Hello and welcome to Vergecast Flagship podcast with binding non-disparagement agreements. It's contentious this week. Who is allowed to say what about whom? I think I got the who and the whom right there. Uh, I'm your friend Nilay. I'm here. I'm running the show for the first time in years. I'm going to kind of remember how to do it. It's going to be great. David Pierce is off because he has the temerity to have children and need to care for them. And I think that's completely inappropriate, but so it goes. Anyway, to replace David, we have an all-star crew. Sean Hollister is here.
I am here. I am not David Pierce.
Dom Preston is here. Hey, Dom.
Hey. Also, also not David Pierce.
Maybe we'll summon him throughout the show. No, it's fine. David had stuff to take care of. Well-deserved break. We've got Sean and Dom. It's a huge week of gadget news. If you've been paying attention to the show, you know we did all of the Apple news in a live stream earlier this week. You can go watch that. You can watch me get a spec wrong and then just melt into a puddle of embarrassment. I got texts from my friends who told me it was okay because they have not seen me be embarrassed about getting a spec wrong in that way in quite a long time. Thank you to everybody in the chat who corrected me. We got it right in the end. It's an OLED display. I don't want to talk about it anymore. That's it. That's all you get from me. But aside from Apple, it was an enormous week of gadget news. Dom was at Mobile World Congress along with Allison. A million Android phones are launched there as well as 6G, which sure. Sean, you covered Google and Epic settling a giant dispute in the Play Store. There's all kinds of other gadgets to talk about this week. I actually want to start by talking about a gadget. One second. I do want to say there's other news in the world. There's a war going on. There's a massive conflict between Anthropic and the Pentagon. We've got all that on the site. In particular, we're going to have Hayden on with David to talk about the Anthropic Pentagon situation in detail on Tuesday. One of the reasons we're not doing it right away is as we are recording, more things are changing. So we're just going to hold for that story to resolve one tick further before we dive all the way into it. But there's a ton of coverage from Hayden on that on the site. It's some of the most in-depth reporting anywhere on what the contract terms actually mean. So we'll link it in the show notes. Go read that. She's going to be on the show on Tuesday to dive into that in full. So we have all that coverage and there's more coming on the show. It's just literally as we were going to record today, more like the Pentagon said, more stuff today. So we're just going to wait for that to resolve. And then the last thing I want to say before we get started, the new season of Version History starts on Sunday with Furby, which is wild. Do we have the Furby trailer, Travis? Do you remember the most exciting gadget of 1998? It was a robot that ended up in millions of homes and it was very high-tech. It had a light sensor. It had a sound sensor. It had fur.
On this season of Version History, we have six stories about the tech that we talk to.
What's the first rule of Fight Club?
Don't talk about Fight Club.
Outside interventions. What if a conference call was a social network and the tech that talked back?
Hello, I am Macintosh.
Oh, listen to the podcast. Watch it on YouTube every Sunday starting on March 8th.
I think this is you guys' best podcast.
It's great. That's very good. And it starts with Furby, which I believe is one of the most politically intense episodes of Version History we've ever done. I mean, we did the Macintosh, like the 128K Macintosh this season. It was really fun to do, but I think the Furby is going to inspire even more emotions. Version History Now has its own YouTube channel. It's at Version History podcast. Go subscribe to that channel. I can't wait for you guys to see this season. I think David's like really cracked the code on Version History this time around. It's great. I'm excited for you all to see it. And in particular, tell us how you feel about Furbies because there's more going on there than you could possibly know.
I cannot wait for you to see V's Furby.
It will haunt your nightmares.
