And welcome to another episode of Android Faithful, your weekly source for news, hardware, apps, and all the wonderful Android goodness here in 2024. I'm very excited. It is my first episode back in 2024. I am Ron Richards. Welcome, Ron Richards. I'm Jason Howell. I'm with Red Owl. And we are very excited because the three of us are all together here for the show again, as I mentioned my first show at 2084. But our good buddy, Michelle, is not here because he's in Vegas for CES. Poor guy. Which I'm just awaiting the phone call that he needs money. Because here's something.  When you're co-host of a podcast, you are bonded for life. So at any given point, if one of your co-hosts call you and says, I'm in Vegas and I need $5,000, you have to send it to them right now. You have to help them. That's why it is a family, it is a brotherhood, it is a sisterhood. It is a everything hood. We take care of one another.  Yeah, be careful, be careful. I didn't know that that was the bond. Like if I didn't know that, I'd rush off to Vegas and you cashed in. I don't go to Vegas next. Seriously. So super excited though. It has definitely been a week leading up to CES. I know we got a ton of stuff to talk about. But first, before we get into it, I want to remind everybody, go to patreon.com slash android faithfully. You can support us there. We thank everybody who's support us. Listen to later on the show. We're gonna give a shout out to one of our supporting patrons as we cover the patron pick of their news selection of a story for us to talk about this week. But yeah, thank everybody who supports us there, so. Y'all are awesome. Yeah. You help us, you allow us to do this. Exactly. So thank you for this. Which is important. And so this show is a little different because it is CES. So we actually have a ton of hardware to go through, but Google made some announcements at CES and Jason Nguyen, you guys got the scoop on it, right?  A little bit. Google the mother ship. Flew their mother ship over the top of both of our houses independently, even though we live in completely different parts of the United States of America and pulled us into their ship and allowed us to speak with Sandeep Chavukula. I knew I knew I was gonna. Chavukula, sorry. Chavukula, there we go. Thank you. There we go, Sandeep. Super sorry about that. At least I get it right in the actual interview, which is what we're gonna play next. I'm gonna stop talking now. Yeah, so we were super excited because Google knowing that Google announced some stuff, they came to us and they said, hey, Andrew Faithful, we're super excited.  Do you want to talk to Sandeep from our team to hear about the great stuff that we're announcing at CES? And of course we said yes. Yeah, of course. So which I'd like to thank Google and everybody that helped make this happen because this show being less than a year old, kind of flattered, like it's kind of nice to see that they are watching and listening and know that all of you are watching and listening and we're all working together to spread the word. So that's pretty cool. Yeah, pretty awesome stuff. Should we jump into it? Yeah, let's roll the interview. Why don't we get, we got some stuff to talk about here coming up here. So sit back, relax and enjoy this interview with Sandeep. A consumer electronic show, year after year. We're looking forward to it in the month of January. It's underway in Las Vegas. Google unveiled a solid list of announcements at the show. Really exciting stuff. So we have Sandeep Chavukula, Director of Product Management for Multi-Device Experiences joining us here today with Google, of course. We've got the mother ship joining the show today. Welcome to the show, Sandeep. It's great to meet you and great to have you on Android Faithful. Thank you so much for having me. Nice to meet you both. Yeah, very nice to meet you too. I mean, it's CES. So I know that you are in the weeds as they say. It's been a long time since I've been to CES. I'm sure you have experienced a CES. How is it going so far with the excitement around the announcements that you guys are making and just the general vibe of the conference while you're there? Well, you know, it's CES.  There's a lot of excitement about the investments that Android is making around continuing to show how we're giving users different choice. So we're really excited about being here this year and really excited about the announcements that we're making. Yes, indeed. Well, you've got a lot to be excited about. And, you know, I mentioned in your title, Multi-Device Experiences, which really, as far as these announcements are concerned, is that the heart of what we're talking about, which is exactly why we have you on here, what is the importance of being able to scale and distribute the things that are happening in the world of Android and, you know, all the different, the multifaceted ways that we can use Android from big screens to small. When we're talking about all these different experiences, how important has that become in being able to take these things that Android does and spread it across into all these different directions and do it seamlessly? That I think is the really important part. You nailed it. You nailed it. I think there's a few different bits there like we could unpack. So first is this idea that, you know, we live in a world where an average person has dozens of devices that they expect their phone to interact with. So for me, for example, when I get up in the morning, by the time I'm brushing my teeth, I want to listen to some music that's playing in my bathroom speaker. And I want to be able to move that over into my kitchen as I'm making breakfast. And if I get a call in the meanwhile, maybe I just want to pop in some earbuds and just take that as I'm walking out the door. And that's actually a pretty typical day in the life of, you know, really millions of users. And Android with three billion devices out there, you know, we are really in a great place to help people have those experiences, regardless of what devices they use underneath, right? So the idea of Android is around choice. When we think about these seamless multi-device journeys, we and Android want to create those in a way that brings in our industry partners so that you could do that in a way that's intuitive, it's delightful, and to use your word seamless, but also while maintaining this notion, this ethos we really have around giving people choice to pick the best devices for the job that they have at hand. That's a really great point, Sandeep. And I think, especially as an Android developer, it's something that I love about the platform being able to give people choice and being able to let people kind of pick from a wide swath, a wide ecosystem of devices. And that's a really great segue because I think one of the most intriguing announcements from you all at CES this year is QuickShare. And I guess for our viewers who are not, or who might be a little bit confused about what we mean by that, that, you know, Google has nearby share. And as you said, you know, part of the wonder of the Android ecosystem is the many OEMs of partners that you have and one of the biggest ones is Samsung. And Samsung has their own version or flavor of sharing and that's QuickShare. And what's super interesting is that, is the announcement that, you know, Google and Samsung will be collaborating, combining, you know, coordinating, nearby share and QuickShare into one project. Oh, what?  Can you talk about the impetus of, you know, this combining of QuickShare and nearby share? Yeah, so that's a great question, right? So I think that, you know, sometimes things are framed as choice versus convenience, right? And it shouldn't be that way, right? You should be able to pick the best tool that you want for your job and still get the things that you want to done as a person in a seamless and delightful way. And so that's kind of what we're going for. And frankly, you know, it's not really easy to take a set of devices that have different hardware that are coming from different brands that, you know, we'll talk about some of the other announcements where you may even have a different operating system, but getting them to work together in a seamless way is actually a difficult challenge. And one of the things that we've invested in in Android is to create a flexible technical platform that while being flexible, it's also robust and delivers a high quality seamless experience. So, and when we think about that, we always think about how do we deliver what users need the most, right? And so that's kind of the genesis of the announcement that you're talking about with respect to a quick share and nearby share. So both us and our great partner, Samsung, we looked at this and say, hey, you know what, people need to be able to share files, photos and texts in a seamless manner across all of the Android ecosystem. We've got two great solutions. How do we take the best of both of these, put these things together and create one unified experience so that when as a person who is using Android, you wanna share, you just do it in one simple, quick, intuitive and fast way. And so now, you've always been, as an Android user, been able to share to other Android devices and you've all been able to share to Chrome OS. But we've taken the same work and we've also expanded that to Windows. So last year, we launched nearby share now to be quick share on Windows and we're taking the same effort that we're doing with the convergence here and expanding it to Windows as well and we're partnering with OEMs like LG to make sure that we preload this nearby share Windows binary so that right out of the box without having to do any setup, you get to choose the best set of PC devices that you want and it just works seamlessly as well. And when it's done with the PC, it's gonna be called quick share there as well, right? That's right, that's right. It's all basically the nearby share terminology out the window, now it's quick share. Regardless of the fact that like quick share was a Samsung technology prior, so that would allude to kind of Samsung's devices, Samsung's phones, that sort of stuff. When we're talking about Windows PCs in general, it's all just gonna be quick share. When we're talking about Samsung, because I think this is probably gonna be a little bit of a confusing sticking point for people is, okay, these were two separate things. Now they're kind of coming together, but does Samsung still have some of the secret sauce that they had that was driving their version of quick share prior to this kind of combo effort or are they kind of essentially entirely the same now going forward? Yeah, that's a really good question. So I think in this transition period, there will be some, hey, does this work? Does that now work kind of question? So I think here's the