You guys want to know what the top DxOMark score on a phone is right now?
176? Are we... I'm guessing like 137, the OnePlus... the number three? Okay, okay. The number... there's a tie for second, so the number four is the iPhone 16 Pro Max with a 157. Jeez, wow. Then there's a tie for second between the Honor Magic 6 Pro and the Pixel 9 Pro XL, 158. Oh, those have cameras, dude. That... that's 163, that's the number one score right now.
Hey, what is up, people of the internet? Welcome back to another episode of the Waveform podcast. We're your hosts. I'm Marques, I'm Andrew, and I'm David. And we actually do have a lot of stuff back this week. Sora has officially launched and we took an exclusive first look at it. We'll talk a little more about that in a second. Galaxy S25 rumors are catching our attention. Mention we have some rapid-fire end-of-the-year brief reviews on some phones that didn't get full videos. And also, fun fact, Gemini 2.0 literally just got announced like 10 minutes before we jumped in here, so we haven't actually gotten to test or try it, but it's a thing that happened. That's some news that you should know about. Gemini 2.0, it's an experimental version, it's cool. But first, I wanted to start with a thought exercise. I put this in the Slack because I was very curious to hear what you guys, what all of you guys would say about this, including Zui who's sleeping in the corner. It's a tweet that reads: 'You received a wedding invitation that specifically said on the dress code line: no Apple Watches, please. How does that make you feel?' Because there's lots of takes about this now. 'Oh, Apple Watches don't dress up well.' 'Oh, I would just wear an Apple Watch anywhere.' Where are you on the spectrum of 'I'm going to a wedding that's no Apple Watches allowed'? How does that make you feel? It makes a lot of people feel something because it has 9.1 million views on this tweet.
It does. Um, I guess I'll go first.
Yeah, go first. First of all, I just want to hear what you say so that I can say the opposite.
If I'm going to a wedding and they asked it, I would take the Apple Watch off. Like, I'm the least argumentative or least conflict-prone person possible attached to the app, so I'm not trying to... it's their day. They're the one paying a ton of money for it. If they ask me to wear the Apple Watch, I'm trying to figure out why. Well, okay, if I was in the middle of a workout competition, I would be devastated because dance floor weddings racks up the rings on that fitness app. You'd severely have to make up a lot for that or just lose the day, so that would be a huge bummer. I agree, they don't dress up very nice.
Um, I don't know about that. I feel like some of them do. I think if you throw like a metal band on a dark watch and throw a nice watch face on, like one of those simple watch faces, that looks fine. That's pretty classy.
I imagine it's a pictures thing. They're taking pictures at the wedding and they don't want pictures of Apple Watches.
I guess that's the distinction. Or if you're in the bridal party, you definitely just listen because you know them well enough, just listen to them.
This is a general wedding invitation, like you're just going, you're invited.
I have a take. Okay, my take is that things that can become dated, people often don't want in their content, and I think that makes a lot of sense, right? Like I heard a song the other day that was like, 'There's more to life than retweets on your Twitter.' It's not called Twitter anymore. Now you're like dating yourself, right? It's not this omniscient thing. Watches have existed for an extremely long time. Watches, you could make the argument, are more of a concept than they are a thing. And the more simple that you make your watch, the more timeless it is. So when you have that Apple Watch Gen 1, you're really dating yourself, which is, you know, fine. But I think that a lot of people don't want to put themselves in a space where things could be potentially dated.
I fully agree with everything you're saying. And my argument to the couple who is saying that would be, everything else in your wedding is going to get dated too. It's just a snapshot in time, and it helps you better remember the time that it was. Your haircut will be outdated, your suit will be outdated, all the cars in the background that you drive away in will be outdated. The watch is just a part of the times. That's all.
I agree with you. You know, time, time. I will say it would be smart to like turn your watch on Do Not Disturb or something during the ceremony, theater mode, or that, you know, so that you could really experience the time, you know. But I don't know, I'll do whatever the hell they want, you know. One time I bought dress shoes for a wedding.
Yeah, well, only... no way. What have you worn to every other wedding? My sneakers.
Can I tell you a story? That's actually... I got yelled at by my roommate at one point. Actually, it was Michael Fisher. So I was going to my sister's wedding, right? My sister's wedding, pretty big deal. And Michael Fisher was like, 'Well, where are your...?' I just bought my first suit ever, which I wore to like 30 weddings, and then I tore them in half by accident. I was dancing really intensely. Yeah, yeah, good rings. Thank you. It did happen by accident. I tried to own it. Too many children and old ladies were staring at me, so I went and changed my pants. Okay, but so he's like, 'Well, what about your shoes?' And I was like, 'What do you mean?' And he's like, 'You have to get dress shoes.' And I was like, 'No, I'm not buying dress shoes for a wedding. I'm going to wear them once.' And he was like, 'You got to do it.' I didn't do it. I went to my sister's wedding, stayed at a motel with my parents, and in the morning my dad puts on his flip-flops and my mom puts on her sneakers. And I go, 'Oh, so you're not wearing dress shoes?' And my dad goes, 'Why would I buy dress shoes for a wedding?' And I was like, 'Okay, there it is. You as a person makes so much more sense to me now.'
