This episode of Android Faithful is brought to you by Awesome! The Awesome Privacy Cable gives you much needed control over when and how your data is shared. Get more info at awesomeprivacy.com slash privacycable. Welcome to Android Faithful, your weekly source for the latest news, hardware, and apps in the wide, foldable, flippable, and occasionally private world of Android. I'm Hwinn Tweetdow. And I am Ron Richards. And I'm Michelle Ramon. And our guest this week is Chief Privacy Officer at Awesome and whose career speaks for itself in regards to her knowledge, experience, and firsthand engagement in cybersecurity, consumer protections, and in particular data privacy, as well as policy around these critical issues. Evan Drake Faithful, please welcome to the show, Mary Stone Ross. Hi, Mary. Hi. Thanks so much for having me. Well, we really appreciate you joining us. So to get ahead of it, Awesome has been so fantastic in joining us as our inaugural sponsor. And in talking when we were talking to the fine folks at Awesome, Ryan, our good buddy, we said we'd love to have someone on from Awesome to talk about privacy. And Mary, you drew the short straw. Well, I mean, this is what I live for. So very, very happy to be here. Excellent. Excellent. So, Mary, let's dive right into it and get started. We'd love to hear a little bit about you and how you got to this spot. I know that you were the co-author of the California Consumer Privacy Act, which sounds very, very important. Can you tell us about your journey in the world of privacy and technology? Yeah, I can. So we moved to California in 2015 at COVID time. I lost track of it all since the time. It was a long time ago. And when we moved out there, I didn't have any background in privacy at all. In fact, my background was working for the government. And I worked for the CIA. I was counsel on the House Intelligence Committee. So kind of the opposite. Wow. Yeah. And we moved out there. I had a startup helping parents help their kids with homework. And we were at the baby stage and I had the choice to either go make it into a real company and raise funds or do something else. And at the time I met a real estate developer that had an idea to do something on privacy using California's crazy initiative process.  You have like some policy experience. Why don't you help me? And so that kicked off the beginnings of the initiative that ended up getting passed by the legislature. That is now the California Consumer Privacy Act. Wow. So what is the California Consumer Privacy Act? Like what does it do for those of us who don't know? For the uninitiated. So for the New Yorkers and the Texans in the crowd, the CCPA gives all Californians the right to find out what information companies are collecting about you, the right to opt out of the sale of your information. So if you're, you may not see it because a lot of companies do locate. But a lot of them do provide it to lots of different people. Or if you're in California, you'll see, do not sell my personal information. And that's actually thanks to CCPA. So you can opt out of, and sales define really broad. So it's selling or sharing or tracking with cookies. And so you can opt out of that. And then it gives you the right to have very clear privacy policy. So one of the things that I have seen is that privacy policies, they're still very owners to read, but it's much clearer. And so if you even scroll down to where it goes, like your California privacy rights, it'll look much better. So you can find out what information is collected and what is done with that information. Yeah. And the, and this, sorry, the CCPA was passed in 2018. That right, Mary? That's correct. Yeah. And then it was amended by another initiative. But yeah. How do you think that, you know, so that's, so it's been five years since then. And do you think that the public either because of, you know, initiatives like the CCPA or just kind of naturally, do you find that people are more and more aware of the data privacy? Cause I feel like, you know, it's been a long time unfortunately where we've been, we've all been on the internet. We've had smartphones for at least 10 years. And unfortunately it's only kind of just now where, you know, we cover now very increasingly security and privacy all the time, you know, companies like Google and Apple are trying to catch up is not quite the right word, but maybe bandaid. To try to avoid. Yeah, I tried to avoid.  What's, what's your been, what's kind of been your take on the folks? When we first started researching CCPA, it was a totally different world and all the time you would hear why should I care about this? What is the harm? And I think that conversation, it's still there, right? Every once in a while you hear that, but to a much lesser extent. And I think part of that is, is because laws like CCPA have given it's a tool. It's a tool for journalists to go and say, like, Oh, let me see what these companies are actually doing and what they're collecting. Oh, Grindr is collecting social security numbers and HIV status. Maybe that's, yeah. It was a real study. Oh my gosh, really? Maybe that's something that should not happen. And then it's forced companies to kind of change their, their habits and their policies. I'm actually a little stunned. I'm sorry. I almost fell back in my chair hearing that. I can understand that Grindr, like another one where people are on it for sexual activity. They want to know and proactively share their status, right? Because there's a whole, you know, like this, that's a whole nother.  Yeah, important though. But actually health is, is one of those categories where I think people assume that they're protected because of HIPAA, which is the every time you go to a doctor's office, right? Like you sign the HIPAA waiver that all your information is protected. But HIPAA only, sorry, I'm going to go into legal use, but HIPAA is only pertains to covered entities and covered entities as defined very statistically as hospitals and doctor's offices. So when you're collecting health information on your smartwatch or on your Fitbit or going to like a period tracking or website, but it's all of this information that's very, very sensitive health information is actually not protected under our current regulatory environment. So you need laws like CCPA and hopefully someday a federal grant will actually practice. Wow. That's a really interesting point that, you know, and like around that Ron, you made also that there are positive intentions with some of this data collection. But yeah, you know, and I think especially as a developer, I've seen it where we have good intentions, but maybe we don't necessarily see all the impacts of the decision we make to track certain data and send it off somewhere. Did you find that the kind of, I guess, response or kind of the engagement from businesses was positive, was less positive, was it a fight or was it kind of like, oh, should we get to do something? We should play ball. Like how was it? So it was to back up a little bit. The CCPA was going to be an initiative on the ballot in 2018 and California has this very powerful process where theoretically and saying theoretically because it's really expensive. Any citizen can collect enough signatures and get their law on the ballot and if it passes it by a majority. So 50% plus one, it becomes law. And then the only way to change it is through another initiative, which is it's really a difficult thing to change it if that happens. The original version of the CCPA went much further. The initiative version went much further than what was passed by the legislature, including the enforcement provision, which gave anyone whose rights were violated by a private company under the CCPA the right to go sue that company. So if you asked them to stop selling your personal information and they didn't, you could go sue them. That was an existential threat to Google, Apple, Verizon, like the big Comcast, like they were all against us. So in 2017 when we put it on the ballot, they formed a political action committee to oppose us at the beginning. It was just like $100,000 to pay to play. And then Cambridge Analytica happened. A moment in time, right? We're like, thank you Facebook. This is crazy. One of the few people who are happy about Cambridge Analytica. I got going back to the point I made before. That the conversation was around why should I care. This explainer point, you do a Facebook personality test to see if you're more like an apple than an orange and all of a sudden that data and whatever other data is underneath it is used to send you political ads and manipulate you. And so it proved our point. So there is a lot of pressure on the legislature and it ended up getting passed and it was a long sordid tale and I actually didn't support the, and I supported going through the legislative process, but because we had this like poison pill in it with the private random action, I think we actually could have gone even further in the legislation that we did. But still, it's done a lot of good. Cool. So do you have a lot of friends in the EU on the GDPR crew or like? No, so it was very, I can't say that we weren't influenced by GDPR, but it was, it just so happened that GDPR went into effect right when all of this was happening. It was really coincidental.  They're not creative.  Which is the concern with this sort of stuff is like, but as someone who just went through a GDPR, verification of a website, it was not fun. So like, yeah. And at least we had the California privacy stuff in place before that. So we had taken one step closer from there. So how do you go from working on that to joining the cool folks at awesome? Awesome. So I had, once I delved so deeply into privacy, I truly believe in privacy. And I also believe in technology that it's, I mean, like as someone who actually got toilet paper from Amazon today, like I couldn't live without it. And I also saw though, we had this like golden moment of time where the tech companies, they still were actually not spending that much on lobbying. I don't think they were very concerned about the regulatory process. Since then the regulation has become so broken. So we're passing very weak data privacy laws. There's no federal legislation. The wrong people I think are in the room to actually write this legislation. It's so hard to write because technology changes faster than the laws are actually implemented. And so there's never going to be good privacy legislation because it can't be written. And so I had this opportunity with awesome to address the same sort of privacy concerns. But through a solution that involves technology. And so we are creating hardware and software that you hear privacy by design all the time. And it's a DS term that is like more retrospective than actually truly thinking about privacy first. But at awesome, that's where we start. We start with trying to figure out what makes sense by minimizing data collection. Still giving people technology that people want to use. And that's easy to use.  