Welcome to Android Faithful, your weekly source for the latest news, hardware and apps for the wide, sometimes weird, but always wonderful world of Android. I'm Huyen Duet now. I'm Ron Richards. How are you doing, Huyen? Good to see you. Good to see you. It's been a good week. Here we are. Episode number six. We're very excited and you all can't see it, but we can see it behind the scenes and maybe he'll do it again because he's dancing to the music. No, he won't.  We get the benefit of the Dowd or really very lucky because we have the benefit of the Dowd today in Adam Dowd. Yay, hello. Thank you for having me on. Very awesome. Adam is a friend of the show, but Adam, for those of us who are new fam in the Android Faithful, please tell people about yourself and what to do. Well, I'm a freelance tech reviewer. I am an editor. I edit over at Slash Gear and a review for both Slash Gear and Forbes, mostly mobile, but I do some fun computer stuff and consumer electronics and stuff like that. So if you want to read my words, you can find them at SlashGear.com and Forbes.com. But if you want to see this beautiful face, you can find that at YouTube.com slash benefit of the Dowd. Excellent. Well, you were a frequent guest on our previous show and we're glad to have you back in the mix here on Android Faithful, definitely for sure, and stuff. And in celebration of your new show, I wanted to raise a glass for you. Not only are you raising a glass, but you're raising, is that a Robin by Nexbit glass? That is a Robin by Nexbit glass. I didn't even know that existed. Wow. That is circa CES 2016. Wow. I stole two of these and one of them actually just broke last week. So this is the last one and I'm using it to toast you. Thank you for resting. Thank you. I don't have a Nexbit glass, but I got my Indiana Jones glass, so I will cheers. I'm lame. I just have my big old yeti thing of water. I should have gotten a drink. I should have, especially for Adam, I'm so happy, Adam, because last time you were your last friend in the old show, I missed it and I was, that was actually legit. One of the things I was said is like, oh, I'm not going to get to hang out with Adam and stuff anymore. Never mind. We have an issue. That was really the excuse. We just made a new show so that we can hang out with you, Adam. Exactly.  The threads thing. So, and the show is also up on threads. And in fact, you can go to androidfaithful.com where you can find all our links to social and all the links to subscribe to the show and everything there. And please head over to patreon.com slash androidfaithful support the show. We love our patrons. They are so awesome and they get to help us pick stuff to talk about on the show, which is awesome. So thank you everybody on the patron side of things. It's good to have you back for sure. And it's a good time to mention also, if you tune in at 8 o'clock Eastern, 5 p.m. Pacific, you can watch this show record live. We are currently live or recording live. Audio listeners, what you're listening to is what happens live. We do very little editing, just so you know. But during the show, everybody on Twitter and on YouTube, you can help us pick a title on the show. If you go to af.showbot.tv and there you can enter in your suggestions for the title of the show. We love the live people who are participating over on twitch.tv slash good day internet and youtube.com slash daily tech news show. We love our DTNS fam. Thank you everybody for that. So more titles coming on the live show. The only way you can do it is by watching live. So that's how you want to do it. Awesome. Yeah, I suggest a combination of the first and third one and just call it Dowd AF. Good idea, good idea. Do that. All right, so we still don't have any sort of bumpers or anything like that, which is on the list of things to do, but we'll get there at some point. But that said, let's get into the news. And first up, we were talking before the show, before the show went live about how we're in a very heavy Samsung cycle. And we're gonna get to that in a little bit thanks to you Adam. But Pixel 8 is on the horizon and the leaks, they are a leaking. And sure enough, the most recently cast to do with Pixel 8 Pro, a video leaked out on X or whatever it is that's called now revealing not only a lovely new blue color that we haven't seen the Pixel in, but a new feature called Audio Magic Eraser. And if you are familiar with, and here I have the video that in question, if you are familiar with the concept of Magic Eraser, you know, that was the Google Photos feature that allows you to remove people from the background and things like that. And Audio Magic Eraser, it's probably what it suggests, which lets you take out audio from your videos and identify sounds and pull them out and take out any noise. So is this the next evolution of the Magic Eraser world? Or Adam, what did you think when you saw this? Oh, I hope so. As a podcaster, oh my God, that's amazing. I mean, also I should say as a podcaster, I think we're all pretty familiar with, just noise reduction and noise reduction algorithms that you can run to get rid of that pesky fan in the background. But I mean, I'm gonna be interested to see how well this works with sudden noises. Noise reduction is great with like, but like with dog barking or something like that, I would love to hear how that's gonna go. Because I mean, if they can do that, then oh yeah, that's gonna be awesome. Yeah, and this is yet another extension of Google's AI and what Google's AI can do. And it is funny because like that idea of the dog bark or like the burst of sound, you know, like we you, I don't know if it's AI, but we use tools on this show, like when we export it, we level, there's a great tool called Levelator that I think is the podcasters best friend, right? That uses technology to make our audio all sound of the same level. But if some, like you said, if somebody's got a fan going or if there's some sort of line noise and there's nothing we can do about it. I guess my interesting thought about this is that it's all phone-based and the media's gotta be on your phone in order for it to work. Like, you know, how will it help filmmakers or podcasters or things like that? When if it's just, you know, kind of cell phone footage or stuff like that, when we actually have actually media that you'd wanna use this tool for, it'd be nice to see it kind of extended out to the web or something. But I know it's one of those pixel kind of, like, fun things that you get for having a pixel. I don't know. What do you think of it? I like it a lot. I would like to see Ridley Scott. I know I keep talking about Ridley Scott, but I think he did a movie for Samsung. But it would be fun to see, like, eventually the eventual pixel-made movie. I don't know. I'm sure Google has enough money to make that happen.   And I don't know. I just like anything that kind of empowers people either doing video for themselves for their kids or for trying to, you know, be the next thing on YouTube for better for worse. So I like it. I kind of wonder if they will eventually, maybe, I don't know, not anytime soon, but if Google will eventually, you know, open up the magic erasers to everybody because they kind of started doing that with the visual one. But maybe for right now, while it's still kind of new experimental and also kind of like, you know, the new hatness, it'll just be exclusive. And I want to know what the blue colorway color is because I think last week. I was going to go back to it. I was going to go back to it. I want to know what that color name is. All right. We don't know what it is as of yet. We just know that it's a blue colorway. Cause we had licorice, something in haze last week. I feel like it's going to be something sky or like or dreams or I don't know. So I believe that particular color on the iPhone was called Pacifica, which was the, which was the less good blue, by the way. Apple, if you're, if you're watching, cause you know, Apple definitely watches this show. Oh, for sure. Yeah, they're right on top of it, right? So all right. Well, yeah, we'll see. I mean, it's another one of those things that will make you, that Google hopes you'll want to buy their pixel because you can fix the audio on it. Cool. What else is going on? Not so much pixel, but in the realm of Android. Yes. We are getting close here. We are on Android 14, Betify rolling out. And this is the third and final, you know, platform, you know, there's a certain final stop on the platform stability train and on the OS release timeline. So I think our, I think episode number one, Ron took an over under on whether it was gonna, whether Android 14 released before or after Labor Day. And given that, that we're getting Android 14, Betify on today, August 15th. I don't know, Ron, you feeling pretty good about those odds? Like. I am. I mean, I said after Labor Day, right? You said before. Before Labor Day. Before Labor Day. And we said before. Oh yeah, right now. Right now I don't feel good about that because Labor Day is not far off. It's like two weeks away. And so like, we need to go back and see what the, what's your model, what the gap between the last beta and the release was, but with no event on the horizon or anything like that, I'm actually not feeling good about before Labor Day. So. Well, it'll be soon either way. And so if you are currently on a pixel from four, eight, five G all the way up to, you know, whatever the sevens. And if you have a pixel fold or a pixel tablet, you will get your pixel 14, beta five. If you're in the program, I got mine already. And basically nothing too surprising, fixes, fixes, fixes, fixes, including some specific to the pixel fold and the pixel tablet. Android central noted a particular fix that Google has been working on and that is the kind of persistent issue with wifi scanning causing too much power consumption. They're still working on it. Maybe it's fixed now. But anyway, if you're on any of these devices and in particular, if you're on the beta program, look out for that and we'll see very soon, the final countdown to Android 14. That is not the tune of that song that I was referencing. There you go. Thank you. Adam got me. Adam got back. How many betas did Android 13 go through? Did they go to five? I'm trying to find a timeline here. I got nothing. I don't run betas because as a reviewer, I can't really do that. I need to experience it as the masses will. So I never do betas. I also don't really care.  