Yeah. Can I give my Apple Watch take at the wedding, please?
Yeah, please. I think so. We, the five of us in this room, right? We're into tech, we've been in tech for some time. Our brains have been slowly turned to mush over the last 10 years by being in this industry. For those whose brains are still intact, which still have wrinkles in them, I can understand not seeing your Apple Watch or any smartwatch as being fundamentally different from your phone. And I could see it just feeling like you have your phone out the entire wedding, even though we don't see it that way. We see it as like a separate product category with separate use cases. You use it in a different way. I understand, and I have lots of friends that even if I go out to a bar with them and they see an email flash on my Apple Watch, they're like kind of offended. They're like, 'Why do you really need to have your email on your wrist? Like, we're hanging out.' And it's like there's a part of me that's like, 'Come on,' but there's another part of me that's like, 'Yeah, you're kind of right about that one.' So maybe just put it in theater mode. I don't know.
I could also see in the sense of like, we all of us here know how to silence our Apple Watches, but they're so popular that a lot of people who are not technologically advanced wear them. And like the worst thing is just mid-ceremony like, ding, ding. And so like at this point I would rather just blanket statement be like, please just don't wear it. Because like, I've officiated two weddings and I always had to make in the beginning like, put your phones away, everyone, there is a photographer here, like they know how to do it. And every single time there's always somebody with a phone out.
It's just a pro tip because I just officiated a wedding. Have them give them two minutes right up top to take all the pictures. That is what I did. I was like, take them all now and then put them away.
Have you guys officiated a wedding?
I've never officiated a wedding.
All right, so at least we're in the majority here.
Yeah, I was about to be like, this is the craziest statistic. Like, I've only been the photographer at a wedding. I've never...
I think that's way more pressure.
Way more. It was, yeah. That's a lot of pressure, especially because they didn't tell me that it was their wedding.
Oh yeah, well then there's not a lot of pressure, and then into all of the pressure.
You should come out for the weekend for this like family and best friends party.
Oh my, they didn't say it was a wedding, and then I showed up and they were like, 'This is actually our wedding, surprise everybody!' And then they were like, 'David, can you take the pictures?' And I was like... but luckily I bring my cameras everywhere, so it worked out. But I have two notes on this whole topic. One, true story, Linus wore socks and sandals to Austin and Evan's wedding. Nice. There were black socks and black sandals, but it was socks and sandals. It was on brand. I was going to say that's pretty impressive. Yeah, on brand. It worked out. It was a suit, it was great. That's dope. And two, I wore an Apple Watch to the Met Gala.
If anyone, you have the greatest answer to this question possible of like, is this bigger than the Met? Is this more or less formal?
I will add, Marquez, yes, you looked great. You did look great.
I think so. It was just under the cuff. It wasn't like out, you know, it wasn't like a highlight of my outfit, but it was there and you can see it in pictures and it's not that bad.
But all the pictures I saw of you with the watch, and correct me if I'm wrong, you did have the screen off.
I don't remember. Okay, it probably didn't show up on camera. Yeah, I for sure wasn't on my watch during it. Yeah, but it was there in case I needed the stand hours. Oh my God. Or if I got an important email, you know.
Okay, as a watch guy, I'm screaming internally at this whole conversation. I want to take... I want... because not only should you not wear Apple Watches, I think they should go a step further and ban certain kinds of watches. Wow. Yeah, I'm saying it. Certain kinds of regular watch, even mechanical watch. Like, because there are Rolexes that are like 50mm and they're massive, and it's like, I don't care if it's a Rolex, get that behemoth off your wrist. Like, it needs to be a nice dress watch, classy, thin, slide under the cuff. There's a whole thing about when you're doing suits and tuxedos, you want like a nice watch that just disappears.
Yeah, but then you're trying to like control the guest's look.
Dress code. Yeah, you already have to wear certain colors.
Unless you're Hagrid, 43mm max, right? Am I right?
I just want to know in this scenario, if someone was wearing their smartwatch and the bride comes up and says, 'I said no Apple Watches,' and they go, 'This is the Galaxy Watch 5, ma'am. This is a Whoop. This is just a Garmin.'
Well, it's the same thing as like when you have your Android phone and you go to the bodega and you go to pay and they go, 'Oh, Apple Pay,' and you're like, 'Yeah.' Yes, it could become difficult here, but there's no reason to do so.
Good move. Definitely a good move. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't know, I think it's funny. One other thing I want to bring up real quick related to this is like the Apple Watch is the most popular watch in the world. It is. I wonder how many people only started wearing a watch at all because they wanted an Apple Watch versus the people that replaced their existing watch.
