coming up on D. T. N. S. Shirley Lowe from Engadget is here to help us understand the current state of foldables and we look at the hybrid workplace from a study on some of its pitfalls to some new tools to help make it work smooth. This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, Monday, Spooky September the 13th 2021 in Los Angeles on Tom Merritt. I'm from studio Red Wood. I'm Sarah Lane. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Lowe. Welcome back. Hi. Thanks for having me again. Yes, it's good to be on the Internet with you. Last time we met was in person at CES a few years ago. I doubt that will happen in time soon. But hey, maybe maybe someday we were just talking about bees and some technology to perhaps get rid of them from your picnic area as well as some other things. Get that wider conversation on our expanded website at CES.com. That is where you can join top patrons such as David Mosher, Dan Voiles and Logan Larson. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Epic games announced that it will appeal U. S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers final judgment in the epic versus apple lawsuit, which largely ruled with Apple in the case. The appellate court is expected to rule on judge Gonzalez Rogers for the first time, but it is currently from both companies and possibly clarify the language of the injunction requiring Apple to Apple links to alternative payment options. Apple said it's still evaluating whether to launch its own appeal of that injunction. But I put my money on it. I would say that would happen Firefox 91 lets users set it as a default browser in Windows 10 using the same one click button. This isn't officially supported by Microsoft. Instead, Mozilla reverse engineered the exclusive edge feature and circumvented anti hijacking browser protections. So it's a vulnerability, I guess. An internal Google document names October 4th as the tentative release date for the Android open source project or a OSP source code for Android 12 and past Android releases developer source code. Release and consumer release are typically on the same day. The financial time sources say Chinese regulators plan to split ant groups alley pays credit business into an independent app that would see ant hand over customer credit data to a new credit scoring party partly state owned joint venture. Regulators also plan to crack down on other online lenders, not just ant, but ants the most prominent of them. Also, China's ministry of industry and information technology are still in place. However, Apple's marketing campaign has devised tech companies to stop blocking links to each other sites. Tencent restricts users from sharing links to ByteDances, Dow Yen and WeChat and QQ. Dow Yen filed a complaint in court in February and Alibaba's Tau Bow and TAMIL marketplaces do not allow Tencent's WeChat pay to be used as a tool to make sure that it believes that there are too many EV makers in the country and it encourages consolidation. Yeah, okay. Let's talk a little more about ZoomTopia, not Zootopia, ZoomTopia. One is possibly more fun than the other, but at the annual ZoomTopia conference Zoom, unsurprisingly made a lot of announcements. One of the biggest features is the expansion of real time transcription. Back in February, this was announced but now the company says it plans to add support for 30 languages by the end of this year. So it's not just coming in the fall to English, it's coming to 30 languages by the end of 2021. For paid accounts, the company also plans to add real time translation across as many as 12 languages by the end of next year. No word on what the language is will actually be, they didn't announce the list yet, but it will be powered by machine learning tech that Zoom acquired with the startup Kites back in June. Zoom is also expanding the functionality of whiteboards. These currently are available when you are in an active meeting, but the company will launch Zoom whiteboard outside of meetings in Zoom apps and the web as a beta later this year. So you can revisit it just like you could a real whiteboard if you walked in an empty conference room. In other words, Zoom is building productivity tools for teams to use when they're not on the call. And next year Zoom will be coming to Facebook's shared VR meeting space Horizon Workrooms. We'll be able to host video meetings in VR, use whiteboards, and interact with those on traditional computers. So all mixed together VR won't be a refuge from Zoom fatigue for very long. Charlotte, do you do a lot of Zoom conferencing these days? Too many. Way too many. Any of these features feel like they would make your life better? I feel like real time translation is something that's been a dream across the tech world, aside for a long time. And there's been a lot of device makers that made earbuds that promise to do real time translation as well so that when you're traveling in a foreign country and you have one of their buds on you can pretty much in real time hear what other people are speaking to you, but you don't have to go to the trouble of learning another language, I guess, or whip in out your phone and using Google Translate. I feel like we're still pretty far away from it working the way you would see in a science fiction movie. It's not as fast yet. The devices we have, the processes that are in place, the machine learning models, they're just not that quick. They're still not even that accurate. If you look at Google Translate there's colloquialisms that get left along the way that don't get translated very well. I speak Mandarin in various Chinese dialects and there's so many nuances between the different dialects that that's also hard to capture. Anyway, I'm interested to see what Zoom is going to do, especially because of that. I think that's something that people have been asking for for a long time. Everything