I know I'm a bad Android user because I never do betas. I never root phones. And I don't do any of that. Okay, so last year, Android 13 launched on, literally launched one year ago today on August 15th, 2022. Hey, help me with that. Android 13 launched, right? So Android 13 beta four launched on July 13th, 2022. And then August 15th, they launched the stable launch almost a month later. So if you go by that, so Android 13 did not have a beta five where Android 14 does have a beta five. And with the, and here I have the schedule I can throw it up here so you guys can see it one second. This is what happens when I'm driving the bus and it's challenging. Where's Burke when I need him? There we go. All right, cool. So we can see there is the schedule thanks to our friends at Android Authority. So there you can see the whole history between February and August. So it looks like there was a month between the last beta and the stable launch. So going by this, it looks as if Android 14 will launch mid September. What do we think about that? That seems about right. I mean, why not? It's not like anything else is going to be launching in mid September. Right. Says a man who might know things. September and October right around the corner. And don't get me wrong, it's great from a freelancer perspective because I'm going to be super busy. Sure. But yeah, it's a lot. Yep. All right. So yeah, so we'll just, we'll wait and see, but we'll see if we can hold another month for it. So cool. Well, that's the majority of the news, but, and you know what, excuse me, I was eating almonds before the show and now they stick to the back of your throat and it's not a good thing for a podcaster.  It's very important. I did get my protein. Yeah. But it is that time of the week where our patrons over at patreon.com slash android faithful get to help us pick a story to talk about. And sure enough, it was a close one this week. We gave three options for you all to pick from. A YouTuber flipped the Samsung Galaxy flip five for a week straight to get at the break. That only got 11% of the vote. Waze was having problems on Android Auto, that got 42% of the vote. But the winner, drumroll please, was the fact that it was revealed that Google is working on the ability to cast media to your tablet from your phone simply by standing in front of it or near it. Dun, dun, dun, dun. I got a bit, I'm shocked that this is the one that won because I thought, I was like, this is so what? I mean, it is neat. It is very, very cool that you can utilize the ultra wide band chip to cast from a phone directly to the tablet device, which is neat. And it says here, we're on Chrome on box.com. They do say here, it says, it sounds like science fiction. And it really kind of does. It's no different than nearby share swiping files from one or another or something like that. It's just the idea of media. But, and here, Chrome on box, I love when they do this. They embedded our good friend, Michelle Ramon, who can't make it this week on the show, who shared it on X with a thanks to at assemble debug for the tip. But it shows here how you are able to cast directly to your tablet for your phone. This is neat, but as an owner of a pixel tablet and of a pixel phone, I can't think of any scenario where I'm on my phone and I want to swipe it to the tablet itself. Now, give me this functionality to my TV and then you've got science fiction. Then you've got like, if I just go from the phone and go like that and it goes, that's pretty cool. So maybe this is the beginning of it, but... I have a theory as to why this story went out. And it goes back to webOS. Do you remember the days of webOS? Of course. Where you could share like web pages from your Palm Free to your HP tablet? Yep. I'm guessing people are feeling that vibe and they're like, oh, we got to bring this. Cause it's like the last thing that an operating system hasn't stolen from webOS yet. So I'm here for it. I'm disappointed that it's only for the pixel tablet. I would love to see this for like, you said TVs and I wouldn't even like it to be even more intuitive like that. Like you're watching media and you just walk up to your TV and it just says, boom, here we go. You know, it's exactly like that. Although then I worry that I don't know if y'all have experienced this, but for the last month and a half or so, every time I ask my Google Assistant devices to do literally anything, I get a notification on three different phones asking, was that the right device? Was it really? Did we do it right? Please tell me thank you. And like, I would just be really afraid of a feature like this. You walk past your TV and all of a sudden it's like, we're gonna put on the TV now. Was that right? No, it wasn't right. I'm just walking. Well, I mean, the scenario that you all remind me of and this is way, so this is pre-Android, pre-IOS, pre-smartphone era. I was at a job where I was doing kind of like marketing innovation technology stuff. And I got invited out to Redmond to go to visit Microsoft where they had built the home of the future. Okay. And it was like early smart home stuff. And one aspect of it was that if you wore a little pin, kind of like a Star Trek communicator and you were watching TV in the living room and then you got up and walked to the kitchen, what you were watching would follow you and would move from the screen in the living room to the screen in the kitchen and like that whole idea. Now it was prototype. It was all, it was all smoke and mirrors. It didn't actually work, but it was like conceptual. But when you think about it, our phones are our little Star Trek communicator pins, right? And so like, and if you are saying I'm actively watching something, hypothetically there's no reason why it can't follow you to all your screens and I go from the living room with TV to the kitchen with my pixel tablet on the dock. Can the location services be so specific to pinpoint what room you're in and which device to go in?  Well that, and I'm sure, and I'm sure when you can speak to this, but like what happens if you're walking into the living room and your wife is already there watching a TV show? Do you override her? Or like there's so many like teeny tiny decisions that have to be made like when you're programming something like that. And I'm not even a developer, I'm sure. No, yeah. That's a really great point. So I think it's interesting within, I think the discovery of this, it's called MediaTap to transfer. So the fact that it's MediaTap, what's the tap? And I kind of want it to be a weird dress gesture because like especially like using like like that kind of like a fling thing, right? Like is that on a sci-fi show where someone flings a device and then the media kind of almost flies? Yeah, well that goes back to on our old show, I used to talk a lot about the expanse. The expanse kind of had that way, they had those little see-through terminals and they would fling the phone and it would go up there or they would flick it and like that sort of thing. So I mean, but I think that's what would be handy and I think that's what's kind of getting me is like, how do you confirm? You know what I'm saying?  These are things for my actual life. But I do think it's going to be interesting how the user experience like end-to-end works. And as you said, Adam, how to kind of smooth that out. But yeah, if needy to tap is something kind of like with the phone, I think they'd be really cool. But I'd be happy with just like an NFC thing. Like you just walk up to like, just have like a little thing on the TV where they don't tap here or something like that. You just go boop and zoom. Well, and then you got to wonder how long it takes for either a California proposition or EU to shut it down and not have like, you need some sort of consent or you need some sort of like modal or like, how can we, I don't want to be Debbie Downer on it. But this is neat. This is very cool. This is very sci-fi. This is very of the future. And using that ultra-wideband channel like on the phone and the tablet that shows the, like what the Google ecosystem can do. So, yeah. It'll be pretty cool. I can't wait for six years from now when Apple invents it. True. Fantastic. All right, cool. Well, that's going to wrap up the news, right? And let's get into hardware. Yes. That's a done. So it is Samsung. It is the season of Samsung since, you know, we're just a little bit of, we're not quite a month away from unpacked. And we've had many kinds of folks kind of like talk about what their feelings and thoughts on the flippable revolution is from Samsung. And as Adam mentioned, he does the factory right for Forbes and he wrote two reviews. Well, not just two. I mean, he's written probably many reviews, but he's written very specifically on the two Fs that we're going to talk about today, the fold and the flip. Adam, how do you feel about, let's start with the fold. How was the fold for you? The fold is the most boring device that was announced at Samsung Unpacked because, so there's two ways to look at it. And there's a way I originally looked at it. And then there's a way that another reviewer looked at it that I read and I'm just like, yeah, that's a good point. I'm going to go with their interpretation because it's a lot more positive. This, the fold is the the evolved design that Samsung has been moving towards for the last four years, which is to say that they have a new and improved hinge with more shock resistance and it now folds flat, which is kind of the headline.  