way I think about it, right? So one, Android's all about choice, including for users, but also for giving our OEM partners the ability to differentiate and create new things based on the hardware investments that they're making. So, but the foundation layer before we get to all of that is really the interoperability layer. And so with renaming these two solutions as quick share, we're focusing on what is the value that we're adding to the users, being able to share quickly. So that's, if we start there in a peer-to-peer way, that's what this accomplishes. And so that remains a core interrupt principle that we work on. Now, on top of that, there are some additional features that quick share has had around, for example, uploading temporarily to a cloud and sending a link over. Or there is another feature of being able to simultaneously send to multiple users. Some of these have hardware dependencies, some of these are differentiating features. And so we're looking at these holistically to figure out which ones make sense to move across the ecosystem, and which ones are ones that we want to give, again, coming back to this idea of choice, to give users the opportunity to pick things that work for them. Got it, okay. All right, well, then that, I'm super curious to see how this plays out. When I think of the terminology, like nearby share is kind of the thing I'm comfortable with, quick share seems to be a little bit more, well, yeah, they're both very descriptive in different ways, but I actually like quick share a little bit more. I think it gets to the point a little bit. Well, it's about... Somebody looks at that. I think they're gonna know immediately more. Like I want to share this with someone nearby share. There was still a little bit of ambiguity there. Yeah, I think it's a brand that 50% plus of Android users know and we want to lean into it. And look, people want to get things done quickly. Indeed, exactly. Let's lean into the quick because that's gonna make a lot of people happy. And speaking of that, from quick to fast, we can move on to fast pair. There's some sort of like thing going on here. They sound really good together. Fast pair, I personally, I'm a huge fan of fast pair. Like one of the things on mobile that I just absolutely hate is like the slow drawn out, convoluted, kind of Bluetooth pairing process. And fast pair, I think I was a little skeptical, if I'm honest, when it first was introduced, I was like, okay, yeah, it's got to prove to me that it actually worked before I trust it. And now when I don't have a fast pair experience, like when I'm, you know, get a new phone and I use a pair of headphones and it doesn't pop that up, I'm totally missing it because now we gotta jump into the settings. But it sounds like this functionality, I'm not alone. It's broadening out. Tell us a little bit about how this is gonna play out on the big screen because that is one of the places that I use headphones. I like it late at night to use my headphones to watch on the screen.  That's totally right. Fast pair is a technology that we started investing in. Actually, you know, before I get into fast pair itself, like let's talk about our multi-device experience, right? Any multi-device experience starts with unboxing, unwrapping that new set of earbuds or whatever you've got, the new peripheral that you want and setting it up with your device. And that's really where fast pair really starts and shines. So we introduced this, I believe in 2017. And, you know, we've been seeing a lot of positive adoption from our users here. Just in the last year, and I'll have to remember to say last year because it's 2024 now, in 2023, we've had 660 million pairings with fast pair. That's 2x what it was the year before. So, you know, this idea that when you build things that intelligently adapt to users and while giving them choice, right? So we work with 400 plus different kinds of headphones today, right? So people can choose between those different headphones and still connect them to any Android phone. When you do that, people reciprocate that level of choice and caring for that user journey by using these kinds of features. And so we're very excited about the value that people are getting from fast pair like yourself, right? So you get to a point where you're like, you expect this, right? And that's how we believe it should be. Now, fast pair works with both your Android phones and also your Chrome OS devices. Today, we announced that we're expanding it to Chromecast with Google TV. And the use case is exactly, as you said, you know, you may be watching TV. I actually have a different use case where sometimes you may have friends or partners who fall asleep as soon as you put the movie on, right? And then, you know, you wanna be nice and you don't wanna wake them up and so you just wanna pop those, you know, Pixel Buds or Sony Link Buds that you have already paired with your Android phone. You put them in, you get a notification and then all of a sudden you're watching your TV without any interruption while allowing your friend or partner to get a nice sleep in. That's actually hilarious. My husband and I often are on the couch like later at night. He's watching on our Chromecast with Google TV and I'm watching something on my phone. So I think actually, I didn't realize this but I think we really need that because we're just overly online kind of people. But actually that brings up a question for you, Sandeep. So yeah, we have a Chromecast, a Google TV Chromecast, a little bit older. Will, is this support going to be for current and kind of incoming devices or is there going to be support for older devices with Chromecast for Google TV? What's the backwards compatibility like? Yeah, so I think I don't know exactly which version of Chromecast you've got and what the detail is. We're happy to follow up, you know, going forward. But you know, our goal is to make these things again, you know, we're really about expanding both the breadth but also the depth of devices that we can support with Android, right? So choice is something that's important and we'll figure out the right ways to take this as far as we can. Indeed, all right. Well, cool. Well, I think it's a wonderful feature to lean into because like I said, once you have it, it's really hard to go back and go back to the manual process and everything like that. Now, we are talking a lot about kind of the multi-device experience and something that I've been hearing a lot about and I know I'm not alone on this in recent years is this idea of handing off from one device to another and you know, and again, I'm probably gonna come across as really skeptical but just as in general, which I'm totally not but I'm always like, okay, I love the concept. I love the idea of handoff between one device to another but man, that's gotta work. It's gotta be, again, going back to an earlier word, a seamless experience. Yet, I have had experiences where it works and when it works like magic, it's like, okay, this is the future, this is the way things need to go. It needs to kind of be this process of anticipation of like, I do wanna take whatever I'm listening to on my phone and put that up onto the screen and make that seamless, make that easy instead of me having to remember what protocol to use and all this kind of stuff. So you guys have had the announcement at CES this year about a handoff process between the Pixel phone and the Pixel tablet for at least, I guess, to begin with Spotify and YouTube music, talk a little bit about that, the customer experience. Like, I as a customer, if I have these devices and I do this handoff, like what can I expect out of that experience? Yeah, that's a great question. So I think this feature that we announced is really a showcase of something a little bit more fundamental, right? So when we think about this idea of building these seamless experiences across different hardware, different manufacturers, different operating systems, we really think about how do we use two major signals? How do we use proximity and context in order to build something intelligent that adapts to the person's needs? And what you're seeing here is one instantiation of that. We've also used similar kinds of technologies for a few other aspects. For example, there's the audio switching that we launched last year or even something as simple as copy and paste, right? Copy and paste, that's not really a very complicated feature per se, but knowing the context that you're using, you're copying and pasting to yourself versus to somebody else's device helps us adapt what that experience looks like. When I'm copying and pasting it to my own devices, for example, I'm taking something from my phone and I wanna send it over to my Windows PC, for example, I expect that to work without me having to confirm anything because it's my own devices. But if I'm taking something and pasting it over to somebody else's, I probably want their permission before I do that. And so we use these two signals of proximity, what's near you, what's around you, what devices are around you, and context, which is what is the person trying to do to figure out how we can enable these experiences. With a particular feature you're talking about, but about everywhere from the hardware level through the OS all the way to our app partners to ultimately give a very intuitive and seamless and delightful experience for the user. Yeah, and I absolutely love that. Now, how is this proximity being determined? Because I know this announcement, is it specific to the Pixel 8 Pro? Is that right? And I know the Pixel 8 Pro has the UWB Ultra Wideband. Is that kind of the critical component here or is it a mixture of technologies that's determining that kind of proximity, that important key piece of information? Right, so there's a few different ways to kind of get at that proximity, right? So we use a range of technologies to pull that together to understand what it is. In this case, we are using UWB as well, but we have a few different signals that we can pull together to determine presence and proximity. Excellent. Awesome. Well, being someone who is concerned with multi devices, it's been a very interesting history in the last several years where we've gone kind of from an internet of things to like smart home devices. And I know like this is not a new announcement, but kind of a new name, a new kind of product that we're hearing about is Matter. And I was wondering if you could at least maybe talk about not just what's going on with Matter at CES, but maybe just tell us generally, why does Matter matter? I had to do it, I'm sorry. Yeah, no, it's a good question. It's not an area that I cover in depth indirectly, but in general, the notion that we should have some standardization around how different devices connect is something that's important, right? So