41:32Speaker 04

  Samsung has been coasting in the wearable watch field for a very long time. Like uh, from the Galaxy Watch 6 to the Galaxy Watch 9. I was like, well, the biggest change that I can tell you off the top of my head is that they made some really wonky health metrics. Like I fooled a antioxidant sensor last year with a Cheez-It. Like that's what I was doing when I was testing these things.

• 41:54Speaker 02

  That's the title of V's memoir.

• 41:55Speaker 04

  Yeah, I fooled Samsung's antioxidant sensor with a Cheez-It. That's my memoir. Uh, and you know, like the big thing last year was like, it's a squircle now. Everything's a squircle. Nah. And then you look at the Galaxy Watch 9, it's, sure is a watch. That is like last year's watch, very, very much kind of coasting. It's a good product. Um, but it's, it's just coasting for a long time. Whereas the Pixel Watch, when you go from one, where everyone was telling me like, this will be dead in a year, to the two, to the three, to the four. My review of the four last year, I said, this is the Android watch to beat. And uh, the five, yeah, like in terms of the health space, they are running circles around Samsung. Like it's, it's pretty like-

• 42:40Speaker 04

  Crazy.

• 42:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:41Speaker 04

  Some of the health features that they are releasing with the the five, I was just like, this is novel. Like, no one else is doing that. Like the insulin-

• 42:50Speaker 02

  Can you talk through a couple of those?

• 42:51Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 42:52Speaker 02

  Actually, like, the the the three that you call out specifically are breathing emergency detection, uh, which, as far as I can tell, just calls emergency services if it detects you've stopped breathing, which seems good.

• 43:02Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 43:02Speaker 02

  I'm in favor. Uh, and then there's blood pressure trends and insulin resistance trends. And I'm particularly curious to hear more about the insulin resistance and stuff, because this is a thing that is obviously of, uh, deep personal interest to you, as you've talked about on the site and on the show. Um, this is also a feature that is not, like, every smartwatch is getting into sort of similarly niche features, but this seems like a big one and a new one simultaneously for Google.

• 43:28Speaker 04

  Yeah. So, uh, just like, kind of going down the order of things, like, no one else has a breathing emergency detection feature. And so what it is, is it's like detecting, um, your SPO2 levels or your blood oxygen saturation. And if you go below around 83%, which, if you're at 83% blood oxygen saturation for an extended period of time, go to Hoptil. Hoptil now. Hoptil now. That that is, that is a crisis. Um, uh, so, you know, it's not for people with sleep apnea. The feature will turn off after it detects 30 minutes of sleep, because smartwatches are terrible. Uh, if you're a side sleeper, like, the Samsung watches would always say that, like, my sleep, sleeping SPO2 was, like, 82, which, again,

• 44:10Speaker 04

  Hoptil, Hoptil now, if that's your SPO2. So, you know, they're, they are mitigating for false positives there. It's an extension of last year's loss of pulse feature, which, if it detects that you have no heartbeat, it will call emergency services. So it's sort of like for an acute attack, where maybe you're choking and you stop breathing, but your heart is still beating, it'll call emergency services or something like that. It's using a bunch of sensors and AI to, like, call for help. Not in the US. At launch, it's only going to be in Europe, because they have to go through all these regulatory things. Um, but it's like, an interesting thing. That's not a feature that we've seen on other smartwatches yet. Google is the first to that, which is like, oh, you're you're the first to, uh, an advanced new health feature. Interesting. Um, and then

• 44:54Speaker 04

  moving on to blood pressure trends, like, speaking of Whoop again, Whoop got in trouble with the FDA last year, because they're like, we have blood pressure trends too, in beta. We'll tell you, like, kind of an estimate of your systolic and diastolic, and whether it's high or low. And the FDA was like, eh eh eh, that's diagnostic. And Whoop was like, no, that's a wellness trend. And they kind of got into it. The FDA tweaked the rules a little bit. And then everyone else was like, we also do blood pressure trends. Like, Apple did hypertension notifications last year. Um, Aura is, like, kind of poking around with sleep time, blood pressure trends. It's like, okay, you're using a bunch of

