Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of really important technology with absolutely no business model. I'm your friend, David Pierce, and I am somewhere in the woods in the mountains of Virginia. This is the week every year that is Mother's Day, my wife's birthday, our wedding anniversary, and this year her grad school graduation. Congrats, Anna. All in the span of 7 days. So, we try to get away. We try to have some fun. And this time it was go sit in the woods and just be quiet. It's been lovely. Can't recommend it enough.
But that is not what we're here to talk about today. Today we're going to do two things on the show. First, we're going to talk about a couple of really important new devices. And by new devices, I mean flip phones. The new Motorola Razr Ultra is out. Allison Johnson reviewed it. We're going to talk about that. And we're also going to talk a little bit about whether this is finally the year of flip phones. Then Alex Heath is going to come on and we're going to talk about Snapchat. We're going to talk about WhatsApp and we're going to talk about whether letting people talk to each other is actually a tech business that even exists. We also have a really fun question on the Vergecast hotline. Lots of stuff to do. All of that is coming up in just a sec. But first, I'm going to be honest, just like a tiny bit more celebrating to do. And also, I have not yet baked a cake. So, I got to go bake a cake. Wish me luck. This is the Vergecast. We'll be right back.
Welcome back. Allison Johnson is here. Hi, Allison. I've seen a lot of you recently for reasons I both can and cannot explain yet. And this is very exciting. It's nice to see you again.
It's good. It's a good addition to my life. I don't know.
So, there are two Androidy things I want to talk about. One is kind of the big picture Android 16, Material 3, cool kid, young people design. But first I want to talk about the Razr. Because you and I might be the only people on earth who believe in flip phones, but I still believe in flip phones.
You reviewed the new Razr Ultra, which is like the high-end flip phone. What was the verdict? How'd you feel?
It's so beautiful. Like, I can't emphasize this enough. Like, I don't get to say this a lot. Phones are shaped like phones. They look like phones. You know, we've settled on a thing for phones. This is a gorgeous phone. So, the Ultra comes in the fancier finishes. They're all kind of fun. There's the regular Razr and then the Razr Plus. This one has the wood panel back. Maybe because I made such a stink about it. Motorola knew that's what I wanted. It's gorgeous. It's not a huge departure or huge evolution of the Razr, I would say, from last year. Like, there's some upgraded specs. You get the Snapdragon 8 Elite processor, which is just the most amount of firepower you can throw at a phone right now. It has a slightly bigger interior screen than the other two. It has a 7-inch display. It's a little bit higher resolution, and you get upgraded cameras. There's an upgraded 50-megapixel main camera, an ultrawide, and then a 50-megapixel selfie camera.
The cameras, by the way, seems like a super big deal to me because I think one of the reasons I was excited about this phone in the first place is it's one of the first flip phones I can think of where you don't look at the spec sheet and immediately see some glaring deficiency. That is like, in theory, this is just a very good phone that also happens to be a flip phone. It's not like the Samsung stuff that always has worse cameras than the normal candy bar phones. There's always some issue and the Ultra seems like it's the first one with a feature-complete spec sheet, which is very exciting to me.
It is. I would say it's like it has closed the gap more than any other flip phone for sure, but it's not all the way there. Just the thing is like they called it Ultra, which already, you know, you're making your bed when you call a phone Ultra and the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra exists. It costs $1,300, and if you want to get into like how much phone can you get for $1,300, you can get a phone with so many cameras, you know, and an amazing display. Like if you want to get into that, there's still kind of, we're not quite at parity, I guess. But this does feel like they're like, we shoved as much as we can in here. You know, I found the battery life was like real good, honestly, which is a concern for a flip phone because they are secretly just like two small phones strapped together. Yeah, it feels more than ever before like if you have been thinking about a flip phone and kind of put off by like, yeah, you know, but I want a little more. I don't want to give up so much. This, you don't have to give up quite so much this time around.
