AI gadgets, bendy phones, and more from MWC

Today on the flagship podcast of region locked phones: The Verge’s Allison Johnson and Jon Porter report back on all the tech we saw at Mobile World Congress this past week. MWC 2024: all the phones, wearables, and gadgets announced in Barcelona Peering through Lenovo’s transparent laptop into a sci-fi future What if phones actually bent to our needs? The Phone 2A makes a guest appearance at Nothing’s MWC event. The Humane AI Pin worked better than I expected — until it didn’t Samsung has big ambitions for the Galaxy Ring A short gif of Infinix’s color-changing charging E Ink phone concept. Now there’s a 28,000mAh battery with a phone in it Xiaomi’s new Watch S3 has a bezel you can swap as easily as a strap. Honor’s Magic 6 Pro launches internationally with AI-powered eye tracking on the way HMD is making a Barbie flip phone alongside a smartphone for tinkerers Later, David answers a question from the Vergecast Hotline about web crawlers and AI. With the rise of AI, web crawlers are suddenly controversial The Vergecast and Decoder are live at SXSW this weekend, March 8th and 9th. SXSW attendees can see both shows live on the official Vox Media Podcast Stage at the JW Marriott, presented by Atlassian. Learn more at voxmedia.com/live. Email us at [email protected] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. 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.

• 0:03David Pierce?

  Welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of region locked phones. I'm your friend David Pierce and I am standing outside of the Alamo Drafthouse, where I just saw Dune Part Two. Now, I don't know if I'm like the expert on whether Dune movies are any good. I saw Part One just the other day on an iPad on a train. I haven't read the books. Loved the first movie, loved the second movie. It's really long, it's really intense, it's really loud. I had a great time. Everybody should go see it, ideally on the biggest screen you can possibly find. But Dune is not what we are here to talk about on The Vergecast today. Today, we're talking about Mobile World Congress. MWC is one of those trade shows that some years is kind of boring. It's just a bunch of companies being like, "Look, on Android phone." And some years, it's really interesting.

• 0:47David Pierce?

  And this year was one of those interesting years. So, we are going to have John Porter and Allison Johnson, two Verge reporters, who were at the show in Barcelona over the past week. And they're going to tell us about all the interesting gadgets they saw, and maybe whether we got a hint of what the future of gadgets really looks like. All that's coming up in just a sec, but first, I'm going to go home and sleep for a bit, because it's really late, because that is a three-hour-long movie. Then we'll get to it. This is The Vergecast. See you in a sec.

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• 2:21David Pierce?

  All right, we're back. I got some sleep. I'm now deep in the dune behind the scenes YouTube rabbit hole. I've learned a lot of fun facts about Austin Butler's hair. Let's get into the show. So Mobile World Congress is, I would say, typically the second most interesting trade show of the year, at least most years. CES is the big one in Las Vegas for the whole electronics and tech industry. But MWC has for years had kind of a special niche as a place that is all about one thing. And that one thing is obviously mobile. Often that just means lots and lots of phones. And this year it meant that too. But the thing about mobile right now is that the definition of that word is starting to change. So thanks to AI, we're getting new kinds of devices altogether.

• 3:06David Pierce?

  And because Apple and Google have so thoroughly dominated the smartphone era, there are lots of companies that are looking to figure out what's next, even in the smartphone world. The idea that your phone should just be a slab of glass that runs a bunch of apps that come from an app store that's run by either Apple or Google. There are so many good reasons for companies and for people, frankly, to try and get past that idea. And so not only are we getting lots of new phones, we're getting lots of new ideas about what a phone or a mobile device in general should look like and how it can work and what it should mean in our lives. This is my kind of stuff to talk about. So we're going to talk about it. The Verge's Allison Johnson and John Porter were both at MWC last week. They played with all the devices and they tried to figure out what they all say about the future of mobile.

• 3:51David Pierce?

  And somewhat miraculously, they both made it home, safe and not sick. And they're here to help me dig into all of it. Allison Johnson, hello.

• 3:58Speaker 04

  Hello.

• 3:59David Pierce?

  John Porter, welcome back to the Vergecast.

• 4:01Speaker 05

  Hello.

• 4:02David Pierce?

  So you guys survived?

• 4:03Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 4:04David Pierce?

  Tell us a little bit about what MWC is like. I confess, it's been a bunch of years since I went and it's like in Barcelona. So it seems very romantic and lovely in a way that like going to Vegas for CES does not seem romantic and lovely. But like, give me the 2024 vibe check of MWC this year.

• 4:21Speaker 05

  So I read a lovely comment that referred to MWC as a very nice overseas trip for this journalist. And I read that comment whilst sitting in a dingy hotel room with a bathroom ceiling that was leaking at approximately 11:30 PM on a Saturday evening while I was just writing my third embargo of the weekend. So I think that I think that kind of sums up maybe how glamorous how glamorous MWC is. But I mean, like a lot of trade shows, I think a lot of companies want to kind of get out ahead of the show itself. So it means the weekend is kind of filled with with these press events and you kind of end up kind of rushing from from one to the other to the other, kind of like barely keeping track of what's happening

• 5:05Speaker 05

  because every single company is just trying to jostle and not step on each other's toes too much, but maybe step on them a little bit. And then the show kicks off on Monday in earnest. And then it's just this frantic rush to to see the kind of the smaller players that aren't able to hold a big press conference over the course of the weekend and actually kind of get hands on time with with the gadgets themselves.

• 5:25David Pierce?