But is very mindful and respectful of actually giving people control of their personal information. So Mary, I had a question. I want to ask you about your opinions on how companies like Google, like meta responding to, you know, the, there's not like a lot of legislation that are forcing them to make changes with the way they collect like cookies on their websites and across apps. But, you know, we're seeing companies like Google roll out the privacy sandbox initiative on the web. And of course on mobile, which is one of the things we wanted to talk about. So I wanted to ask, you know, what are your opinions on this initiative in particular from Google? Because I know that there's a lot of mixed debate from industry, you know, professionals who feel that Google is kind of pushing this forward through without everyone else being on board first. So I kind of want to hear your thoughts on this. Sure. So I want to first say that any movement that makes things more privacy protective, I think are good. And I think that again, like just having the conversation about how much data is collected and what types of data is collected is good. With that said, I'm pretty cynical. I think that if you look at when Google was unveiling the privacy sandbox, it's a timeline of when actually these data privacy regulations were coming online. And I think like even more so in Europe than in the US. And so it was 2019 when they first unveiled privacy sandbox and the flock, which was their original, they were going to put people into cohorts based on their online browsing activity. So it wouldn't be supposedly be traced to one single individual, but just a cohort of they never said the exact number. The problem, though, is that you're still using pieces of personal information to target individuals. And again, the power to target is the power to discriminate. So we go back to the original question of what is the harm here. And so even though these flocks and now they're changing the name of it, but it's still like somewhat similar to what it was before, Google is still allowed to target individuals and still allowing their advertisers. Like that's where the money comes from, right? Like it's their business model. I can't not do that. And so when that's your business model, there's no incentive to change it. So there's things like using your credit history for housing and it's not necessarily your credit score, but it's there's proxies. So you can see how much money a person earns or what types of websites they're looking at. And you can discriminate against them. That's brutal. So just to follow up on that, what in your opinion would a universe where advertisers and identifiers can coexist with privacy? Like what would that look like if it's not Google's vision? Right. In my ideal universe, I would get rid of targeted advertising that it's you go back to the model where you're watching everybody's watching CBS or ABC or whatever television network you're watching, but everybody is seeing the same advertisement. And so it's it's you're still seeing ads ads by their nature or manipulative.  I don't know. But it's actually that's improvement. Yeah. But what I'm saying is that like, I get ads that I like to see and then I've actually purchased the purchase because they're targeted to me. So like, so like, how do you balance, you know, the technology has enabled us to customize ads based on their interest. Isn't there a world where that is pro consumer? But I think that's your personal preference, right? And so that is a model where what it should be is that you can opt into it. So the default would be that you choose to see those personal ads and maybe you don't, but they don't even need that much personal information. Right. You can say the categories of interest that you tell them, not that they're following you around the internet and discerning from whatever website you're going to or what IP address you're logging in from that you might be interested in. And you make that decision, not Google or who was ever feeding you those advertisements. So I agree. Like sometimes it's helpful, but it shouldn't be the wizard of odds behind the screen. That's pulling those strings. I will say Clinton in our chat room said, I usually get targeted ads for stuff I already bought, which I like 60% of what I see is stuff I've already bought. Like I wish I could just be like, kind of like that. You did it already. Yeah. See what your kids are looking for online. Well, thankfully I'm not there yet, but I'm very afraid of that anyway. When? Yeah. I mean, to back up, just talk about the privacy sandbox real quick. So we, there was a slight story last couple of weeks from the developer blog about, you know, this developer sandbox, which basically kind of a suite of tools that, and that Google has announced to kind of address, you know, the previous, and they called themselves out for blunt approaches. And traditionally, you know, Google has, you know, Google and other, you know, folks that make money off of ads will use tools such as the ad idea, which is basically a device, you know, specific identifier that they can use to track your behavior across apps and websites. And so I'm feeling very cynical as I'm describing this. So please, please acknowledge that while I'm describing what the privacy sandbox is. But there's a lot of talk on, you know, the developer, you know, website and, and kind of product websites about how, you know, free content is super important on the internet, y'all, but free content is supported by ads. So in the, you know, and so I think it's so interesting to see that, that framing in so many different places in this blog post, in, you know, kind of saying, well, this is really great because the idea is that they want to basically wind down usage of again, the Google advertising ID, which does identify you by your device and tracks, you know, your data, your, your activity across apps and websites and sends it out there to kind of something which honestly, as I'm reading this is just extremely hard to understand. I'm not very good on the ad tech side, but it's, it almost feels like making you feel safer through obfuscation and confusion rather than anything else.  But someone still knows it and someone's still tracking that. And it's still, as I mentioned, again, not my field ad tech, but it's still a very obfuscated just trust us because we're Google and there's still a lot of kind of like confusion around it. But that's what Google is working on and they're testing on different, they're testing these different kind of solutions to try to alleviate this. And I want to go back to the first point you made that they keep on saying like, oh, like this, it's the free model that you, that we're all dependent upon. And that's the fallacy in the argument is that, yes, like that, I think what was the boom to all these companies and what made them so big and what they are today. But I don't know that it all has to be free and that we have to pay by giving away very sensitive and personal pieces of information. And I think that you have some models that are proving that people actually are, if the product is good, people are willing to pay for it. So for example, Strava, like people are willing to pay for it or we were just hiking in Idaho and all trails, like I pay for my subscription and I would probably pay more for it because it's an awesome product. And so there's, that's the fallacy right there, but it's also what Google and Facebook are dependent upon because their model is ad supported revenue. And it's interesting to see how much that money, the money side of it drives the conversation. I mean, like we're all, I often say this, I've said this for years and you know, podcasting about Android and technology is that like the vision of what technology can give us often runs straight into that wall of capitalism, right? And shareholder value and ultimately greed, right? And like we like to think that so much of the world of technology comes from a noble place and we want a better society and things like that, but ultimately the things that are really driving are the people who are driving shareholder value, which is why like an organization like Mozilla or whomever out there you see struggle because they're trying to do kind of what they see is what is good for all the internet. And so like it's interesting, you being an awesome to see kind of at a company that's taking that position in terms of how privacy is important and to try to merge that vision with a proper way to approach it with, you know, walk in the walk but also being a substantial business.  We are taking on the biggest players, but I think that there is a market for it and I think that we're doing it the right way. Right on. Well, cool. Well, we appreciate, I mean, this is great.  