Yeah. The other thing Motorola seems to be doing here is having just increasingly more ideas. And some of those ideas seem to be good and some of them seem to be bad. But I feel like the two pieces of it that I most want to talk about are the outside screen, which I think my impression has been Motorola has kind of done the most of the flip phone manufacturers in terms of like what you can actually do on the outside screen. And then we have to talk about AI, but let's talk about that later because I don't want to. The outside screen. Has Motorola continued to kind of dial in what you can do with the phone closed?
Yeah, and I think for my money, they're ahead. And I have to apologize to the flip phones that are not sold in the US. I don't really get to play with those. So, I'm really kind of basing this on experience versus the Samsung Z Flip 6. Sure, Motorola just makes it super inviting and really easy to enable apps on the outer display. There's little games, which I normally shrug off. I was like, I don't want to play a little marble game, but I handed the marble game to my child, to my 3-year-old, and he freaking loves it. And he's actually kind of good at it. So, like, that's been a weird little bonus feature where I just hand him the phone and it's closed and he has a little marble game moment. But they make it really easy. There's a new widget panel so you can kind of get even more into customization for it. Just like the media player is cute. You can make it a tape deck and the little tape reels move as the music is playing. I just, it's fun. Yeah, I love it.
The thing I've been trying to decide with all of the outside screens on flip phones is whether their job is to be like a worse phone or if their job is to be more like a smartwatch where it's like simple controls but you can't actually do very much, right? Like you hit one button at a time and that's kind of it. What's your read on sort of in day-to-day use how you want the outer screen to work?
I think it's somewhere in the middle. I kind of started with like the flip phone has a little smartwatch on the front and that's cool and fun and you can do quick things. I end up doing a lot more than that on this phone. I actually had my digital boarding pass for my flight on there. And I pulled it out and had the gate agent scan it and he was like, 'That's a cute little phone.' I was like, 'Oh, he doesn't know. It's two phones in one.' But I enable a lot of apps so I can just fully open up Strava. I can choose my activity, start my bike ride, and then just put the phone away in my pocket. Have I saved some kind of amazing amount of time, or is it that much more convenient? I think it's like an emotional, mental thing where I don't feel like I had to dive into my whole phone and look at every notification. So for me it's really somewhere in the middle. I respond to texts. I'll use the little keyboard. It's kind of janky, but it's perfect for just like, hey, on my way, or those kind of things. So it can be less if you want it to be, but for me I've kind of crept towards like it's a cute little phone when I want it.
Can you do things like open settings and get to the notification shade and like if you want sort of the full phone experience on the front screen, can you get it?
You can get a lot. Yeah, it has its own kind of built-in UI for the notifications panel and you can swipe through that like you normally would. There's quick settings and all that stuff. You can run any app you want on it and you just have to tap through an alert that says like, hey, this might suck. And sometimes it really does. But yeah, it's like Motorola is very like, it's your world. You can do what you want with this and I love that.
Yeah, that feels like mostly the right answer. There is a little part of me that is like there should be a set of things that it protects you from in a certain way where it's like the notification shade is an interesting one, right? Because I feel like it should, I want it to show me the notification that just buzzed in my pocket, but I actually feel like I want to have to open the phone in order to go get the rest of my notifications because there's just that little tiny bit of added friction feels like it's useful. And again, it's the thing you're describing that I think I find so charming about flip phones in the first place is that like when I go to a text message, making it a literal physical activity I have to do in order to then go open Instagram is going to prevent me from opening Instagram. And I think that's probably still true in this case just because the front screen is small enough and not quite good enough to really be a good Instagram experience. But I do feel like dialing in that sort of how do we give you all the things to do without then just sort of letting you into your phone unless you open the phone feels like that's the balance. I don't know that anybody has quite dialed in.
Yeah. And it's a little bit of like personal responsibility because Instagram is 100% the one I will like mindlessly tap on a notification from the outer screen and it'll be like, you want to open Instagram. Like I haven't enabled it for the outer screen and I'm like, 'Oh, no, no, no. I don't actually.' And then I like back away. Like the social media apps really, I've kept off the front screen. It would be a bad experience using them. You could if you wanted to, but I have maintained that as my barrier of like I'm not going to cross this line. I'm going to have to make a conscious decision to open the phone if I want to check on Instagram.