  Alison, what was your read? Was this your this wasn't your first MWC, was it?

• 5:28Speaker 04

  This was my first MWC. It lived up to the hype, I guess. Yeah, I was surprised by how busy. Yeah, the weekend was. It was just like darting around Barcelona just to see different stuff and just the added like difficulty level of like, I don't understand any of these street names, but I'm gonna find this place where I'm gonna look at a phone that bends. But it was great. It was you can't beat eating some meat and cheese in your hotel room at 11:30, writing embargoes.

• 5:58David Pierce?

  Glamorous job we do. It really is.

• 6:00Speaker 04

  It really is.

• 6:00David Pierce?

  It did seem like watching from afar, not only kind of an unusually newsy show, but an unusually cool show in the sense that there was like, not just kind of the giant slew of all the phones that are kind of the same as the other phones that MWC falls into every once in a while, where it's just like every company shows you their version of the same phone that everybody else is making. And there's 60,000 of them and that's MWC. This year, it felt like there were some some big weird swings in a way that I don't remember seeing in a while. Is that did it feel like that on the ground? Like, was it cooler and more exciting than than maybe some of these we've had in recent years?

• 6:38Speaker 04

  That was my impression. It was kind of a lot of running around to see like weird little things like the Samsung Galaxy Ring was kind of out on display for the first time. So we got to go see that. The Humane AI pin was kind of an unannounced guest appearance. So we got to see that in action. I think the Deutsche Telekom booth, which in the US is like T-Mobile. It's a very like T-Mobile vibe of like everything was magenta. There were like blinking lights and stadium seating and kind of like carnival-ish. I was like, wow, this is really wild. We saw some cool stuff. Yeah.

• 7:19David Pierce?

  I made a list of kind of the coolest gadgets that I read about you guys seeing. And I just want to sort of run down your experiences with a bunch of them. And it seems to me that if you were going to pick one that was kind of like the the star of the show that everybody was talking about, it feels to me like it's Lenovo's transparent laptop. Do you think that's right? Is that the right answer?

• 7:40Speaker 05

  I love Lenovo's transparent laptop. I can't articulate what I would ever use it for. It filled me with joy hearing Lenovo themselves trying to articulate why you would, what you would use it for. But then that feels like a kind of part of the process with unveiling a concept laptop like that. You show this thing off to the world and a bunch of people see it and a lot of people go, I don't know really what this achieves. But then maybe like one person right in the back raises their hand and goes like, what about? And then you can take it back to your lab and kind of like optimize it for that kind of like idea that that just came up. I will say Lenovo's big idea for this laptop, which if you haven't seen, firstly, go see it. It's a transparent micro LED display. Gets as bright as like a thousand nits, but it doesn't have a kind of a contrast layer.

• 8:23Speaker 05

  So that thing is just transparent in a way that you can't control. When all the pixels are lit up, like when it's bright white, so if you say had like a notepad open or something, you can't see through that. But kind of other than making the whole screen white, you kind of don't have, don't have control over this thing.

• 8:39David Pierce?

  So it doesn't have like the, there's that LG TV at CES that could sort of roll up the thing behind it so that it would have something to contrast against. This doesn't have that. It is just see-through all the way.

• 8:48Speaker 05

  It doesn't have that. A thing Lenovo told me when I asked was like, oh yeah, we'll definitely try and include something like that if this were ever to make it to production. But their idea for why you might want this was they kind of had this artistic idea for it that, oh, maybe you're an artist and you're sitting there and you're sketching. And you can see things behind it. So maybe you put some sunflowers behind, behind the screen and then you're. Then it brings me on to the lower half of the tablet, which is this kind of drawing tablet. Where when you bring a stylus close to it, the keyboard, the illuminated keyboard disappears. And suddenly it's kind of like a whack on surface type thing.

• 9:26Speaker 05

  And then you can kind of sketch what's behind the laptop, which I think would make sense if this thing was the size of a TV like Lenovo's thing. But when you're talking about, I forget exactly how big the screen is. I think it's maybe like 14, 15 inches. You can just look around it. Like, I don't know anyone out there that's like, oh, I'll be unknowable joys of what could be behind my laptop. So my, my theory for who would buy this thing if it did ever make it into production. And like, to be clear, they're not making any promises about being introduction. They were kind of confident that the technology would maybe appear in a future product. But my guess would be that this would be a thing for kind of really high end front desks in like banks to buy.

• 10:09Speaker 05

  And like the kind of place you, you walk into and maybe nowadays they have an iMac because they want, because they want to project that air of high tech sophistication. And maybe in the future they go, hey, check it out. We all look like we're in Minority Report. Don't you want to, you know, spend a bunch of money at, at this business? Because it's a real, it's like a, it's a showy thing, but I don't know like where the practical element of, of this thing comes in. But I hope that like, I hope it starts the conversation in the way they hoped. And I hope that someone at the back is kind of now thinking, oh, actually I have this perfect use case for, for a transparent laptop display.

• 10:45David Pierce?

  Yeah, I appreciate that with the whole transparent display technology happening right now, nobody knows what to do with it except to put it in fancy waiting rooms, which is so funny. And it's like the LG TV, they were like, it could be, it could be a virtual fish tank at your dentist's office. And it's like, all right, like, sure, I'm down. Let's do it. I have no issue with that. I also will never, ever buy one for my house. But I'm just honestly glad that anyone is doing weird laptops. The world is better when there are weird laptops. And I appreciate Lenovo for not just making ThinkPads, but for also making weird laptops.