if you talk about choice, the way we can maximize the investment that we're making is to get different, well, let me kind of do it this way. I mentioned with QuickShare how we brought two companies together and hey, like we found the right set of ways to take the best of both worlds and bring that together. With Matter and other standards-based approaches, we're just taking that same dynamic and expanding it more broadly, right? So we wanna make sure that we can bring in all of our industry partners together. They agree on the right journeys that we want to enable for our users and make sure that we deliver on those in a compelling and cohesive way. Yeah, okay. So now when it comes to how this is kind of implemented, actually, when I read this news, I was like, this is a real no-brainer piece of news. It's one of those pieces of news that I'm like, I wish this had existed sooner because I feel like we're at a point right now where these home assistants that we have, like I've got a Google Home and I hope I'm not saying something to fire it off. I've got one in every room. So I might be an outlier. There are a lot of people that have these devices. They might not have them in every room, but having the TVs integrate some of these experiences so that we don't have to rely on if we don't want to. We know we're gonna have a TV. We might not know that we're gonna have a Nest Hub or something like that. Having this technology integrated into the things that we already have to control things that can be so incredibly complicated, like the smart home control reality can be very confusing and complicated. Can you give me a sense of what, and I imagine, I envision that this is gonna actually make things a lot simpler. Can you give me a sense of what I could expect if I happen to have a TV that is acting as a home hub where I don't necessarily need to have a Nest Hub? Is it the same type of experience just maybe lacking a touchscreen in the process or what does that look like for a user? Yeah, exactly. So I think the, I don't, again, I'm not the expert on this particular bit, but the way the matter hub works is that the idea is that you've got a device that's always available in order to act as the central controller for all these different matter compatible devices that you have. Now, as you said, you may or may not have speakers around your house. I do, because it's something that's important to me. But most folks have a TV, being able to build in some of these foundational technologies into something that's always available in your home is what allows us to then kind of build off of that and make sure that we are bringing in these experiences to a broad set of users. Yeah, yeah, I think that's super important. And I'm really looking forward to that. And also, along those lines, it means that I'd have to upgrade my TV and hey, you know what, I'm okay with that. I'm okay with that. You're there at CES, you're kind of, you know, obviously, making the rounds on communicating a lot of these features and kind of basing in a position to be exposed to the excitement that surrounds these features. What is the thing that you're most excited about as far as where Google is at when it comes to this multi-device kind of interoperability space, which is, I imagine, close to your heart because it's what you do. Like, what are you excited for that we have to look forward to without naming any specifics? Because I know you can't talk about future projects, but where's this all headed? I guess it's... Yeah, yeah, so it's, you know, it's a great question. I actually, we'll talk about something that we're doing right now that's, I think, a side of what, of things to come, right? So we talked about making it fast and easy set up and we've talked about a little bit of where that is. So we'll continue to invest that in that in 2024. Getting things done across devices in a seamless way across more and more devices, whether that's, you know, a single entry point into being able to share files and photos or being able to share with Windows. I think that's another big area that we're gonna continue to invest in. The third bit, which is the bit that I'm actually most excited about is really expanding what we're doing on Android to other ecosystems. So one of the things that we announced at CES is being building in Chromecast into LG TVs. LG TVs don't run Android OS, they're on WebOS, right? But we are working with industry partners who share our common vision of creating these delightful journeys to go beyond just Android. And so that's one thing I'm really excited about. And one of the, you know, I think a little bit interesting bit is when we start looking in here there's a lot of folks in the industry who believe in this idea that users should have choice, right? We work with LG on integrating CAST into their WebOS operating system on TVs. And that's gonna be available in hospitality pretty soon as well. Now, we also worked on the app player with TikTok to be able to cast short form videos onto any CAST receiver. And so this is a first, right? So many of us are used to this idea of like, hey, look at this cool TikTok video I showed you and what do you do now? You take your phone or if you have your phone, you can open it up and... Yeah. Been there, done that. Exactly. And we passed that around. Yeah. But now instead you could like cast us to the big, beautiful TV that you have that acts as your Matter Hub and be able to share that with the people in your life in a very seamless way. So I'm really excited about this idea that we're going beyond to these other operating systems beyond our own. Yeah, totally. I mean, and what does that mean? That means that people don't necessarily have to go to a specific place for something. They might already have the thing that comes to them, which I think is, that's happening in what you're talking about. That's happening in the ways that artificial intelligence is kind of converging with across many platforms in different directions. In so many ways in technology right now, it's about these really great features coming to us instead of us having to remember to go to that place to use it. It's like it's all integrated seamlessly. And when it's done well like that, it's just, it's a really wonderful experience. And that's exactly right. So like the devices start working for the people rather than the people working for the devices. And this comes back to our core tenants here, which is, we wanna give people choice. And at the same time, we want these seamless high quality experiences across the board so that choice shouldn't come at the cost of delight in something that I strongly believe in. It's really cool how things have kind of become, I guess there's like a give and take where I feel like when mobile firms first came out, we were trying to cram like a lot of our lives into a phone, right? So the internet and eventually like TV and like movies. And now, as you mentioned, like with the TikTok integration, now you have something that is a very, internet online and very mobile cultural construct. And now you're kind of turning it back around whereas we were trying to get things from our TVs into our phones, now we're like, hey, can we broaden the experience and take something that is, in a sense, very inherently mobile and bring it out like back into the world. I really kind of like that the idea that it keeps kind of going around and around and like the two sides kind of like start paying ideas or like innovations off each other. Yeah, enhancing each other. Yeah. Because I mean, ultimately what you're talking about is putting people in the center of the experience, right? So whether it's on the TV or the phone, we're doing it in a way that ultimately we, I think human needs come back to connection, right? They come back to connecting with each other. I think even before we started this show, we were just talking about different ways that we connect, right? And so I think it's very natural that given the opportunity, people will want the devices to fit in the background. Of course, you want to pick the best device for the job. You want that choice. But once you've made that choice, you still want to get the job done, which may mean having people over and sharing something with them. Yeah. It's a cool place right now where we are with technology and how all this stuff is converging with all the other different types of devices out there. It's actually, having followed Android so closely for so long at this point, it's really neat to see how that playing field has broadened out, how the operating system and all the technologies underneath have gone to a point of maturity where they can interoperate the way they do now, because 10 years ago it would have been a really complicated mess. We might have promised it or we might have heard a promise of it, but run into roadblocks along the way. And it feels like right now, like a lot of those roadblocks are lifted and this stuff's working in the way that we hoped it would 10 years ago and doing new things that we haven't thought about. So Sandeep, really appreciate you taking time out of your busy CES schedule to talk with us this afternoon. And I know you're probably there for the long haul in Las Vegas. So I hope you have a wonderful conference and that Google gets a lot of really enthusiastic people stopping by to see some of the developments that you have going on right now. Thank you. Well, thank you so much for having me and thank you for your time. Absolutely. We hope to have you back real soon. Okay. What a great interview. You guys did awesome. I'm so bummed I missed it. Sandeep seems like a really cool dude. Yeah, he was awesome. It was fun hanging out with him and getting the CES experience from a distance. I gotta say, they put him up in that swanky CES Vegas hotel. It was a good location of podcast as ever. But yeah, but seriously, huge thanks to Sandeep. Huge thanks to Google for reaching out and giving us the lowdown and all the great stuff that they announced at CES and some really meaty, interesting stuff. What were your main, Jason, what were your main takeaways from that conversation? Like what do you think is the biggest thing of all those announcements? I mean, between the quickshare, the fast pair, I mean, like I said, I like the fast pair. I love the fast pair. It's such a friction point that I've experienced so many times that if, and then once fast pair kind of came along and I experienced it and I was like, okay, that actually worked. That actually works really well. I want that in all places. The less I have to like jump into Bluetooth settings and try all the weird funky like angles of getting it to work the better. So that's the one that made me happiest. I don't know, just generally a feeling of, you know, multi-device, cross-device and I kind of like the, just