Yeah. And that's an okay balance that you can set that up for yourself. Feels like a good, that's an okay way to do it. Tell me about the AI stuff. I think Motorola again has just a lot of ideas about what AI is supposed to do on your phone.
Yeah, it was a little overwhelming. I'm still reserving a little bit of judgment because I want to live with some of this stuff a little bit longer. But so they have introduced something called Moto AI, which is really just, there's an app on the phone and it's kind of a dashboard for all these AI features that live alongside Gemini and every piece of AI that Google has shoved into Android. But Moto AI is a handful of things. There's Catch Me Up, which will summarize your recent notifications from messaging apps.
Is Motorola better at this than Apple is?
Well, yes and no. Because it can only do the messaging apps. So, I'm like, catch me up. And I have a bunch of emails that I really need to get into and it's just like, you didn't get any texts in the last hour. Is that even solving a... I don't feel like my notification overload is my messaging apps. Like, that's not the problem.
No, that's where I'm hung up on it. I like that it's you opt in. You're like, I need this at this moment. And it makes me more irritated with the Apple alternative, which is like we're going to give you a weird little summary of every single notification. It might be wrong, too. You got to double check it. So, there's that. There is something called Remember This, which is a little Pixel Screenshots-ish because you can screenshot a website, you can take a picture of something. I believe you can just write yourself a little text note and it'll save it and kind of catalog it in the way of AI reading it and tagging it. And then you ask the Moto AI later like, 'Hey, what time is my flight tomorrow?' And in my experience, it was good with that stuff. It didn't go hallucinate another flight out of another airport.
Yeah. But has that catch where you have to remember to add stuff to it, right? But I will say I think that is a very cool sort of overall idea. This idea of like you just need a place to dump stuff that you encounter on your phone. You know, you screenshot a text message or you see a recipe or whatever and you just sort of dump it all somewhere that you can access and query later, I think is the right idea. I'm not super sold on the idea that every phone manufacturer should make this for themselves. I feel like this is better as like a cross-platform thing tied to an account that I already have instead of all living on my phone. But this still feels like that in terms of like phone AI stuff actually feels sort of directionally correct to me in the same way that I think Pixel Screenshots is like a very good idea.
Exactly. There's so many times I end up with a thing where I'm like, where do I put this? Like this is, I don't want to just leave it. I don't want to put it in a weird Chromebook bookmarks folder that I've forgotten exists. And yeah, so that's one of the things that like this feels promising. Want to use it a little more. And then there's like an AI voice, you know, recorder. Then it makes a transcription. It's sort of like you want it to pay attention in a meeting. You do that kind of thing.
Motorola are really just trying to do Pixel stuff here. It sounds like a little bit.
Yeah. And it gets a little AI overload with the fact that Gemini and all that stuff is on here, but also like they've tried to make it very obvious how to interact with their AI. So, there's like a little floating bubble on the screen that will get you to the AI. There's the Moto AI app, which is like right in the middle of the home screen. The Ultra has an AI button on the side, so you like long press it or short press it and get into the AI. There's also ways to like prop up the phone, have the front screen kind of facing you, and you can approach it and the AI will start listening.
Yeah, it was all a little much. I tried the propping up thing and then I just felt like the phone was watching me.
So the idea is like you have it on your desk or whatever and then you walk up to it like the Echo Show does this, right? Where it'll change the interface when you get close to it, right? But instead, it's an AI assistant being like, 'What's up?'
Yeah. And there's the little glowing border going. I'm like, 'What does that mean? Is it listening? Is it waiting for me? No, thank you.' Yeah. Didn't super love it.
I do feel like Motorola is in a category I would put a lot of other companies in that I don't necessarily blame it for, but they're just so deep on the AI thing that it's like we have to overplay our hand on this, that it's like we can't be chill about the AI. We can't just have you discover it over time. We have to just put it in front of you no matter where you are all the time. And this is like early Samsung mistakes, right? Where for years every time you would do anything the little pop-up would appear and Samsung would be like, did you know that Milk Music exists? And you'd be like, I don't care, Samsung. I'm good. I do know this and I'm not interested in knowing this information. And my hope is give it another generation or two and they will stop feeling the need to beat you over the head with AI exists in quite the same way. But it is everybody is kind of overshooting their actual usefulness with a lot of this. That said, I do think the button is a good idea.