So that's great to have it. So we want to thank you for that. And you're going to hang out with us as we talk through the week stuff. So curious to hear what you think of the various Cummins and Goans and Android. But so we'll dive right into the news and Michelle, you got the first story here for us. That's right, Ron. And this is going to be a quick one because, you know, we want to get through the rest of the news, but basically Google published a blog post that covers some of the changes that have been going on with art or the Android runtime, which is literally the engine that powers, you know, apps, the OS on your device. So as Google explains, like all Java and Kotlin code is eventually compiled down into bytecode that's executed by the Android runtime on your device. And art updates are provided through Google Play system updates. In other words, they're literally pushed through Google Play. And even though this is a core component of the OS, it's able to receive updates through Google Play thanks to the project mainline initiative that Google announced way back with Android 10. And basically Google just talks about, you know, all the things that this enables, that they're able to roll out security fixes, compiler optimizations, and various other fixes and improvements that enable them to do things like rollout performance enhancements that give up to 30% app startup time improvement. So you see if you're watching the video be this little chart right here, Google shows like after they roll this out, they were measuring the average app startup time on some devices and there was significant performance improvement after they rolled it out. And so basically the Google just highlighting the work they've done over the last couple of months because this is kind of one of those changes that would actually introduce in Android 12, which is when our Android runtime became a project mainline module. But, you know, the way Google works is they do a lot of work and then they, you know, go look back and say, here's all the work we've been doing over the coming months and here's what's coming next. So that's basically the gist of this blog post and this announcement. Well, I gotta say, making the startup times, like those, whenever I see an app open up with the loading screen, I always feel like we failed a little somehow in the world, right?  It is a big deal. There have been actually even developer-centric APIs that are meant to kind of help us like bootstrap things a little bit faster and, you know, either kind of create profiles, like there's this thing called baseline profiles which is meant to kind of help you do certain things a little bit faster and make startup times faster and even just, even just splash screen APIs to kind of give you a little bit of, you know, like to kind of trick user brains into thinking that things are faster. So both, there's both, like, very concrete, you know, initiatives to make your app start faster and then also just things to make it feel faster. So yeah, it's a big deal. So anything that's actually concrete and actually makes it faster is a little bit easier because only so much a splash screen can do in an inpatient user. As an inpatient user myself, I emphasize, so no hate there. Mary, how's your user patient? So are you patient with apps? No. I am zero patient. Demand better from us, please. Fair enough, fair enough. All right, cool. Well, thanks for the run down there, Michelle. And every week we go out to our loyal patrons over at patreon.com slash android faithful to help us out with some of the news because we can't talk about everything. And if you go to patreon.com slash android faithful, sign up to become a patron. We love you for doing it. You can join for as little anything you want, really. But everyone who's a patron gets to chime in and vote on a story for us to talk about each week. And this week the three choices were YouTube music rolling out lyric support. Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 was allegedly spotted. Both of those got 20% of the vote. But the winner this week with 61% of the vote, which did not surprise me. And as an outlook user, I was happy to see Google Calendar is finally playing nice with Outlook. And if you live in both sandboxes of the world, Google and Outlook, you know that it's 2023 and it's a pain in the butt. Mary, are you on Outlook or on Google at all? No, I was laughing. I had to use Outlook once and it was not a nice experience. So I for my day job use Outlook and you're raising your hand there? Yeah, so even just getting Google Calendar set up to share my calendar with my wife on Google Calendar so she can see when I'm available took like a week to figure out. It was brutal. Yeah, I know, but I didn't put a lot of time into it. But anyway, so now thankfully Google Calendar now will display the name and roles of Microsoft Outlook users who invite Google Calendar users to meetings. This is going to roll out gradually to all the Google Workspaces and personal Gmail accounts starting it started last week actually so it started rolling out there and this goes along with some new features that they added including specifying a work location integrating appointment scheduling in the Gmail and of course material you in the Google Calendar widgets for Android. So I gotta say it's nice to see them like it's so funny there's so many different areas of Google and Android and things like that and sometimes you wonder if like the product like did they forget about this? Are they doing anything here? So is that in Google Calendar? They are just trying to push people into Google Calendar. Yeah, exactly. And Google Calendar is such an integral part. I mean, calendar in business is such an integral part of everything and so it's great. You know, Lord knows, you know, being on both sides of the fence, having all my side hustle businesses in Google and my day job being in Outlook it just sometimes be maddening and even getting an ICS and importing it never worked. Oh my gosh. Sorry. So I was glad to see you. It's like in the wrong time zone. Yeah, oh god, the time zones. And Outlook will automatically adjust your time zone and not tell you and so I'm getting meeting invites and I think when I'm in California I'm like, right? Sorry. The audience listeners, Wynn is just making a lot of eyes, like angry eyes right now at everything I'm saying. Yeah, so it was definitely a welcome, welcome, welcome change for sure. So, all right, cool. Well, we are going to pause for a moment and we are going to thank our awesome sponsor of which Mary is a part of, awesome products and you spell that for our audio listeners, OSOM and awesome products are the fine people who make the awesome privacy cable and it gives you much need to control over when and how your data is shared and what it is is it's basically a USB cable. It's an ingenious USB cable. It's got a built-in switch to enable or disable USB data and it's got an awesome LED light that flashes when data might be detected and what that does is that gives you control. The switch gives you the final say as to when data is actually transferred from your device with the security of an air gap. So whether you're worried about public chargers or you want to stop a connection when plugging into a car or a friend's laptop or you want to charge up your phone, you don't want that Uber driver possibly to be getting your data. You want to lock that data down and listen, software is fantastic but what we've learned over life is that hardware can be better than software. Some phones and tablets claim to block USB data through software and all software systems might have vulnerabilities and some Android devices can allow data in certain circumstances even when it claims to be disabled or when the switch is set to disabled. And best of all, and this is my favorite thing and I got to grab it because it's over here, the cable is durable. I love this cable. I love hardware design and I love what the folks at Awesome have done with this. This cable has got that awesome nylon woven kind of wrapper around it. It looks really nice. It's a braided nylon sleeve and it's got adenized aluminum end caps to keep your data protected with that lovely USB hookup there. So from all the scrapes and dings of travel to the grind of daily life, it's totally built to last and it shows. So very, very cool and I definitely respect the product design over at Awesome for sure. So the switch enables and disables the USB data pins. The LED light flashes when data may be detected as being transmitted. It's got USB Type-C to Type-C. It supports USB power delivery up to 60 watts, up to 20 volts and three amps. And USB 2.0 data speeds and best of all, you can get it for the low, low price of $30 on Amazon.com. That's right, just for $30 on Amazon, you can have the awesome privacy data cable. And all Awesome's been such a great supporter of Android Faithful. We want to thank them for their support and it's easy to make the joke that they're awesome but honestly, they're pretty awesome. So thank you, Awesome. Privacy.com slash privacy dash cable or head over to Amazon and search for OSOM Privacy Cable. And we thank Awesome for their support. Thank you, Mary, we really appreciate it. You're so welcome. Do you know what Awesome stands for? No. So it's out of sight, out of mind. So what we wanted to do is there's been privacy focused hardware in the past but it's always been very hard to use. And so we wanted to flip it around and show that you can actually use privacy protective hardware that's easy to use and that you want to use. Love it. That's awesome. Well, we appreciate it. I love my cable. I've used it in the field. It's in my laptop backpack and I take it with me into New York City and I know my data is protected. So that's awesome. Cool. All right. So with that, we're going to get into some fun hardware stories here. Here we go. So when you got the first one? Yeah, so from OSOM 2019-2023 launched in China their new flippable and their new watch. So the Find N3 Flip and the Watch 4 Pro were launched today in China. We love the flippables here and what I absolutely love about the Find N3 Flip and when I saw this picture, I was like, Ron, we're going to cover this this week. Oh, you got so excited. You messaged me. You're like, we're covering this. So it's kind of crazy because I feel like on previous shows, we talked about the Find, sorry, the Find N2 very recently and I know like our very own Florence Ion, you know, in kind of comparing these different flippables, it's a lot of it is about the cover screen, of course, and we talked a lot about the Z Fold 5 and the Razer Plus but what was kind of delightful about the Find N2 was this portrait, you know, very tall cover screen which Flo noted looked very much like a smartphone. So it's almost like kind of like a tiny mirror of your inner screen on your outer screen. Well, if you're not able