• 11:20Speaker 05

  We should also point out that they're very sensible business laptops are probably actually the more impactful announcement from the show because they've kind of done a bunch of work with iFixit to kind of make these things more repairable. So I went through this cool demonstration with a couple of iFixit guys who were kind of like pointing out all the kind of like the little things they've done. So I think for starters, loads of components can be removed with just a Phillips head screw. And then they've got little icons kind of printed into the chassis to kind of go, okay, if you wanted to remove the battery, you want to remove these three screws. And then they've got little QR codes in there that you can scan and it takes you to a page on Lenovo's website where it shows you, A, what part you need and B, a little like video showing you how to how to replace this thing. And like, that's, it's like the transparent laptop kind of gets you

• 12:02Speaker 05

  in Lenovo's door. And then when they're there, they're like, okay, but this is the less lesson attention grabby thing that's actually going to have like a huge impact on like the thousands and thousands of businesses that buy those ThinkPad laptops.

• 12:16David Pierce?

  No, I remember years ago, somebody, I think it was at Lenovo, told me that they make really cool colored laptops to bring you over to the shelf so that you'll buy their black laptop. And I have thought about that ever since, that they're like, everybody loves this like rad orange thing that we made, and absolutely nobody buys it. But it is literally marketing for our other colors. And I was just like, you know what? If that's what we do with this new stuff, I can live with that for a while. Alison, speaking of truly insane things that will probably never come to a real product, but I love to pieces. Anyway, you saw a thing that I believe you have named Bendy the Bendy phone.

• 12:52Speaker 04

  Yeah, Bendy phone.

• 12:53David Pierce?

  Tell us about this.

• 12:54Speaker 04

  It's a phone that bends. No, this was a similar thing Motorola, you know, owned by Lenovo.

• 13:01David Pierce?

  Oh yeah, we're just doing a whole Lenovo thing here. I didn't even mean to do that.

• 13:04Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's, that's all we saw at the show was Motorola phones.

• 13:08David Pierce?

  Apparently.

• 13:08Speaker 04

  No, they have this, it's a concept phone. So similar, they're just kind of like, we're trying this out. It's just to see if we can do it. They showed it off, I think late last year or earlier this year. But it's an actual phone. Like they showed me it runs apps and all that stuff. But it just bends backwards. You sort of get to that point of like, okay, so why? And the, the couple of things they had worked out was like, there was a little metal bracelet you could put on. And then it was the case that the, that bendy phone was in would just kind of clamp onto it. And then you have this like massive chunky bracelet or watch on your arm. And it's like, okay.

• 13:49David Pierce?

  Probably not though.

• 13:50Speaker 04

  Yeah, I don't think I'm gonna wear that, but like, okay, that's a thing you can do. And then it, it's sort of like, it doesn't just kind of bend one way. You can sort of like curve the top part of the screen a little more. And they had it so it would kind of run a little launcher on like half of the screen. Just pretty much the way the flip razor phones like cover screen works. So you get like little widgets and you can run a full app if you want, but it's weird. Yeah, it was just kind of a fun, like you see it and you're like, oh, I don't, I don't know, what is this? But then I've come around to like, it's a gadget. Like this is fun. Why, why shouldn't we have fun?

• 14:32David Pierce?

  I totally agree. And then I think all the way on the other end of the like, is this a thing spectrum? You also saw the Galaxy Ring, which you mentioned, which I am totally fascinated by. I am desperate to become a smart ring person, but

• 14:43Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 14:43David Pierce?

  The only one I have is the Aura and it's just like a little big. And I noticed it too much on my hand and I don't love it. But I am very excited about the Galaxy Ring and you got to try it, which we had not before. How did it go? What'd you make of it?

• 14:55Speaker 04

  So as a disclaimer, I do not have an Oura ring. I'm not super familiar with the category, but I was allowed to put the Galaxy Ring on. It's surprisingly light, like the pictures of it. It looks kind of dense and you think, you know, there's like a battery and a bunch of sensors in there. It might be kind of heavy, but it wasn't. It has kind of like this concave shape on the outside. So it sort of like takes up less space on your finger than you think it's going to. And just the, the overall concept is like, you know, not everybody wants a smart watch or can really wear a smart watch. Maybe you don't want like notifications buzzing on your arm all day,

• 15:37Speaker 04

  but you want some kind of fitness tracking or wellness tracking kind of deal. And that's where this will come in. And I think that's a pretty compelling pitch.

• 15:47David Pierce?

  I agree. John, are you a smart ring guy?

• 15:48Speaker 05

  I'm not a smart ring guy. I, okay. So I wasn't able to actually hold the ring, but I did peer in it through a perspex box at Samsung's booth. And that thing looks so slim and svelte. So I'm really tempted by it, but I'm also kind of really in the Garmin, like health tracking ecosystem. And so the thing I want out of smart rings at the moment is basically for them to kind of be a little bit more commoditized and kind of work across different ecosystems. I believe there's, there's one quote that kind of suggested that maybe the Galaxy Ring would work exclusively with, with Android phones to start, and that they're kind of hoping to, to support iPhones down the line. And that feels like that could be the tricky thing to get over initially, that if this thing is going to be a, hey, you're like, you're in Samsung's ecosystem

• 16:33Speaker 05

  or you're in the Android ecosystem and it works with all that stuff. But there's a, there's a wall between that and the kind of like the broader wearables market.

• 16:41David Pierce?