A lot of people. Yeah, a ton.
So in that way it could be considered more of an accessory, I suppose. Yeah, yeah. I'm pretty sure if any single one of us here got that wedding invite, we would just not wear our Apple Watch.
Yeah, because I'm respectful.
I'm not sure. Push the B for sure. Dress up the Apple Watch and put it in theater mode and then be like, 'Do you still want me to take it off?'
Should have it like on a chain in your vest, like flavorfully. Yeah, wait, do they make... no, I mean like the pocket watch. Pocket watch Apple Watch.
I thought you meant... no, no, how it's like in your vest in the little pocket.
I'm not getting the rings though if I do that.
That's funny. No, it can... fun fact, the Apple Watch can track your heart rate through your upper thigh. It's a thing.
But oh, you're wearing it? I'm lying. Yeah, I was like strapped. This is if it's like in pocket watch config in the front pocket next to your phone. You know how in the movies they have like the assassins that have like the knife on their upper thigh? You do that, but you just strap the Apple Watch there so they can track your steps.
Yeah, got to get those steps, man. Yeah. All right, yeah, we got to move on. Yeah. Fun headline: you can now buy a Hyundai on Amazon in the US. I see this headline and it's Amazon Autos, and I'm familiar with eBay Motors and other ways of buying a car online, but there's something funny about the idea of like buying a car and then like 24 hours later they just like deliver it to your driveway.
No, but that's what you picture when you see Amazon and this headline. But it's Amazon Autos. They don't deliver it. They don't deliver it to you.
I bought a lawnmower with Amazon Prime. Yeah, free shipping.
I feel like we're not that far off.
Can you get a car-sized drone on Amazon?
No, they're too busy flying in our skies right now.
Okay, so basically they are launching Amazon Autos. It's this new push that they're doing in the United States. Thus far, they partnered with 48 different cities and specifically Hyundai right now. But effectively, you put in your zip code and it tells you this is the closest Hyundai dealership that has the car you want. You select your make, model, and trim of what they have available, and then you can do everything that you would normally do with an actual car dealership. Like you can trade in your car through the Amazon portal. You can also sort by prices. Like I'm pulling up cars in our area right now.
There's a... you search... how did you actually search this?
I clicked on the Amazon Autos link in the article and it took me to the hub.
It's not great that I can't figure this out exactly from their actual page.
Yeah, yeah, but if you type in Hyundai, then there's 'Buy your new Hyundai on Amazon.' Shop available cars.
Oh, what? Yeah, it is crazy. It kind of looks like when eBay launched eBay Motors. It's just a weird idea to see a car on Amazon.
Yeah, but right now it only works with Hyundai, but they're planning on expanding to other manufacturers next year, and they're also going to expand the amount of dealerships that they work with.
What I'm interested in is the button says 'Begin Purchase,' not 'Purchase.'
Well, which like... well, but like every single auto dealership has a price, and then you go there and it's a different price, and then you have to play that dumb game.
There's no heckling on this. Yeah. Is this like price listed as price out the door? That's great.
Are you sure? Yes, I read that in an article.
I can almost guarantee you this would not be the price when I got to the dealership, whether they say that or not. I've had dealerships straight up lie to me.
You check out on Amazon though, it says 'Begin Purchase.'
Yeah, but you go through the process, the price says 'price excluding government fees, taxes, and $187.50 dealer fee.'
Oh, but then that should be it. You're not haggling anymore after you lock this price in, which you never should have ever had to do with cars. That was the one thing that Tesla really changed the world with was like, can I just pay for the thing at the price that it says?
Yeah, but the price changes every two weeks.
That's true. Yeah, but yeah, you can just sort, you know, cars near you. There's a bunch of Ioniq 6, Ioniq 5.
You know what they have to do now? They have to bring back the Amazon Dash button.
No, you should be... not only should you be able to buy a Hyundai on Amazon, you should be able to hit a button in your...
Yeah, for those that don't remember this, in like 2017 or so, they released the Amazon Dash button, which was a little sticky button you could have in your house that when you pressed it, it would just automatically order the thing that you assigned it to. It's usually like paper towels or dishwasher tabs or whatever. Yeah, and people's kids started just smashing them, and there were these stories of like 30 packs of 30 boxes of toilet paper would just show up at people's houses.
That's wild to not have two-factor on that. Just like give me a notification on my phone, don't just order it. Someone could just... 'I ordered 12 boxes of Tide Pods just now.' That's crazy. Two-factor, that's the only...
Yeah, there was a really fun hacker community going on with that though, where people were reassigning them to things like opening their garage and doing routines and stuff with them.
That is sick. Pretty cool.
Because they were free, actually. I think they were $5, but they gave you $5 off your next purchase of the thing they were assigned to.