to see it on the audio stream, well, on the on the audio only, I encourage you to go Google this or search it or whatever you feel like, you look for it Bing. Come on, Wen, Bing. I don't know, we got it, you know, like they're doing the, I don't know, chat GPT, right? So I guess trying to be inclusive. So imagine the Find N2 with that kind of smartphone looking cover screen and next to it rather than that kind of, I think it was like two or three, you know, simple lenses on the outside. Imagine one of those round, huge camera units, which by the way, it looks very much the Oppo Find X6 camera unit with, you know, a beautiful big round button full of three camera units and Hasselblad, of course, because Hasselblad partners with Oppo, you know, emblazoned across the middle and just stick that right next to the cover screen and that's what you got. It was like, it's basically taking the the Find N2 and sticking on this amazing, you know, camera unit on it. So it's kind of like, it actually reminds me of last we were talking to our dear friend Eileen about kind of like flippables and cameras as well. You know, I don't think they have you that crazy one inch Sony sensor in this, which is in the Oppo Find X6, but these cameras blow the Z Fold 5s out of the water. And I think that is just one of the big things about this is that while Z Flip 5 has a 12 megapixel ultrawide and a 12 megapixel main, this huge Hasselblad branded camera unit has a 32 megapixel telephoto, a 48 megapixel ultrawide and a 50 megapixel main and you know, just throwing a 32 megapixel front facing for that. You want other specs you want other specs as well. Well, you've got a MediaTek Dimensity 9000 plus, you've got 12 gigabytes of RAM and you got between 956 gigabytes and 512 gigabytes of storage and those are well, currently the dollars approximately 932 to 1042 USD for those two models. Which is affordable which is affordable. Which is affordable. Yeah, definitely affordable. I mean, for amazing cameras, I think also that it has a 4300, 4400 mAh battery with you know, honestly there's a lot of specs. I think right now the specs are all in the Chinese release. And I mean, I talk about it, but this might very well be your phone that we can't get in the U.S. We'll see. They are announcing a global launch very soon. Quotes soon, we're not exactly sure, but for you foldable and flipable fans that might be able to get one, it looks very compelling and it definitely is something that you know, competes in that flipable slash clamshell category in a lot of different ways. So, I don't know, what do you think? Would you buy that phone?  Yeah, well, Mary, I'm curious, what do you think of foldables these days? Are you do you think it's a fad or is the real deal? I I'm laughing because we have this the team from awesome came from essential and so the phone that was never launched, but a bunch of them still hold on to is the Gem and so there is a loud group within awesome that was loved to bring back Gem and Gem is a small phone. So, I hope there's a market there because I've seen it's really hard to it's hard to argue the foldable change in the world and I'm small phones that we we've talked about small phones in our old show I love the idea of that. So yeah, I mean, I think all different form factors were pro that because variety is the spice of life and we get bored with just the same old candy as someone that I am not a fan of the big purse I carry like a really small one I would be all for and I'm kind of cool. Yeah. Cool. All right. Well, let's switch gears over to gaming Michelle. What do you got here? So Qualcomm last week actually announced a new trio of chipsets, you know, the successor to its snapdragon g3x processor that was debuted in the razor edge device. So for those of you from who aren't familiar the razor edge is a portable handheld gaming console that was launched at on Verizon exclusively the 5G version and it was quite pricey at launch and you know people were kind of skeptical on you know whether or not this is actually going to be the future of gaming but Qualcomm is pushing forward and they've debuted three new chipsets in their g3 line sorry their g1 they have the g1 the g2 and the g3x gen 2 I know Qualcomm's naming is kind of, you know, confusing but specs here aren't really what's important. You know, you do have the g1 which is like the lower end processor you have the g2 which brings 5G support and you have the g3x gen 2 which is more powerful than the gen 1 by the 2x in GPU performance but the reason I linked this verge article in lieu of the press release from Qualcomm is I think it does a good job exploring really the context behind this device what it means for Qualcomm and like whether or not you know it's actually worth looking forward to in the future. So one of the things they brought up was quite interesting they had an interview with the product manager they talked about how Qualcomm is kind of looking beyond android and even beyond Windows potentially maybe launching something akin to like Linux with a compatibility layer so if you're familiar with the steam deck that device doesn't run Windows it runs Linux with a compatibility layer to get many games working on it and so maybe Qualcomm is exploring that avenue or maybe they are just hoping that android devices pick up in the future. Right now in my experience there aren't that many very demanding android games out there. You know you have Fortnite you have Genshin Impact War Thunder sorry I think it's called War Thunder just launched and that game for example supports ray tracing on mobile Snapdragon HN2 but in my experience it barely made a difference when I toggle it on and off so kind of curious to see whether or not Qualcomm continues pushing these Snapdragon mobile gaming chipsets forward and whether or not they are actually going to be picked up right now there was one great point brought up in the Verge article people kind of thought what is Qualcomm doing with their VR chipsets they have been making them for years and years and then all of a sudden you started seeing them end up in metas quest headsets and those are wildly successful so maybe like Qualcomm is betting maybe not right now but in like two, three years or even four years and beyond we'll start seeing a whole bunch of these gaming handheld powered by Qualcomm chips and I mean this is interesting because it's a huge I mean that entertainment vertical is a huge opportunity if you get it right and gamers and like my friends who have Steam decks love their Steam decks and you know they're right to be thinking in that direction and you know they're going to doesn't Qualcomm have an event coming up in October like their big Snapdragon kind of thing so like I feel like this is seeding the conversation ahead of that right as we learn more about what Snapdragon can do from the Qualcomm folks so I don't have time to play games so that's just me personally so cool alright well moving on to our last hardware story I love when this happens in the world it's been a while since we've had it but all the internet was a tizzy when ASUS reportedly shut down the Zenfone division and said that the Zenfone 10 would be the last phone in the line as you can see here if you're watching on the video as the article was updated to reflect the fact that this was not true and I feel for all my friends who work in PR and corporate PR as the ASUS press website they have a statement that says the ASUS Zenfone 10 to continue production we would like to address the rumor that the ASUS Zenfone 10 will be the last generation of the series and the Zenfone product line will be shut down this is not true good for them and being directed to the point they say we will continue our two main phone business product lines the ROG ROG phone and the Zenfone ASUS or ASUS I'm sorry ASUS has a strong commitment to our smart phone business and customers please reference our Q2 earnings call for more information and stay tuned for our 2024 product lineups so someone in the marketing part was having a really fun day I mean I'm sure it's onerous to have this like rumour around but the mic drop on this is not true bam if I were them I would have gotten up on a victory lap around my desk and then just add a little extra sassy at the end of that if anybody in the live chat is submitting episode titles this is not true should be considered for a lot of them because it's just like this is not true Google believes in privacy yeah so I love when that stuff happens so good job on ASUS for getting ahead of it and squashing the rumors because you want to do that when that happens and Michelle you got a Zenfone 10 didn't you or yeah I have one I think I even showed it off you did it's been a couple weeks you still like it yeah I mean I haven't really taken around taking my time to actually use it properly but it's definitely it's not much different from the Zenfone 9 and I love that Zenfone 9 I had it for months as my daily driver so I'm not expecting much different with the Zenfone 10 alright excellent alright well that will wrap up hardware and we actually have a whole bunch of app news because apps is always kind of like the area that we're like weakest on just because there's not always a ton of app news but this week we were blessed with lots of them and when I feel like it's been a while since we've made this joke but you can go for it yeah so Google is finally getting on board with pretty much every other social network and even apps like Signal and adding stories or at least that is what codes lose assembly debug in the team over at 9 to 5 Google seem to have found so Google is experimenting like I think everyone else has with content and the different ways that we can I guess different tech companies can engage and get users more engaged with content and they actually published something they had something out in the wild called web stories which was announced in 2020 which is very much just again imagine Snapchat, Instagram stories but you know basically generally portrait but highly visual, highly interactable ways of like producing kind of slideshow like kind of content that you know is you know very modern feeling I guess for lack of what a better way of saying it now these web stories are actually