else just seems like Zoom is trying to encroach on Google and Microsoft's market share in their respective spaces. I watch a lot of things on Vicky and even the human translators will translate the same phrase differently when they do the previously on than they did in the actual thing. Real-time machine learning translation has a long way to go. I also do not attend meetings in VR but I am a VR enthusiast and I would love to know who says this is actually a great advancement in how we can be together while not together because I know that there's a huge conversation that's been going on for a couple years now about what are we missing by not being together. If anything, or how is it actually better for productivity and the VR part of it is I just don't know anybody who does this regularly but I would love to know if you do and if you find it helpful. I suspect that the reason you haven't seen a lot of people do it yet is because there's just not a lot of apps out there and devices out there that enable a realistic translation of your body and your being into VR just yet. I think if you look at devices like Microsoft's HoloLens and the most recently announced was Facebook had its own, you know, the one that actually Zoom is going to use there's attempts at making this. I agree with you that it's not there's not a lot of loss of body language cues or whatever if you're not if you're doing a Zoom 2D I guess call you probably get enough cues to understand but I think there is something to be said about sharing the same physical space even if that physical space is virtual I did do a bunch of like so called immersive VR style meetings Tribeca Film Festival I think earlier this year was held sort of in person so they created this sort of exhibit hall for us to run around like our avatars and God there is still so much that needs to be done on the device side like you see a lot of people like yeah treadmills on to simulate the walking because you don't want to run in place but you also don't want to run into a TV and then yeah they just don't pick up like your gestures very well just yet but I did give industry friend like a fake hug and it felt kind of weirdly nice I don't know why all right yeah I mean probably because none of us have hugged a lot of other people right close enough well on that remote work versus in person Microsoft published research in the journal nature human behavior of a study of the effects of remote work on its 6,100 employees a lot of employees that study covered December 2019 through June of 2020 so 6 months or so the study found a hindered communication and also collaboration and increased work hours employees spent less time communicating outside their teams less time in medians but more time in instant messaging and also in email this meant less information was shared in real time and more in asynchronous ways and information was less likely to be shared across the organization overall bonds within teams were strengthened but collaboration outside those teams dropped 25% the scientists recommended taking proactive measures to help workers acquire new information across groups now keep in mind that 82% of Microsoft did not work remote before the switch in March 2020 and the switch happened very suddenly so these takeaways don't necessarily include a lot of time for employees to learn how to adapt to remote work but it's the study nonetheless yeah I feel like it's the first crack at okay what do we know from those first three months but I'm waiting for the next study because I think that will be even more informative as to this is what happened when we first started and after a year of doing it which we'll have data on right because we've been doing it that long this is what people learn this is how they adapted because I think the real question is what are the behaviors you have to proactively correct for and what are the ones that people will learn how to do maybe you can speed them along by giving some tips but I think we've all gotten better at it since June of 2020 for sure yeah I think that some sort of hybrid workplace is going to be where we ultimately land I think that for my workplace it's almost always been hybrid we've got so many people that work in you know remote locations or places where we don't have headquarters or offices that they just you know completely do the remote thing and then for me I've just always had an office to go to but I never felt the need because it was never enforced I didn't have to go in every single day of the week which is a luxury at the time right now though I think that if we move forward people who want us to have a real office space should consider letting like workers who can do the bulk of their work from home never mandate I think a certain requirement of dates in the office because I think if workers like myself have the freedom to dictate like what our work schedule is in terms of going to a physical office and meeting up with people then that's where you find people have that creativity and that that sort of brainstorm that people say we're missing from not being in a physical office but once you enforce it you're going to drain that creativity away anyway like that's my take the only thing I miss is free lunch but I used to eat in gadgets free lunch in our San Francisco office even though it wasn't really for TechRange when I worked there but I was like well yeah it's free free lunch free weight free pounds and free calories as well yeah I mean and we're you know bringing up hybrid work there's going to be all new things to learn once people are doing hybrid work and what that means and with that shift to hybrid and remote work we're going to need new tools in fact that sudden move in March 2020 to remote work put a strain on the product supply chain if you remember trying to buy a webcam in April 2020 it was almost impossible it's because