Why would Amazon not want a button that just gave them money every time you pressed it? Yeah, yeah. Wow. So that's fun. Maybe you'll buy your next car on Amazon. Dystopia. Maybe your next Hyundai. Okay, here's another interesting one that's come up this week, and I haven't tried this, but I really am curious to, and maybe you'll be interested too. Instagram trial reels. So hear me out. Typically when you post a reel, you want to make sure your followers see it, right? But what if there was a feature, and yes, the irony is not lost on me, but what if there was a feature where you could publish a reel where none of your followers see it, but it does populate to the feed and the algorithm can pick it up and non-followers can start to react to it?
I thought that was just called posting on Instagram.
That's what the comments are all saying. But the idea behind this trial reel is you're not really sure if your audience will be into this one, but you do want to sort of test the waters and see how people are reacting to it. And if it turns out to be a good one, then you can sort of unlock it and it will then show up on the homepage and the feed for your followers as well and on your profile. They can still have it sent to them, like if it gets shown in someone else's reel, it gets sent to you. It's still visible, but it's a trial reel. I kind of want to... I think it's interesting.
Yeah, it's an interesting feature to me. My first question, and I don't want to throw this off topic too hard too fast, this seems like it would take a lot of work to develop and creating a way of posting something that goes to an algorithm that doesn't involve your followers. Like this wasn't an easy task from Instagram.
I check all of your followers from people who could see it.
Yeah, it just feels the only thing it's doing is it's not populating in the home feed for the people who follow you.
Yeah, so like only swiping reels pretty much, but it does show up when people swipe reels in Explore.
So if I'm following David, not the people who follow me.
So like that means it's sending it to the feed, but now I have to have a feed that just says 'exclude from followers of David.'
Yeah, that's pretty much it.
Okay, I was going to say they did this before in the Instagram app or iPad app that I just got. The iPad... I'm allowed to complain even more now.
How have you tried it on the mini? The Instagram app?
No, I didn't. There is... oh, it's just like the... I haven't even downloaded it.
Fair. Yeah, so I want to try this. So the idea is if you're like a beauty influencer and you're mostly doing beauty videos, but you want to do like a comedy reel or something, and you don't want the people who normally only subscribe to you for beauty things to see it because you want to experiment, then after 24 hours you get to see how all the rest of Instagram liked it, and then you get to decide at that point if you want to put it on your followers' feed and on your page, or if you want to archive it immediately.
Which is kind of weird. It's a trial run.
Yeah, but the thing is like it's going to go out to the random people, but then you have to decide if you want to delete it or put it on your page. And if you put it on your page, then your followers will see it, so they're going to see it anyway.
Well, they also automatically post to your page after 3 days if it does well.
Yeah, interesting. Yeah, there's no way to keep it private. It would be crazy to like make something that's viral that your audience can like never see and like create this secondary feed of whatever you're doing.
I have... okay, I've wanted this for YouTube for so long, where like you have a YouTube... you know how people make multiple YouTube channels for different interests? It's like, can you just subscribe to someone's interest on their YouTube channel? You know, like if I wanted to have a photography section of my YouTube channel and someone could subscribe to that, and I wanted a video essay section and people could subscribe to that, I would much prefer that to just making separate YouTube channels.
Google+ was so ahead of its time.
Can you follow a playlist? Was that part of Google+?
Yeah, you just share it to your photography circle.
Oh yeah, or people who follow you would put you in the photography circle, and then the things you share would just be in photography.
You can't follow a playlist on someone's channel.
It would mean they would have to correctly put it in the playlist.
You would have to keep only following the playlist, which nobody does.
Kind of strange. And also they've just deprioritized subscriptions anyway and the algorithm just everything now. So it would be nice if Instagram had this too, you know.
Yeah, it's like David.beauty, David.do comedy. I don't know, I just wanted like what funny things could you do with these reels that aren't going out to your audience but going out to other audiences?
Gas your audience. What content can you like put out there that you're specifically like... because you have a huge audience, right? So like you could say 'don't show this to four million people' essentially on Instagram.
Yeah, and like what funny cryptic thing could you do on the side of it? There's got to be a... 'if you're seeing this, it's a joke.' I could play... I don't know what it would be. A possibility that that could be really interesting.
Yeah, I don't know. This is why... well, I'm sure I'll have this feature at some point soon, but yeah, I want to try this and I'm going to probably do it with like a throwaway reel that I, you know, wasn't going to publish anyway, but just to see what happens.
So now to properly follow your favorite Instagram influencer, you need an account that follows them and an account that doesn't follow them, just in case they post something.
But you have to randomly see it in your... yeah, you have to get lucky enough to find it.
Dang, true fans. Why is it different once you've shown it to random people and it performed well with random people that you're willing to put it on your page? Because your followers are still going to react the same way that they always have.
Well, maybe. Okay, I'm trying to think. I hear what you're saying, but maybe there's something you're trying that's like a little bit outside of your comfort zone and you want to try it first to see if regular people... because the goal when you publish a reel is to grow your following anyway. You want it to be shown to people who don't follow you. But sometimes if it's shown to the people who follow you and they don't react to it well, then it kind of hurts the chances of it being shown to more people. So you want to start with it being shown to those more people just to see if they like it. If they do like it, okay, my regular audience probably will like it too. But if they don't like it, never mind, it was just a trial.