Yeah, the button I don't hate. I wish you could reprogram it to do something else. They don't let you do that. It should be like the iPhone's action button. Like even if you start it as an AI thing, but sort of let me turn it into something else. Fine.
Yeah. Like we would like you to use it for AI, but you know, it's your world.
And I kind of sympathize with Motorola in that like they're asking you to create some new behaviors with your phone and you have to take a minute and think like how do I get to the AI or if I want to put this in Remember This, what am I doing? So they've kind of put it everywhere I feel like in an attempt to be like, here you go. But yeah, it just gets a little bit like AI overload pretty quickly.
That's fair. So, I'm going to ask you the question I ask you every year around this time. Is this the year of the flip phone?
Man, we're going to get at least another one from Samsung.
Yeah. Sounds like the flip iPhone, which is probably going to be a fold iPhone, which I would like to be on the record of saying is a bad decision, is a ways out. But it feels like at the very least we are getting to the point where you can credibly say this phone is as good as the other phones you might buy. And also it's a flip phone. Like we're almost there and that feels important.
Yeah, it's closer than it's ever been. I think if you've been on the fence about a flip phone and you're pretty sure it's a good idea for you. Actually, someone in the comments had a good suggestion that you could get one of the low-end Razrs on a prepaid number for like 250 bucks or something. Good idea. Try that out. See if you like it. And then that might be a good way to get your feet wet without jumping into a $1,300 phone. The couple of things that I hesitate about on the Motorola and all the flip phones right now, there's no dust protection. There's like teeny tiny particle protection. It's IP48. But still, it's still kind of like I would be a little more careful with this phone than a regular slab phone. I handed it to my three-year-old and he put his fingers all over the inner screen. Like I didn't go easy on this thing. But that's a little bit of a hesitation. I am also a little annoyed with Motorola's software policy. They haven't been super great about rolling out software versions in a timely fashion. They support it not quite as many years as Samsung. I think they do three OS versions and then four years of security updates, which is like not as good as its competitors. Yeah, it's okay. Like it'll get most people as far as they want to go with this phone probably. But yeah, just kind of, we're getting there. I'm like if you are pretty sure a flip phone is for you, like it's a great year for the flip phone.
Yeah, I was excited to, I got to try yours for a minute. And we're also still at the point where like there is a crease if you look for it in the inside screen. But it continues to go away, which is nice. Like even after a couple minutes of using it, I didn't really notice it anymore. It's still very tall and it is still not quite as good a screen as you get when it's just a regular pane of glass. But like you said, we're getting there. The gap gets smaller and smaller every year it seems.
Yeah. Yeah, I'm very excited to see what Samsung does because from a hardware perspective, Samsung has been out in front of this for a long time and I think might still be the one to get us there. Yeah, but we'll see.
That's coming later. So, before I let you go, let's talk about the Android 16 stuff for just a minute. What do you make of this? We talked a little bit about this on Friday's show, but there's a new design language for Android. It's very vibrant and bouncy and colorful. There's a new font. What do you think? What do you make of all this?
Yeah, I think it's fun. They're calling this Material 3 Expressive. It's a big update that's going to be in Android 16. It's going to be in the beta later this month. And we got kind of a little preview of it when Google accidentally posted a blog kind of explaining the rationale behind the designs.
You know, Google leaking Google stuff is a tale as old as time.
It's a true tradition of this time of year.