Okay, so on Wednesday, I promised that I would start this show with like five minutes of me just being happy about a gadget. And so I'm going to keep my promise. And I'm not with this review isn't published. We're not ready to like issue a definitive ruling on this product yet. But if you will recall, when I went away on parental leave over the summer, I said, I'm going to get a Kaleidescape, the high-end movie streamer, and that's all I'm going to do. I'm going to watch movies with my baby. I did not do this because the idea of reviewing a gadget while on leave is dumb because the baby has many more needs than I do. It turns out this is our second time around. You would think I would have realized this, but I had this dream and I failed to realize this dream. Then we hired John Higgins who is like a legitimate expert TV and AV reviewer. He knows way more about this than anybody I've ever met and he knows everybody. And so the Kaleidescape people are like, "Do you actually want to review a Kaleidescape?" And so they've sent John and I Kaleidescape systems. If you don't know what a Kaleidescape is, it is the single highest bit rate movie streamer you can get. And the way it's supposed to work is you don't just get one device, you get two. You get a server and you get clients that you place around your house. So the reason you have to have a server and clients in your house is because the files are so big, the movies you download are so big, you can't actually stream them over the internet. You have to download them first and then stream them locally on your own network. So the server that they sent me was a Kaleidescape Mini Terra Prime. It's an 8 TB SSD. It can only hold 115 movies because then the files are so big. And then I have a Strato E Player, which has its own little storage, and you can just buy the thing by yourself if you want. The Strato E Player alone is $2,500. The Mini Terra Prime server that I have is $10,000. So I have $13,000 of movie streamer in my house right now. It's out of control. It is the single most incredible experience I've ever had watching a movie in my house. In my entire life, I've never been so happy. And you know, I have a Sony A95L, which is one of the best TVs you could buy. Some would argue it's still the best TV you could buy. And then we have a 5.1.4 Atmos system running through a big Sony receiver. So there we have four speakers in the ceiling. We have five around and a huge subwoofer. And basically the experience of watching like full uncompressed to 100 megabit per second video files with full uncompressed Atmos audio or fully uncompressed DTS-HD Master Audio is mind-blowing. It's like you're seeing reality for the first time. This is a very niche thing to say. You know, like you can drive your car fast on a highway and you know that you're not supposed to do that, right? Right? And you're like, you're having this thing. You're like, "Oh, that's pretty cool." Have you ever driven a car on a racetrack? Like, have you ever had this experience? Or even like a go-kart. Have you ever driven a go-kart on a race?
Go-karts are a thing. I love my go-karts.
Right. And you're like, "Oh, this is how it's supposed to be. Like I'm supposed to go this fast. Like my car is much faster than the highway." This is very much the experience of lighting up my TV and my speakers with like full uncompressed audio and video. Like, oh wait, all of this stuff I've been watching looks like [__]. Look at how much more headroom there is. It is incredible.
I love that you've picked a solution to watch movies like reality that you can actually share with other people. Whereas I am in my living room on my couch with a pair of glasses watching 3D movies. I cannot stop watching 3D movies because that feels like seeing reality for the first time to me. But everybody around me is like, "What are you doing in your living room with glasses on?" So all I have to ask is, is this a better TV than the Vision Pro that you were down on?
Yes. So here's the thing. I say it's like I already had the TV. I already had the Atmos system. It was to your point, Sean, about wanting to share with other people. In our previous house where we lived in the woods in the pandemic, I put up all that stuff in the basement and literally no one wanted to go to the basement with me. Like I was like, "Do you want to watch a movie?" And everybody would be like, "Yeah." Then I'd be like, "Let's go downstairs." They'd be like, "No." And so it's like I would go alone to the basement to watch a movie without my family like all the time. And then so when we moved here I put all that stuff in the main room, right? We don't have like a separate theater room. We don't have any of that stuff anymore. We just have like kind of the one big TV with all that stuff. And like that means mostly what we watch is Bluey. Like the reality of this setup is like very expensive home theater is that we mostly watch Bluey on it. And then you watch Disney Plus streaming or Netflix streaming and all that stuff looks fine and it's like appropriately that, but like we're watching basically kids movies right all the time because we have kids.
I want to hear about the nature of reality watching uncompressed.
Right. No, but let me get to it. So all that stuff is still streaming at like 15 to 25 megabits per second. Like on the high side you're getting 25. That's a lot of compression. And in particular, it's a lot of color compression that is like it's very wonky, but you know see those numbers when you set up your HDMI signal like do you want 4:2:2 or 4:4:4 or whatever? Like that is a way to describe color compression. And people have a lot of feelings about bits versus it's fine, but that is a way to describe color compression. And you get a lot of that on streaming. Just a lot of color compression on stream. That's why red, like the color red in digital video often blocks so hard. That's just an artifact of the amount of color compression that happens. And then compression generally, bit rate compression is why when there's fast motion at the super like the confetti comes down, the whole image blocks up. Like there just isn't enough bandwidth to show you the motion happening all at once. So you got a lot of color compression, you got a lot of motion compression at 15-25 megabits per second. This is like fine for Bluey and you don't see it. We get the Kaleidescape and we're just watching Incredibles 2, right? The same movie that we watched on Disney Plus and you're like, "Oh, this is way better." Like I'm actually seeing more of this movie. I'm noticing more things in the image of this movie because there isn't any color compression or it's much less color compression and the overall bit rate is so much higher that frame to frame there's more detail. This is crazy. I accidentally watched all of Pacific Rim again because so much of Pacific Rim happens in the rain that when you watch it on streaming, you're basically not watching anything. A 1080p Blu-ray still looks better than 4K streams from Netflix because of this.