• 45:34Speaker 04

  the optical sensors to measure pulse wave velocity in your fingies and and your wrists. And, cool, it's not going to give you an actual reading, but it'll tell you if your blood pressure is trending high or trending low. And, um, it's going to require a minimum of seven days of data. And then it only gives you that data once a month. So this is meant to be like a check engine light feature, not a diagnostic feature, which is like, why, for me, the insulin resistance trends thing is super interesting, because, like, do that but for insulin resistance. But typically, and like, I had a 10-year journey trying to find out that I was insulin resistant. Uh, that was literally 10 years of going

• 46:17Speaker 04

  to doctors and them telling me, well, girl, I don't know what to tell you. If you have a hard time losing weight, try, like, eating less and exercising more. And I was like, Jesus-

• 46:24Speaker 02

  It's an idea.

• 46:25Speaker 04

  Jesus Christ, do I have to pull out my exported PDF files of my exercise data? How? Okay. So, you know, I went on this, like, pretty invasive journey. I got a lot of different blood draws. I was using CGMs, which I'm also, yeah, got one in right now.

• 46:41Speaker 03

  The things you do for this job.

• 46:43Speaker 04

  The things that I do for this job and for all of you, like, y'all don't understand, like, I have three smart scales that I weigh myself on every morning and make me feel terrible. So, and that's neither here nor there. But the insulin resistance stuff, it's non-invasive. Because usually, when you're testing for insulin resistance, you have to get a blood draw, and it's not a typical metabolic panel. You have to get, um, your fasting glucose and your fasting insulin, and then they do little math equation, and you get something called a HOMA IR, uh, uh, score. And then if you fall within a certain range, you're insulin resistant. But that doesn't, we're getting really into the weeds here. But basically, what this is doing is it's looking at your lifestyle

• 47:27Speaker 04

  trends. And they said, because they have such a large dataset, they're able to kind of tell whether your metabolic stress, which is what insulin resistance is, it's your body being unable to use and, um, unable to use blood glucose effectively. So your pancreas has to work harder to create more insulin. So they're saying, like, well, you know, based on certain factors, your lifestyle factors, and the data that we're creating, collecting passively over a minimum of a seven-day period, we can tell you within a month whether your insulin resistance is trending high or low. And I was like, show me the science, nerds.

• 48:02Speaker 03

  Where's the paper?

• 48:03Speaker 04

  Show me the science. They, they have it. It's published, peer-reviewed in Nature. Um, the sensitivity, so sensitivity and specificity, which is like, whether you're going to get false positives or false negatives, and is always inversely related. I looked at that, and I was like, hmm. It's not like, super high in the 90s numbers, but it's decent. I'm very curious to see how it'll work on me, because I'm building a digital AI twin for my metabolism at the moment. I'm psycho, guys. I'm really psycho. I'm getting so much blood drawn.

• 48:33Speaker 03

  Huh? You're building a digital AI metabolism twin?

• 48:36Speaker 04

  Yes, so-

• 48:36Speaker 03

  Are they gonna be cool?

• 48:38Speaker 04

  Uh, they're not gonna be cool, but it'll be able to, like, tell how I will personally, personally react to certain foods.

• 48:46Speaker 03

  Can you, can you give it a Cheez-It?

• 48:47Speaker 04

  Yeah. I can, I can basically go, like, if I eat a Cheez-It, how is it going to affect my metabolism? And we can model it, basically. And it can help me taper off some of my medications, hopefully.

• 48:58Speaker 03

  I see what you're saying.

• 48:59Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 48:59Speaker 02

  My digital metabolism twin is such a good hang, you guys. Like, you don't even, you don't even know.

• 49:04Speaker 03

  Most twins are evil. Like, I don't know what you're saying.

• 49:07Speaker 04

  Oh, my God, no. No, my, my, my AI metabolism twin will not be cool. That is very true. Um, but the whole point is, is that I'm so excited to test whether it says that I'm insulin resistant or not. One, because I'm on medications that mess around with my insulin sensitivity. Two, I am very insulin resistant. I have, um, it, it used to be called PCOS. Now it's called PMOS, which is polyendocrine metabolic ovarian syndrome, which S F's up my metabolism and all of that. It's been a journey, guys. Uh, but the point is, is that a lot of people have insulin resistance. Um, it is a precursor to type 2 diabetes. It can be invisible for years. So getting this kind of detection, if it works, which

• 49:50Speaker 04

  is the big, if it works, um, could be really helpful for people, because, like I said, I went on a 10-year journey to find out I'm insulin resistant. And it was a lot of poking with needles, and I'm not good with needles.