There's no more gap. Do we want to bring up a... I was just going to say, I don't want to interrupt the Adam, but we want to welcome. We do have another guest that's a company, Adam. We have Skippy the Review Cam. So our video watchers watching the live stream or people watching the video after the fact, Adam has been kind enough to set up a review camera so that you can see hands on with the fold and the flip. So now, if you looked at this on a table, you'd just be like, is that the three? Is that the four? Is that the five? I honestly have no idea because it looks very similar. It's got the same aspect ratio. On the inside, it's got the same aspect ratio. The main difference is here in that this folds flat. In fact, I'll even go ahead and take off the laughably $100 case at Samsung. That Samsung is going to sell with this. Yeah, I said laughably. Does that come with the S Pen? Is the S Pen in that price? Yes. Oh, thank goodness. Okay, okay. Now it is a much better S Pen case than the one from last year because last year's looked like a CSI technician's case that had the S Pen in it. So okay, so you can see it folds flat, which is Primo and kind of Samsung had to do that. There was really no excuses anymore. Like I guess they could have leaned into it and said, well, we've always had a gap.  Anyway, so the front screen is still too small in my humble opinion. It's kind of hard to type on this thing. Anyway, it's a little bit too small. But when you open it up, you get a nice palatial canvas that you can play with and you can do multitasking. As soon as I remember how to do the multitasking, that's not how to do it. Yeah, you can do like the split screen and you can open up, I don't know, photos. Sure, why not? And then you can even do a pop-up window above that if you want to. I mean, you could just multitask this thing to death if you want. So, and you know, it's got the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 Force Galaxy processor in it, which is basically the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 with a little bit of overclocking. And so like this thing could do just about anything you want to. You want to play Call of Duty, you can play Call of Duty. You want to play Genshin Impact on the maximum settings, you can absolutely do that. I would do that except it takes, you know, can we pull up some Genshin Impact? Why not? Well, I'll chat while we let this slow. Yeah. But anyway, so like the two major things that happened with this phone were the folding flat and the hinge, which is designed to be more impact resistant. Yeah, confirm, whatever. And oh, it wants me to update. Nevermind, we're not playing Genshin. So, yeah, go ahead.  No, I mean, the really cool part is this extra $100 case, which I mean, it shouldn't cost $100, but it does have the S Pen built into there. It is a very nice sleek S Pen. So, and it is specifically designed for the fold. If you try to use a different S Pen on here, pop up window comes up and says, don't do that.  So, the one thing that I kind of, like, it's okay. I've got this home screen mirroring thing turned on. So, like, right now I've got my home screen here and if I open it up, it shows that home screen plus your second screen. I never have a second screen. The only reason these widgets are here are so that I can have something over here when I open up the phone. So, like, that's kind of cool. The Google Pixel fold does basically the same thing. The other option is you can turn off screen mirroring and then you get a whole different home screen interface which is actually, I think, the way that most people would prefer to do it just because when you open up your phone, now you can have, like, a calendar widget and a weather widget and, like, all these things that normally take up a bunch of room. You can have that on the inside but not take up a bunch of room on the outside. So I think that's the way that most people would do it. I don't go that way because I have a very specific way that I like to have my apps and folders and I didn't want to have to replicate that on the second screen but in a more spread out fashion. But, like, Samsung has done some really cool software things here. There's one thing that you can do. Let's see if, I'm trying to figure out a way that I can do this quickly. Let me just, okay, that's, yeah, that's fine. So, like, you can grab, let me open up a web browser here. Hi, Timu, that's nice to see you there. I'm looking for something with a photo. There we go. So, like, if I wanted to grab this banner for some reason and, like, drag it down, I can then open it up a different thing and then I can drag it, like, into that thing. So I think if I open up, like, a Google Doc, then I can let that go and there it is. I kind of like that. That's pretty cool. And, like, that is a very smart use of this expansive canvas here. The other thing, what was the other thing? I had another thing I was gonna show you and I completely forgot what it was. You showed split screen, like, you can set up one in the left screen, one in the right screen and then drag an image over to it, right? Like, you could potentially do that. Yeah, you can definitely do that, too, if you wanted to. Let me see, can I do that? Yeah, and, like, a new document, I guess, or something. But, I mean, the cool thing is, is that you can actually use two fingers at the same time so that, like, you could be like, oh, I don't have that app open. Now I can open it up and drag it over. You could definitely do the one to the other thing, but what makes that really cool is that you can actually use that second hand in a useful way and, like, open up a second window if you need to. The other cool thing that Samsung, this isn't exactly new, but actually, it is new this year for the, can we transition over to the S9 for a moment? Yeah, for sure. Oh, please. To the Tab S9 Ultra? Yep. So what Samsung did with the Tab S9 Ultra and the Galaxy Fold, I'm gonna have to attach the keyboard here, sorry, and I'm gonna bash my microphone while I do it, they introduced this thing called multi-control, which allows you to use a single, I need to get out of dex mode here for a second. It allows you to use a single keyboard and mouse on multiple devices. So, for example, if I do, I think I need to turn it on. Yeah, okay, it's already on, so I think I need to connect to it. That's when it does. Connect phone. Adam's Fold. Oh, it was here. And so like, it does that and you see this like this. Oh, cool. Oh, that's so awesome. Yeah. So now if I use the mouse over here. For audio listeners, the Tab S9 Tab Ultra is next to the Fold and it turned it on and you get a little gray bar on the left side on the phone showing that it's connected to the tablet to the left of it, which is a nice little visual prompt. That's pretty cool. And now the mouse cursor is going from one screen to the other, which is crazy magic. How is it doing that? Wait, so can you drag from your, like an image from your phone to your tablet? You know, I never tried that. I guess we could try it now if we want. We'd love it. That is wild. How is it doing that? That's amazing. So yeah, it connects via, I believe, Wi-Fi unless I'm mistaken. Let me try to drag this over here. Oh my God, it worked. So he just dragged an image from a web browser on his phone via a mouse onto the tablet into a document. And it's thinking about it. It came over like when you were clicked on it when it was active. So the graphic was there and then the moment he dropped it, we're getting a little cursor. Oh. The file of the recorder not supported. That's awesome. Oh no. Okay. I know. Close, close. I wonder if I can find, let me, here's a, let me try this guy here. It's still thinking about it. See, same thing, same thing. Probably. Unless what if I grab like just a static image like this little icon here? Oh yeah. W's got us in chat. Yeah. It did, a synergy was what I was thinking of too because I ran synergy for a hot second in college I think, which is, yeah, it was multiple devices, but yeah. Well, we all experimented in college. That's what a college is for. All right. My mind is perpetually in the gutter. So I work, darn it, but well, I guess that kind of did something. You can also do like a copy and a paste in between the two devices if you want. So if you, let's see if I just like do now, fine, I'll just grab. I'm in a geocaching app right now for those of you who are listening. So if I copy there, I should be able to cut. Yeah. Yeah. Text works. Yeah, that was pretty cool. So what I like about this is that, Samsung is building in like a true ecosystem of devices that all work together. It's not just a, here's a PC, here's a tablet, here's a phone. The S9 Ultra can also act as a wireless second screen, but only for a Samsung-based PC. So it has to be like a Galaxy book or something like that. I don't have the Samsung PC, so I wasn't able to test that particular functionality, but still multi-control is kind of cool because you can have your phone over here and you can like go over there and check your messages, your emails or something like that. And then you can go back to work over here. And this particular tablet, especially in DeX mode, I mean, you can see on the dock here, I've got like 87 different apps open up here. I've got Telegram and Prime and Slack and Chrome. I can do my job on this tablet if I wanted to. And the really cool part about that is this thing is 5.5 millimeters thick. So once I take off that and once I take off that, I mean, this is a super thin. Is that thinner than the fold folded? Let's find out. So I wanna say it is, well, unfolded. Well, yeah, no, but folded, when it's the thick remote control, the tablet's gotta be thinner, right? Oh yeah, the tablet's way thinner than it is folded, but I'm like even unfolded. I mean, you can see they're not too far apart from each other. And this is by the way, the S-Pen that's a magnetically attached to the back, which I honestly, like I'm not an artistic person so I don't use the S-Pen a whole heck of a lot. You know, I've got a trackpad. Why would I wanna use an S-Pen? But that attaches magnetically to the back here and has little handy-dandy cover on there, which is nice. Cool. So that is kind of the Tab S9 in a nutshell. And then you've got the flip somewhere there, don't you? And I have the flip. And this is arguably the most exciting device that Samsung launched because it gives you this massively huge cover screen, which allows you to do, it's similar to the Motorola Razer Plus. Was this show around when the Razer Plus came out? I know it was like right around transition time. I