there, I mean, they've been invested in it in a while. That's not like news, but I don't know. Some things, especially some things we're gonna talk about. I feel like kind of like, oh, finally kind of calm. I mean, more culmination of partnerships and actually making things a little more like tightened up in like the ecosystem or this ecosystem of ecosystems and things like that. And yeah, it feels like that, like it's first like, first you are able to do a thing on your phone and then you're able to do similar things on all these different devices and now it's been about kind of making all those things connect and to some degree they've succeeded, not succeeded or they succeeded and then things have felt like they've kind of regressed a little bit thinking about you, Nest Hub and things like that. But I don't know, it just feels like, you know, there's a lot of things that are kind of coming together and even these little things, like it kind of feels like small announcements, right? Like QuickShare and nearby share, and like the fast pairing thing. But I mean, I think it's like the small things in aggregate that make a really good user experience. So I think, yeah. Yeah, they all add up to something much bigger. Yeah, looking at it and it was funny because I actually was doing my own personal research and I was like, what did they announce last year? What did they announce the year before? And it's interesting to see the trajectory and how the refinement of what they announced and how they're positioning it is like kind of evolving year after year because last year CES was about casting and was like had a lot of the similar things but this continues the evolution. So yeah, good stuff. Well, great job. Well, thank you and thanks again to Sandeep for his time. Thank you, Sandeep. And that's not the only news we have. We have a ton more like top of the fold news and then we've got hardware from CES and then we've got like hardware that's not from CES. So we should just get right in it. Let's do it. I don't know, something about, is there a song about jump in my car or something? I don't know, maybe it's like a Beatles, Beach Boys song or something, but something we didn't... Gary Newman, here in my car. Yeah, oh, here in my car. Well, at CES there, something we didn't get to talk to Sandeep about but which was at CES were some great announcement for Android Auto from CES 2004. There's a lot of stuff, some big, some small, some, you might question the safety of it. Again, it kind of goes along the lines of a lot of partnerships and building relationships and integrating is really starting to feel like it pays off. I know like last week we talked about an experience going away, but at the same time, it really feels like Android Auto has kind of arrived in a place, I don't think there's a pun in there, but the integration with EVs is coming along. Right now, as we've been talking about battery APIs a lot last couple of weeks, but some of that battery informational work is coming to Android Auto. And so starting soon with the Ford Mustang Mach E and F-150, you'll be able to get battery life with onboarding EVs so that you can do things like be able to kind of monitor your battery level and you arrive or have Android Auto suggest to you charging places. You can, so I was confused about this and I believe Jason was too, one of the announcements was that you could send a trip from Google Maps to Android Auto, which I think you could already do or it already picks up. I mean, that's one of those features that I would have assumed that you could do, but I don't have an Android Auto head unit so I didn't really ever use that. I'd hope you could do that. This is one of those things where I feel like the announcements there, but the details are a little fuzzy. Now, yeah, if you have navigation going start on your phone, it will instantly transfer to a display. So I don't know what the difference with this is, but there's something different, maybe I don't know if it's like a more complex trip or something else.  Yeah, if you pulled up the navigation on your phone and you say send it to car, right? It's almost like, yeah, it's that device connection, kind of Jason that you're talking to Sandy of about, but in the car side of things. Gotcha, oh, that's a great, that's it Ron. So it's basically like transferring a podcast, but this time it's directions and actually that's fair, I remember now. That happens when your phone is directly connected to Android Auto, but now it'll happen just wirelessly, cross devices.  You send the destination to your Android Auto and when you get in there, it's all ready for you. Yeah, or you have it, someone set you the link to the thing you pulled up on your phone and you're like, okay, car, I'm gonna send it to car, I'm going here, right? So I gotta tell you, I hate these Android Auto announcements at CES because they always make me want a new car, like those product videos and like the changing sizes of the display and like the amorphous non-car that they show in the demo, which is like, I'm like, oh, I'm just so tired of my 20, whatever, 2019 or 2020 Subaru, like I want a cool, different car, but actually it's funny because I'm glad this came up because unrelated to the CES announcement related to Android Auto, I've been having a hell of a time with Android Auto in my car because it just doesn't work, like the A, wireless doesn't work, I've been buying cable after cable to try it because I thought that Jason, remember when we discovered that like some USB-C cables work better than others and things like that, right? So it's been going on months now, I've not been able to use Android Auto in my car. I brought it in for service change and I was like, hey guys, I was like, can you check the USB connectors to see that they're connected? And sure enough, this USB connector's got disconnected inside the- Oh, no way! Oh, well good. So all the USB-C cables I've been buying and trying and stuff like that, they're fine. It's the actual connector in the car was broken. Oh my God, I need to get my car checked out. Now you're flushed with cables. That's not a horrible thing. I've done the same thing for years, just like coiled cables, not coiled cables. And right now, if I plug in my phone, if I just breathe or the car goes over a tiny bump, just connects. So have a forbid I'm traveling somewhere I don't know. Check your connectors because they had actually replaced my radio unit about eight months ago because it was defective and in doing that, I think they didn't connect the USB connectors correctly. And so they're gonna fix it for me under warranty. Well, good to know. But yeah, I mean, it is something to note that in all the vendors they share, they do show like a lot of different kinds of HUD, not just like the regular like landscape, but like kind of these more elongated, like super landscapes, super wide. Yeah, that's like the, I think the Ford ones, I want the Ford model so bad. I want that electric Mustang, it's so cool. But I think the Ford one has without the longer, like widescreen, screen type thing, so yeah. It's pretty nice.  Would you like PBS Kids in your car when you're parked? Well, you can get that on select models as well as crunchy roll for all you anime fans out there. Of course, probably with the proviso that you should be parked or otherwise stopped when being entertained by Android Auto. But not only that, you'll also get the Weather Channel app, Chrome on some cars, I think pole stars and some other models. Again, Chrome being something you probably do when you're stopped and not in motion. Hopefully the car will provide you for doing that. And just kind of like a lot of other things. And Google or Android Auto rather is broadening its reach coming to more manufacturers, to the new Nissans, Fords, Lincoln's and Porsches, oh my. And we've talked about digital IDs and licenses in the past. Well, guess what? We still need digital car keys to go with our digital licenses and then our driving experiences will be all digital all the time except for the actual cars. And digital car keys are actually expanding to Volvo. So there you go, quite a smattering of Android Auto awesomeness from CES other than making us all want to go to dealership and get a cool new car with Android Auto. Which I totally get because I love it but I'm also, my little Subaru's just having a hard time. Kind of stay connected. So maybe a new car, my new car is obviously the whole. Yeah, it's a good solution. Good solution. Android Auto stuff is neat, I don't know. It's funny because when I brought my car in for them to look at the USB connector, they gave me a loaner and it was a brand new Subaru Forester. And so I sure as hell, there was a USB cable in the car so I plugged my phone in and I got an Android Auto and all its beautifulness and I'm like, oh, I missed this. So I gotta fix it. You're like, at least I know it works from here like in this direction, the problem's in the car. All right, so moving on a little non-CES news but one of our favorite topics, it doesn't say CES but it's RCS, how about that? So the Google Messages beta app is actually getting a new feature within RCS according to some new strings that have been discovered by the code sleuth at assemble debug on Twix as we like to call it here on the show. And in that code sleuth thing, they found that support for dual SIMs when using RCS. So there's a switch that would allow users to choose which SIM to use and then messages will denote which carrier they were sent via and also have different colors so you know which SIM you're going off of. And I gotta imagine if you're using dual SIMs, this is awesome news for you.  