• 50:03Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 50:03Speaker 04

  Like, ironic, considering my giant tattoos, but I'm not great with needles. I'm always like, please, oh.

• 50:09Speaker 03

  I do feel like America 2026. Google has a big dataset.

• 50:14Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 50:15Speaker 03

  They could just be like, most people are probably a little insulin resistant. And then it's like a short hop to, and Google Shopping is going to order you a GLP-1. You know, like, the agents are going to do it. Like, you, you see where this heads inexorably, given what we see all over the rest of the wellness space. As you cover, it's like Maha-adjacent.

• 50:35Speaker 04

  It's Maha-adjacent.

• 50:36Speaker 03

  It's peptide-adjacent.

• 50:37Speaker 04

  It's, the Whoop is so peptide-adjacent, like-

• 50:40Speaker 03

  That's right. Like, there's, there's a thing that every Google demo ends in a transaction. And I, I'm always like, where is the transaction going to come from?

• 50:47Speaker 04

  Like, this, this is kind of an interesting thing, because, um, Google also announced a partnership with Abbott to pull in their, uh, CGM data, which I was like, ah, the metabol- like, health tech right now is very focused on metabolism and tweaking metabolism and all the things that are happening there. Um, but it's very hard to get any kind of, like, data or insight non-invasively. So that's the thing that I'm very much like, that's, it's huge if true. It's huge if true. I'm curious to see what will result from the insulin resistance trends. Lord knows, I am, uh, finally, finally, this is like

• 51:32Speaker 04

  a health detection check engine light feature that applies to me, because they're doing sleep apnea, and I sleep with almost no snoring. So I'm useless test subject.

• 51:40Speaker 03

  I can't do this for you.

• 51:41Speaker 04

  I can't do this for you.

• 51:42Speaker 02

  I also think it is, like, everyone on Earth who buys one of these should spend a long time staring at themselves, deciding whether they want to put their information into Google Health. Because, uh, I've been using a Fitbit Air for a while now, and that thing wants you to have such a specific and different kind of relationship with your ongoing health data, that even, even if you are a person who is just like, I want very basic sleep and step tracking and, and, you know, screw the rest of this. You can't do that, right? Like, this thing wants all of this data about you and it wants to spit it all back at you and tell you a lot of things about yourself and give you a lot of recommendations and tell you all sorts of things, all of the, like, this is not just a simple relationship

• 52:27Speaker 02

  anymore with technology.

• 52:29Speaker 04

  It's very-

• 52:29Speaker 02

  And you should, you should look at it carefully.

• 52:31Speaker 04

  It's very interesting because I was talking with Rishi Shandra and Sandeep Warik, who are kind of in charge of Fitbit and the Pixel wearable things. And it was like a really big philosophical debate about what a health experience is now because wearables are at a very weird inflection point. All of the, and on the health side, they are just cramming AI into every bit and corner that you can get into. And to your point, I spend a lot of time handholding the Google Health AI coach because you have to. Like, I lose my mind on a weekly basis. I actually went screenless during my two-week vacation prior to this week because I was

• 53:14Speaker 04

  like, I have so much data and AI health training fatigue. It's, it's, it was driving me a little cuckoo. But everyone's gonna have a different health journey and everyone's gonna have different things that they're kind of zeroing into for their health trends. So you can, you can go into the Google AI Health Coach and have a bad time. I went in because I have no concept of health data privacy thanks to this job and I gave it everything. I was just like, here's everything. I am going to handhold you through everything that I possibly want. I actually had a decent experience with it. Like, I've had a trash, garbage experience with every AI Health Coach and I've, I've tested every, I've tested every single one, basically, at this point.

• 53:57Speaker 03

  My whoop is often like, "Good job drinking all that bourbon." It's like, that's not right. That's not the right answer at all.

• 54:02Speaker 04

  I mean, my smart dad told my spouse to drink every night.

• 54:05Speaker 03

  That's not relaxation, that's smart recovery. It's like, sure it is.