Absolutely. Because the bit rate is so much higher on a 1080p Blu-ray that you actually get motion frame to frame.
So anyway, I have this like $13,000 movie streamer in my house and I'm watching Incredibles 2 and re-watching Pacific Rim for some reason. And it's not necessarily the TV and the speakers. Like obviously the one I have has so much ability to show you the quality that it's like driving a fast car fast. You're like, oh this car is meant to go very fast and like mostly I putter around at 30 mph. Like you're like, oh this car could actually go 100 miles an hour. Like that is what that feels like.
So what I'm hearing is you're going to invite The Verge over to have...
We should all have a Kaleidescape night. And but what you really get is like, oh, it is a crime how much compression these streamers force upon us. Like there's a big delta between 25 and 100, right? And I would pay more to a lot of these streamers to get higher quality. The only one, like Apple's a little bit better. Like Apple I think will peak out at 30. Like it's like moderately better. It's like not that much better. The only one that I think you can get, which I also have on my dumb Sony TV, is Sony Pictures Bravia Core, whatever it's called now, where it will stream only Sony movies at up to 85.
And but that's like you can only get Sony movies. Like you can watch Spider-Man 2 as many times as you want at 85 megabits per second.
Into the Spider-Verse, that color compression, you're going to like having less of it.
There you go. All of that, all Sony's IP. But it's just a movie store. It's got everything. It's got TV shows. I'm going to, they sent me Night of the Seven Kingdoms, which I haven't watched yet, but I'm like excited to watch it on this thing. And I'm like, your options if you want source material that can live up to the quality of the display that you've bought are to collect Blu-rays, which I think a lot of people are into, or a $13,000 Kaleidescape. That's it. That's what you get. I don't know. I mean, obviously John and I are going to write reviews of this. I'm sure his review will actually be far more technical. Like he has things to say other than this is sick. So I'm excited to go by and this review. I mean there's some really truly wonky stuff about this. Like I had to open a to configure it you have to go on the web and then like log into a little web portal on the device. It's like ridiculous. Like it's meant for installers to put in for rich people. It's not meant for normal humans to have. And I had to do that not for any particular like complicated reason. You have to do that to enable HDMI CEC because it doesn't because for $13,000 you do not get a remote control because the assumption is this is true because the assumption is that your high-end AV installer has put this in as part of an integrated system and you're just like sitting down in the theater and your butler has been getting this for you. I feel like far too much of the tech industry has been premised on the idea that HDMI CEC is a viable solution to solve everything. I got it. It works kind of. So now we can at least click around with my TV, but to turn it on, I have to open an app on my phone. So there are some real edges here, but then you like it's a video playback device, so who cares? Once you're in it, you're in it. And I've just been re-watching all of these old movies that are in the catalog that came with the device because I'm like, oh, it's like I can see what's actually going on for the first time. Highly recommend it. It's very much that Ferris Bueller scene with the Ferrari. Like if you have the means. Anyway, that is it's the gadget of all gadgets. I've never been happier. We're going to write an actual review of it. Like I said, there are some rough edges around this thing that make it not a consumer device. And of course, just to get the whole system as delivered to me, you're $13,000 in the hole. And it doesn't come with any movies. Like you still have to buy or rent the movies.
Do they cost like more than usual? Is it like 70 bucks a movie? 100 bucks a movie?
Talk about the same. It's uh all the ones I've looked at are it's like six or $7 to rent and $25 to buy.
So it's not out of Blu-ray zone.
That's fine. I'm conf You can also buy a used Blu-ray player for like $150 and just buy Blu-rays. This is a thing you can also do for now. They are discontinuing a lot of these Blu-ray players finite results. But like I've been saying, it is I just haven't been happier with a gadget in ages because this thing isn't trying to do anything. It's not trying to like replace all white collar work, right? It's like these movies will look better than the regular movies. Like yep, it super does. No getting around that. Even my wife noticed it the other day. Like I made her watch that's really good at concerts. So there's a lot of concert because again it's uncompressed audio. So we're just sitting around watching The Cure and INXS and The Rolling Stones live for no reason. And she's like this sounds really good. I'm like yeah it's uncompressed. And she was like out of the room by the time I finished. But it's like it's just you get so much more dynamic range in the audio that they have built a little business doing like concert streams or concert footage rather. Because watching a streamed concert like this sounds bad, but if you have all the channels uncompressed, I told the people I was a huge nerd and so I had to prove that I'm a huge nerd after getting a spec earlier this week.
Just invite a few of them in to testify. I went to Nilay's house.