I just have one carrier, one SIM, one number. So this is like, okay, but somewhere out there I feel like Miriam is super happy about this. I don't know why, I got Miriam, Mateo. Yeah, totally, Miriam's probably very happy about this. Yeah, this is not a world that I have lived in where I have the need for two different SIMs in the same phone. Less of a US thing maybe? It's an international thing. We travel internationally, we do it more, I think, yeah. So yeah, that makes sense. And then, what is this? So this is AI, that's right, that's right. Mr. AI, you're here, Lisa and AI, howl over there. They call me sometimes. Okay, so two pieces of news here we got, hold on, I gotta pull it up here. ChatGPT as a possible assistant replacement. It's looking like that might be more and more possibility, not for Google deciding that ChatGPT will replace the system, but rather it seems like more and more there are possibilities for the Android operating system to allow you to replace an assistant with something like ChatGPT. And Michelle, who is not here today, of course, wrote a few articles for Android authority on this topic. Michelle actually tested a new activity found in the ChatGPT app that when it's enabled it actually summoned the same animation as the one that you see when you summon the in-app voice chat mode on your phone. He couldn't actually get it to complete the activity, but the code did reveal it to be an assistant activity specifically. And then Michelle also wrote another, or he was busy writing about this stuff. The very next day wrote a look that he took into Android 14 QPR2 beta code, spotted the potential ability, and he actually said probably coming Android 15, so this is not meant to happen right now, to open up the voice activation feature to third parties. So until now, this has been exclusively tied, right, to assistant, or if you've got a Samsung phone, for example, you could do this with Bixby, and this could actually mean the ability to summon chatbots like ChatGPT, or one could guess Bard in the future, or Bixby, right? Or, yeah, or Bixby, if you just wanna, who's choosing to put Bixby on their device? That's what I wanna know. Someone is, but yeah, who is that? I just real quickly, I wasn't on last week's show, I apologize again. Is this our first mention of Android 15? Oh, I don't know. I don't know that we specifically said Android 15 by name or number of last week. Yeah, I mean, I think in terms of the drinking game or whatever, like Mark January 9th, Android 15 in play by Michelle. He's not here, but he wrote about it. You're getting ready for Android 15 already. Geez. Yeah, yep, there you go. I mean, this makes a lot of sense to me because we're seeing a lot of overlap between the feature set of why or what we might have used assistant for, you know, voice input, voice commands, that sort of stuff in the past. And then the feature set that we're seeing out of these LLMs like ChatGPT that allow you to use your voice to answer questions, to create things, all these things. They seem like they go really hand in hand in converging and coming together. Although, you know, kind of interesting if Google hits a point where they're like, okay, you can replace assistant with yours. Although I guess it's not very unsurprising. Like that is Android in a nutshell. Apple would be the platform to say, no, you can't replace this with ChatGPT. It can only be the Apple product. So, you know, I guess it makes sense. But I like it. Cool. So who knew that there was news outside of CES? How about that? Who knew? Who knew? But we actually had more non-CES news and we took those news stories to the patron pick of the week. So every week on Monday, we post three stories and let our wonderful, wonderful patrons like Jesse D from New York vote on the three options. And then we pick on Tuesday, the one that was the most votes that will get our substantial conversating and opining this week. And so this week of our three choices, the one y'all wanted least, which I'm kind of surprised, but not surprised was Microsoft Teams finally coming to Android Auto. Probably one of the less sexy Android Auto announcements of the night. Only got 20% of the vote. 36% of the vote went to files by Google. Files by Google, the app, important tab is shutting down, will delete files. That sounds ominous. But what did win is the fact that Google manager just picked, Google password manager, sorry, has become easier to access on your Pixel phone. So some folks on the Pixel 8 are reporting a slicker way to get to the Google password manager. So I mean, Google password manager is generally, I mean, pretty integrated extremely, well, it's already extremely tightly integrated and very deep in the Android system and Chrome as well. You know, it generally is pretty good at being available on context, in context whenever you need a password or creating a new one, but something that's not very easy is random access. If you just want to open Google password manager, it's not easy. You have to go into settings, go to Google, go to Autofill, Autofill with Google, Google password manager, and that's just a lot. And sometimes you kind of want to take a look at Google password manager. But it looks like on Pixel 8, Google is testing out a new UI, whereby if you go into the Google search and start typing password, you're going to get a very handy and very high in the results, shortcut to the Google password manager that will take you directly there without going through 15,000 steps through your settings. And yeah, we'll get to see whether this will pop up on more than Pixel 8. Seems like it might be just like an AB test or something, but there you go. If one of your frustrations with the Google password manager is that it's just dang hard to get to and isn't a standalone app, Google, it looks like it's working on a solution for you. So Pixel 8 people, let us know if you see it. But yeah, that was the patron pick of the week. I will admit there was a small part of me that's hoping that Microsoft Teams on Android Auto Store is getting connected too. Because that's just like a tech bingo card that I never would have thought we would get. It's like Microsoft Teams and Android Auto. It's like, it's the Kevin Bacon game. You're like, can you connect Microsoft Teams to Android Auto? But, ugh, ugh. Well, I have taken, when I worked at Adobe, we used Microsoft Teams and I did take more than a couple calls in my car. And this was during the summer when I still worked there and it was hot and the car had to be off, which was not a good idea, it should have been on. And yeah, it was a nightmare. I eventually ran out of battery or my phone overheated from trying to do Microsoft, like Microsoft Teams call in my car. So this would have been great for me like a year and a half ago. So, eh. Yeah, all right. Well, thank you, Jesse D from New York for being a supporting patron and all the patrons for voting in this week's patron news pick. You can go to patreon.com slash android faithful and every week you get to do that because we need you, our listeners, our loyal listeners to help us do the show. And with that, we have a ton of hardware coming out of CES. And by no means am I jealous that Mr. Michelle is in Vegas, despite my distaste for Vegas. I am jealous that Michelle is there roaming the floor because he got his hands on none other than the ASUS ROG Phone 8 or the ROG Phone 8, as I like to call it. There it is in all of its Republic of Gaming glory. Reported to us briefly that it's thinner and lighter than the previous models. It has an AI wallpaper feature that runs on the device. It lights up ROG on the back, which is pretty cool. It's got semantic search that runs on device as well. And the air triggers still intact, contrary to the rumors, they are still there, thankfully. Michelle's gonna be back on the show next week and we're gonna go in depth with the ASUS ROG Phone 8. So it's a little bit of tease to tune in next week. That's just one of the many things Michelle's gonna be back talking about next week from his adventures at CES. But the ROG Phone 8 is real, it exists. It's real! All you gamers or all you, yeah, there's a, if you're watching our video show, there's a photo of the phone showing that air triggers do still exist and you can turn them on or off in the settings. So I feel like with the ROG Phone 8, they went less gamer and more just phone. Yeah, like it's not as extreme as the past. So maybe they're going a little more towards the middle ground, the mainstream, who knows. Yeah, I wonder, that could possibly be a good direction to go because if you're pigeonholing your phone into the total gamer style, it's not like gamers is a small category of people. There are a ton of them out there. But you stand to open up the market a lot more if you still provide a phone that can do all those things that a gamer is going to want out of a gamer phone. But make it a little less like on the nose, you know? Like, yeah, this is a tough phone that's really crazy and stylish and flashy with all the LEDs. It seems like they toned it back and all they do is open up, I think, the people, the possible market for their phone. It's so funny though because ROG, sorry, I want to say ROG too, because it's just simpler than saying ROG. I know, I know, believe me.   The rest of us are like, yeah, I've been saying that way. It's just so weird because ROG is just an inherently big, flashy, expensive gamer brand, and they have a successful phone line with the Zen phone. I don't, I guess I'm confused about why, why not either kind of build the Zen phone line or maybe they just want to keep Zen phone as like the, it's not even a mid-range phone. It's like the lower, lower high to, you know, like kind of like the high to mid-segment and then ROG. I don't know, it just, it's just interesting to me just because, I mean, we have ROG stuff all over my house. It's big, it's flat, it's LED.  I don't know, I just think it's really interesting where they're taking the brand. I don't disagree, and I think it's a really attractive phone. I just find the ROG branding weird or just, I don't know, I don't know, just. It's weird. No, it's, it is when it has always been weird. So we're going to talk more about it next week though. So I don't know. Sorry, save me it for next week. Yeah, we got a ton more. Jason, what do you, what do you got about TCL? Oh, TCL, yeah. Actually I got a lot of stuff about TCL bringing the heat at the Consumer Electronics show starting with, let's see if I can get it up here on the screen. I happen to also be switching the show right now. We will start with the TCL 50 series. So I'd say two thirds of the three, two of the three stories, which also works out to two thirds of the stories from TCL have to do with next paper. And next paper, no E in next, N-X-T-P-A-P-E-R is a type of display that, and this is not like the first time that it's existed. There have been previous iterations, but essentially what it attempts to do is resemble the reading experience on paper. And we've heard this before with E-ink, but this isn't actually E-ink. It's like a satin finish that goes over the display. It rejects sun glare. It rejects fingerprints. Kind of has like a flat quality to it. And this newer version is actually brighter than previous next paper displays, which is a good thing because the previous ones were dimmer than normal displays. And I'm not certain that this necessarily brings it right up to the brightness of a normal display, but apparently it's closer. So if you're using this outside, that rejection of sun glare is gonna be even better because you'll actually be able to see what's on the display because it's brighter. So that's a good thing. And so the TCL 50 series really leans into the next paper technology. But that is not all because TCL also talked about the next paper 14 Pro, which is a tablet. It's a 14 inch tablet here. And I'll scroll down so you can actually see it. There you go. 14 inch 2.8K display. It actually has two different modes. It has the standard tablet view. So just like a standard tablet mode, full color, everything that you expect. And then it has a black and white reader mode, which kind of slim, it pairs back the experience. So you still have your standard Android layout, but like the icons kind of change. You get more simplified.  