  Yeah, that, that is very fair. Speaking of wearables, actually, I think there were two kind of big name watches that dropped at the show, right? Was it the Xiaomi one and the OnePlus watch? Were there any other big watches that people were talking about? I just saw those two.

• 16:54Speaker 04

  I think that was it. The Xiaomi is super cool because you can take the bezel off and like they have different ones you can interchange it with.

• 17:03David Pierce?

  Like instead of just changing your strap out to make it look different, you can actually change the bezel. That's cool. I'm into that.

• 17:09Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 17:09Speaker 05

  Like hypothetically, maybe you got a Garmin watch as a gift and it's in this kind of fetching turquoise color and you can change the strap, but you can't change the bezel around the screen. So it will never quite look right. So you're just kind of stuck with turquoise. Hypothetically, if you're in that situation.

• 17:25David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 17:25Speaker 05

  The Xiaomi Watch S3 could be exactly, exactly what you need. So Xiaomi actually had two watches. They had the Watch S3, which is their kind of like lower end watch. And then they had the Xiaomi Watch 2, which is their kind of slightly higher end Wear OS watch. We didn't really get like get too much of a chance to play around with those, but certainly from like an industrial design perspective, they look, they look pretty cool. Like a lot of Xiaomi stuff, really. The, I think Alison got a chance to try out the Xiaomi 14 and just, that's a very nice looking phone.

• 17:55Speaker 04

  It is.

• 17:56David Pierce?

  Yeah. Tell me about it, Alison.

• 17:57Speaker 04

  Yeah. Into the straight edge phones these days and the Xiaomi 14 has embraced, you know, they're on the right side of history, but the no curves, the straight edges. No, it's just very nice. And we got to see the 14 Ultra. That's the one with the like one inch camera sensor and all the stuff and the vegan leather back, which I also like.

• 18:20David Pierce?

  That's the one that has the round camera bump, right?

• 18:23Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 18:23David Pierce?

  I love a round camera bump.

• 18:25Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. It's like, we're not trying to hide this thing. It is right here. This is, this is a camera with a phone attached, basically. So I've used the Xiaomi 14 a little bit, but 14 Ultra wasn't quite available yet to us. And I really want to get my hands on that one.

• 18:42David Pierce?

  It looks, it looks awesome. You have a, you have a pull quote in the story you wrote about it that just says, I witnessed the aperture moving. Which is such a ominous thing to say, but it's also like, it means it's a camera.

• 18:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's their thing this year is that it has a variable aperture that actually, like every smartphone camera basically has a fixed aperture. This one, the aperture can get bigger and smaller, just like a dedicated camera lens. Is that a good idea? I don't know. Like, I don't think it's actually that practical. I kind of put it in the category of like Sony Xperia phones that had like actual continuous zoom between two focal lengths. And it was like very small and you're like, I don't know quite what the point of this is, but you did it. It works.

• 19:31David Pierce?

  You did do it. You can't argue with that.

• 19:33Speaker 04

  They did.

• 19:34David Pierce?

  John, you got to see Nothing's new phone, right? At what seemed like one of the more bizarre showings of any kind of gadget that we had at MWC this year.

• 19:44Speaker 05

  Yeah, this phone is ostensibly being launched on March the 5th, but Nothing is at the point in its hype cycle where it's just posting full on unboxings. Okay. And we kind of, we know the processor, it's a MediaTek Dianity 7200 Pro, I think. And then we kind of went along to this event in the evening. So of course Nothing, like the MWC show floor is so stuffy. It's just, that's for like Deutsche Telekom and Qualcomm, you know? Nothing doesn't play by their rules. So Nothing instead has this kind of evening event where we show up and like everyone, everyone's kind of like milling around. And there were just these like 2001 style monoliths just kind of like dotted around.

• 20:26Speaker 05

  And I just like catch Alison's eye and I'm like, I'm betting you there's a phone 2A behind, inside that monolith. So we just kind of spend the rest of the evening just like standing by one of these things. And of course then Nothing stand up on stage and they go, oh, thank you so much for coming, everyone. This is our, it's gonna be our third smartphone. We're so, so excited to reveal it to the world. And, and then suddenly like all of these monoliths, the, the sheath gets taken off and they're, oh, look, it's a Paspex box with a Nothing phone 2A in it. And oh, it's the flashing gifts. Ah. So we got, we, okay, I don't know like how much inside baseball you want here today. David.

• 20:59David Pierce?

  Very. Keep going.

• 21:00Speaker 05

  Okay, cool. So Alison and I game planned this. We were like, we're gonna stand by where we think the phone is gonna be revealed. I will have my camera. You will have your iPhone 15. I will snap the photo as quickly as I can, and I will hand you the SD card. You will quickly put the SD card into your like USB C adapter, put that in the phone, get that uploaded on the verge. And then like, rather than like tweeting it or putting it on threads or whatever, we'll like have the images on the verge super quickly. And then, of course, just way over engineered this entire situation.

• 21:31Speaker 04

  It all fell apart.

• 21:33Speaker 05

  It's so quickly. And the iPhone sucked up the RAW file. Well, first off, Alison opens up my SD card and is like, why do you have so many pictures of keyboards in here, John? And you have to scroll through.

• 21:44Speaker 04

  It was 1,000 pictures of keyboards.

• 21:48Speaker 05

  And then right at the bottom, we had the Nothing Phone 2A shots. And then she kind of copies them over. Then we upload them into our CMS Chorus.