don't think it was. We didn't talk that much about the Razer Plus. Yeah, we can check it out. So the major selling point to the Razer Plus is how much you can do with just the outside screen. And the same thing is here too. You can check your notifications here and all the Cubs are losing because of course they are. But then you have like different widgets that have been optimized for, alarms and this is like my step counter. I don't know why it thinks I've done 4,300 steps today because I haven't been carrying this phone like all day. But anyway, there's also a select few number of apps that you can run on this. And running apps on the outside screen, with the Razer you can basically do any app that you want. There's like, I think I said I had 200 some apps on my phone and the Razer gave me the ability to do like 167 of them. So it's like basically any app that you want. Samsung is offering a much more curated solution here. It's only gonna give you a certain number of apps that are kind of like approved. I'm using air quotes here. And those are, let's see, I think Maps, YouTube. You'll have to bear with me. I've had this phone for exactly 24 hours at this point. So it's like Maps, YouTube, a couple of messaging apps and I think Netflix. And then if you want to go farther than that you can open up an app called GoodLock which you can download I believe from the Galaxy Store. And then through that method you can enable other apps to work on the outside screen. The value proposition here is that you don't have to open the phone all that much.  I mean, with the Motorola Razer I would say my usage is probably somewhere in the neighborhood of about 70% of a time I don't bother opening the phone because I can do anything. Wow. With this phone it's a little bit more limited just because Samsung, Motorola did the spaghetti against the wall type thing. Let's see what sticks.  Oh, this app does not work great. Let's not do that anymore. Whereas with Samsung it's a much more curated. Here's what we think you're gonna wanna do on the cover screen. And for the most part Samsung is very right. So it's, but it is much more of a, I see some of your commenters are using the term walled garden, which is not inaccurate at all. Well, yeah, I was gonna say the tone of the chat room right now, JJ and some of the other folks and stuff like that are talking about how the, this is feeling a lot like an Apple device in terms of the walled garden and like curating we're picking what you're gonna want. But Adam, you just said something which I found terribly interesting is that for the most part they're right, right? Yeah. I think so.  One game in particular I play, it's called Cody Cross. It's kind of like a little crossword puzzle kind of game. And I tried playing that on the outside screen and it messed up in so many different ways because it's just not designed to work on a 3.6 inch screen. Other apps like the apps that Samsung curated specifically like the Netflix controls you can see that the cover screen here is kind of a funky shape. We've got this kind of like a dip down here on the side. On the cameras, right? Yeah. So Motorola, I keep talking about it. Motorola, they put their screen all the way down here all along and around the cameras as well. Yeah, with the pinhole approach basically by having the screen wrap around the two holes for the camera. And when I say that you can run out at any app that you want on here I mean every app you could possibly want on this outside screen, it just doesn't stop.  And so like I can open up my geocaching app and I can go to the map and then I can move the map really quickly so you don't see where I live. And I can see these, yes, I know I'm on the Android Facebook podcast. You don't have to tell me Samsung. Anyway, so now like I can see where all the geocaches are around my house and it's really nice. I don't even have to open the phone to do it. But then like, you know, other apps, I'll see if I can, if I pull up KodiKross this is the one that I'm talking about and it takes forever to load. So I'll talk through it. This one you'll see does not work at all. Like it's laughably bad. So like if I wanted to do that same thing on the Samsung I have to go through like two different hoops that I have to jump through in order to get to a point where I can put KodiKross on the screen in a really, really bad way. And so like, and I think Samsung is kind of serving it's kind of like a roadblock to say, you know, you really shouldn't do that. And, you know. Yeah, I mean, I kind of get that. Like, so it was kind of funny because remember we had Chet Haas on a couple of weeks ago and we were talking about the flip and I think he had that same resistance to like how open is this? Like what can you actually run? Or how, you know, how curated or how gated, you know, is this outside screen? And so I think in terms of like the spirit of Android, no, this is not very Android spirit. But, and I, maybe this is just maybe coming in cynical dev after many years. And again, I'm always going to cop to- Cynical dev, whatever could you mean? I know, right? So just unicorn over here. But like after all the years of us kind of being so resistant on, you know, different form factors, what happens is, is that, you know, and I've seen this for, we even just casually talking to friends of mine who use like the fold, right? When a software experience doesn't fit the form factor, it becomes like it, usually the inclination is to blame the device, right? Because usually maybe this is the, that person's first time working with a foldable phone.  But I think for Samsung, they want to keep this foldable train going. They want to get more people on it. And the best way to do that is to provide people the best experience, which is going to be curated. And like without saying anything, NDA, I've actually been at a couple of companies where, you know, yeah, Samsung tends to like, hey, hey, cool app person. Do you want to like do a thing for us? And like, but that's, that's their approach is to find partners and do really tailored experiences. So from a business side, and also like, if I was just, you know, in isolation, if I wanted to make my app as successful as possible, that makes a lot of sense. Or, you know, if I was a hard, they'll make a lot of sense. But yeah, it's not the most Android-y thing. So I can kind of see it both ways. Yeah. Can we pop on Skippy real quick? I just want to, so like, this is what I'm talking about. So this is Cody Cross on the note and, or on the fold. I keep calling this the note and it's the next generation. Yeah. It is, it is. So like, this is, this is that game on the fold. And you know, the one thing that you notice is like, this is really optimized for the fold. Like, you know, it looks really good. This is that same game on the, on the Motorola. And it's unplayable. That's unplayable. It's not playable. You can't even see like a single line. So I mean, that's what I'm talking about. Like when I say that it's just really, it's, it's suboptimal. But the one thing that I want to, I want to finish off my thought on the note is, the fold again is that the fold has been around for so long that app developers have actually come around to it and they've actually designed their game to work very well on the screen. This same game does not look good on a Google pixel fold because of the different aspect ratio. It doesn't look terrible, but it doesn't look good either. And so what you're going to find with the fold is that more apps are optimized for this type of screen because the fold has been around for so long. Yep. Interesting. All right. So all in all across these three devices, fold, flip, the tab, thumbs up, thumbs down, like how are you feeling about the latest offering from Samsung? All right. So I'll do each one in a tweet. This is a lot of necessary upgrades. The final evolution, I'm sorry, I'm talking about the fold five is a lot of necessary upgrades, the final evolution. This is where what's going to get interesting is next year when Samsung actually has meaningful competition in the United States, what they're going to do with this device. The Tab S9 is the best Android tablet that you can buy hands down. It's not even a question, but this package that you're looking at right here is the base model plus the book cover which Samsung does not ship in the box. Anyway. And so this whole package is like $1,300. And you're in laptop territory there. It's a base model. Spendy, because I believe somebody in the chat said Spendy. It's very Spendy. This is basically a two in one computer that happens to run Android. So, and then this is arguably the most exciting device that Samsung released. They finally did the cover screen the right way except they're still holding it back with software. I get why they're doing it. I don't necessarily like it, but I get it. And so that's kind of my summation of the three devices that I brought home from South Korea. I did not get any watches. All right, cool. Well, thank you for showing that off. It was great to have all those devices. It's the first time we've had all three of those devices on the show. Michelle also went to Korea. He came back with the fold and he was playing with it. We got a little quick glimpse of that. We're waiting for his full review of it, but to see all three of them is great to see. I didn't know Michelle was in Korea. I never saw him. He was there. Wow. He was at the same event. Oh, that's a bummer. What the heck? They must not have been there with the, I don't know. Samsung had a lot of different contingents there.  