more creator and publisher focus like I think I was looking at they're basically done through WordPress and other kind of like CSMs but what assembly bug and 9 to 5 Google seem to have found is that Google is working on a way for users us end users to create stories basically and to be able to share them with other users and not only that but 9 to 5 Google also found what looks like you know the very specifically what looks like you know if you're an Instagram story person very much like an S story editor with the kind of common things like stickers and text and all kinds of things like that but not only that 9 to 5 Google also found something which seems to be called notes which allows users to drop comments search results with content moderation in place probably and that these notes will be able to be seen by other you know users and those users will be able to like and like slash heart these kind of things so again Google just kind of trying to tap in you know to that kind of story style that kind of again very social media ask highly visual highly interactable you know way of formatting content and the idea with web stories is that you're going to be able to be viewed through Google search images and discover if you have used discover like that and notice like carousels with big tiles of like you know stories that's basically what this is so eventually it might be in the hands of us users for better or for worse and not just in the hands of content greater so the notes itself 9 to 5 Google has a source that says that they're probably going to be in labs Google labs starting in September so yeah engagement interaction is any are any of y'all want to interested in using any of this it was like I feel like it was a couple years ago where like every app was rolling out stories like once they did you know like and didn't slack was going to do stories and then they pulled it back like so for what it's worth sorry we're going to go Mary Zoom story you're unmuted I don't know if any of y'all have seen the existing stories show up in like the Google Discover feed but the ones that are there already are really low quality so I'm hoping that you know more high quality more tier one publishers and like the ones we're all familiar with start picking up and start making stories so that we don't have you know the AI generated articles just turning whatever you know thing they played rise into stories it's already a problem in the Google Discover for you I don't know if you've been going through those articles it's just not interesting to me I mean I'll be frank it just hasn't been that interesting to me the it it I don't know it just hasn't grabbed me in and I don't I don't think I use Google search results as well as in Discover in the way that I use Instagram stories so it just kind of feels like there's a disjoint there it's just it doesn't kind of fit how I personally search results are so transactional like you search for something and you want to get it back you want to get that information and honestly I find stories to be distracting in this way in the same way that I have the AI the generative AI Google Labs thing turned on and my search results and that's immensely distracting because it's it's just keeping me forgetting from the search results so like I feel like search isn't something that you want to add stuff with just get to the point please kind of exactly that's what it's the distracting effect of it when you were even when you pulled up the article and they were reeling through the examples of it it's not pleasant to look at and it doesn't get to the answer exactly exactly just a quick note on the generative AI thing I still laugh every time this is a little funny but I still Google search for Mdash just to copy that because I use that all the time but now like I wonder how much processing power I've wasted on Google for generating the AI response it's giving me the history of the Mdash is it like that's funny well I don't know I'm just going to make some transition into the next story but I'm just going to preface this with I'm about to rant so I apologize Mary in advance but one of my pet peeves is YouTube music and podcast support so YouTube music over the past couple of months this past year or so has been slowly adding podcasts in YouTube music which makes sense they want to compete with Spotify they want to compete with Apple they want to have all your listening be in one place so YouTube music is not actually a music app the same way Spotify is it's music delivered via video in the form of videos on YouTube so why should podcasts be any different and their whole approach to podcasts has been backwards and I've been very critical of it and then now it's funny to see this hit the news I actually I heard about this a few weeks ago from talking to some folks that work at YouTube because YouTube music is going to be rolling out some upgrades for podcasts specifically and as the sub head on Android police that we're looking at in this story says RSS feed support will soon be coming to the app and at first glance if you're a podcast or you think great I'm going to be able to plug in my RSS feed and my podcast will be ingested into YouTube music the same way it works at Apple the same way it works at Spotify the same way it works at Pocketcast the same way it works at every other GD podcast app in the world but no, YouTube music has to do it their own way what they'll be doing is by the end of 2023 making it the ability for creators to ingest episodes via RSS so that's an important distinction and that's why I'm going to explain it what it will do is the way podcasts work RSS really simple syndication you publish a podcast all your information is in the feeds that goes out to a feed that people are subscribed to via Spotify via Pocketcast via Apple and if you change something in your feed it is syndicated and that change shows up on every app also if you download or listen to a podcast that metric flows back through the player back to the podcast host so that like us our podcast we can see X number of people downloaded this podcast and listen to it by the way thank you to everyone who listens to this podcast and downloads that we appreciate it so you have one singular spot for your metrics what YouTube music is doing is taking that RSS feed and sucking your podcast out of your RSS feed and ingesting it into YouTube to make a video that can be released as a quote-unquote podcast but is severing the tether between your RSS feed and their app so now no longer do you have one unified metric about how many people listen to your podcast because now you need to look at all your podcast host data and your YouTube music data right if you make a change to your show notes or to your title it won't get picked up on YouTube because they're not subscribed to the RSS feed they just ingested that data once you have to go back and manually change it this is like infuriates me and now Mary I know you think I'm a crazy person but infuriates me so much because it's YouTube manipulating and mangling what it means to be a podcast purely to get more video inventory on their platform ultimately to sell ads and it just bothers me so much so I'm sorry that was my rant there about YouTube music I don't think you're a crazy person I appreciate it but yeah it is just so frustrating and this news rolled out at the podcast movement conference that happened last week so all it is is the way to add video up to your account and it's not true podcasting as a loyal podcaster of almost 20 years now this just pisses me off it's just still this weird thing that they're trying to make YouTube music a thing and in ways that from the name of the product just seem a little bit odd so it just I was really excited when this article popped up because I was really really I was looking forward to the rant Ron so thank you thank you for the Ron rant this week I hope it delivered it just I listen I'm passionate about podcasting I mean here I am we're here every week right like we're talking about it and I just I want it to work and I want it to be good because I like I use YouTube music it's my music platform I want it I want my podcast to be on there and the way they're doing it it's it's it's podcaster what's the word I'm looking for aggressive is too harsh it's like it's I don't know it's just it's hostile that's the word I'm looking at podcast or hostile like why the metrics alone the podcast industry is you know millions I don't know if it's billions yet but maybe billions billions of let's say billions of dollars of advertising revenue throws through podcasting and has flow flow through podcasting and it's all dependent on metrics the IAB and podcasters and networks and apps have worked for years to set the standard so we can say this is a download this is a listen and YouTube is just thrown it out the window because it's because it doesn't suit their needs and it just it just pisses me off and they can because it's good exactly exactly but hey at least they don't get any personal personal you're playing in the privacy so I don't know YouTube YouTube music will until they get it right I will continue to rail against them I'm sorry and I like people who work at YouTube I like they're great I've heard the product manager speak and talk about their vision all this sort of stuff I just don't agree with it so oh well anyway all right cool run along let's get through our last couple of bits here so we can let Mary get back to her family but when you get the next one I don't know yeah so this is basically a follow-up to a story that a controversy that happened earlier this year where users discovered that on their Samsung devices when they went to settings and storage that the what was reported as being the OS or system files was in the tens of gigabytes so for example if you had like an S23 Ultra some users were finding out that system was taking up like 60 gigabytes and users were outraged like why is the OS 60 gigabytes inside why is there so much bloatware you know why why can't we use up all this storage so there was this like a lot of controversy and a lot of backlash against Samsung and other brands for what they thought was bloatware but in actuality it's kind of like a misunderstanding and