That's a fair point. It's like if I want to do something else, but I want to have a better chance of it doing well in the algorithm, something a little different my audience probably wouldn't immediately love.
Also, quick clarification: it auto-shares after 72 hours if you click the toggle to allow it to share if it performs well. So there's a potential that you can post something and permanently leave it on only the non-follower feed.
There's some potential to do something silly here and I need to figure it out before someone else does.
You should be brainstorming this whole... this should be an incredible... my winter break. Sorry, I can't celebrate Christmas, Lane. I have to figure... I need a crazy... there's a joke here somewhere. Yeah. All right, well, we got to take a quick break. We got a bunch more phones to talk about, stuff that's come out this year and that's coming next year, and even more after that. So before we take that break, trivia time. Today's first question is: we talked about buying a car on Amazon, but this is not the first time really expensive stuff has been sold on Amazon. So today I'm going to read you three real Amazon listings and I need you to tell me which one is the most expensive.
Are you ready to hear the listings? I'm going to read the titles verbatim from Amazon. Product number one: 'Quick, simple, easy, SEQ, fully equipped double two-story, or excuse me, double story, two-bedroom, free prefab expandable container house, 40 ft x 20, luxury home, stairs included, free bed set with terrace.' I would love that. The most Amazon listing possible. So just for clarity, this is a luxury prefab two-story home with a 40 by 20 ft floor plan, stairs included. Stairs included. Item number two: 'Queen Victoria Bano Dees, IM Mexico, 1,000 pesos, 1905 dated stock certificate with dividend coupons attached, uncancelled.' That is a bond. I thought it was a painting at first. And then those are vintage peso notes from Mexico from 1905. Item number three is a painting. It is the painting titled 'The Way' by expressionist artist... that's a really hard name, I apologize, leave this in... Gafur Tanov Gaffarov. The painting is called 'The Way' and it is an expressionist painting.
You're looking at what it looks like?
No, because if you look up what it looks like, you'll probably see the price.
Oh, I was trying to make a joke, but... oh, 'The Way.' I didn't see any price.
Right, you didn't see any price. Didn't see any price.
I was trying... never mind, I was doing 'da way' like show me da way, the Sonic the Hedgehog thing with Knuckles. It didn't work.
Anyway, so think about which one of those is most expensive: old money, a small big house, stairs included, or some painting on a canvas by a person that I personally have never heard of, but maybe they are a world-famous artist. It's on Amazon. All right, we will think about that. Answers will be at the end, like usual. We'll be right back.
Support for Waveform comes from AT&T. What does it feel like to get the new iPhone 16 Pro with AT&T Next Up Anytime? It's like when you first pick up those tongs and you know you're the one running the grill. It's indescribable. It's like something you've never felt before. All the mouthwatering anticipation of new possibilities, whether that's making the perfect cheeseburger or treating your family to a grilled baked potato, which you know will forever change the way they look at potatoes. With AT&T Next Up Anytime, you can feel this way again and again. Learn how to get the new iPhone 16 Pro with Apple Intelligence on them and the latest iPhone every year with AT&T Next Up Anytime. AT&T, connecting changes everything. Apple Intelligence coming fall 2024 with Siri and device language set to US English. Some features and languages will be coming over the next year. $0 offer may not be available on future iPhones. Next Up Anytime features may be discontinued at any time, subject to change. Additional fees, terms, and restrictions apply. See att.com/iphone for details.
All right, welcome back. We've got a bunch of phones that are next to me here now. You can kind of see them if you're looking at the video version. But the idea behind this is we reviewed a bunch of phones this year, but there's also a bunch of phones that come out that we don't review, and a couple of them I still think are at least noteworthy in some way. Spoiler alert: the Smartphone Awards are also coming out, depending on when you're watching this, either soon or it's also just come out. We love the Smartphone Awards. That's like the big flagship video to end the year. We recognize a lot of phones, and a lot of phones get mentioned that didn't get their own videos. I think this is a good time to highlight some phones that have come out in the last few weeks of the year that haven't gotten a video, but that are interesting in some way. Because I saw a lot of phones that come out this time of the year, we realized, because we started doing this at the beginning of November and then looked at our email and we're like, there's a lot of things we still need to see. A big thing is that Qualcomm used to release the new flagship chip in December, so the first chips would come out around January, the first phones would come out around January, but they keep moving it back and now they did it in early October.
Yeah, so we got a whole wave of phones in November and December.
Yeah, and that was really interesting because I put together my award winners like mid-November and then I thought, wait, hold on, wait, there's like two or three phones that might actually be worthy of checking out. And we held back on some of the trophies and on some of the awards and actually got to test some of these phones and have now put together the awards accordingly. So anyway, I got four phones in front of me here and we can do them in any order. I don't know if we have a theme for how we want to start, but they all have the word Pro in the name.