I mean, he's American press. So I don't know why he wouldn't have been with us, but yeah, there were a lot of like distinct groups that were unpacked for Samsung. So he must have been in a different group. They packed them in for unpack. That's for sure. They did. They did. It was a very long flight. I didn't want to say like, so y'all lucky people that got devices, I'm very happy for you. No jelly because if you did order, say like any of the devices, for example, I order Z flip five. The original ship date was August 11th. Last week I checked it was August 18th. The day I checked it is September 8th. And I looked on forums and I think a lot of people are being surprised by the continual pushback. And these are people that ordered the day of unpacked. And is that is that is that is that appointing towards the demand that so many people wanted it or the manufacturing that Samsung didn't make enough? It might be manufacturing. So just to give context, I ordered one of the Samsung.com exclusive colors, the yellow one. And if you look on the site, the dates for ship are different. So yeah, if y'all pick the fancy colors, that might be it too. I think this ship date on like the standard colors is a little bit sooner, like still in August. But anyway, if y'all haven't checked in your ship dates in a while and you're curious, you might want to go check your order number, especially if you got a fancy color. There you go. Yeah, I'll double check that. One last note for JJ4884. Oh, actually Technoman's just answered it for me. I don't root or hack or put on betas. So sorry, I have no idea. Well, we're going to talk about the one UI six in a minute when we get to that question. But so before they're real quickly on the topic of folds, Samsung is going to have some competition from Xiaomi's new Mi Mix Fold. The Mi Mix Fold three is out and it's gotten lots of good reviews and people saying that the large battery, the fast charging, the quote unquote, and here we have, we're looking at Android Police's coverage, the usable outer screen of it is really giving the Xiaomi approach to the foldable a bit of an edge. I haven't got a chance to really look into deep to it, but it seems as if the thinner design and here we're showing the Xiaomi kind of hype video as they show, they animate the fold, not the fold, the fold three coming together as it folds. Yeah, they're patting it. It kind of looks like the trench room from Star Wars, honestly. Yeah, it really is, look at that, look at that. But this one, this one looks pretty cool if you're looking at it. If you know it's got that woven background, woven back kind of texture on the backside on the display list side of it without the display where the cameras are, it's got those Leica lenses. So Xiaomi stepping into the foldable world pretty heavy with this third generation of their phones. So be curious if anybody gets to put their hands on it, but the fact that it's got a usable front screen in comparison to the Samsung one I think is a very interesting angle for it. And I think we, I think the price that we saw if you translate it to USD is actually like around 1200, 1300. Oh, there we go, yeah. Yeah, so this is launching in China with 12 giga RAM and 256 storage for roughly about 1250. And then they've got a higher end model at 16 giga RAM and one terabyte of storage. Goodness gracious. 1500. For 1500 bucks. Which is, this is cheaper than the Pixel Fold. No, that's like, yeah. That's kind of, I mean, again, assuming that we're on, like in the world where we consider $1,800 foldable, not ridiculous, that's pretty awesome. Yeah, so if you were in China, pick one of these up. And maybe if you find a way to get phones from China, go for it.  It just seems like there are so many foldables over there. And it's like, I'm kind of jealous because now that I've had a chance to play with so many foldable phones, like we were talking about it a little bit off air, but I like, I find candy bar phones boring now because like foldables are just so exciting and so neat. Yep. But yeah, sorry. Cool. All right, well, so that's gonna wrap us up on hardware and run out a bit of that time. So we're gonna get through a bunch of app stuff, but when you've got the first one, this is a story that you've been tracking for a couple of weeks now, right? Yeah, so we talked a little bit, I think with Beck with Max about some kind of like suspected Google Photos updates. So there is an update rolling out today, August 15th, which is probably the most sizable Google Photos update to date for at least for a while. It is unfortunately a US only update, but that crazy navigation bar, the pill bar, chip bar that I like to call is not there, but the memories that those generated scrapbooks that have like different themes where Google Photos collects a bunch of your photos and then creates like kind of like delightful little scrapbooked experiences for you, that is its own tab now within the Google Photos app. It's down there on the bottom nav bar that it's still docked, not floating, but still docked. And so you're gonna be able to access those directly rather than having it just be up in that carousel on the top. And along with this are a couple of additional features, it's not just kind of a reorganization of the content, but with your memories, you can now actually have people collaborate. So the memories are actually an album and then Google Photos does some magic to kind of do a very nice like slideshow of them. So now with memories, you can actually collaborate and invite your friends and family to add albums to your memories, your memories, montages, collages, one of those things, something in some kind of age, you get to have people helping you with those. And also, let's see. Oh, also you will get the chance to take these memories. So again, these are like, they work pretty well within Google Photos, right?  You probably show them with another Google Photos user.  The bird is dead, unfortunately, or your Instagrams or whatever on your threads. There will be now a feature to export any memory as a video, so some of them are much easier sharing. And last and quickly, if you are signed up for the latest experiments from Google Labs, there is of course drink a generative AI feature in the works for Google Photos called Help Me Title. If you just want help titling a group of photos you put together, go to Google or sign up for Google Labs and hit that Help Me Title button that should appear and see what generative AI does for you. And there you go. There's your Google Photos update. That's very funny. It's so funny because I'm looking at my Google Photos and I have the little pill menu you can see there. Oh, it is there. I have it in my Google Photos where it's got all photos or memories, you see it says there above the menu. So it's like, I'm in this weird beta transition state between... AB tested. Yeah, clearly AB testing. But I've got the whole new memory section on there and honestly like, I went to it and I was like, oh, I don't have the patience for this. And I quickly went back to my all photos. I immediately felt stressed out that I needed to organize my memories and things. Oh no. Yeah, I'm kind of with you. I just want Assistant to do that. And my problem with Google Photos and the Assistant that does that is it will do like, hey, look at these similar shots that we found. And it's just like, yeah, of course, that's where I go to take my test photos. And so, yeah, of course there's 87 pictures of being standing in front of the Great America sign. That's because that's where I do all my selfie tests.  And so, I kind of wish Google was a little bit smarter about that, like maybe there's a reason that he's taking all these different photos and maybe we should just knock that the heck right off. I'm surprised they don't have like a generative AI prompt for memories.  And then do the thing rather than it always suggesting, oh, hey, here's you eight years ago. Oh God, I'm so old is usually like the response. Maybe that's what I get stressed out to, but more like, oh God, what is all the things that used to happen or all the things I used to be able to do, but I can't anymore. Yeah. All right, so going back, it's like we can't even take, can't even take a step without talking about Samsung. But going back to Samsung, some big news in the software world of Samsung as they officially launched the One UI 6 Beta for Android 14, the number of people who are excited by this is just fascinating and blows my mind. But yeah, but basically this is, you know, as Android 14 is on the exit ramp as we were talking earlier in the show, One UI 6 for Samsung users is as important as is the Android version. So this beta rolls out for the Galaxy S23. I know JJ in the chat and some other folks were asking whether or not it would work on the fold or the flip. It looks like as of now it does not. It does work on the earlier versions of the fold and the flip though, I believe on four and backwards, but not on the fives as of yet. And that's got to be some version and kind of issue. But friend of the show, Max Weinbach had a whole bunch of a great breakdown on his X account showing some of the changes and the things that you can expect from it. And the folks at SAM Mobile were gracious enough to pull together all of the beta features and improvements and changes. And there is a lot. And I am not a One UI person. So I apologize to everybody in the audience who is a new One UI zealot when. So you can tell me if these are important or not. But it looks like lots of changes to the quick panel. You got a new button layout, quick access to brightness control, improved album art, enhanced layout for notifications, sort notifications by time, which is pretty cool. On the lock screen, you can reposition your clock. Everybody who's been asking for that for Christmas or Hanukkah, there you go. You can reposition your clock on UI. The home screen allows for simplified icon labels now. They're limited to a single line for cleaner and simpler look. So Galaxy and Samsung have been removed from some app names, which is like, I feel like the definition of bloatwares when they put the brand name in there. I am a font nerd and I will define the fact that they have a new default font to get my attention. They say it's got a more stylish and modern feel. And you can select that font in the settings. And yeah, so new font out there for you, Samsung folks. On the multi-passing side, you can keep pop-up windows open instead of minimizing them. They've got new emoji designs that appear in the keyboard, picture and video previews, extra sharing options for content, a new weather widget. I feel like, you know, got a new version, new weather widget, right? It's gonna come with the territory. Lots of going on with the camera. They've got custom camera widgets, alignment options for the watermarks, quick access to settings for the resolution, you know, a picture leveler with the pixel kind of already has, document scanning, quality optimization, auto FPS settings for videos, which could be super helpful in low light conditions. So the list kind of goes on and on and on. If you're a Samsung person, I'm sure you've been all over this already, but lots and lots of changes in this. This is a pretty big deal, isn't it, Wynn? Like as a Samsung user. Yeah, I mean, I guess now I'm a pixel fold user, but yeah, no, I think that's kind of interesting because I think the expansiveness of the list is, I guess I'll compliment Samsung in this case, is like the, is indicative of how customizable and how kind of like just fully featured. I feel it's like too positive, but just the fact that there's a lot of, there's just a lot in one UI. And so they've tried to like up the game on everything. So I don't know.  