kind of two-prong you know users misunderstanding what was going on and also the OS kind of badly representing what was actually going on behind the scenes so in one UI6 it looks like Samsung is going to be fixing this by changing how it calculates what comprises the system file so previously the issue stemmed from basically you know if you're familiar with any PC you know you buy a one terabyte hard drive right you expect to be one billion sorry one one terabyte you know like clean zero zero numbers but when you insert it into your PC you find out that oh you actually are missing several gigabytes of that storage and the reason is because the way they market the storage is different than the actual storage capacity that the OS you know sees and that's because of the way that computers work you know computers run on a base 2 system versus the marketing uses a base 10 system and when you do that conversion you end up losing quote quote losing some capacity you're not actually losing anything it's not actually physically you're losing space it's just a difference in the way it's advertised versus the OS season and that's what was happening with Android and because of you know Android lumping that all in system it was causing some confusion so basically Samsung's clearing that up by saying hey no this is not actually all system files this is just you know here's what the actual OS takes up and then for the rest of it we'll just put it up in other. Alright I know I'm incredibly frustrating to not truly see that especially when it comes to bloatware and Samsung is guilty of that big time right I mean when you've got your new Samsung phone right are you playing with that a ton? The pixel fold has been taking over but that is definitely the ritual with new Samsung's phone is to disable as much bloatware as uninstall slash disable disable disable as much bloatware as possible. Cool. Alright well that's going to wrap it up with some news and real quickly we want to tap into you the listener in our community because we love it when you all write in and want to remind everybody you can email us by emailing at contact at androidfaithful.com we want to hear what you think about everything we're talking about and I'm happy to report that Chuck and Thousand Oaks did write in this week and when you've got the first email. Yeah so hi again Chuck so Chuck writes this it was interesting what your listener thought was good service from Google here is what I consider service my daughter had an out of warranty note 10 on Verizon she had the extended warranty policy through Verizon she dropped her phone and totally shattered the screen and as you know those curved note screens are very expensive to replace couple hundred dollars at least she called Verizon first thing in the morning no problem at all getting someone on the phone in minutes Verizon said there was a twenty nine dollar deductible but they come to her home to fix it by late afternoon that same day a repair service got up at her doorstep and replaced the screen in about twenty minutes now that's the kind of service we should expect from everyone someone to talk to on the phone and home replacement service there is something to be said for buying your phones from a major carrier instead of the manufacturer regards Chuck and Thousand Oaks California and this is in reference to the emailer last week on the show who shared their experience about working with Google and getting their pixel 5a replaced with a 6a and getting it shipped for a week and all this sort of stuff and honestly this that's Verizon said someone in her house and in the same day within twenty minutes got it replaced that's good service I'll give them that credit that's pretty good twenty nine dollar deductible not bad I'm not a Verizon customer but that yeah that's crazy that's good stuff well thank you Chuck and our last email comes in from Craig from Scotland I love getting international emails Craig writes in he says there was talk of seeing androids in the wild my wife and I were at the gym a couple of weeks ago and there were only two other people there I noticed they both had pixel phones so that meant everyone in the gym that day was using a pixel crazy in the coconut which by the way is my new favorite phrase crazy in the coconut thank you Craig I love you for that cheers as Craig and thank you Craig for writing in yes indeed we love getting reports of Android in the wild back in the day it was the Samsung Galaxy Note that was our first like has they actually seen anybody on the subway that that's always my litmus test like when foldables are coming out it's like great is there anybody out in the wild actually using foldables or not and sure enough there were which is pretty cool so alright and that will wrap up our show reminder you can email us at contact at android faithful we want to hear from you please write in we're not getting as many emails as we were earlier in the summer so get to your email clients and start asking your questions or share your stories and that's how we created it alright well that's going to wrap us up Mary thank you so much for joining us we really appreciate you sitting through our Android nonsense and a great time thank you so everybody can find what you do over our awesome privacy that's o s o m privacy dot com definitely check it out we thank them for the support of the show and Mary we thank you so much for joining us this week thanks for having me excellent alright cool Michelle you want to thanks for so you know as I mentioned last time I was on you know I started up a patreon of my own so for those of you who want to support my Android reporting on the web if you want to see me continue to do all that stuff mostly on social media you want to see some exclusive scoops that I post on occasion on my patreon feel free to go to patreon dot com slash Michelle Ramon it's you know minimum three dollars a month if you can spare it you know also of course you should support this show as well but if you can spare also some to support me I'd appreciate it thank you awesome well thank you Michelle it's good to have you back we missed you although we did while you were gone we did have stories that referenced your tweets so while you weren't here you're always like Ross and Monsters Inc you're always watching always judging alright cool why don't you plug away yeah so I'm an Android developer that is my job you can find things about my day job and other side hustles that I do at my website randomly typing dot com if you're interested in my technical talks about Android stuff there's the talks links to videos and code there and if you are a social media type person you can generally find me at code monkey in places and if that person isn't me let me know I just need to know I just need to I need to squat I need to squat the screen name wherever I can oh and by the way I got my it's not on my watch six classic so I want to give it a shot and maybe if you all are interested in knowing what the watch six classic is like as especially someone who doesn't often use a smartwatch let me know write in and let me know maybe I can do a little review or something of it so yeah we're gonna hold you to that when you should only if you write in like alright cool and lastly I can be found on the internet at Ron XO whether it's X or Twitter whatever Facebook Instagram tiktok I think tiktok I'm the Ron XO but I never post on tiktok so I'm gonna go looking for me there I'm on threads I'm on Instagram Instagram I'm most active on you can find me here always love to hear from everybody really appreciate it and additionally as Michelle said we want to remind everybody and thank everybody for supporting us on Patreon go to patreon.com slash android faithful there you can sign up for as $5 a month where you get access to the pick a story for us to talk about on the show get access to our discord for $10 a month you get all that plus an ad free version of this podcast and then of course for $20 a month you get all that plus an exclusive t-shirt which a couple people have ordered which is pretty exciting and I do want to remind everyone we do have a crazy level for $500 a month you can come on the show you help us do the show that's all no one's done it yet I'm shocked but we'll see if someone does because that's a fun thing so thank you go to patreon.com slash android faithful we thank everyone for their support and we thank you for listening to the show you are the reason why we do it the android community we love you but that's going to wrap us up for this week we hope you enjoyed it this podcast publishes every Tuesday night and you can go to android faithful.com where you can find subscribed links to all of our social media etc and of course as I mentioned you can email us at contact.androidfaithful.com and that's going to wrap it up for this week we'll see you next time on android faithful