camera makers like Logitech thought no one would buy anything so they reduced their orders and then they were wrong because everybody was buying cameras because they suddenly had to work from home a year and a half later we're starting to see that industry catch up which I don't know might be good news for the general chip shortage out there we'll see but we're getting the first product cycle for productivity tech made with work from home in mind. Logitech recently announced the 399 dollar Logee dock which builds on a typical USB-C dock doesn't have a camera in it it has power pass through a bunch of IO ports and offers an integrated noise cancelling speakerphone and physical controls for video calls so it's meant specifically to sit in front of you and make it easy to control your video conference it'll even do some light up effects if you integrate it with your calendar let you know your conference is coming dedicated video chat appliances have also been given a new life google introduced the $2,000 google meet series one desk 27 that has microphone speakers a camera and a touchscreen whiteboard on it Microsoft is working with a lot of OEMs Jabra, Neat, Poly, Yalink to integrate AI powered speaker tracking into video conferencing appliances that keeps you in the center of the frame it can also do things like split out people in the same room into separate camera instances so they look like everybody else on the zoom call startups are also getting into the game with a $300 webcam that might have seemed like a silly idea in 2019 opal announced the C1 which claims to offer DSLR technology on a webcam in styling that would look at home on top of a premium laptop you know you're gonna be looking at it all the time maybe you want it to look nice it includes a larger 4k sony image sensor about the size found in a low-end point and shoot an f1.8 lens and offers noise cancelling mics so we're finally getting those stylish high-end home cameras for the discerning and $400 for the Lodge Dock that is a lot I mean docks are usually two or three hundred dollars this is at the higher end of the range for sure yeah it struck me as quite high but yeah we're getting to the point where companies are getting very creative about making your experience as great as possible it's sort of like I don't know it almost seems like the early days of Instagram where it's like this filter will make you look better or you know make your photo look better it's it's all a sort of about making your experience as pleasant as possible because this is the reality you live in yeah apparently we all need to have home offices now I think that's also why like as everyone builds out a home office Lodge Detect can charge whatever the hell it wants for it's a really powerful dock that is very compact and can fit a lot of things in it and do a lot of things like light up with the calendar events so I mean I'm intrigued but I don't have a very sophisticated home office I'm never going to get one anytime soon but that DSLR webcam though I would I would check it out I would snap on a ring light over it yeah because currently I use the Lodge Detect Brio on our live streams and stuff like that and that one's good it's like constantly sold out like you know to Tom but it's not DSLR style by far so I'd love to see what the startup can do what is hardware can do but yeah yeah and we didn't go into it much but there's a lot of aspects of these being sold with easier provisioning which is another thing as companies are buying the setups for their employees to work from home as it becomes more of a permanent thing or a hybrid thing that's only going in a couple days a week so there's a lot of those kinds of features out there as well to make it easy to set them up for people because the three of us we could all set up a webcam just fine but you want to make it easy for your entire workforce to do it even if they're not as savvy with cameras and USB protocols and all that sort of thing. I feel like the more people get these pieces of gear or are able to get it for themselves instead of their own home setups very easily we might see a rise in people not needing organizations or companies at all and just more small businesses and more entrepreneurs I think rising out of all of this. One thing I noticed in David Pierce's article on protocol is Logitech saying they hadn't really thought about cameras in a long time and I'm like yeah it showed. The C920 was a workhorse, it's a great camera but I kept waiting for the really good next one and he basically admitted it sold well at 90% of the market like we were kind of resting on our laurels and then pandemic came and kind of shoved everyone into innovating so yeah I hate patrons of the show if you are a patron you might not know that you have an ad free RSS feed where you can have just DTNS or just Good Day Internet which is the expanded show or both check your tier on Patreon see if it says DTNS, GDI or all in the name of your tier and if you want to change it's easy just change tiers at dailytechnewshow.com Well foldable phones are the new hot thing at least they want to be with smart phone makers right now in fact we talked with Shannon Morse on Friday's show about her enthusiasm for foldable phones but how well do they work and more importantly should you be investing in one thankfully Sherilyn is here to help us break it down so Sherilyn how long were you using the foldables from wherever they came from tell us about what you've seen so far so Samsung's foldables are kind of where it's at right now just launched in August so I've had them since mid August about August 11th I want to say so basically a month and I also had experience with prior versions of Samsung's devices and other companies foldables specifically I think one comparison that keeps coming to mind is the Surface Duo that's not necessarily a foldable it's really