I'm sure the Kaleidescape people will be happy for you to come demo their product. 13 G's at a time. But we'll have a full review. John and I are going to work on he's got other stuff to do. He's got other products to review. You can imagine what some of the display products he has to review are that are in the mix. We're working on some of that stuff. But when we get a free moment, we will review the Kaleidescape just so I can talk about it again on this show. That's what I have for you. All right. We should start with the actual news, which is not just me insisting that everybody comes within a mile of my home. Look at how good my TV looks. Dom, you at MWC. I haven't been at MWC in years since we're Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. It's the biggest phone show, telecom show in the world. I think a really interesting dynamic right now playing out for us here in the United States. Phones outside the United States are getting so much more interesting than anything we have here.
And MWC is where that's happening. Describe the show to us. I want you to absolutely start with, but then I want you to talk about just how different phones are getting over there.
Yeah. I mean, I think the big theme of MWC for me this year was hardware is getting weird on this side of the Atlantic, and people are pushing hardware in as many weird directions as they can, mostly in the camera, but not exclusively. The emblematic handset here is the Ucatel WP63. You probably don't know Ucatel. They are a rugged phone brand. So they make these sort of big bulky phones with giant batteries and absurd waterproofing and that kind of thing. The WP63 is pitched as a camping phone. It's got a 20,000 mAh battery. It's got a camping light. It's got a super loud speaker that you can use for listening to music or for sort of sounding an alarm or something. And it also has a fire lighter built inside. It has an igniter. And igniter is sort of a generous way of putting this. This is basically like an old car cigarette lighter. It's a tiny little electric plate embedded inside the phone. There's a button on the outside which has a little red fire icon on it and you push the button. I think you can also do this like within the phone and this little plate slides out and it is just the size of the end of a cigarette.
Wait, are they selling it to light cigarettes?
They are pitching it as a camping accessory for outdoors, for rugged adventures, but the way they demoed it at MWC, I have been told, is by lighting cigarettes.
Right? When you need a rugged adventure outside of the bar for 5 to 10 minutes.
So this is no more stylus. Instead, your pen-shaped object is a cigarette lighter now.
Yeah. I mean, they just need the slot for the cigarettes to slot in the phone as well, and then we're really talking.
Wait. No. So I'm looking at a picture of this. It's not a pen-shaped object. It's just like a...
It's a tiny little disc that slides out. It really The whole bit that slides out is the size of the cigarette tip. It is like this quarter of an inch by quarter of an inch square that slides out.
You know how like we've criticized various phone companies for the batteries not big enough? Like just make the phone thicker and put a bigger battery in there? This is like they made the phone gigantic and they're like with all of this extra battery, we're going to do resistive heating on a coil of metal so you can spark up a cigarette. Like I respect it. It is very much a 1980s cigarette lighter.
Like this is the thing that was in my parents' cars.
It's retro tech and maybe cigarettes are the next retro thing that Gen Z is going to get into and everyone's going to take.
This is what I mean about what's happening overseas. Like you can start a company where your entire first of all it's called Ucatel. Your entire promise to the consumer is like it's just an Android phone but this one can light cigarettes and like maybe you have a business because there's just like more access to the market there. Like this thing is not going to be in the T-Mobile store.
I suspect not. I'd be pretty impressed if they could pull that off. Not because I never saw it light a cigarette. We tried to see this thing work three times. And I was repeatedly in contact with the PR. I know other people did see it work. Like it did work. I've spoke to other journalists who watched this thing light something on fire. Every time I went, it had broken about 10 minutes before I arrived. And this happened on three different occasions. Allison and I kept trying to see this thing, but we never once saw it light up because they had one sample and it broke every single day of the show.
This is the same company that does like the giant batteries in their phones, right? Like...
Yes. And this one has a giant battery. It's got a 20,000 mAh battery as well. They have others that go bigger than that.
Once you have a big enough battery, like what can we do with it? It's like cigarettes.
Yeah, you can do anything with it and just stick a little resistive heat plate next to the battery and you know...
All right. So this is what I mean. Like if phones over there are just getting weird, right? Because there's more access to consumers. There's more Android users outside of the United States than not. Like there's just a different WhatsApp is a more dominant messaging platform that lets people switch more easily. There's all this stuff and then you can see phonemakers are competing on hardware. So cigarette lighters aside, we should talk about the robot phone because this to me is like the most let's compete on hardware phone in quite a while.
I know they're calling it a robot, but it appears that they've just put a gimbal on a phone.