Season's greetings everyone, welcome to tonight's webcast from Blackstar HQ Northampton. I'm Steve and tonight really we're going to look at some different models in different ranges that Blackstar do that might be really good ideas for treating yourself or maybe treating a loved one. So we've got some high-end stuff that we do right down towards the very, very small entry-level price point gear. And I'm going to run through some of the features of each one and hopefully give you some really good ideas and incentives to try the gear or maybe treat that loved one as we said. So the first thing I'm plugged into is really where our heritage lies with Blackstar. It's the larger valve equipment. So here we've got a 50-watt Blackstar Series 1 head. It's four individual voices or channels with our own EQ section and Blackstar's patent ISF to get our British or American styles. We've got a master section and then a power soak, DPR dynamic power reduction which allows us to alter the wattage without changing your tone which is very, very important. There's not many products out there that will let you do that. Often if you switch it to a lower wattage, you will lose certain characteristics in your sound and DPR doesn't do that. It allows the sound to travel exactly the same at lower volumes. Now the interesting thing that we've got here, because of room this evening, we've got the Blackstar Series 1 here going direct into the desk. So the sound that you're hearing in a moment is a direct signal. There's no cabinet plugged in so you don't need any load to use this head. Now the cool thing is if somebody is at home, maybe it's yourself and you've got a small mixer and you do recording, whether it be the simplified version of recording on your iPad via Cubase or GarageBand or something, or if you're using more professional gear, it's possible for you to actually use the Series 1 without having a cab pumping. And at home it's not always advisable to do that so if that's being controlled through a small mixer, you can get everything that you would expect out of this at low, low volumes which is really, really important. So I'm just going to run through some of the tones. It's a very, very basic amp, very easy to use and you can get your sound straight away. So in the clean section we have two choices, a warm clean and a bright clean. The bright clean, as we've discussed many times, gives you more of a break up. It's more of a boutique style sound. Warm clean being more of a full bodied, modern sound. So I'm just going to run through those two at the moment with some strumming chords for you. So we're starting off on bright clean. Really nice sweet tone. On to warm clean, what you'll notice now is that we get a lot more low end and a lot more full bodied sound. Now one thing that not many people realise is that Blackstar, the innovation that goes into our amplifiers is second to none. I truly believe personally that we make the best amps in the world and we give you the most versatility. You can go from two cleans there and you can also drive them really hard as well. So if I raise the gain stage on those channels there, we get a lot more bite. So let's go for a bright clean and now try and imagine an old boutique 60s, 70s style amplifier. So we get a lot more of grit to our tone. If I go to my neck as well, it still remains quite clean. The guitar I'm currently using is a Fender Telecaster, just to let you know that this is a stock pickup. But this one is a Seymour Duncan little 59, so it's a stacked humbucker. So naturally on this position I will get a little bit more bite. But even on the neck pickup, I'm still getting that grit there. On the bridge, onto warm clean. So again we can really drive both clean sounds and that's really, really useful. You can get a lot more tonal characteristics sometimes if it's gaining a little harder. You can roll your volume back to clean up still. So when this is really pushing, you can get some wonderful, wonderful sounds. So onto the crunch channel on here. What we have now is again a volume and we have a crunch and then a super crunch. Super crunch being more of a full bodied crunch if you like, more of an up-to-date scooped sound. So this is more of the classic style. So you can see we're kind of starting off where we left off before with the cleans pushing really hard, which is really, really nice. So this is more of your kind of classic, I'll play some licks, put you in mind of it. Now this series one is using EL34s, which are inherently a classic British valve for your parent stage. And it gets that really cool classic British rock sound. So this is perfect for that as well as those maybe slightly more modern full bodied cleans that might be the other side of the pond if you know what I'm saying. Onto super crunch, you should notice quite a big difference here. I'm going to turn the gain up all the way so you can see how much we can produce. So a really, really nice singing lead tone. But the important thing here is that we've got the ISF all the way over to that British side. If we bring it over to that American side, we get more of the mid-scoop, the mid-cut, more kind of like an American sound if you like. Really cool, really versatile tones, nice and easy to use. And importantly as well, the clean channel on this side, especially on warm clean, is perfect for multi effects pedals and that sort of thing. So if you're a guitarist that might be using that on the floor, this is perfect for that as well. So this is kind of the guitar amp that would set you back roughly around that £1,000 mark. Obviously we can only speak at the moment for the UK, but around the world I'm sure you'll be able to find online your local pricing in local stores. But this is really the, like I said, the heritage of Blackstar. It's where we really started and began with large valve equipment which is historic and the sound of rock and roll. So we'll leave that alone for the moment and then we'll revert to the Club 40. Now this is mic'd up traditionally. We've got a condenser in the front there to get a good tone. On here we have two channels again, but importantly we have a voicing switch in the middle, so we can obtain everything that we previously talked about here. Clean, warm, clean, bright, crunch, super crunch. So you can get all of those style tones. Again, a three tone EQ, three band EQ there with our ISF on the end, our patent. This one has built-in reverb though. It's a digital circuit and it has two choices. On the reverse of the amplifier there's a button that will give you a light reverb and also a dark reverb for different styles. But importantly the reason the very, very clever guys here at Blackstar chose digital reverb as circuitry because spring reverb which is the traditional old-school way of doing things was very clumpy, very noisy. If you touch the amp or bang the amp you would often hear it moving around which was always a worry if you were carrying valve amps around. And also it used to work very, very good with cleans, but on overdrives and crunches it often got a little bit messy. So with the digital reverb it's a lot easier to control. So we'll run through that now. Okay, so currently I'm in the clean channel and my switch is actually out which means it's bright clean. If you own one of these amps or one of the Blackstar venue range just to let you know a very, very simple way to remember the voicing switch options is if it's in it's more of a modern sound. So bright clean, warm clean, semi crunch, crunch, super crunch. That easy way to remember it. This Club 40 is actually a special addition. We've got the basket weave on the front there. Hopefully you'll be able to get a bit of a glimpse of that on the screen. These are limited run. There's only about 100 in the UK. We're looking enough to have one here tonight to try. And also there's a vintage 30 1x12 speaker in there. Normally it's a Celestion 7080 for the guys that are into their spec. So the vintage 30 is a more sought after speaker if you like. You get a lot more low end and a bit more punch. So this is a special addition. And this is going to be around about the 700 pound mark somewhere around there. So yeah, we've got a little bit of reverb on there already. But let's choose a warm clean at first. Generous reverb, getting a little bit John Mayer-esque on you there. But that's a really nice warm clean full bodied sound. Really cool. If we go for the bright clean, you should notice again that break up. To the bridge pickup. Some Rolling Stones action there, but that really nice old school boutique thing. You know, you can hear it there. Really nice. So over to the warm clean again. Over to the crunch channel or overdrive channel. So here again we have the voicing switch. So the gain's quite far back there. If you were in the old school area of things, if you like, definitely be good with like a Les Paul style guitar, that kind of sound. If we go into the voicing switch, if I go from actually just let a chord ring out, hopefully you should hear quite a substantial difference there with the gain stage. So with the voicing switch out for more of an old school crunch sound, we get more pushed mids when it's in. We get those mids scoops a little bit. And with the help of the ISF, we can start to achieve those high gain American modern sounds. So if I go from voicing switch out, low gain, and I'll do a real big difference where I'll push the gain slightly, put the voicing switch in, take the ISF over to the US side, and you'll see the big, big difference. So again, two cleans, two crunches, really versatile. Really, really useful. So again, four tones. The clean warm on here is again great for pedals. So if you're a guy that uses multi effects or pedals, brilliant amp for that. So this is a 30 watts of Valve EL34 British power on stage. And again, limited edition. Check it out at your local stores. Okay, so onto some of the smaller products to look at. This first one here is the ID core. So this is more of definitely a home digital amplifier. We've got the original ID series, which I'll come to really last. I'm going to jam some tracks through there. But ID core is definitely built to be the home amplifier. There's two stereo speakers. So we have an option here for programmability. We can store six of our favorite sounds. We've got six voices, of course, to choose from. 12 super wide stereo effects that you can have three simultaneous. And it's a USB recording device as well. So we can send a cable here to an external device to record with. The same with our original ID series, which is very important. For example, I at home use GarageBand on my iPad, just getting ideas down, just take a cable, USB cable into that and away I go. Very, very simple. So I've got some of my presets on here just to give you an idea. But the really unique thing about this is, and you will hear a little bit of it on your headphones or speakers, because we've got the two microphones here, but because the stereo speakers, the super wide stereo aspect of this is awesome. It would make a great present for anybody at this time of year. We do a 10 watt, a 20 watt, which is this one, and also a 40. And they're all relatively quite small. But the unique thing about this is because it's linear speakers, full range flat response, you can play your games through here via a cable from your mobile device maybe, or you can listen to music that sounds just like a very, very good quality hi-fi, or boom box. So let me show you some of my presets and hopefully you'll get a really good idea. This is my clean warm. Really nice. Crunch. Super Crunch. There's some really expansive delay. Overdrive 1, more of a high gain sound. So that's some of the sounds on the ID Core Stereo 20. This is going to set you back roughly just over 100 pounds, less than 200. Put it that way. So onto here, this is our HT1, which is a very unique product. It's a one watt valve amplifier. So before we do a demonstration on this, we're just going to move the microphones over. You'll probably notice we've got two mics on the Stereo 20 ID Core, but we're just going to single out one of the mics for the HT1. Now this product is a one watt valve amplifier for practicing at home, for recording. Again, you've got two channels, but if you manipulate the gain and the volume, you can start to recreate some of the stuff we've previously talked about. You've got EQ, which is the ISF, so you can get the British or American styles, and then we've got a built-in reverb as well. So without further ado, this is basically our clean tone. And importantly, you can have any sound out of here at any volume. So valves give you a certain feel. If you're a guitarist that uses valve amps, you'll know.  