• 21:55Speaker 04

  I had to log back into Chorus. It logged me out, of course.

• 21:59Speaker 05

  And then Chorus is like, we can't, we can't take a RAW file. We're sorry. And so just the whole, it was not nearly as quick or seamless. Yeah.

• 22:07Speaker 04

  This was in the category of, you know, luxurious trip to overseas countries where I'm like literally standing under a plant. Like, there was a big plant, like right, and I had my laptop out at this fancy restaurant. And I'm like, opening, I mean, camera RAW, like, we touched some photos and upload them to Chorus. And I'm like, this is, I just don't know how to explain this to any normal person.

• 22:30Speaker 05

  Yeah, waiters and waitresses kept coming by and like leaning, because we were on the kind of matrony table. And they were trying to get like cutlery out of this. And then, of course, friend of the verge, Sam Byford, just like shows us his phone. He's just like, you should have just taken on your smartphone. Smartphone cameras are real good.

• 22:44Speaker 04

  He was just watching us, like, not saying I told you so, but it was like, all over his face.

• 22:50David Pierce?

  If you're listening to this and you're wondering if you should get into tech journalism, the answer is yes. But also, that is what all of your days will look like. It just is what it is.

• 22:58David Pierce?

  All right, we're gonna take a quick break and then more MWC talk. We'll be right back.

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• 24:36David Pierce?

  All right, we're back with Allison and John. So the last thing I had on my like cool things you guys saw list is also kind of the big picture thing that I feel like was happening at MWC, which is basically what is a phone if it's not just a collection of apps that Google or Apple runs? And John, you wrote about this going in as kind of what you were thinking about entering into the show. And I think it really proved out, right? That the idea is what is sort of the post-app smartphone look like? And Allison, you got a demo, I think, of a phone or an app, or I don't even know what to call it, from a company called Brain AI that is doing something along these lines, right? I still, I have trouble explaining what this thing is to people, but you've now seen it. Can you explain what this thing is?

• 25:20Speaker 04

  Yeah, so they're kind of billing it as an appless phone and the spoiler alert is that it, the phone has apps. It's like a regular phone, but this company Brain AI is launching it, or planning to launch it with Deutsche Telekom, AKA T-Mobile. And it's, right now, what it is, is it's sort of like, you have the normal OS and then there's this like, almost like digital assistant where you can launch a page. And it's, it looks a little bit like a chat GPT kind of text box where you're like, tell me about this. But the idea is you, you ask for things. You want to book a flight. You want to look for a gift or something. You kind of type it in and it starts building this interface around whatever you're asking

• 26:03Speaker 04

  for. So you're not going directly into like a travel booking app. You just sort of like, ask it to become a travel booking app and it builds it around you.

• 26:14David Pierce?

  But instead of just doing text for everything, it'll actually try and like redo the interface for whatever you're trying to do.

• 26:21Speaker 04

  Yeah, they say they've trained this AI on interfaces. It's not like a large language model. It's sort of like, here's how you present information so someone can do something with it. And then I think the really cool part is like, you ask for something like, the demo they gave me was like, show me ideas for a gift for my girlfriend who likes tennis. And you get, you know, kind of a page of results and you're scrolling through and you can stop at something and kind of tap on it and ask for, you know, a question. You can ask a question about it. You can say, show me a video of this thing. And it did, like it answered the question correctly about how fast it could shoot the tennis balls. It

• 27:02Speaker 04

  was a tennis ball machine or like a little YouTube video module kind of pop up under it. So it all just kind of happens in this, like, kind of fluidly in the same space. You're not going, I want to watch a video of this. I'm going to jump over to a different app. I'm going to type in some text, which is a really compelling way to think of like, yeah, maybe our phones don't have to be these, you know, boxes with drawers in them where Constantly, you know, drilling down to the thing you want. There's so much that's unproven about this right now. It's very focused on like shopping, which is, I think AI companies love the idea that we just always want to book flights. You know, from San Francisco to Maui or whatever.

• 27:48Speaker 04

  I'm sorry, like I want help with my email, like what about productivity and all those things? And Jerry, you, the founder of the company is like, that is coming. That's kind of the next step, but yeah. And they don't have a launch date. They are targeting Europe and the US, but they couldn't give like a definitive timeframe. But I'm super interested in it.

• 28:09David Pierce?

  It's a neat idea. Yeah, John, what did you see? I know you came in kind of looking at this question of like, what's next after app stores? Do you see anything that piqued your interest?

• 28:19Speaker 05

  I will say, no, I think I saw, I saw a much more traditional show than I think I was, I was expecting. But also I think my kind of my takeaway from a lot of the stuff we saw was for me, I kind of, I ended up kind of comparing and contrasting the humane AI pin with the rabbit R1 from CES. And the rabbit R1 like wasn't, wasn't present at MWC. But I think that so much of introducing a new product category is talking about a potential rather than what exactly it can do. And I think when talking about potential, it's very easy to kind of get very philosophical and very navel gazing in a way that kind of puts people off. Which I think is the direction that humane has kind of gone in.