Oh, yeah. It is absolutely the robot phone name is a real stretch. This is the gimbal phone or the stabilized camera phone or the DJI Osmo Pocket phone. Any of those would work just fine. It is this is from Honor. It's worth saying this one is China only, but they do say it's coming out. This is the sort of thing you look at and you think, "Oh, that's some goofy concept device that someone's come up with and they made three of them and they're never going to sell it." They insist they are making this. There is a production run. They're going to sell them in China. They talk about it like it's a product line that will have more of them. They talked about the idea that it will come to Europe in the future or future versions might. This is something they are supposedly exploring. But yeah, it is a phone with a DJI Osmo Pocket style mini gimbal that kind of sits in the rear camera and folds up out of the top of the phone and then it can rotate, it can look around, it can do stabilized video, it can do subject tracking video, you can swivel it around and use it for your selfie camera. So you're getting this kind of rear main camera quality for your selfies. And then the robot of it all is it has an LLM powered chat app and it makes cute noises and it will nod its head at you and shake its head and dance to Imagine Dragons and all sorts of horrifying things like that.
My favorite part of your video, by the way, is you point out it can dance to Imagine Dragons, but no other songs.
No other song. That is the only program. Yeah. I asked if it knew other dances and other songs, and they were like, uh, you know, it will, but you know, for the demo, the demo we have this and Imagine Dragons.
Do you think that they licensed the Imagine Dragons songs or you think they were just like they'll be fine?
I hope they did, if only for how often it was being blasted. I heard it played, I don't know, at least two or three times during the press conference. They had this dance routine on stage at their booth. I heard it played there. Anytime anyone went on the demo and said like, "Hey, robot phone, play some music." Suddenly, Imagine Dragons busting. Imagine that. But with 10 robot phones in a ring, and it's the one demo everyone wants to see is it dancing to music. So I've had a lot of Imagine Dragons in my life. I feel like it shouldn't be too much of a stretch for this company to come up with like some reasons that you might want a robot. Like maybe the little gimbal could be your eyes if you can't see very well and the phone could like describe things into your ears. This feels like there could be legitimate reasons for that.
Yeah, they didn't pitch accessibility uses at all. The way they went down the robot angle was that kind of it's a companion. So they're talking about having an accessory that clips onto your backpack. And they were saying it could describe what you're seeing, but in that kind of like you could be on vacation and it will describe the scenery and talk about where you are to you and that kind of thing. But...
Wait, hold on. I know this isn't the first time we've encountered the phone. This is the first time you've gotten to like see and hold it, right?
I didn't get to hold it, but this is the first time we have seen it turned on and working. It has previously been shown off in a pure CGI maybe AI slop concept video. And then at CES I got to see one but turned off and I wasn't allowed to touch it and the arm didn't move or anything. That was just to like here's a plausibly a dummy unit. You know, this is what it will look like. This time they had a load of them on the booth working moving but no one was allowed to actually grab the thing.
So 3 months from now you'll be able to touch one.
Yeah. At some point second half of this year it'll come out. We'll see.
Right. You can just see that you can see the progression. Every 3 months you get ever closer to the robot. I'm just saying it seems like they've backed into needing to make it more of a robot because of AI. Like if you're like this is a robot phone and actually all it is is a gimbal that pops out and moves around mechanically. Like yeah, it's enough. Like it doesn't actually have to be a robot. The extra bit of context here is that Honor is building towards an IPO and they do not want to IPO as just another company that makes phones and tablets and smartwatches. And so robots, they just thought we'll do robots instead. That'll be the thing that pushes us forward. I was told by someone at Honor they kind of looked at EVs, but the Chinese EV market is already sprawling and enormous and has countless brands and Xiaomi's there and doing a very good job so far. So Honor kind of thought we can't fit there, but you know, robots, we could probably do robots.
And so their attempt to convince everyone they're a robot company is by putting a gimbal on the phone. But this is all fine. I'm actually very taken with the gimbal on the phone. Like I watched your video. I watched some other videos and I'm like, "Oh, this is neat." Like you get stabilized video. It can do the tracking. It's tracking Allison and a crowd of people in your video. And then like in the back of my head was isn't the S26 Ultra doing all this with a crop sensor? Like there's a real dynamic here right now where they did a lot of mechanical stabilization. And it's cool because people like mechanical gimbals. They like the Osmo Pocket.
I enjoy the gimbal I have for my phone. And then I'm looking at Samsung and they're like, "You don't need that. It's just a huge sensor. We'll just crop it really fast." You're reviewing like the S26 for us. That has the horizon lock on it, right?