This valve still has that tonal characteristics that most guitarists will absolutely adore, but it's very, very minimal cost. Again, you're looking around about the £200 price point here. This is a HT1. So with a clean channel, you can keep the gain fairly low there, and the volumes are around about halfway. Now if we start to push that gain, we can get it to really drive like the boutique thing that we've been talking about. So more of a clean warm sound, more of the bite. Now if I put the overdrive select button in, we're now definitely in the realms of gain, high gain. So if we back that gain off, more of a classic sound. Really nice. Pushing the gain stage, high gain. If you notice, I moved the ISF around to the American side there, and I'll keep moving that back and forth between the USA and the British side so you can hear the EQ chain. So that's the HT1. Plenty of noises going on as far as cleans, crunches, high gains. At low volume, it's a one watt valve amp. Perfect present. So onto our brand new product, which is the Fly. The Fly is a 3 watt mini amplifier. It's a linear speaker. So importantly, we can play again music through here. We can also use it to play our games through via a phone, all that kind of stuff which I'm going to show you which is a really unique part of this product. Now this is going to be in stores December. This is an exclusive product. It's just been launched. It's battery powered as well as mains. And also here you might notice there's a little area where we can connect something else. There's going to be another speaker which is going to be available very soon that you can buy as an extra add-on that will make it into 6 watts, which is very, very cool. But we use in here, we've got six AAs. And I've got to say I've had this Fly for my car stock when I've been travelling internationally and around the UK for around about a month now and the batteries are still working. I've also used it on a couple of Skype Cores which again is a unique part of this product because it's a linear speaker, very clean, very crisp, very clear. So we have again a volume with an overdrive switch, so in that respect it's very similar to the controls on the HT1. We've then got ISF so we can get our British or American styles but also importantly we have a tape echo delay in here which is very, very cool. We can get some ambience at low volume. So this is going to be perfect for the home, the office. You can use this for your multimedia needs as well so you can connect your computer to this and have it for your computer monitors. Of course, when the extra one is involved as well, that will be perfect.  So if we keep it clean at first, we can then drive the clean a little harder to get again the boutique breaker. Really nice for that. We can then add some ambience with the delay. So what we can do here, we have a separate time control and then a delay level. So if we keep the time fairly short, we can start to get that almost plate reverb sound if you like which is good for also country styles, blues styles, punk style. If we add more gain there with that style of reverb stroke delay, really quite cool and that was on clean still. Of course, I just went to the bridge pickup there to get a bit more grind. If we back the gain off and switch the overdrive switch in there, now we're in the realms of crunch of course. So there the gain is around about 11 o'clock so it's fairly low. The most gain we can get if we push it all the way, really something special. Now let's add some delay so we can hide behind those solos. So make it a bit more spacious, a bit more on the level. I'll give it a bit of a click so you can see where we're at. So that's a really, really nice ambient addition to your tone. Of course you can use that on the clean as well. Now I'm going to show you something really quite cool here. We're just going to play a little section of a track and also I'm going to show you something else here. Which will hopefully inspire you to think, actually this is a really, really great product. This is going to be around about £50. Three watt battery powered small amplifier that sounds like an amp. That's really important. A lot of the competitors products that are out there, they don't quite have that sound that you're after. So let's try some music through here. So just maybe some sort of backing track. So you can see there I was just jamming along with the song through there with my guitar and the music. So imagine playing along to stuff like YouTube and all that stuff. It's a really, really nice device. Also I'm just going to show you how nice it sounds with playing a game through there. So if you've got young children, they might be learning the guitar, but also most of them will be playing their games on their computers and smart phone devices. So you can hear... EA Sports. It's in the game. Sounds very good.  So a very, very, very cool product, the Fly. Hitting the stores this December. So onto our last product this evening. But before we head over there, we're just going to talk about some of the other options from Blackstar as well. So let's just plug into the ID 30. We'll move the mic over in a moment. So Blackstar have merchandise for sale. T-shirts you can probably see behind me. We've got some really, really nice hoodies. T-shirts, beanies. We don't sell Christmas hats, but you can get those pretty much anywhere. But we have things like armbands, which are really cool key rings. We have lanyards. We also have some really nice caps going in, some plectrums, some really cool mugs for your cup of tea and your coffee. And we've got some sweatbands if you play tennis. Or if you want to wipe that brow if you've got a sweaty gig. So there's plenty of stuff on there, some really, really nice products for presents and ideas. And simply it's just blackstaramps.com forward slash store. And you can hit there, and we can send that directly to you. So you can get some really nice extras for the seasonal period. So make sure you check that out. www.blackstaramps.com forward slash store. So folks, make sure you check out the merch store. And also, you know, if you're looking to treat yourself, again, we've discussed it many times, but get into your local dealers and check out the fly. It's very, very cool. And also the smaller products. If you're looking to practice maybe late at night, if you've got neighbors, if you live in a small apartment, make sure you check them out because they're very, very good. And they offer lots of options. So lastly, we're going to go through the ID 30 here. Now again, this is a product that you could use at home, but also you could use for gigs. We have a very unique feature on here called True Valve Power TVP. And it gives you six choices of power amp options, power valve options, so on here you can marry the voicing with the ISF and the tube to try and recreate some great classic amplifiers as well as build your own and profile your own. At the moment, I've got a really nice super crunch which suits the sound of my neck pickup on the guitar, which I've previously set this evening and I've got a little bit of delay, a little bit of reverb and I'm going to jam along with the track because on my computer, I've got a software program called Insider Software. Inside of software we've discussed many times, but if it's new to you, it's a piece of software that's free to download from our website, blackstaramps.com. You'll find a link from there. And it's free to download and you can use it on Mac or PC. Now, there's one thing on there that you can use and you don't necessarily need to use it with a blackstar amp. You can use the phrase trainer. Now, if you're not familiar with what a phrase trainer does, it essentially allows you to import an MP3 file of music and you can slow it down and it won't alter its pitch.  But the rest of the software, things like patch library, online sharing community, tuner, all that kind of stuff is used via either the ID series or the ID core that we were looking at earlier tonight. So you can get a grip of what's going on with that. If you download it, check it out. I've done a webcast before on the insider software as well. So make sure you check that out on the Blackstar YouTube channel. So we're going to jam along to end things this evening in a seasonal sense with Stevie Wonder. I'm Stevie and I hope I've been wonderful this evening for you, all sorts of. We're going to end with Superstition. I'm going to jam along and get a little bit more of a bluesy kind of vibe and any questions that you might have forward them to inquiriesatblackstaramps.com or if you need any further advice to what to buy. Some extended advice on the digital products. My email is steve.marksatblackstaramps.com Have a great, great Christmas and New Year. Remember to follow all the social media feeds as well, of course. Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, of course, and our website to keep up with artist information and so on. So thank you very much for watching and I'm going to sign off now and hopefully play along to some track. So we'll see you soon. Keep it loud. Keep using amplifiers. Keep writing rock and roll songs. See you soon.