• 29:01Speaker 05

  And then if everyone's kind of actually seen the pin kind of goes, oh, this is, this is a gadget. This is a gadget, gadgety gadget that like does a bunch of gadget stuff and that's, and that's cool. But it's kind of been wrapped up in this, in this very philosophical idea of, oh, we want to get rid of smartphones and screens are bad and stuff. And it's so interesting kind of comparing the, the reception of the humane open to the, to the rabbit R1, which from what I could see was very warmly received. Despite having a similarly kind of experimental approach towards what a non-phone gadget can be. And the difference seemed to be in that, in that kind of like pitching. I mean, also I think that the rabbit. Kind of teenage engineering, industrial design kind of helped and you kind of have to look at the humane IP and go,

• 29:46Speaker 05

  were you just one teenage engineering deal away from like a much more positive? But yes, that was like a lot of my takeaway is that it's the the story that you want to tell about the next step. I think if you kind of shoot high, you lose people. And if you shoot low, then you end up with a kind of this is today's smartphone, but but slightly faster. And so there's that kind of, I think the the appless phone thing kind of sits in the middle there quite nicely where you go, you already have this thing, you already know the form factor of it. But what if, what if there were less apps that you downloaded and what if it was more kind of customized towards your needs?

• 30:26David Pierce?

  Yeah, Alison, you got to use the PIN. Well, use, use might be a slightly strong word for what happened with you and the PIN. But what was your experience? What did you make of it?

• 30:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, I I hovered near a couple of people as they used the PIN and I just.

• 30:38David Pierce?

  Yeah, I think the way you said it was somebody used the PIN at you.

• 30:41Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 30:41David Pierce?

  And that's, that's good enough.

• 30:43Speaker 04

  I I did try to like, I was like, can I just like stand real close to you and like have it project on my hand? And we tried that for a second. It was very awkward and didn't really work.

• 30:53David Pierce?

  You have to like hug them from behind and reach your arms around.

• 30:56Speaker 04

  Can I just like put my head on your shoulder? It was like very sweet of them to let me try that.

• 31:01David Pierce?

  That's nice.

• 31:02Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly. Like John said, it's, it's a gadget. Like you hear all the marketing and the TED Talks and all this stuff. And there's just like, no piece of technology could ever live up to like what I am hearing about. And you see it in person and you're like, this is just kind of cool. Like, I think it would make a lot more sense if it was something that was designed to complement your phone. And and the spokespeople I talked to were very like, no, no, this isn't supposed to replace your phone. It's like, you know, it's just when you kind of want to unplug from your phone, you have it. But it costs $700, it has a subscription fee, it has its own SIM card.

• 31:43Speaker 04

  Like, I don't know a lot of people who are going to have a phone and a budget for like basically another phone. So it's, I still have weird feelings about it. I still have questions, but what I saw was, was kind of cool, like the, the navigation, you know, that you do kind of a pinchy pinch thing to scroll through the menus that the laser is projecting on your hand. I saw one of these spokespeople, she had to like check the wifi settings on it, which is just, sounds like a nightmare thing to, to do. And it kind of made sense. She was like, okay, doing the little like maneuvers and I don't know, it's going to be a wild one, I think.

• 32:24David Pierce?

  I really love the idea of projecting a settings menu, like huge onto the wall next to me while I slowly scroll through all the wifi options. This works for me. I'm into this.

• 32:35Speaker 04

  It's the future.

• 32:36David Pierce?

  All right, let's do, we're going to do a really quick MWC awards lightning round, and then I'm gonna let you guys get out of here because you, you both need to sleep after MWC. The silliest thing that you saw at MWC that you kind of love anyway. John, go first.

• 32:48Speaker 05

  Uh, the idea of HMD make a big song and dance about a Barbie flip phone that's coming.

• 32:55Speaker 04

  That's a good one.

• 32:56David Pierce?

  Fair. Very good answer. Allison, what do you got?

• 32:59Speaker 04

  I think I gotta go with Bendy phone. I played Connect Four on it. They had it like set up. That's like one of the things you can do with it. I'm like, oh, I love this.

• 33:07Speaker 05

  Actually, I'm so sorry. Can I change my answer?

• 33:09David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 33:10Speaker 05

  28,000 milliamp hour battery phones.

• 33:15David Pierce?

  Yeah, I think your headline for that was this gigantic battery has a phone attached to it.

• 33:19Speaker 05

  I a hundred percent stole a former colleague Vlad Savov's, like four, four or five years ago, they had an 18,000 milliamp hour phone. Now they're back 28,000 milliamp hour. That's called progress, baby.

• 33:30David Pierce?

  Yeah, get out of here with 18,000. Come on. That's what inflation does. I love this. All right. Thing you think a lot of people are most likely to buy very soon that you just saw. What screams like big hit coming soon?

• 33:44Speaker 05

  Well, I mean, I don't know about big hit, but Lenovo's repairable laptops. That's, that's just going to be businesses all over the world are going to have those things. And people are barely going to think about it, but there's going to be some IT admin with his little Phillips head screwdriver just going like, ah, yes, this laptop will live, live another day. Thank you very much.

• 34:03David Pierce?

  Love it. Allison, what about you?

• 34:04Speaker 04

  Yeah, I don't know if big hit, but like Galaxy Ring, I think, has a lot of potential, I would say, especially for something that, I mean, it's not brand new, but it's sort of a new category for Samsung. And so it's kind of rare to be like, oh yeah, I can, I can see where you guys are going with this. And I'm, I'm curious to see what happens.

• 34:24David Pierce?

  Okay, I love it. Yeah, I am super bullish on smart rings as a thing. I think there's like a lot of stuff left to do, but I think that category is going to be really interesting for a while. All right, last one. Thing you held in your hands and most wished you could have just taken home with you in that moment, that you're like, this is mine now, I'm going to leave, I'm going to pickpocket someone in Barcelona and this belongs to me now. John, what do you got?