like a dual screen phone and yeah there you go Tom's holding up the Surface Duo basically the difference is it's actually got a hinge it's not trying to have the screen go across the if we're going to do a straight comparison the Galaxy Z Fold 3 is the one that really compares a bit better with the Surface Duo because it's two phones in one more or less whereas the Z Flip 3 which is the other device that Samsung launched this year is the Motorola Razer Flip style phone which is like one phone but it flips the folds in half so the one that's more interesting I think to everyone right now and the one that I could even recommend people buy as a mainstream phone is the Flip 3 which is the one phone that folds in half except for the fact that it's battery life is kind of bad it's okay Tom, Sarah how long can you go on your phone nowadays before you need to charge it yeah I used to have to plug it in all the time I have to charge my phone every night pretty much yeah overnight pretty much okay so every night this phone won't get you to the night like it won't you can charge it overnight and then like before the evening or maybe in the evening you'll be like at pushing you know zero or five percent depending on how much you've used it for a few reasons I think because it has a larger external display than before and it's got a 120 hertz refresh rate on its inside screen so things that's that battery that you can possibly turn off if you want it to to safe but it's still kind of an issue the other guy the bigger guy excuse me same as the Surface Duo and Tom let me know if you have the same experience I don't reach for it as a like regular phone and then the only time I really enjoy using it is when it's like it's a big screen immersive experience which is when I have to intentionally and consciously decide to do something on it like play a game, read a book, watch a movie that I for some reason don't want to watch on my TVs on the subway or on a plane or something so it's for very specific use cases and then as just a phone it really is a very perfunctory kind of thing where like I get the basics done and I'm I'm never going to be idly scrolling Twitter or Instagram or Reddit on this phone because it's too narrow, too heavy as a single phone and yeah so I think Tom you were saying right you have similar experiences with the Duo? Yeah I was going to say it's pretty much exactly the same probably less call for me to do video on it because it has the hinge gap right and so I was you know I was like oh I'll put a TV video up on the top screen and set it on the coffee table so I kind of have you know poor man's picture but I mean I did that a few times and then I never went to make sure that I did that I really liked reading on it like ebooks but again like you said I had the same experience not reaching for it to do that not remembering to go get it. Yeah totally I will say that there are people that this device will serve well I think if you're a person that kind of wants a tablet but doesn't really want to spend on a separate device and don't need such a big screen or you travel a lot which few of us are nowadays but maybe we will again and then if you're like a super huge tech aficionado you're like oh my god the technology is so great I have to try I think so yeah I mean Samsung's done a really good job of things like making sure the cameras are the high-end cameras you expect from having so much for devices $1800 for the fold and then there is software in there that Samsung's done to make this a more productive like a multi tasking device so you can use app side by side you can drag and drop things there's a flex mode there's a new edge panel that you can pin to the side so it looks like a taskbar on windows sort of which is kind of nice but who the hell is typing on this thing like it's a laptop you know maybe you will but it's not me so not and not everybody really not a lot of people I know one person is a big fan of the note who loves the fold but that's it go ahead sir I for I know there are a lot of people who say like foldables but how are they gonna you know withstand the test of time I mean what do you think about that you know that that that crease situation and how and how it'll be you know if you buy a device that's $1800 what's gonna look like in three years yeah no this is not going to last you three years because no one's gonna be able to be as careful as like you need to be with this thing for that long I think you're going to either trade it in for the next version when it comes time or you're gonna break it at some point right and to your point Sarah about the crease the crease isn't it's something that someone I think on a YouTube video that we made comments that saying oh how's the crease or like I bet that thing creases over time I was like you bet um excuse me they've been from the beginning of time with foldables the crease has been there they've always been noticeable but not so obvious that you can't read anything on it um and I think that that's something that we've learned over time that we just have to deal with you have just kind of suck it up it's going to be there's going to be a crease because it's a thing that remains the design yeah as for like the the durability of it the external parts I think and the hinge Samsung's gotten pretty good already with this current iteration the screen though even if it's stronger I would still say that if you ever close the phone with a key or a grain or a crumb in it you you might you might find that yeah you've scratched something but I don't know it's it's hard to say how it depends on how careful you are with phones anyway right like I drop I have like seven cracked phones at home because I can't stop dropping them because they're all slabs of glass nowadays you and me both sister I saw you through the flip three in your bag though and it and it survived so