• 54:08Speaker 04

  Sure. You know, it's not great. And there are a lot of issues with the Google Health AI Coach, which they acknowledged. It's very fixated on how my calves and shins are feeling because one time I mentioned I'm prone to shin splints. Um, so it still has a lot of those issues. And, you know, I talked to other reviewers and some of them have been like, "It's trash." And others have been like, "It's super helpful." Which is really funny because, you know, we talk about personalized health, we talk about everyone having their own bespoke, like, experience within these apps now. And that's all dependent on how much information you're willing to give it. And I think if you are not willing to give it a lot, your, your mileage is not gonna go very far.

• 54:51Speaker 04

  So it is a thing that you have to sit and think about what your goal is, what are you trying to solve? But if you do have a chronic illness and you're very well informed about your chronic illness, like I am, and a little bit the most annoying patient to ever exist for any doctor, anywhere, you can, you can do a lot with it. It's just, um, it's, it's a very steep learning curve at this point in time.

• 55:16Speaker 02

  For sure.

• 55:17Speaker 04

  Yeah. So that's my health spiel. But GPS, we should talk about the GPS on this thing.

• 55:21Speaker 02

  We should talk about the GPS.

• 55:23Speaker 04

  Shots were fired.

• 55:24Speaker 02

  But-

• 55:25Speaker 04

  Shots were fired.

• 55:26Speaker 03

  Do them very quickly because we gotta, we, we promised a half an hour, we're over.

• 55:28Speaker 04

  Oh, okay.

• 55:29Speaker 02

  We need to get out of here.

• 55:30Speaker 04

  Basically, the shots fired is that they said that the GPS, which has historically been shitty on these, on these watches, is now two times improved and will be better than the Garmin Phoenix 8 and the Apple Watch Ultra 3. And I was like, wow, you guys are, that's shots fired. Because you do know-

• 55:46Speaker 02

  V, you're gonna have to-

• 55:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, you have to, you have to go on a long bike right now.

• 55:49Speaker 02

  You do, but also, we're, we're gonna need to come back and do a whole thing about the GPS wars here because it turns out there is a whole, like, years-long GPS battle among wearables that I was completely unaware of.

• 56:00Speaker 04

  Oh.

• 56:01Speaker 02

  That everybody has incredibly strong feelings about and, and we're, we're gonna have to get into that. But I think, weirdly, that is the piece of this review that I'm most excited to hear about from you is like, "Does it know where I am?" Important question.

• 56:12Speaker 04

  I mean, yeah.

• 56:13Speaker 02

  So, but, uh, we, we do need to get out of here, but I'm, I'm curious before we go, um, whether, obviously, all of this stuff is pending reviews, we need to test the cameras on the phones, we need to test the GPS, we need to see if the insulin resistance stuff works. Is there anything here that sort of screams huge immediate upgrade people should run to buy this phone?

• 56:34Speaker 04

  Absolutely not. All the, a lot of these health features are coming to the Pixel Watch 3 and 4, so.

• 56:39Speaker 02

  We've gotten a bunch of questions in the chat about like, "Why wouldn't I go buy last year's model or the year before?" And I don't, I think the answer to that is go buy last year's model or the year before for most of these things. Neelai, what about you? Is there a shot that some of this stuff is meaningful?

• 56:52Speaker 03

  I mean, it, it's Android and the Pixel, like, will this version of the Pixel camera come, be brought to the previous versions of the Pixel? I don't, who's to say, David? But that's why I would buy the new one. I would just maybe wait one turn to see what the community brings to you.

• 57:12Speaker 02

  I would say several years running last year's Pixel has been one of the best Android phones on the market and that may well still be the case.

• 57:19Speaker 03

  Especially when this year's Pixel is the same hardware.

• 57:21Speaker 02

  That's true. Judging by the fact that V is holding one of these, I suspect reviews of these are gonna come soon. We'll be back on the show talking about all of these when the reviews drop. V has Trevor Noah to go hang out with, Neelai has to, I don't know, go be fancy somewhere with fancy people, uh, I have to go pick up my kid at preschool. So we all gotta go get out of here. Thank you to Travis, our producer, thank you to Eric and Denise for getting all this done, thank you to everybody who made all this happen, including fixing our audio problems. Thanks to all of you for watching and listening, hanging in here with us this long. We will see you back on the show, regularly scheduled programming tomorrow. Neelai, take us out.

• 57:54Speaker 03

  Rock and roll.

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