• 34:45Speaker 05

  Okay, like, so this company, Infinix, this wasn't like, brand new for MWC, but they had a concept, concept phone called the E-Color Shift, where basically whenever it charges, it has an E Ink display on its rear that rapidly changes between different color schemes. And then the idea is you like, yank out the power cord when it kind of hits, hits the, the color that you like. And you're like, cool, this is, this is the color of my phone now. This is great.

• 35:08David Pierce?

  That's so fun.

• 35:09Speaker 05

  It's so, it's so great. And like, it's not even a functional phone. And it is, it's a concept thing. They think maybe in the next couple of years, they'll, they'll actually bring this thing out. But yeah, you're just like, a checkout, you can't decide between the like, really adventurous color and, and black. What, like, why not both?

• 35:24David Pierce?

  I love that. Alison, what about you?

• 35:26Speaker 04

  I'm gonna go with the Xiaomi 14 Ultra. With the like, subcategory of the photography kit, they introduced this with last year's series. And it's like a little camera grip you put on the phone. It sounds so stupid, but I loved it. It has a little shutter button. They're doing it again this year for the 14 Ultra, but it's like, actually more useful and has a battery in it. I love what they do with their cameras. And it's just like a camera nerd's phone. I want one.

• 35:55David Pierce?

  It's a good one. I like it. All right. You both need to go get some sleep and recover from all of your many travels. Thank you both for doing this. This was, this was super fun. Can't wait to do it again.

• 36:04Speaker 04

  Yeah, thank you.

• 36:05Speaker 05

  Thank you, thank you, heavenly.

• 36:07David Pierce?

  Okay, we gotta take one more break, and then we're gonna come back and answer a question from the Vergecast hotline.

• 36:15Speaker 02

  Flowing ad budget on metrics that look great till the CFO sees them? That's bull spend and marketers are calling it out in dashboard confessions.

• 36:25Speaker 03

  I remember telling my boss, it'll be good for the brand when leads were slow. Yeah, it wasn't.

• 36:33Speaker 02

  Cut the bull spend. LinkedIn lets you target by company, job title and more. Advertise on LinkedIn. Spend $250 on your first campaign and get a $250 credit. Go to LinkedIn.com/campaign. Terms and conditions apply.

• 36:47Speaker 06

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• 37:12Speaker 07

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• 37:47David Pierce?

  All right, we're back. Let's get to the hotline. As always, the number is 866 VERGE11. The email is [email protected]. We love all your questions. We try to answer at least one on the show every week. Thank you, as always, to everybody who calls and emails. We love hearing from you. This week, we have a question from Taylor.

• 38:04Speaker 08

  Hi, this is Taylor from Colorado. Love the show and I was curious this week with you talking so much about crawler bots and the consequences of AI. What do you think the impact is going to be on websites like the Wayback Machine that are archiving the internet and in some ways have already been accessing New York Times and other places behind paywalls? But also really important to Wikipedia and the history of the internet. Would love to know more what you all think. Thanks, bye.

• 38:34David Pierce?

  I love this question because it gets at something that actually I wrote about on The Verge a couple of weeks ago, I'll put the link in the show notes, but this idea of access and basically who controls what is public and what is private on the web. And just, Taylor, to answer your question directly, the answer is yes. It's a huge deal and it's potentially a huge change in how a lot of these things work. So there's things like the Internet Archive, right? Which is going out and literally just downloading versions of web pages periodically in order for you to be able to go find them later. The Internet Archive, a bunch of years ago, essentially said, "We're doing this for the good of humanity and we are going to do it no matter what you think."

• 39:15David Pierce?

  So every website, in theory, has this thing called robots.txt, which is just if you go to whatever the website is, amazon.com/robots.txt. It's just a simple text file and basically what it does in most cases is say which web crawler bots are allowed in and which are not allowed. And for like three decades, this was actually a thing that was created in the 90s back when, you know, having a bunch of crawlers on your website could actually crash your website because internet infrastructure was slow and didn't work all that well. But for the last three decades, it's mostly been about search engines. The idea was, do I, as a website owner, want Google to crawl my website? And it's essentially a question about exchange of value, right? So you say, "I want Google to crawl my website."

• 39:59David Pierce?

  That means Google is going to use some of my bandwidth costs. It costs money to let its crawler come and look at all of my webpages. And it means Google has access to a cache of every one of my webpages at some interval of time. In exchange, I get to be in Google's search engine and Google will send traffic to my website. So there are a bunch of versions of that. Bing runs a crawler that does very similar things, but for a long time, that was the exchange. The Internet Archive was a slightly different one, where in a sense, you're getting something back from the Internet Archive, but it's not like they're sending you traffic. The traffic to the Internet Archive goes to the Internet Archive, their download of your website. In general, I think most people think the Internet Archive is like a net good for humanity. So I think this wasn't really a huge issue. But if you did-

• 40:43David Pierce?

  Want the Internet Archive to crawl your website for whatever reason, and there are plenty of valid reasons not to. You could, in theory, in that robots.txt page, block the Internet Archive. The Internet Archive said, I think in 2017, that it was just no longer going to respect that. That its mission was too important, that it was doing things that were good and valuable, and it was no longer interested in respecting the wishes of somebody's robots.txt page. That page has huge sort of normative value on the Internet, but no actual real legal authority. It has no technical authority. It's just kind of a way of saying, you know, please keep out. It's like putting a sign on your treehouse. It doesn't really accomplish anything, but it does send a message. But if you don't want to listen, you don't really have to. So that has all been happening over the years.