Yeah, that has horizon lock as well. It doesn't have the giant 200 megapixel sensor that the Ultra does, but it also has horizon lock and I tested it out after seeing the robot phone. I thought I'll go play with horizon lock a bit and see how they compare. And yeah, Horizon Lock seems to work really well. It seems impressive. What it's doing on the software side is kind of amazing. I think it's plausible the hardware solution will be better in terms of like pure quality you're going to get. You're not cropping into the sensor as much. You can have the full resolution. You can do all this other stuff. Maybe even the actual stabilization will end up being better because they have hardware and software going all at once. But you get all these other problems. You know, this thing is probably going to cost a load whenever it comes out. I can only assume it will be unreasonably fragile compared to any other phone on the market in China. I don't know how well set up Honor is for a repair system, things like that. They are a big company. They have a big presence in China. Maybe they're going to be able to repair people's broken robot phones if they ever launch it overseas. I would never really put my faith in them to be able to handle fiddly repairs on, you know, this tiny little gimbal arm. I assume the waterproofing will be near zero and the dust proofing. I assume we're going back to like the early foldable days where they just have to shrug and say we can't protect this in the way that we could have slapped.
I will say as somebody who does use an Osmo Pocket 3 all the time. I film all my videos. You're actually looking at me right now through one. I can probably get its gimbal active track going. This thing is wonderful, but I always feel like I can't quite tell what I'm filming on it. The postage stamp size screen is not big enough. So you kind of want to pair it with a phone. So I can definitely see.
You got our first robot phone customer right here.
Yeah. Put it together. Put it together.
I've used a pocket as well and had the same thing. The postage stamp screen is very hard to work with sometimes. Getting that experience on a big phone screen all in one device. You get to edit on that device, right? If you are willing to edit on your phone screen, but you can edit on a phone better than you can edit on an Osmo Pocket. So there's a logic if you but I think the most important thing is getting the sensor out of the phone so you can make it bigger and you can pick up much better low light.
But it's not much bigger. Well, we don't know actually the size, right? But it's still a 200 megapixel sensor.
We know it's 200 megapixel and that is it. Honor has said zero other camera specs. They've said nothing about the actual sensor size the aperture or anything like that. It will also have an ultra wide telephoto and even still has a selfie camera built into the screen because I asked them about that. They did explain it kind of makes sense that you might want to use face unlock or something and you don't want have to wait for the robot to pop its head up every time you want to do face unlock on your phone. But...
I'm just saying all the stuff the AI stuff they're trying to do to make it a robot. It's like just put googly eyes on the gimbal and call it a robot and like everybody that's fine. It's like honestly half the people would still be like it's alive you know like it's like the presence of googly eyes like yeah that's definitely alive. Like you don't need to do this AI stuff.
By you mentioned dust resistance. They also announced a new foldable what's the V6?
The Magic V6 which is the sort of the most toughest foldable around, right?
It is now IP68 and IP69 beating Google's Pixel 10 fold which are just IP68. The difference between those is that the 8 is for submersion in water and the 9 is for high temperature and high pressure jets of water. So it has both ratings. It can survive submersion, but also I don't know a really intense pressure wash. If you want to subject your phone to that.
You know, it's funny. I still get nervous about putting my phone like regular phone underwater and then it's like, oh, this folding phone you can put in a car wash. It's like I don't I'm not going to do that.
But you should the IP ratings that sealant is good once, twice, maybe as salt gets into it as chemicals eat away at the sealant. It's for that accident. But do not rely on it to do it more than once.
All right. Well, I'll keep my folding phone out of the car wash.
I've heard stories of a Google employee I know in the UK who once in the early days of an IP68 Pixel very proudly demonstrated the waterproofing on his Pixel phone by dunking it in the swimming pool which it did not survive.
Brutal. Xiaomi was there. They had a bunch of Leica phones. Some other stuff. What's going on there?
Yeah, they had a huge launch. They had all of different stuff. The main things are the Xiaomi 17 series phones which had launched in China very late last year. This was their big European unveiling. So there was the 17 which is their iPhone 17/S26/Pixel 10 kind of compactish flagship phone. They jumped from the 15 series to the 17 series. They quite explicitly said at the time they did this in China that it was to match their numbering to Apple's. Which is delightful. I love that for them. The more exciting thing was the 17 Ultra and then this kind of Leica branded spin on that which is officially the Leica LUX phone.