They do. That's one thing. They're all very expensive phones.
But I think we can just go through one by one.
Yeah, maybe let's start with the Vivo.
Okay, okay. So here's interesting phone number one. This is the Vivo X200 Pro. There's also a family of X200s. There's an X200 and an X200 Mini. This phone is complete. It's got it all. It's the Ultra of Vivo's lineup. I think the most impressive part of it, though, would be the cameras. So they work with Zeiss. It's got a 50-megapixel primary camera, 50-megapixel ultra-wide camera, and then a 200-megapixel telephoto camera. And what that means is you can crop in a lot and ideally still maintain sharpness. And it's a really good set of cameras. I think this is the closest to a real camera that I've seen a smartphone camera shooting experience get from the results to the actual shots, like shooting them. And you can tell by looking at it, it's a very camera, gigantic camera-focused phone. Yeah, thoughts? Any other things you want to know about it?
I just think that the funniest thing about this line is that the Vivo X200 Mini is still 6.3 inches.
Yeah, Mini. Yeah, we'll talk about that in the Smartphone Awards, but Mini, there's not too many small phones these days. Yeah, this phone also has a giant battery and super fast charging and wireless charging, and it's got a pretty high-end chip that enables a lot of the AI features. It's not the Snapdragon 8 Elite, but it is MediaTek Dimensity 9400.
And it's, yeah, it's a rock-solid phone. It's actually a really, really, really, really good phone.
So wait, this street photography mode is kind of cool. There's a bunch of modes that are crazy in the camera. You should also try... so there's a portrait mode lens emulator. I'm assuming it's emulating half of these, but so good contrast. And like it actually has contrast. Oh, and there's different... oh wow, there's different like... are you looking at the portrait mode?
Yeah, so the lenses, you can emulate the background bokeh swirl characteristics of different lenses as well, which is really... and it still has like a cutout and you kind of can tell it's a fake portrait mode, but it's cool that it works and actually looks...
We're in the like street photography mode that makes it kind of look film-y and has like different textured...
Yeah, there's a... it says textured and then it says like a Zeiss one.
Seems like natural looks like any other smartphone camera and that it just jacks the shadows a ton, but textured actually gives it...
Textured has contrast. It's one of the LUTs. LUTs. Vivid is just more saturated than natural with brighter highlights. Then there's black and white, and then textured is more contrast. So as you can see by what's happening here, this is a phone that you would get if you're really into photography. If you are very into the different looks you can get, the different customizations, can mess with the different lenses or like pseudo fake AI-assisted lenses that you can play with on a camera. This is all of that. There's just a ton of stuff in the camera here, and then it happens to be an awesome phone outside of the great camera.
So wait, that zoom seems kind of nuts actually.
The zoom is really... so it goes to 100, right? 135. 135x, continuing to millimeter in this.
The like street photographer Sony needs to take notes because like this is the exact opposite of Sony. Sony is like between... but Sony's is like really hard to understand and like so... and this is like let's take pro features and make it fun to look at and like a clean UI.
Sony already announced something like this. It's just coming out in two years.
No, I mean it's got all these pro features like white balance and aperture and shutter speed that you can control manually, and then it's got these rapid focal length changing features, but like this is considered basic mode.
C1, C2. Oh, there's presets. Oh my, this is awesome.
Yeah, like a fun UI that like feels filmy. Anyway, sorry, that's just the camera. That's just the camera. It also is a great screen. It's also got these nice flat sides and it's got this brushed metal look to it. It's nice. It's got this ring. Vivo X200 Pro. That's the first one. Any other questions about it? Any other ideas?
Yeah, that's first. You swap to that.
Oh yeah, yeah. This is one where like the... it's got an ultrasonic fingerprint reader too. This is one where the camera bump is so big that it kind of... you kind of feel it when you're holding it, like it weighs the phone. I will say the Oppo Find X8 Pro is kind of like a cousin phone to this, but is similar except it has... I think this phone has two different telephoto lenses, so it's all 50-megapixel sensors, but it's like a 50-megapixel primary, ultra-wide, 3x, and 6x. So that's why they do it with this instead. It's got this nice... I'll let you hold it. It's like a marble-feeling back with this particular color. It is... let me double check, but I believe this is the first Snapdragon 8 Elite phone we're looking at.
So the marble back is really nice. No fingerprints, although the marble texture almost just looks like it's already smudged.
Yeah, this feels nicer in the hand just because it's like thinner and less top-heavy despite still having a huge camera bump.
Yeah, it seems like the Oppo one is a little bit more about style than functionality necessarily, even though the Find X phones have always been really, really amazing ever since the first one came out. It's just been... I've reviewed a lot of Oppo Find X phones.