I feel like you keep asking me. I want my Flip 5 now. I have the Razer actually recharging on my living room couch and I was gonna drive that today. You know, it's, but they're all foldables. If it doesn't have a hinge, I don't want it. Wow, you're full of- That's what I'm saying. That's what I'm saying. You can call me Ms. Mobile. Foldable, your foldable convert, right? Totally, totally. All right, cool. Well, we got one last story to go through before we're gonna call it a night. And that is you get your, Adam, you might want to get your drink ready because when is going to talk about- Jetpack. Yeah, so, okay. So I really, really liked the story and it's a dev story, but as a dev that has written an emoji picker from scratch some years ago for Trello, but also as a user who I also, I love Signal as a messaging app. I cannot stand their emoji picker. So I'm excited on multiple fronts because what happens is, so Jetpack, which is like the suite of libraries that Google puts out to help Android developers do kind of commonplace things easier and also to help with the, you know, make things work easier and consistent across the fragmented landscape of Android, we now have an emoji picker. So I know this doesn't seem like a huge deal, but it kind of is. And so this is basically a pre-book component that devs can now, you know, with some, with not a lot, but some effort, you know, hook into. And so I know this doesn't sound like a big deal, but again, as someone who has written an entire one from scratch, it is a big deal. And I'm going to tell you really quickly why. So- They can do it in three steps here. We're here on the Android developers blog. It's literally like, it's so funny as someone who's worked in product and have had engineers throw things at me when I go, it's just a couple of lines of code. This is literally just a couple of lines of code. You just, you just literally just put it in like your code and it'll spit out emojis to you.  And so you actually get fragmentation in your emojis if you say have, you know, some content, some text that has an emoji that your phone, for whatever reason, because it doesn't have the right fonts or it's an all old version. I mean, it's all kind of fonts doesn't support, right? So you end up seeing the tofu, which is the legit technical name for that kind of like white square for when the text renderer encounters an emoji that it can't render. So the Jetpack emoji picker will actually be able to tell like what version of, you know, the emoji set you're working with. And in the picker, it will actually hide, you know, any emojis that aren't supported in your current device and the device that, you know, it's living in, which is a huge deal because that actually did come up when I was writing the emoji picker for Trello. We were like, oh, we want everyone to have the most emojis. Oh, and if you're on the live stream, you can actually see the emoji picker that I made. I kind of like looked at Slack and copied the design because I didn't really have a lot of design help. But yeah, I made this from scratch, by the way. So if you're watching the video, you can go ahead and see when's efforts at making emoji picker, but I would be happy if Trello threw this away for the Jetpack one.  So the Jetpack emoji picker will be a little bit, hopefully more smooth when it comes to like rendering and scrolling. And then finally, yeah, variants. So a really, really awesome thing about Unicode emoji is the variants. So basically with emojis, and I think I've talked about some of the show before, the way that Unicode works is that you can actually, in essence, add emojis together. And when you add emojis together, they create like an emoji, not like emoji kitchen, but like legit, like if you have like a person emoji and then you put the right skin tone modifier, the right gender modifier, you'll get different variants of the same emoji. And designing a user experience around letting someone pick, you know, their variant of choice is kind of difficult. I was very proud of the little like hand skin tone like experience that I did on the Trello thing. Again, watch the video stream, but again, this will also be integrated. And so that I guess that's kind of another benefit is that you get a nice Google design for the emoji picker instead of like stealing the design of Slack like I did, at least the design of emoji picker and Slack like five years ago. So anyway, hopefully in the future, you'll get a little more consistent emoji picker experience signal on talking to you.  So chat back, emoji picker. Look it up, three lines. You got it. Anyway, that's your Android Dev news for the week. Congratulations, I'm very excited for you and all the developers. So excited. Yeah. I think one of your commenters mentioned, is it weird that developers had to code an emoji picker themselves? And yes, it is actually deeply weird that it took this long. It is weird. I don't even know how to tell you because at the time that I wrote the emoji picker, it was kind of already established that emoji reactions were a thing mostly because of Slack. And yeah, and it's a really hard problem because like, again, fonts, because a lot of it's around fonts and then having the right font to render the thing. It is weird and it's kind of weird because the Unicode like product, like specification for emojis is actually really well-defined and really predictable. It just takes work. It takes work. So it just take a lot of work. And that's the kind of thing that ROI, I don't know, anyway. Cool. Well, thank you, Wynn, for sharing that. That's excellent. That's the Wynn's Dev Corner there for you. So all right, well, we were running out of time. Normally, we'd love to hear from you, the audience, but we're gonna skip that this week. So you can choose to email at contact at androidfaithful.com. We wanna hear from you. I think I even have it, yeah, there you go. Email us at contact at androidfaithful.com. Let us know what you think of any of the topics talked about at the show or other topics. Ask us questions, challenge us. We'd love to hear from you. Please write in, everyone. Adam Sir, thank you so much for joining the show. We really appreciate it. Once again, tell folks, this is your chance to plug folks. Where should they look for you? Yeah, yeah. Well, thanks for having me on again. My primary, Mary outlet where you can get all of me is Benefit of a Doubt. Is the Benefit of a Doubt podcast slash YouTube channel. We're looking at the YouTube channel as we speak. And that's where you can find me. Also BenefitofaDoubt.com, even though that website is massively overdue for an overhaul. On the socials, you can find me at deadtechnology at all of the things, except for Facebook and Twitter and know the irony that I'm not on Facebook, but I am on threads and Instagram is not lost on that. And finally, you can find all my writings on slash gear and Forbes vetted. If you want to know what I think about all the electric gadgets that I had today and all the ones that are coming out because man, I'm just doing a lot of them. And the best place you can reach me is BenefitofaDoubt.com or YouTube.com slash Benefit of the Doubt spelled like my last name, D-O-U-D because I hate good branding. All right, well, thank you so much, Adam. We love having you on the show. We hope to have you on future episodes. We really appreciate it. Hell yeah. So, when, where can people find you? Well, you can find me. I obviously, very obviously now am like an Android dev. I post any kind of technical talks that I do and other technical content on my website, randomly typing.com. And you can find me on social networks at Queen Code Monkey. And I would just like to say that without a doubt, I'm so glad that we are with a doubt today, Adam. It was so good to have you and especially on the new show. And hopefully more often, more often. Yeah, I'm down. Yeah, but anyway, thank you, Adam. And thank y'all. Cool. And last but not least, you can find me. I'm on the internet. I am Ron XO, pretty much wherever I can be. Here's, you know, video viewers, you can see my Instagram. I like music. I like food. And you can see me post about that in movies and fun stuff on Instagram. But I'm on, I am on X. I'm on Facebook. I am on threads. I am on Mastodon. I'm Blue Sky. All that stuff at Ron XO. Are you on T2 yet? Have you gotten on the T2? I have not. I have not. I am in high. I am in T2 in favor of threads. I logged on to Hive and then never logged in again. I just, I just go into squat, my name, and then I beg. I need to do that for Hive, because everyone was doing it. But as mentioned, as always, head over to androidfaithful.com where you can subscribe to the show. You can support, you can go over to Patreon and throw your support there. You can follow us on the various socials or whatnot. We appreciate everybody who has supported us and watches the show every week. You can watch us live every Tuesday at 8 p.m. Eastern, 5 p.m. Pacific. And of course, this podcast is released on every Thursday night and on all the good day internet. E-mail us at contact.androidfaithful.com again and we will see you next time on Android Faithful. Thanks everyone. Do a rock spirit thing. All right, yeah, there it is. There we go, yeah, Adam, Adam's got my back.