that's that's a good testament right yes the flip three is stronger it's the screen where it's like I can't but the outside the where there's no screen showing um I definitely feel much safer with them and yes the flip three almost feels like it might be more durable for the fact that you can fold it and put it away that screen protected yeah I love the flip three I honestly if his battery life wasn't so bad I would buy one for myself yeah the flip three might be the closest to a recommendable foldable that we've gotten yet yeah I feel like we would might need to wait one more generation for it to like sort out some these kinks but we are at the point where if people are curious and rich enough that I would be like okay if you want to spend that money you go for it it's 999 it's cheaper than before which like it's the same price as an iPhone more or less now so yeah yeah all right real quickly before we wrap up the dream of the modular laptop has another champion Intel is entered the ring offering its next unit of computing or knock products as bare bones mini desktop and they've been doing that for years but Intel has released a variety of mini PC form factors as well from the 15 HDMI connected Intel compute stick to the compute card in 2017 and the similar compute element most recently in 2019 now the company is using that compute element module for a laptop you can just swap out the innards of your laptop like a card the nuke p14e laptop element is a 13.9 inch laptop reference design that supports the u-series version of the nuke 11 compute element which always contains some brand of Intel processor it varies you can configure it storage and a built-in operating system and can be swapped between the laptops the p14e laptop shell is the key piece though it contains a 3,000 by 2,000 display Wi-Fi 6 all your IO ports and a battery CPUs in the compute element range go from celerons to core i7 with IRC graphics and vpro options on i5 and i7 so the reference design will likely be sold directly to companies and government clients while the swapable compute elements make sense for fleet management so you can buy a bunch of these frames and then if you need to upgrade somebody's computer you can leave the frame and just swap out the compute element no word on if Intel will sell a bare bones version to consumers though like they do with nuke desktops but I'm sure we can hope that maybe they will this is a very niche product so it's very hard to people are very high about their modular laptops though so it's a dream it's a dream to have a modular laptop I don't know how realistic the dream is or if people will even use it if it comes along but this is kind of the closest we've gotten to a real working version of it if you have a nice chassis that you like and you can just keep swapping out the compute component then that'd be pretty nice because they do upgrade those every freaking year I guess we need a new CPU every year yeah and you could if you like the style of your laptop or if you want to keep the innards but want to change the style you could do it either way well we've been talking about seeing at home and working from home and how travel has been obviously difficult on the show and quite a few shows before this but if you are traveling and you're looking for an interesting engineering destination on your next vacation Chris Christensen has you covered this is Chris Christensen from amateur traveler with another tech in travel minute I've got a travel place for you today instead of an app some of the interesting things historically in terms of where countries learned engineering are the canal systems they built canal de midi in France or the Erie canal in the US or of course the Panama canal and those are fascinating places to visit but the most interesting engineering solution to a canal lock that I've seen is the fall Kirk wheel in Scotland and if you look at this it looks basically like a ferris wheel for canal boats it's a unique solution where boats are rotated from lower levels to upper levels and back again on a giant wheel it looks like it was designed by somebody who'd seen a revolver and how that works you got to see a picture or video to understand how this works but checking out on your travels the fall Kirk wheel in Scotland this is Chris Christensen from the amateur traveler I want to ride on it me too I'm like did someone say Paris Scotland I'll take it just let me sounds like fun yes it does it really does if you have questions comments and you know just full on feedback for anything that we talk about on any of our past shows or you would like us to talk about on future shows please do send them our way feedback at dailytechnewshow.com and you know what we got some new bosses so we'd like to thank them thank you to our brand new bosses Ed Kevin Edwards Scott Thomas and John Stoneham who all just started backing us on Patreon so thank you Ed thank you Kevin thank you Scott and thank you John that has put us up one patron over last month because we always have some people that just you know they have to fall out for us so thank you Ed Kevin Scott and John for picking up those people that's great you guys are awesome you are awesome also awesome Sherlyn Lowe thank you so much for being with us it's so nice to see you again and let folks know where they can keep up with your work yeah I'm at engadget engadget.com I also co-host the Engadget podcast if you somehow want to hear more of my voice and I'm on Twitter at Sherlyn Lowe that's C-H-E-R-L-Y-N-L-O-W well thank you so much for being with us folks tomorrow is Apple Announcement Day we will be live as usual Monday through Friday 4 30 p.m. Eastern 2030 UTC you can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com and because it's Apple Day we'll be back tomorrow with Nika Monford and Terence Gaines of the Snob OS podcast talk to you then at frogpants.com