So it's really like a mixture of a standard tablet and an e-reader without that slow, refresh, e-ink experience. It sounds really compelling to me. I think that would be a really, really neat thing to have both on a tablet because then you'd have a really large, not solid e-reader without the kind of trade-off of, oh, well, I've got this large, e-ink-like experience, but everything's super slow and it's not really a full, you know, fledged tablet and everything. This seems like the best of both worlds. So those are those items. Any comments on that technology before I get to the third one, which is a lot different? I think it's neat. I don't know if it's like a game changer for me or we're gonna make me pull the trigger, but I like to see any sort of advancement or doing something in tablets to help grow the tablet space, so. I'm a little skeptical just because as someone who still likes e-ink, I have like an e-ink notebook and yeah, the worst part is the refresh, which is noticeable and long, but I also as a dev kind of wonder like whether battery life does get saved by this paper. I mean, presumably they do stuff like turn off animations, like basically making it as e-ink-like without that refresh. So it probably could save some battery life, but I don't know if when the screen's on and white, like lighter colors tend to draw the battery more. So I don't know, I'm just kind of curious. I think it's a great concept. I wouldn't want to compare it directly to an e-ink reader and hope that it had like days of battery life or something, I don't know. Yeah, well, that is true. I would guess that it's not quite the same when it comes to longevity of battery life, especially because it has that alternative mode, which is just like a standard tablet. But if you were to keep it in that next paper, whatever that mode is, whatever you wanna call it, the black and white reader mode, what would the battery life be there? That's a really good question. I think that's important to know, because people will compare the two, whether they like it or not. And finally, a little different, is shifting TCL over to the TVs, which is what a lot of people know TCL for. New TV series, not a series on TV, but actually series of TVs, that includes a 115 inch QD mini LED, the largest TV ever sold in North America, or so nine to five Google says in this article. And the reason that we're even talking about it is because, yes, it runs Google TV. So the largest you've ever seen Google TV on a TV in North America. There you go, 20,000 dimming zones, built-in 6.2.2 built-in speakers, no price yet, although I have to imagine, very expensive, that's all I'm gonna do. Jason, do you remember CES, like, oh God, I wanna say like 10 years ago or so, when it was like, who has the biggest TV, right? When it was like, when they broached the 100 inch, whatever, threshold, and I remember the years I was gonna see it, so it was always finally like, whether it was TCL or Samsung or whoever, who was showing the 109 inch TV, but they were, it was like, oh, you'll never be able to buy this, and now here we can buy 115 inch TV. So what is that, like, what's 115 in feet? Sorry, I can't do the math right now. Like, nine feet, eight feet, diagonal TV. That's 115, that's your developer, divided by 12, that's about 10 feet. I programmed stuff to think for me. Nine and a half feet, around, yeah, around 10 feet. Nine and a half feet, what's this, just a wall in your house, which I am, I am happy, which is great. Build me a TV wall. It's just a wall, an entire wall in your house, of TV and TV. Here's the assignment listeners.  Yeah, on this shot, each of our individual shots and probably the size of a normal big screen TV. No more. There you go, that's TCL, in a nutshell. This next story, when, by the way, our good friend Burke emailed to me today, because I made sure I didn't miss it. Well, thank you, Burke. I know it's skeptical about the eInquerator plus tablet, but I have another combo that Burke and our own Michelle Ramon were very, very excited about. In fact, Michelle tweeted saying, oh my gosh, someone made a device just for me and that is the new Lenovo Thinkbook, which is half a Windows laptop and half an Android tablet. So imagine, I mean, it looks like Microsoft Surface Duo from far away. So it's got this like base, which is the actual laptop, which is called the hybrid station, which is basically the guts and the CPU memory, all the good stuff that a laptop is, the keyboard, everything at the bottom. The screen, there's a detachable screen, which when attached to the hybrid station turns it into a Windows laptop. Now, undock that screen, and it's not just a screen, but it's also an Android tablet. Again, perfect for Michelle. Android tablet, Windows laptop, all in one. It's very interesting. And the screen part is called the hybrid tab. So you've got the hybrid tab and the hybrid station to which the tab docs. It is interesting because what's happening here is that there's actually two OSs. So there's no like file sharing or like kind of shared resources on these two things. They are two separate, wait, but that shows, wait, what's going on there? Oh, I see. This is nonsense, this image, this image shows the keyboard connected to a monitor with the display rotated like a tablet. Okay, sorry, sorry. Popped out, yeah, the display just, yeah. It really threw in off for a loop. Because the two things are separate. Like once you undock the screen, it doesn't share like the Windows, like it doesn't share the storage space or anything. There's no like communication between the storage space of the Android tablet and the Windows laptop. They're two separate things. And Ron was showing a picture where they show the station like connected to a monitor. So it is a Windows machine with a monitor, but then someone using the tablet as an Android tablet on the side. I got very confused. So it's really interesting because yeah, the tablet is running Android.  So, you know, it's not running a whole dang OS, it's running a mobile OS when you're using the tablet separately. So I got really confused by that. And I can't help but think I wouldn't be the only one when you have like a Windows laptop with an Android tablet screen, but I know Michelle was really interested. Here's my question though, when about it. Can I run Microsoft Teams Android app in tablet mode and then switch to Windows and use Microsoft Teams? Oh, that hurts, that hurts. It's just hilariously, yeah, it's probably, oh, why would you do that? Microsoft Teams is like the best punchline in any tech joke, by the way. It's just like, yeah. Why would you do that, Ron? Why would you at all? Why would you not? Lenovo, Lenovo really pushing the boundaries there at CES. We'll talk about pushing the boundaries. We know that Samsung is gearing up for their next unpacked event in a couple of weeks. Jesus, next week? Or it's like a week after, right? Yeah, next week. But we've already heard that there's, you know, the theme for Samsung in 2024 is gonna be AI drink. We'll do whatever you wanna do when it mentioned of AI happening there. But speaking of Microsoft Teams, Samsung and Microsoft at CES show that they've collaborated on some new AI-driven connectivity features on the new Galaxy Book 4, which was actually announced, the device was announced last December. MS Copilot will be able to find, read and summarize text messages from Galaxy smartphones on the laptop and also generate messages to be sent from the laptop through the phone and gives you the ability to use the smartphone as a PC webcam somewhere. Michelle got very excited. But the Galaxy Book 4 is not on sale yet. But when it is, Samsung and Microsoft and Copilot collaborating on the AI stuff, is this a hint of things to come in the upcoming Galaxy rollout and unpacked? We will see, but there it is. You're right, yeah.  It can summarize. It can, you know. What I do think is interesting is that like, it can generate text, you know? Yeah, I know, is this a case of Microsoft wanting to get Copilot in on devices in front of actual users and go to Samsung saying, hey, what can you do for us in Samsung going, eh, here's the Galaxy Book 4.  You cool with that? Or, or. Is that good enough for you? Exactly, or are we gonna see the next Galaxy, the next phone, like all the stuff that unpacked and be tightly driven and Samsung and Microsoft working together on the AI solution? That is obviously the more interesting chess move by Samsung there in terms of what they're doing and how it impacts their relationship with Google, but choosing not to do it themselves, I think is really interesting. I think it's probably 60, 40 in the way of Microsoft going, hey, we wanna do something and Samsung going, okay, here you go. But we'll see in next week, right? So. Yeah, won't have to wait very long. Yeah, I think you might be right. I think this might be a kind of a teaser as far as what we can, you know, what we'll find out about at the event next week. Yeah. Or will they call it Bixby Pilot or? Just Bixby go away. Bixby go away. Bixby's lost the Microsoft Teams. Sorry. Bix, bye, Bixby, bye, Bixby, bye, Bixby, bye, Bixby. Bye, bye, Bixby, bye, bye. And bye, spelled B-A-I. B-B-B-bye, bye. Okay, I'm gonna end with that. Hisense is, boy, that's a brand that I don't spend a whole lot of time thinking about, but they have some new Google TVs and one is very large. Apparently this week, I didn't intend on this, but apparently this week, I've got the very large TV beat. A full mini LED lineup, first of all, so these are not the ridiculously large TVs that Hisense has, three in total, ranging for 55 to 85 inches. And I can, here, let's see here, I didn't pull that up. 144 Hertz refresh, low input lag, really just kind of like designed to be great for gaming. AI, ding, ding, ding, image enhancements, of course, with an onboard AI system on a chip, so onboard processing to enhance the view, the vision that is put out on the glass. And then there is the ULEDX series, and that's a step up. So you get better dimming controls, you get more brightness, 5,000 nits actually, 98 inches at 144 Hertz, but they also have the 110UX, which is a 110 inch ULEDX display, 40,000 dimming zones, 10,000 nits of brightness. That's crazy. So 110 inches, and this is compared to, what was the other one, 115, so they're hanging out, they walk into the same party, and they look at each other and they go, oh, that TV's here. And everyone's like, oh, I thought I was gonna be the tallest TV in this room. So yeah, that's what's happening with