This is a quick video demo of procedural city generation in the movable feast machine using bottom-up distributed robust first Computing principles, so let's take a look. We seed the simulation with a single bit of city street in a bit as it Spreads it produces more streets that have the light gray sidewalks that's next to them as the street grows It has a random number probability of producing an intersection which produces more streets to produces more intersections And in fact it very quickly fills the available space now just because the things are random It means the city blocks are not all going to be uniform and they don't necessarily match up But those mismatches are locally detected and are filled in with parks perhaps not the Best reason to decide where to put a park, but it works nonetheless After a period of time the sidewalks start triggering the construction of buildings the buildings have colors which represent the product or services Available there they also emit cars that have a desire for a specific other color and The sidewalks by observing the passage of cars that are looking for different products and services Adaptively learn to route the cars as the city overall now wakes up and activity is going on in parallel All through the system every line there that says gas usage is one of us a successful routing And this is inherently robust if a disaster happens to a chunk of the city The ability to make roads and parks and blocks was not lost It was merely not being used because it wasn't needed and if in fact more space becomes available Urban sprawl will happen spontaneously and this is in the nature of distributed Bottom-up dynamical processes now all of this new city is now in its period where it's waiting Before starting to construct buildings, but it works perfectly well interacting with the old town part of the city Aside from being you know sort of fun to watch and and pretty spectacular visually It's easy to imagine that this sort of structuring of space with routing abilities Could be used in a more fully developed form for when those those blocks between the buildings We could fill in other computational processes into those blocks Which would then provide the basis for something other than just random routing of the cars But I thought this was kind of fun to look at and I have to admit I just I just can't stop messing with these simulations a Quick video demo of Trent Smalls distributed city generation in the movable feast


Hello and welcome to another episode on how to film and edit a product video at home. Now the video you just saw at the beginning was entirely shot and edited on the iPhone 12 Pro Max.  The quality you get out of it is just amazing, especially with the new iPhone 12 Pro Max. Now in this video, I will show you how I use the iPhone 12 Pro Max to film this short perfume commercial and show you the editing process behind it using Luma Fusion. For the product video, I've set up a gray backdrop. To remove the wrinkles, I had to steam iron the backdrop and tighten it using clamps and gaffer tape. Having a backdrop made out of cotton definitely takes more time and I would suggest you get a backdrop made out of paper. It's a bit pricier but you'll save time and get better results. By the way, all the products mentioned will be in the video description below. I then used the sideboard and placed it a bit further away from the background. This way I can create more depth and have the object in focus and the background out of focus. It also keeps the background darker and makes wrinkles look less obvious. Now for the product, I placed a black acrylic backdrop to the bottom. It creates a reflection that gives the product more depth. Important is to clean the surface using glass cleaner to remove fingerprints and get rid of dust particles because these can quickly become noticeable in the shot. Below I added a motorized turntable to create some movement. You could also use a cheap turntable from IKEA, that would work too. To set up the camera, I used a basic tripod and mounted the Slypod E since it extends and allows me to position the camera more easily. You don't necessarily need one but for this setup, it worked really well and I can use the app to control it. To mount the iPhone, I used a tripod adapter and positioned the iPhone upside down that allows me to easily slide with the camera in and out. To create these cinematic lighting effects, I'll be using the TL60 tube lights which Godox was friendly enough to send me. One of the great features is that you're able to control the light using the Godox light app. So when opening up the app, I can actually control the lights remotely which makes it really convenient to use. I can change color temperature, the tint, adjust the intensity of the light, there are also different lighting modes available so I can create a special lighting effect such as laser, flash, RGB cycle and also select a specific color for creative purpose. In most of the shots, I set the color to blue since it looks great and I wanted to bring out more of that color in the product. In the behind the scenes section, I will show you how I used these lights. As for the camera settings, I will be using Filmic Pro since this allows me to have full control over my camera. Opening it up in these settings, I will set my resolution to 4K that allows me to crop and correct my composition. Another benefit that I'm able to create is a digital zoom in without any quality loss since I will be exporting the project in 1080p. The encoding rate is set to 10 bit that captures more information resulting in a higher image quality. For the frame rate, I will set it to 25 frames per second since I live in a Pala region. If you live in an NTSC country, you can use 24 frames per second. These frame rates will give you cinematic results. Since I won't be using the audio, I will turn it off. For the entire video, I will be using the wide lens since it has an aperture of 1.6 that separates the object better from the background. Image stabilization is turned off since I will go for static shots mostly. I leave the guidelines enabled for setting my composition. With the square, I can set my focus. When using autofocus, it's important that the object is well lit so that the autofocus can work accurately. Since I will be moving the light in most of the shots, I first position the object, set my focus using enough light and lock it. This way no changes will occur. Next is to tap hold the circle to open up the exposure controls. I set my ISO to its lowest number to avoid noise in my image. Since I will be shooting in 4K 25 frames per second, my shutter speed is set to 1 over 50 of a second. Next is to set and lock my wide balance. I have created a preset in which the temperature is set to 5600 Kelvin. The tint is set to 10 because I want to reduce some of the greenish color cast. If you have a hard time setting your wide balance, you can go with the autofunction. Just make sure to lock it to prevent color shifts. The picture profile is set to natural. I could use Log V3 but it would create a very flat and desaturated image which makes it hard for me to see what I'm actually shooting. Next I will tap on the timecode to reveal the histogram to better analyze the exposure in my image. To have better control over the lighting situation, I lower the curtains to make the room pitch black. So let's now move on to the behind the scenes where I will give you 5 tips on how to shoot a product video creatively. So tip number 1 is to light for reflections. So for the first shot, I've placed the light on the opposite side and positioned it in a way so that the light would reflect off the object. Since a product is so translucent, you really have to think about where to position the light. What's great about using the tube lights is that it's mobile and can be placed on a flat surface without having it fall. Work around the object and look for reflections. This gives the product more structure and depth. I have set both lights to blue to bring out the blue colors of the product. I then use the app to turn each light on to create this light revealing effect. Tip number 2 is to use your laptop screen as a backdrop. For the second shot, I used the screen of the MacBook Pro as a backdrop. On our grid, I searched for water splash, downloaded it, then placed the object in the center and played the video as a loop. I used one of the tube lights, which was set to daylight temperature to light it from the front to make the logo more visible. This setup worked pretty well since the object was translucent and made it look realistic. So no need for you to film a water splash, you can also use stock footage for that. If you're interested, I have a link below where you will additionally get two months for free. Tip number 3 is to use backlighting. Backlighting the product makes it pop more and makes it feel more three dimensional and also directs a viewer to the product. So in the shot, I went a bit further and made the lights visible in the shot. I swung it behind the object, which I thought gave it an interesting look. Now when shining light directly to the camera, it creates these lens flares, which I thought looked good. Tip number 4 is to add movement. For the fourth shot, I used a motorized turntable so that the object would rotate. It's important to add movement when shooting products because it makes it look more interesting. What I also like to do is create a digital zoom in in post since I shot it in 4K, which we'll get into later. Again, I did some backlighting and you will notice some dust particles flowing in the air, which wasn't my intention, but I took it in the shot because it created more depth and sort of gave it a magical feel to it. Now you can create movement in different ways. It doesn't have to be using just a turntable. You can also add movement using lights, which leads me to my last tip, which is using light for movement. For the last shot, I wanted to create a revealing shot of the whole product. For this, I used one tube light positioned it above the object and slowly twisted it with my hands to create a revealing lighting effect. I wanted to make sure to highlight all of the areas of the product as an ending shot. Okay, folks, I'm not going to show you how I edit the video in Lumafusion. And if you're not familiar with Lumafusion, it's an advanced editing app that is unfortunately only available for iOS users. For one time payment of $30, you get access to all of its features. I personally like to use Lumafusion when I edit on the go, just because the interface is so intuitive and there are also a lot of advanced functions in it. Now, if you're an Android user, you might want to take a look at InShot, which is also a great editing mobile app that you can download for free. And it also offers a lot of great editing tools, but is limited with Lumafusion. I just have more advanced features. The video files are in the video description below that you can download if you want to follow along. If you're wondering about this setup, I have the iPhone 12 Pro Max attached on a mini tripod using the Lightchaser Pro. I actually created a video a week ago about this, so make sure to check that out if you haven't seen it. And on top, I have a microphone, which is connected to the Sony A7S III so that you guys can hear me clearly. And the reason why I've set it up this way is because I can use my mouse. And it's easier for me to demonstrate when doing a screen recording because I have the pointer and can show you exactly what I did. So let's now hop into Lumafusion.  