This is not a Snapdragon 8 Elite phone, by the way. So this is still the Dimensity 9400. It was in consideration as well for battery because if you look at the specs, it's a 5,910 mAh battery with wireless charging, with fast charging. So that was another thing, like this thin... that's in a phone that looks like a regular thickness. So there's a lot of good things going on with that phone too. It has the word Pro in the name for a reason, you know. It's got high-end stuff happening with the screen. It's bright. Hasselblad branding. Hasselblad branding, pretty classic. That's the thing they keep doing.
Yes, in fact, when you go to the website, it says 'powerful camera, powerful AI.' Yeah, it has the slider, the alert slider. That's the OnePlus calling of it, but the volume slider switch on the corner as well.
Yeah, alert switch. Yeah, so that is the Oppo Find X8 Pro. That's also out.
Oh, it's called alert slider too. Okay, cool.
Then we have these two phones over here. These are both Snapdragon 8 Elite phones. So I just want to say what that means. So that's the new Snapdragon chip, the new Qualcomm chip. The Snapdragon 8 Elite has started coming out, and I think Dave2D did a really good job with his video about this. Somehow this chip has made like a really big leap from the previous generation of Snapdragon chips from Qualcomm to the point where it's both more efficient and has higher peak power in a meaningful way. So you can get better performance in a way that doesn't throttle with games when they make good cooling solutions for these phones, and they get longer battery life, like 20, 30, maybe 40% longer.
That's a crazy jump for one year.
So really looking forward to seeing a lot of phones with the Snapdragon 8 Elite chip in them. These two we have here are very much gaming phones, so they have focused on the performance aspect, but also happen to do a really good job with the rest of the stuff too, because gaming phones are great media phones. So here's the first one. This is the ROG Phone 9 Pro. So a couple things about this one is they have the screen on the back that you saw me make the short on, but also still has wireless charging just higher on the back of the phone. You have a 185Hz display at the front. There's still a headphone jack at the bottom. There's still the two USB-C ports. They've kind of tamed down the aesthetic overall, but you still have the front-facing speakers. It's still very much a gaming phone with the high refresh rate and the high brightness and the Snapdragon 8 Elite.
But that's... there's something funny about going from the X200 Pro with the Zeiss-branded camera to the Oppo with the Hasselblad-branded camera, and then this one just says like 'the good luck, have fun' on it.
Yeah, and the difference in cameras between the gaming phones and the other daily flagships is...
This is sleek though. This is like what the ROG phones should have always been in the sense of like it's still a gamer phone, it's got somewhat of gamer aesthetic, but not the like 'make fun of me on the subway' gamer. Because last year they kind of took away a lot of the things that made it feel gamery at all, and then now they brought back like the texture and the like rapid triggers and stuff too.
Right, and the side USB-C port if you're really gaming all the time, awesome, because then it's not in the way on the side.
Although the headphone jack's still on the side, so that feels counterintuitive.
Yeah, but yeah, yeah. So you can play... if you're on the subway playing games on the back of your phone, you're probably still going to get looked at, but yeah, great for that. 5,800 mAh battery, 65-watt HyperCharge.
Yeah, good looks. It's funny because like the percent doesn't seem that big. It'll be like, oh, this is a 5% or 10% larger battery, and that might not make headlines the same way as the experience difference. But I think people just don't care why their battery life's longer. They just want their battery life to be longer.
So that's also true. I mean, we get into the details, but this is the last phone. This is the RedMagic 10 Pro. This has a cutout in the back or in the side for an active fan, which turns on anytime temperatures get up, anytime you're gaming, or anytime you plug in charging. And when you plug it in, you hear the fan. I wish I had like a USB... I would hold it up to the mic so you could hear it, but like the fan spins up and it makes like a whining noise. So this phone is very much concerned with performance and thermals.
Oh, do we have... do you need it in a charger? I just figured your computer.
Yeah, let's actually plug it in so you can hear the fan. All right, this is plugging in the RedMagic 10 Pro.
Oh my goodness. I would not want that to happen every time I plug my phone in.
Yeah, like you can't turn the fan off. That's a default because it wants to maximize your charging speed, which is a 100-watt peak, without overheating. It has a 7,000 mAh battery.
7,500. Okay, so it's combining the new Snapdragon Elite chip with the 7,500 mAh battery. It also has the air triggers. It's very squared off. This is much more in the gamer aesthetic. I dig it.
Yeah, for some reason I think it looks really sick. It's a good-looking phone. It's pretty clean on the front, pretty minimal, not much to the bezel. You got a front-facing... or you got a headphone jack at the top, which is cool. Yeah, this is a gaming phone for sure. It's got all of the fun graphics on the back that you'd expect from... on both sides.
Yeah, so I'm assuming this is... you can literally see the fan. Yeah, this is not going to be a waterproof phone.
No, this is not waterproof. Yeah, pretty crazy that this is a phone with a 7,050 milliamp battery and it just looks like a normal phone. It's a big phone, but it's a normal-looking phone.