• 41:28David Pierce?

  And there have been people who want more sophisticated tools to actually keep people out. There have been more sophisticated reasons for the protocol to exist behind robots.txt. But in general, it has just been around, and it has more or less worked and more or less been okay with people. But now, like Taylor is saying, with AI, two things are happening. One, a lot of these companies that run websites are starting to think a lot more carefully about what is and is not allowed on their website. So you can say, not just, I want to block Google, but I want to block OpenAI, because I don't want my stuff going into OpenAI's training data for its large language models. So you can block GPT-Bot. That's the one that OpenAI does. Most of the other AI companies have crawlers of their own. They all need this giant mass of training data.

• 42:12David Pierce?

  So not only are all of these website owners having to go into that webpage and say, I want to block GPT-Bot or whatever else, it's causing them to think more broadly about access, right? You have an antitrust case against Amazon that is fundamentally, in large part, about Amazon's ability to crawl the web. It was doing this thing where it would go around the web and look for prices on products that were also listed on Amazon, and then allegedly doing a bunch of really shady stuff if it found that you were listing something for cheaper than you were listing it on Amazon. You can't do that if you don't have an automated way to crawl the web. It's just too much work for a single person to like go click on every product page on the Internet. So this is the kind of thing that's used in tons of ways, right?

• 42:56David Pierce?

  And not only are these companies going in and saying, okay, who do I want in and who do I want out? One particularly powerful way to keep people out is a paywall. And like Taylor said, one of the things we're starting to see is more and more companies, publishers, whatever, putting their stuff behind the paywall. Like, one of the reasons Facebook has always required you to log in is because it doesn't want Google and everybody else to be able to access all of the data on Facebook, because that data is really valuable. And now we're seeing companies like Reddit start to realize how valuable their data is and strike deals with AI companies. So there's just this shift in how data on the internet is understood. For a long time, it was kind of net public. The idea was to be in their place, it was going to be fine.

• 43:39David Pierce?

  And now, to some extent, the website, or the app, or whatever, is actually less valuable in sort of real dollar terms than the data underneath it. Like, the content of Reddit posts is probably more valuable and more important than Reddit, which is weird, because one can't exist without the other, but that is very much where we are. So all of this is up in the air right now, for the first time in a really long time. And in a pretty big way, I think, threatens to kind of rewrite the web. It could put much more stuff behind registration walls and start to silo things off even more. We've talked a lot about the sort of open future of social with Activity Pub and the Fediverse and Mastodon. And I think all of that is very cool.

• 44:21David Pierce?

  I also think there are lots and lots of incentives for all of these platforms to build bigger walls, not knock them down. Because if you knock them down, you give lots of companies and crawlers and people access to your stuff in ways that can be adversarial and problematic for you. This is one of the things I have spent a lot of time thinking about and talking about with people, because it's one of the sort of norms of the internet, right? That like, if I have a webpage and you have a webpage, we should both just be cool. And it is amazing how far that got us. But now there's so much money and so much change and so many new reasons, both to crawl someone else's website and to be worried about someone crawling your website, that I think a lot of this is about to change. And what I've heard from publishers and stuff is that they

• 45:03David Pierce?

  Didn't touch their robots.txt page for years. And now it's becoming like a C suite level meeting you have to have about who do we want in? Who do we want to block? And who do we want to go try to make some kind of commercial agreement with? So I don't want to overstate it, but I'm going to kind of overstate it. Like, I think this is possibly going to be part of the huge change that we're about to see on the web. We've seen the problems with closed platforms and we're now in a phase, I think, where there is a real pushback towards the open web. But there are also really good reasons, if you are a part of that open web, to close your doors. So we'll see. But my great hope, if I'm completely honest, is that things like the Internet Archive and Wikipedia

• 45:46David Pierce?

  and all of these things continue to be free and open because I think the idea that they are generally good things and should continue to exist on the open Internet, that feels right to me. All right, anyway, that is it for the Vergecast today. Thanks to John and Allison for being here and thank you as always for listening. There's lots more from everything we talked about on theverge.com. Our MWC coverage was awesome. John and Allison made a bunch of really great videos. So if you go to our TikTok or Instagram channel, you can see tons of good stuff from them touching and spinning around and playing with all these cool gadgets. But in general, it's a super newsy time right now. So check out theverge.com, lots going on. As always, if you have thoughts or questions or feelings or want to get my humane AI pin from me when I finally get one, you can always email us at [email protected].

• 46:30David Pierce?

  Or keep calling the hotline 866-VERGE11. We love hearing from you. Send us all of your thoughts and questions and ideas. We are rapidly nearing what I would say is like the first gadget season of the year. We're going to get some AI stuff. We're going to get some Apple stuff. We're going to get some Google stuff. There's just a lot coming. So keep all your questions coming. Tell us what you want to hear about. We love hearing from you. This show is produced by Andrew Marino, Liam James and Will Poor. The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Neelai, Alex and I will be back on Friday to talk about the new MacBook Air and everything else happening in tech right now. We'll see you then. Rock and roll.

• 47:11Speaker 09

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• 47:42Speaker 10

  Everyone's got a hard question about AI. Your job, your kids, where it's going. Anthropic was built to surface those questions and share what it finds along the way, because there's hope in hard questions. Ask yours at claud.ai/spotify and keep thinking. That's claud.ai/spotify.