Hisense. Oh, Hisense. Oh, Hisense. Thanks for giving me a very awkward, tall person analogy. I'm sure you appreciate that, right? I was only pulling from personal experience. It's real here. All right, well, we've got large TVs. How about some projectors as well, in terms for your CES announcement? So X, Xgimme, Xgimme, X gon' give it to you. Xgimme, Xgimme, we're certainly one of you. Xgimme. Or is it crossgimme? Crossgimme. I don't know. X-G-I-M-I is a company that manufactures and designs high-performance smart productors and laser TVs. Well, they have announced this year that they will be partnering with both Google and Media Tech to bring a new range of Google TV-powered projectors. So it's interesting, because up until now, Xgimme has, sorry, whoever, let me know how you say that. Xgimme, we're gonna go for it, has previously only offered Android TV. So obviously they're kind of bringing up and getting with like the new hotness in regards to TV interfaces from Google. And yeah, they're gonna be bringing a broader range of projects, products rather, including the Xgimme Horizon Max and Aladdin, of course, Media Tech is a good addition to the partnership since their chips are in all kinds of premium devices like the Sony Bravia. So there you go. If you need a projector, a smart projector, and you've kind of wondered whether Google TV could be part of that smart projector, the answer is yes, and that will be coming from Xgimme, Xgimme, the Google TV soon enough. So there you go. All right, Xgimme, Xgimme, Xgimme, whatever you want to call it. Speaking of projectors, I saw nothing to do with Android, but I saw some projectors coming out of CES that were IMAX certified. Whoa. So that you can finally get the IMAX viewing experience at home. Don't tell my husband. Be a projector, yeah. Which is funny, because I don't like IMAX, but I think it's just too much. But I think that was a neat little thing. We saw Batman, I can't believe, the Batman with Keith Ledger, sorry, Batman. The Dark Knight Returns. The Dark Knight Returns in IMAX, and it just felt like this the whole time. I always walk out my neck hurts. Yeah, it's just staring up there. Like I can't, yeah, my eyeballs are not big enough for this. Exactly. Set the back row. Yeah, high up. But then you're high up, and I don't see you, anyway. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right, so there was a couple, as Jason mentioned earlier, there was some hardware stuff that had nothing to do with CES, which always makes me laugh, because it's like, guys, don't you know what's going on in Vegas? But Qualcomm had some Snapdragon XR2 plus Gen 2 news to make. So in collaboration with Google and Samsung, basically the results are the Snapdragon XR2 plus Gen 2. And this processor will be targeting extended reality devices, like the upcoming MetaQuest devices, a 15% increase in GPU frequency and a 20% increase in CPU frequency. And it has support for 4.3K resolution per eye. That can give you 8.6K resolution if you've got two eyes. And this is confirmation that Samsung is working on an XR device. As, you know, if we're mentioned Meta is fully into XR, if Qualcomm's in collaboration with Google and Samsung, is Google working, you know, we know Google's working on XR devices, this is possibly gonna be interesting. And Snapdragon, Qualcomm will continue to power the next gen of these devices. We'll be curious to see what comes out of them. So, pretty neat. 4.3K per eye at 90 frames per second. That's insane. Good Lord. Okay, I haven't, have I seen? Oh yeah I did, I got a very brief look through the MetaQuest 3 kind of experience with the pass through AR thing. This is pretty neat, I gotta say. So I'm curious to see what this leads to. I mean, this is happening this week, the week of Apple's big, you know, Apple Vision announcement. We were at, my family and I went to Tahoe for the weekend and yesterday we were driving home, we stopped to get some pizza on the drive home and they had a game on and one of the ads was the Apple Vision thing and my daughters saw that and you know, I ended up telling them the price tag and their eyes fell out of their head. But they were like, I bet you Apple can do VR really well. I think a lot of people probably wonder that as well. So it'll be interesting to see how news like this, like it's one thing to see this and be like, oh yeah, VR, okay, AR, that was the thing five years ago that we all thought we were gonna be mad over and you know, kind of petered out. Are we at the beginning of it actually? Like of a new phase of it? I think we might, we are at the beginning of a new phase. A friend of mine got those Ray-Bans. People have been really pro, yeah. I kinda want them, I kind of am interested in them. So time will tell, we will see. I mean, AI assistant buttons came back, so why not XOR headsets? Yeah, I mean it's a bit, I pretty much prefer an XOR headset over a Bixby button. Sorry, Bixby. Everything that's old is new again, let's have a go. It's a circle of life. Circle of life. And finally in the last bit of non-CES hardware news, we've got Periscope cameras, because apparently I'm on the Periscope beat now. Meanwhile, I'm the one that gave the stories to everybody, so I put myself on the Periscope beat. The Oppo Find X7 Ultra, the company's latest flagship, sporting not one, but two Periscope lenses, for those of you who like the Periscope. One is a 3X optical zoom with the biggest telephoto sensor in any smartphone. I'm putting that in quotes, just so you know that I did not claim this, they did. The other is a 6X optical zoom with a pretty large sensor as well. Also has two other cameras on board, 50 megapixel main, 50 megapixel ultra-wide. So you've got that big kind of like circular camera, I don't know, island bump, whatever you wanna call it down there. But two Periscopes inside, and then I mean, aside from that, the phone is a pretty high-end, top tier specs, Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 processor, 6.82 inch screen, 1440p resolution, 120Hz refresh, all the big things, HDR content gives you peak brightness of 4,500 nits, so that's pretty bright. The thing is though, you're not gonna be able to get this because it's China only, so I'm sorry to tell you this, but you know, sometimes these are a sign of what's to come to other markets and hey, I like my Periscope, so I'm all for it. Are we gonna keep it tally, Jason, of how many Periscope cameras meet your New Year's predictions by the end of the year, so if you, I don't know, if your prediction came through like 24. Four, 20, 25 is gonna be the year of four Periscope cameras in a single phone. Every camera on the phone is gonna have Periscope running through it somehow. I don't know. I don't know that that's really gonna be my prediction, but that would be a fun one. Fun one to lose. There we go, I'm done. Too funny, too funny indeed. All right, well that's all the hardware for this week, CES and non-CES, it's been a packed week for sure, and we're gonna be back next week with even more CES stuff as Michelle gets back in front of the whatever phone he's using as his webcam this week, and we'll talk more about what he saw, who he saw, what he saw, where he saw it, how he saw it at CES, so you're gonna wanna tune into next week's show for sure to get that, but in the meantime, we love to hear from you, our good friends, listeners and viewers, you can always email us, email into us at contact.androidfaithful.com, we love to hear from you and we love to read your emails and feedback on the show, so Win, I think you've got the first one, why don't you share it with us? Yes, and the first one is from Ian Bailey from Salt Lake City, Utah. I've been a long time fan and just was so excited to learn that you were back under a different name. So I've been going through some back episodes and you were talking about podcast apps. I just wanted to send in some love for the podcast addict app. I've been using it since I got my first cell phone, the late, great Nexus 4 over a decade ago. It's been a great podcast app. I paid for it once and the developer has been continuously updating it this whole time. It's been amazing with tons of customization and options, which is exactly why I went with Android all those years ago. I have tried Pocket Cast and it has a nice interface, but Pocket, sorry, podcast addict works great and I love it. I just wanted to share my fondness for the app as I haven't heard you mention on the show. Keep up the great work. Thanks Ian Bailey from Salt Lake City, Utah. So I liked this one because I use Pocket Cast. We've been talking about Pocket Cast for years, friends of the show, Pocket Cast, all stuff like that.  And I have heard of Podcast Attic before in the past and it's one of those apps that have been around for a while. You know, they claim that they're the number one Android podcast app with over 10 million downloads, but they've got a lot of, it looks like they've got a lot of really, really good features available in it. So if you're looking for a podcast app, maybe check this one out, so. Yeah. And in fact, Marcello in our live audience says he does like the Podcast Attic app. It's the one that he uses on all his devices. So, thank you Marcello. You're welcome to try. Yeah, very cool. All right, I've got our next and last email, which comes in from John from Cincinnati, who says, what's the deal? What's the issue with not being able to share files? The cloud has been around for at least eight years. If you want to share a file, you can do it through OneDrive, iCloud, Google Drive, and so on. And Amazon Photos is another way. I'm not sure why everyone was flabbergasted on how to get files over to other people. Please make this make sense. Love the show, John from Cincinnati. And I believe John is referring to the freak out we had at the end of 2023 with Flow about Nearby Share, where when you and Flow were freaking out about Nearby Share. And I think it's a very valid question as someone who hasn't freaked out, or what is it called now? They changed the name, what is it? It's Quick Share. Oh, Quick Share, yeah. Now that's become Quick Share. So when in your experience using Quick Share, formerly known as Nearby Share, you were in Japan. I was in Japan. You were sharing files with your husband. Why is that different or better than just uploading it to Google Drive and sharing that link that way? I mean, we could have done that, but I think part of it was we were just in the woods, not in the woods, we were in the, we were in the kind of like a nice rural, I can't say the word, rural, rural, rural area of Japan. And I mean, You didn't have a data connection, right? We had like pocket Wi-Fi, pocket Wi-Fis, which were very common in Japan, but it still relies on 4G or 5G. And we were somewhere where you had neither. And we wanted to just share a photo and it was kind of an immediate thing. So, and Nearby Share just worked. And we did that for like links and all kinds of stuff. It just worked when you don't have a connection and you're literally like passing it to my, like passing it to the person next to you. And I mean, honestly with Google Photos, I would have had to upload it, share it to my husband. He would have had to go open Google Photos, wait for it to sync, download it to his phone. In the, I mean, in the use case that we need that we had it for where he wanted the photo right away, it worked. Well, and if you're not just talking about a photo, right? Like to say you're talking about a small video file. That could be a couple of 100 bags, which doesn't sound like a lot, but depending on the internet connection that you have, that could take a long time to upload and then to download just to get it on another device versus just saying, here, send this for me to you. That's a single transfer and it's also a direct transfer. So it's probably going to be faster depending on your internet connectivity. So there's a lot of reasons why it makes sense. Yeah. And Nearby Share is more than just files. You can share all kinds of stuff like we did with links and texts and all kinds of stuff. So it's a subtle difference. So John from Cincinnati is correct. You can share files in many different ways.  