Yeah, a few manufacturers recently switched from lithium-ion to silicon-carbon batteries, and you can pack a lot more energy density in that same package. That was a very quiet update that we didn't really hear a lot of fanfare about, but that's actually a pretty major thing.
It's probably because a lot of manufacturers, instead of actually giving you more battery capacity, will just make the phone thinner and have the same battery capacity, which is probably what's going to happen in the iPhone 17 Slim or whatever that ends up being called.
Yeah, keep seeing that, the Air or whatever.
Yeah, yeah. But I do appreciate that they're improving battery density in a meaningful way because there's always all the hype about the graphene battery or some crazy breakthrough battery. That's not really usually how it works. Usually it's just slow improvements over time, and this is maybe a 3 to 5 to 8% improvement in battery density, but that's the difference between 5,000 and 5,800.
Right, you could get a 6, you could get a 7,000 mAh battery in a phone now.
So it's wild they put a 7,000 mAh battery in here.
Yeah, and a fan. 24 gigs of RAM.
24. You see it through the side too. Wow, dang.
Yeah, that's wild. And a headphone jack.
They have space. Look at this.
They've always had... 7,000 milliamp and a headphone jack and a fan.
They've always had space.
They've always had space, Andrew. Something crazy. I would maybe switch to that for a little bit. It's kind of sick. I just think it's one of the prettiest finishes I had seen on a phone in a long time. It's just like very industrial, kind of like Gunk. And I like the battery life, and I would miss literally everything about my current phone.
But this is as opposite as your iPhone purple mini could be.
I think in spirit it's kind of the same, you know what I mean? I need to explain that.
Yeah, it is. Yeah, yeah, iPhone spirit animal.
Look, I'm not using an iPhone 12 mini because it's better than any other iPhone, right? I'm using it for two reasons. I'm using it because I already have it, and I'm using it because I love the finish, you know what I mean? Like if I really cared about my phone to that extreme degree, I would just get a better iPhone for at this point like $100, because I could get a better iPhone and get an iPhone 13, you know. And that's the spirit of that thing, you know what I mean? Like it's got a great finish, it's already in the office so I wouldn't need to pay for it, and yeah, so I think spiritually that is the 12 mini purple finish of bizarre Android phones.
I'll just point out all the differences. The 12 mini is one of the smallest phones in the past decade.
This phone has a 6.85-inch corner-to-corner 144Hz 2000 OLED display.
Yeah, yep. It's about the size of the battery. I think that's about where it would fit in the corner of the phone. Jeez. I will note the iPhone 12 mini also had a decent camera. I don't think this phone's going to have that good of a camera. That's just a hunch. I haven't tested it that much.
But use your camera when you're ripping Subway Surfers with your fan on, so it doesn't matter.
There's also no bump, so I imagine small sensors, no camera bump at...
All of which is cool, make the phone a little thicker and do that, but that is another difference. The iPhone has, I mean, this is a nice purple finish, a pretty lilac color, not too offensive. This phone has text all over the back. It's got a big X logo. I don't know why it's not the Twitter logo and it's not the Snapdragon 8 Elite logo. So what is the X? X Games mode? It's probably X Games mode. It says cooling system on the back. It's got the Red Magic logo. It's got a lot. It's busy, I would say. There's another difference. See, you hold it up like that, it reminds me of how the battery of like the Hummer EV is the size of...
That's exactly what I was thinking. Yeah, yeah, it has a headphone jack.
Yeah, and it has a headphone jack. Ellis likes headphones.
But what do you do about your Apple Watch, Ellis? How much RAM does...
See, this is why they're being sued by the US government.
But yeah, honestly, AirDrop would be the thing I miss more than the Apple Watch, because then I can start going to weddings again.
True, it's true. The iPhone 12 mini had four gigs of RAM. How much does this one have?
This one has 24 gigs of RAM.
Gamers can't afford this. If you're a gamer, you cannot afford this. I'm sorry. This phone might not be too expensive, I got to look up, but yeah, that's what's going on. Big new batteries, new higher battery density, new chips, massive new interesting camera stuff. Those four phones all came out in the last month basically in the US, which is pretty cool. And there's also a phone we're expecting to come out next year, which some rumors are starting to spill about a little bit, which would be the Galaxy S25. Number one, I would also expect those to be Snapdragon 8 Elite phones at least here in the US. But number two, there's a rumor about this that keeps coming up. Qi2. What is the deal with Qi2 in this phone? Qi2, is this happening or not? Probably. Well, it's kind of weird because there's a rumor from Ice Universe, but Ice Universe didn't tweet it. Someone else tweeted that Ice Universe said it, so I'm very confused about that part. But there are so many articles saying Ice Universe says Qi2 in the S25, but all of them are sourcing it from a tweet from someone else, so take that as you may.
Okay, what... this is not the first phone with Qi2. That's the HMD Skyline, which I'd never heard of until I...