So this is not going to be an in-depth tutorial on Lumafusion. I'm just going to really show you how I've edited the product video so that you can use it to your advantage. So I'm first going to create a new project and press on this icon and then press the plus sign over here.  And then my frame rate will be 25 frames per second. The aspect ratio is 16 by 9. And the color space is 10-bit Rec. 709. Once I've did that, I'm going to hit the plus button and we're going to start off with a clean project. Now, there are different ways to import your footage into Lumafusion. The way how I did it is I saved the videos onto my camera roll and created an album named Product Video so that everything is organized. So you just head over up here, select Photos. So in here you can go to Albums and in here I have Product Video with those five footages. And the next thing I do is I select the clip and I trim it to just take out the best parts. I think that looks great. Once I have that, I can drag the footage onto the timeline. So I'm going to select the shot over here. And again, I'm going to select the best portion. I think this looks awesome. So you'll notice that the footage is upside down and I can easily change that by double tapping on the clip. And I'm going to head over to the transition tool over here and I'm just going to flip it. Boom. What I'm also going to do is frame it. Since I shot it in 4K, I can also crop in. A bit like so. And I'm also going to set the horizon because that is off too. I'm going to head to the rotation and I'm just going to click on the arrow like this. And I think this looks good. This is how it looks like. Looks pretty nice, right? And I'm going to do that for the other clips as well. I'm going to flip and just correct the horizon and composition. So now we're going to add some music and I actually downloaded the music from Artlist and then shared it so that I can find it in the shared folder in LumaFusion. So this will be the song we're going to use. All right, I'm going to drag it below the primary clip. So once you have your song, you want to edit the video to the beat. Trim this a little bit more. Actually, as the lights come in, I actually wanted to fit it with the music. So what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to increase the speed a little bit. I think by 1 over 50. Works great. Here is another beat cut to again over here and cut it to reveal the ending. And I'm actually going to cut the song right over here. So I'm going to hit the scissor and the trash can and shorten this clip over here. So the next thing I want to do is add a fade out in the music. I'm going to hit the plus button and then select Transition. It is going to create a nice, smooth fade out. So it actually looks really great already. And what I want to do next is to add movement in my shot. And the way to do that is I'm going to double click on the clip, head over to the Transform tool and in here I can create a keyframe. So I'm going to start off here, set a keyframe and then I'm going to go all the way back and then zoom in all the way. And once I'm done, I hit the back arrow and now you can see that it's zooming in. A little bit too fast for my taste. So I'm going to head back and just position the point over here and then pull back a little, see how it looks, much better. And I'm going to do that for the other clips as well. So for the last clip, I don't want to add a push-in shot till the end. I actually want to make it stop at one point. So I'm going to hit the keyframe button and I'm going to create the movement until the logo is revealed around here and then it's going to stop. So I'm now going to create a title at the end. I'm going to hit the plus button and then overlay title. I'm going to shorten it and I'm going to double click on it. And in here, I can select my title and I'm actually going to name it David Dof. Below Cool Water. OK, so I'm now going to change the font. I'm going to go over here. So once I have it, I'm going to reposition it and I'm going to create a fade in and that's it and to create a fade in, move the playhead over here and then hit the plus button and then transition. So let's see how that looks like. Looks pretty nice. So for my last step, I'm going to color grade each clip. So for this clip, I'm going to head over to the effects and colors and I'm going to select original and I'm just going to pull up the mid tones, maybe add a little bit of contrast, not too much, just a little bit and then increase the saturation a bit and what I also like to do is create a vignette. I can add over to the effects over here and then you can select three different vignette. I'm actually going to go for vignette number two. So this looks really nice and I'm going to color grade the other clips as well. So to export the video, head over to this icon over here. Go to movies and then select photos. So it will be saved to our camera roll for the resolution. We're going to export it in 1080p. The frame rate is set to 25 frames per second and the video quality is set to standard 20 megabits per second, which is great for uploading videos onto the web. Below you can see the estimate file size that you will be exporting. Everything else, I leave how it is and I'm going to click on the upper right icon to export the video. So yeah, that is basically it. We now have a nice product video shot and edited on the iPhone 12 Pro Max. As you can see, you don't have to have a huge setup to create a nice product video. Start off with what you have and use the things laying around to create your product video. These product videos can be easily done at home and the more you practice, the better you will get at it. Important for you to keep in mind is that a product doesn't move. It doesn't do anything, in fact. And that is where you have to figure out how to make the product come to life and making it engaging for the viewers to watch. Hopefully you got something out of this video. If you did leave a like and let me know in the comments what type of product videos you like to shoot with your smartphone. If you're new to this channel, make sure to subscribe so that I can keep creating awesome videos for you guys. Make sure to follow me on Instagram at Ben at Grazer. And if you haven't downloaded my free smartphone filmmaking guide, make sure to grab one for yourself, which will help you find the right gear and help you get started filming quality videos with your smartphone. If you want to know more about mobile filmmaking here, two popular videos that you can check out that you will certainly love. Thank you so much for watching. Stay mobile and I will see you in the next video.


Okay folks, Larry Pesavento with the mid-afternoon update for TFNN. We've got a section on the stocks are red, they started out green, they changed colors in the middle of the day sometimes from green to red. Right now they're down. The US dollar is weakening today a little bit, so we have strength in the currencies. We have gold bouncing back after a big $100 drop these last couple of days. They've rallied back about $30 from the bottom, silver's rallied back about $0.50. So those markets are trying to make a bottom down in this area. And then also if we take a look at copper, copper is also bounced back a little bit which is something that could be positive to stocks. The main thing is that the Federal Reserve chairman came in and talked about the fact that they may be close to changing and they might not be close to changing. So I don't know what that means, but you know folks, if you just follow the charts, if prices go up, there are more buyers, if prices go down, there's more sellers. That's the main thing that you want to try to recognize when you're doing some of these things as you go through looking at some of these things. And natural gas continues to move higher, which always is a nice sign. And also we've had a nice move in the corn market finally. It's rallied about $0.20 off the bottom. Still not anything in the record books, but at least it stopped going down. Soybeans, not so much. They keep going lower and lower. Someday they'll have a bottom, but it probably won't be today. That's about the bottom line of what we're watching right now. Remember folks, these crops are just being planted now. So there's going to be some problems all the way through the growing season. It's always been that way and it's not going to be any different this time. And all of us remember when prices go up, they also have the possibility of going down. And there's not just any one-way street with the exception of the stock of NVIDIA. It seems to want to be going up forever. And I don't know if it's still going up today, but it had a huge move. So we did make a big ABCD expansion at $13,960. That was the ABCD level, and we hit that exact number in the NASDAQ. It was a perfect ABCD. It's only backed off 200 points, which isn't anything considering it goes up two and three hundred points a day. So that's just nothing more than a very small correction in a bull market. So we're going to take a break, folks,<PHONE_NUMBER>. Our guest today is Bill Meridian, Cycles Research.