It's great. I mean, so this actually the fourth LUX phone, but the other three were all made by Sharp and they were only available in Japan and they were this kind of weird little phone that a lot of Leica nerds got excited about and could never buy unless they made a trip to Japan. So this is the first LUX phone to be global by which I mean not the US but everywhere else. It is kind of extraordinary as cameras goes. It's basically just the 17 Ultra to be clear. Like the LUX phone is not a whole different thing. It's the 17 Ultra, but with a lot of extra Leica branding. They put the Leica Red Dot logo on it. It comes with Leica branded accessories. The software has been not totally co-created with Leica, but tweaked with Leica. Leica's aesthetic has been put all over Android and all over the camera app. So it feels a bit more like you're using a Leica device from that kind of UI experience, just like the fonts that run through it and things like that. And then the big fun, silly, gimmicky bit on top of it is that the rear camera ring rotates. So if you get the Leica version of the phone, you can use that rear camera, you can twist it around, and it can control zoom or exposure or you can set it to sort of move between different filters in the camera app and things like that, which is fun. And I thought I would love this. I was so excited for it. And I discovered that although in my head the camera island on these Ultra flagships feels enormous. And they are enormous. They stick out of the phone loads, there's these huge black circles on the back of the phone. They look really outlandish compared to, you know, what Samsung and Apple do. But when you compare it to actually a camera and you try and hold it and grip the lens mount with your hand, you discover it's tiny. It's really flush against a camera body. There is nothing for your hand to hold on to. And it's really awkward to actually try and use that as like a zoom control or focus or something. It doesn't actually work in the way you really feel like it should.
I've always wondered who are these branded camera phones for? Are they for Leica nerds who are like, I want to have a Leica phone in addition to my Leica camera, or do these people just they pull out the actual camera, not bother with the phone?
I think it's a little bit of both. I think there are people who want the Leica experience on their phone, and I think there are people who just want the best camera phone they can get and don't care about the branding at all. And honestly, if the camera is as good as they say it is, that second group is going to be very happy.
Yeah, and I think that's the thing. The branding is almost incidental to the actual hardware. Like the 17 Ultra is already a great camera phone. The LUX version is just the 17 Ultra with a Leica skin on it. So if you want the Leica experience, you get it. If you just want a great camera, you get that too. It's kind of a win-win for them.
Right. And I think that's the smart play. You don't have to choose. You can have both. And I think that's what makes it interesting. It's not just a Leica phone. It's a great phone that happens to have Leica branding on it. And I think that's the right way to do it.
Yeah, absolutely. And I think we're going to see more of this. Like the camera phone space is getting really competitive, and I think we're going to see more partnerships like this. More brands trying to differentiate themselves through camera quality and through partnerships with established camera brands. It's going to be interesting to see how it plays out.
It is. And I think that's a good place to leave it for now. We've covered a lot of ground today. We've talked about the Kaleidescape, we've talked about MWC, we've talked about the robot phone, we've talked about the Leica LUX phone. It's been a big week for gadget news. And I think we're going to have a lot more to talk about in the coming weeks. So stay tuned for that. And we'll see you next time on Vergecast Flagship.
Thanks for listening, everyone. We'll see you next week.
So I'm lucky enough to know two Leica nerds. They buy everything Leica makes. And I'm going to just say this out loud: neither of them have any children. And so the money you would spend on college goes directly to Leica. I hope Leica starts like a scholarship fund or something because that would be the true circle of life. But like literally everything down to there was Leica made like a subscription camera app.
And my buddy was like, "Well, I have to have it." And I was like, "No, you absolutely do not. Like I just download Halide, you will be fine." And there was no like... they're going to buy this phone, I'm sure, and they're going to buy the lens cap, which is by far the best accessory for the phone. The huge lens cap that goes over the back.
Oh yeah. For anyone on the video, you've got this like Leica-branded lens cap on the back of the case that comes with it, and it's brilliant.
Okay, how do you feel about the fact that the Leica logos on the back are meant for... are in portrait? Because I think this is the mistake of this phone: that those logos should be for when you're holding the phone in landscape.
So the funny thing about this is that this originally came out in China as a Xiaomi 17 Ultra Leica edition, and it had a slightly different design there. It had a two-tone finish, whereas it's now just a single color on the back. A couple other small tweaks, and in China it's landscape, and then the international version they changed it to portrait.
And everyone is curious about it. All the sort of like... that is the thing everyone has said: why did they change the logo orientation? They ruined it.
Because that's what makes it look like a camera. All right. Well, hopefully this is never going to come to the United States. So hopefully if you're buying it on the gray market, you can obviously choose, right? So I would say buy the Chinese one. Other companies: Vivo, Tecno, there's a Unihertz phone to talk about. Walk me through these.