But the Nearby Share or Quick Share, just to summarize, the ability to connect device to device is the differentiator there, which I have yet to try because I have nobody to share with. Oh, oh, maybe that's what they need. They need to broaden out Quick Share to be a peer-to-peer sharing thing. What I need to do is I have my Pixel Tablet. My Pixel Tablet is right here. I've got this phone. I've got 90, I've got like piles of phones all over. I just need to start sharing PDFs around just to experience it. Just to do it. Just to do it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I really do, I do need to go over with you guys. I've got a stack. I've been going through my basement and I've got a stack of phones. Like we should do a patron bonus or we should do something like that. I mean, I found my next bit, Rob and Jason. I found all my old Nexus 4s. I found the Motorola modular one with all the modules. Oh cool. So I literally like, I'm going to start organizing all my devices and keep them organized and all that sort of stuff. But so that's a tease for later on, maybe on the show or a patron bonus or something like that. If you guys want to see that, if you want to see a history of our devices, Jason, I'm sure you've got boxes of them, right? Yeah, I've got some devices. I'm redoing my office and I actually found the sooner that I bought that it's not my sooner. I just bought a sooner. Like the OG, OG, like, you know, development only phone.   There's that old Motorola with the Pogo Pings on the back and here's the camera attachment, right? Oh my God. Look at that. I remember those. Excellent. I have them all. I don't know what to do. I don't know what to do with them. My wife is like, do you need these? I was like, yes. No. Maybe. Maybe. My next bit, Robin, the best thing is booting them up. Like it's so funny. It's like, it's like, talk about like a fly. Time capsules. A fly trapped in amber, right? Like it's totally like that moment in time. Yeah, they are time capsules. If they even boot up, like I have, I have really old phones that like, I can't even get them to load up anymore. Well, it's funny. And like, I probably, at some time, at some point in time knew why they couldn't and meant to fix it. And now it's so far removed. I'm like, I don't even know what the problem is anymore. Like, I guess I just got to let it go. Well, the one thing to get, let it go. Sorry, I just said Disney. The one thing that gets me is that there was a photo at a party in 2010 that I took with my wife and one of our favorite musicians before me and my wife were together. I was actually DJing a party in New York City and one of my favorite musicians showed up. It was just like a random happens that he didn't come to our party but would frequent that bar. And there's a picture of the three of us and I don't know where that picture is. And I know, I know the composition of it. And so it's, I'm like, it must be on one of these phones. And so I'm like, frantically plugging them in. We're like, is this one? Cause it's like pre Google, pre Google photos. So like, I'm on like a lifelong hunt to try to find this photo. Oh man, I know that far too well. So been there. Tragic. Cool. Well, that will wrap it up. Thanks for everyone emailing us. You can email us at contact.androidfaithful.com. We love to hear from you as well. Big thanks again to Sandeep. I don't want to, you guys said it. Shavukla. Shavukla, there you go. Thank you Sandeep so much from Google for joining us. And thanks to everybody at Google for making that happen. We hope everybody enjoyed that interview. And if you did, please tell your friends. Tell them to go watch it and check it out. But thanks again, Sandeep. Jason, why don't you tell the folks where they can find all the cool stuff you're working on cause I know you're cooking. You're cooking with gas these days, aren't you? Cooking with gas. Yeah, I'm trying to kind of like push my foot down a little bit harder on the gas pedal. So yeah, I have some announcements actually coming up probably next week. So if you go to freejasonnewsletter.com that is free as in you don't have to pay for it. Not free as in I'm trapped. Let me out. Although both, you know, either way, if you type it, it's the same. Then you can subscribe to my newsletter, which will allow you to kind of follow along with my journey as I create a career right in front of your very eyes. Oh, you don't create a career. You expand a career in front of our very eyes, Jason. Well, career is very established, sir. I suppose you're right. Create a new job. I don't know what I'm creating. I'm creating something though, Ron. You can't argue with that. That's good. So yeah, so I've got an announcement that I'll be kind of unveiling next week and I think you're going to like it. So look for that freejasonnewsletter.com, patreon.com slash Jason Howell, if you really want to support me in a financial sense. And yeah, thank you. I love doing the show with you all. It's great to be back. Awesome. All right, Wynne, where can folks find you? You can find me on my website randomlytyping.com. I am an Android Dev and I just started a new contract position this week. So I am now Android developing again. That's been fun. I'm very, very busy. Sorry, I didn't mean to gig Android things. But yeah, normally I do talk about my Android development stuff and you can find all my talks and associated code and video on my website. And if you want to find me on the interwebs, I am at Queen Code Monkey. I technically am on twerks, but really, if you want to find me doing anything vaguely active, find me on Instagram. And sometimes at Queen Code Monkey, at Mastinon, that's social. So long. So long. And of course, you can find me over anywhere on the internet. I might go through it all, but at Ron XO and all the various social networks and things like that. Go follow me. It's a good time. What a good time this show has been. I love doing the show with you guys. I missed it. This is awesome. My first show of 2024. Very excited to be doing it. Reminder that you can subscribe to the show. You go to androidfaithful.com, where you can find all the links and everything, all the various platforms and things like that to subscribe to it. And of course, support us over at patreon.com slash androidfaithful. We appreciate your support. Everybody who's chipped in, you guys are the best. We love you so much. This podcast publishes every Tuesday evening. And as mentioned, you can subscribe over at androidfaithful.com. Email us at contact at androidfaithful.com. And excited for next week. Michelle will be back. We'll be talking more CES stuff. But until then, it's just a fun party time here at Android Faithful, because we are the Android Faithful. Super faithful to Android and lots of other things. But mainly Android. That's why we didn't call it Faithful to everything.


This is the animation minute as always it's our jobs this time It's a senior position for a contract animation gig Mercury Flugmerks is herring as well to the animators and many other positions Harvey put up a really cool clip about the new features from Maya 2022 Speaking of features, there's also a create the art option back and forth between Maya and VR I'm going to try that out. Could be super cool. Rape host here for job interviews do's and don'ts Super hot presents loot river. That looks super cool. Love those effects. It's pixel art and some interesting cool Tetris style Back and forth. I know that's really cool. I'm going to check this out Speaking of pixel art look at that That is awesome. I love it This is really cool too. I love that. It's just the rig only as it says here But it already is super expressive Tentacle stuff is really difficult to do. I love that. That's really cool Another reel for the Mandalorian this time by image engine, which is really fantastic work for the show Speaking of Star Wars, look at those. These are cool. This is for Star Wars Rogue one concept work You always get comments that steampunk is over, but I can never get enough of steampunk. Look at this I love this. I love that combination anything steampunk. I love it More awesome artwork. Look at that That's so cool. Love those car designs. The colors are great This is so cool. So my jam Dave's in this posting here more art style work here. This is for a french book series Also looking super cool. Love this That's just really really cool Watch this whole thing. This is just This cracks me up every time I see it how this character transforms more and more I love how the eyes are pushing things. Anyway, go watch your whole thing. It's really neat Now the awesome stop motion clip, but I love this. I love to see what they use This is the behind the scenes of the toy the setup and the frame by framework Make sure to check out the whole short and the behind the scenes. I love lego. I love star trick. Look at that That is clean and awesome official version. Please The agorantuin for our animation challenge was really really cool Or there's more stuff coming about that, but here is a cool behind the scenes It's a time lapse to show What it took in terms of cooperation the setup the animation reference. It's really cool. Make sure to check it out Last but not least a really cool 2d piece and it's for a commercial. It's a beer commercial I believe it's really really cool a ton of work, but I'll leave you with that It's fantastic. Make sure to watch the whole thing. This is different animation minutes every monday at 10 am on my channel Thank you for watching