Right. But there's just a real emphasis in kind of the appearance of it. It's very like, I don't know, sort of there. They talk about the springy animations and the fonts are bolder, the colors are bolder. You know, there's new icon shapes and everything about it just screams like youth. Like hello, fellow kids kind of thing. Do you think that's the right call? I mean, put that next to everything we've seen about what's coming in iOS, which is like very pared down and simple, and they're doing a similar kind of layered three-dimensional thing, but it's much more spaceship-y and glassy and pristine. Android is going all the other way, and they're just like, get really weird with what all of this looks like. Do you think that is the right call for Android? These things were pushing towards each other for so long. iOS and Android were looking more and more alike every year and now it feels like in a pretty big way they are absolutely breaking back apart.
Yeah, I think it, you know, maybe it is kind of just the nature and they're going to split apart and come back together again at some point, but in my mind I think, yeah, make it look different. Make it, you know, like iOS has such a stranglehold on the US market or such a majority. And especially among young people. I think we all read a study last year where like 88% of teenagers have an iPhone or something like that. So this feels like an attempt to address that market and there's a little bit of inherent cringiness I think when a big company sort of approaches a younger demographic and is like, look, we speak your language. How do you do, fellow kids is such a sick burn, but also like exactly right. You are correct about that. But not to kind of dismiss it all as like, oh, they're just trying to pander to Gen Z. I think it's good to refresh things and it seems like they've put a lot of thought into like how do we make this more usable for everybody. And I think making something that looks like an iOS clone wouldn't be a smart move right now. I think leaning into the difference of like, yeah, this is not an iPhone. This is something else. You can make it look purple and pink if you want and it looks cool.
Are you a customizer? By the way, one of the things I've been thinking about a lot with this is that there is this big push toward letting you do whatever you want with your phone. And I keep trying to figure out how to put that next to the thing that we have known and said forever, which is that defaults are the only thing that matter, right? And so I'm like, am I giving these companies too much credit for giving people more customization tools that statistically speaking they're never going to use? Or is there something to the idea that actually these things are becoming more personal and more versatile and what we should be giving people is more knobs and buttons and options to mess with?
Yeah, maybe it's a good moment to try it. I think because, yeah, I think in the past like I don't super customize my phone. I play around with all the options. I pick one of the color palettes in Material You and then I'm like, this looks weird and I just go back to the regular one. But maybe kind of as the hardware has just hit a point where, you know, flip phones and folding phones aside, they all look the same. Like a Samsung phone looks like an iPhone looks like a Pixel unless you're looking at the camera bump. So maybe that's kind of ripe for like, we'll do something fun and different in the software and people might actually try these things out if they're like, you know, I would like a different color palette. I see more like colorful, fun iOS lock screens, you know, since Apple made that change. I don't believe I've seen anyone outside of my fellow like, you know, phone sickos tinting the icons on their home screens. Like normies are not doing that.
I don't think phone sickos is the exact correct description of who does that. Yes. And I put myself in that category lovingly with all of these personalizations. My problem is like, and it's like what you said with the Material You colors, like 60% of it I'm like, this looks awesome. I love it. It's so cool. And then like four times a day you open a screen and it just feels and looks awful and everything is bad. And I'm like, I'm just going to go back to the way that it was. And so I think like my hope is if these companies and Google in particular can stay committed to this idea that it'll actually get developers and users and like wallpaper makers and everybody to buy into this way of thinking about what a phone should look like. And start to solve some of those edge cases. Because right now it's like half the icons on my screen look great in whatever color I've chosen and the other half look like butts. And like you got to fix that, right? Fix the butts.
Fix the butts and then Android will be perfect is my takeaway.
Exactly. So Android 16 coming this year seems like it might be the most interesting Android in a minute. Like it's been a while since we had an Android that you sort of update your phone and look at it and go, 'Oh, it's different now.' This feels like it might do it. And I'm excited about that.
Yeah, me too. And there's other stuff. They've got kind of like a live activities thing. There's going to be new haptics and all that. It's going to look and feel and do different things. So, yeah, it's been a minute. I'm excited for that.
Me too. All right. Well, we got to take a break and then we're going to come back. We're going to talk about Snapchat. Allison, thank you as always. We'll be right back. I made a mistake. I hung up on Allison before we did one thing that Allison asked. So, Allison's back. Hi, Allison.
You had a special request for the people.