Okay. Vivo didn't bring like a full phone launch, but it did a tease of its X300 Ultra, which is going to be its equivalent to this Xiaomi phone, its rival. It's similarly priced, top spec, similar giant camera module. It announced for the first time that it's going to bring that phone to Europe, which it's always been China-exclusive before. They said that this Ultra will come out internationally. And it teased a set of ridiculous accessories to go with it. So last year Vivo was the first of the big Chinese phone brands to release what they called a telephoto extender lens, which I reviewed at the time. It was a 200 mm lens that you strap onto the back of the phone and you stick it on top of the existing telephoto on the phone, and then you get this full 200 mm telephoto experience. They're now doubling that with a 400 millimeter telephoto extender, which I think might be more millimeters than I need for my phone focal length, to be honest. It's going to be a lot of zoom.
I love all of Allison's pictures of this one because...
It's just all the gear around the phone. You can't see the phone at all in any of her pictures.
Yeah. Then they are releasing a camera cage together with SmallRig, which is a company that basically makes all these camera cages and other kind of OTT professional-ish accessories for phones. And so this is a dual-hand-grip camera cage with a fan on the back and a mount for a light. You can mount a tripod to the bottom and all this stuff. And they're really trying to pitch this as now like you can have a professional cinema setup with a phone at its center, and this can be the phone. And you know that they're announcing some other like video features, support for 10-bit log across all three rear lenses. The new stuff they're doing with lookup tables and complex video things that mostly go way over my head, and at some point I'm going to have to get my head around because I'm going to have to review this thing somehow. But they're really like leaning in on this idea that cool, what we can do to stand out is just go full in on professional cinema as what this phone does. Which I will say in their credit, one thing I like about this is it's kind of refreshingly honest for a company like this to confirm that that's what you need when you want to produce this kind of "hey, all of this was shot on a phone" content. And part of their hype spiel for this camera cage, this grip rig thing is, oh, this is what we use when we shoot our product launches and produce all the pro promo videos for it. It's a nice contrast compared to other brands which love to tell "this thing was shot on a phone" and they leave this big blank around what that means, right?
Yeah. Samsung just did this at the S26 launch. Yeah.
And I mean Apple does this every time, but Samsung literally just did this weeks ago at the S26 launch, and you saw the photo, the actual rig they were using to shoot the S26 launch, and you're like, where's the phone?
Like you kind of get to a place where it could be any phone.
Because you put so much around it. Vivo's demonstration of this, they literally had a setup you could go and try it out where they had taken this whole rig and mounted it on a dolly, and you could sit and use the tracking dolly to like take a shot and try out the new Pro Video app they have. And again, I just love that they're like, "Cool, when we talk about using this for cinema-grade stuff, we mean with all these other thousands of dollars worth of equipment around the phone."
Well, it's interesting. So their approach to modularity is like stuff around the phone. Then you've got this company Tecno which is...
It's all just like pogo pins and magnets, like can make the phone bigger and weirder.
And then I actually want to end by talking about Lenovo, which I have a lot to say about this Lenovo laptop and its modular ports. Talk about the technical because we're just in an age of like modularity in like specific ways, right? You're going to build your own parts, but you know, in this case, you've got, okay, we're going to be honest that what you need to do is mount the phone in a rig and then mount accessories to the rig. This Tecno company is like, we're going to be honest that you're just going to clip a bunch of magnets to our phone. And then I think Lenovo's on drugs. But let's talk about Tecno first.
Yeah. So the Tecno one is back into this is full concept territory. This is not a product that they're intending to release. We've seen modular phones before. I like this. I think this is one of the smarter implementations of it I've seen imagined. It is just a very, very thin phone, thinner than a USB port, and it doesn't have a USB-C port. It has a tiny battery, but they have various pogo pin and magnetic attaching points on the back where you can slap on power banks, and you can stack multiple ones on top of each other, so you could kind of keep stacking these various 3,000 mAh power banks on until you've got as many as you want to have. They had microphone attachments, speaker attachments, they had various types of camera attachments. They had sort of small little action camera things you could slap on the back, but also you could just put on what basically looked like a full mirrorless camera and pogo pin that to the back of the phone.
It is a dream. The magnets are not strong enough. I held this thing, and if you were not supporting the full weight of the camera lens with one hand, it just immediately wanted to fall off.
This is the reality of all pogo pins.
Yes, it is not quite enough for a full camera to stick on the back.
It can become essential. The Essential Phone had a magnetic pogo pin camera attachment.
Just to answer your question of the Essential Phone: is that company still around?
Obviously not. They had so many other issues, but magnetic and pogo pins was not the problem.
Name a pogo pin product at scale that still exists.
All I am saying are the only reasons to buy a new phone in the world anymore are because your battery is too old or because you want a better camera. So the sooner we get to just slap a new camera on your phone, slap a new battery on your phone, the better we will be.
