SammyGuru with Jeff Springer
SammyGuru with Jeff Springer
S25 Ultra vs Pixel 9 Pro XL Deep Dive + Where did all the Updates go?
This week we have the Pixel 9 Pro XL in studio and run down a full display and camera comparison. Torrey elaborates a bit on his one month review of the Galaxy Watch UItra that we posted on the site this week. We try to contain our boredom/anger from the lack of Samsung updates this month. Seriously, where are our 6.1.1 and 7.0 beta updates Samsung? Come get your anger out with us, for episode 10!
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Follow Jeff on X (Twitter): https://x.com/jspring86az
Follow Torrey on X: https://x.com/T_Martin_23
Check out our website: https://sammyguru.com
Welcome back everybody. This is episode number 10 of the Sammy Guru podcast. My name is Jeff Springer and with me, as always, is my co-host, Tori. Tori say hi, hey, how's it going? And yeah, we made it to number 10.
Speaker 2:Congratulations to us Number 10.
Speaker 1:It's a very exciting episode. I'm very happy about that. A lot of podcasts don't make it beyond episode number one or two, so making it to episode 10 is a pretty big accomplishment in my opinion. We've got a lot to talk about this week. There's actually a huge list of show notes that we're going to get into.
Speaker 3:It is.
Speaker 1:Torrey posted his one-month review of the Watch Ultra today, so we're going to revisit that a little bit. There was a ton of news. We got some good Q&A. I have the Pixel. I've got a lot of devices in here. I got the pixel 9 pro xl right here. I got the bellroy case on it. But uh, what color? Let me actually show you guys the phone color if you haven't seen my video the hazel color right here. So it's supposed to be like a green color but it's actually in certain lighting it's like a gray. So I don't know how it'll show up on this video if you go check out my video on youtube. But we're going to talk more about that bad boy today as well. But before we get started into all the tech, samsung goodness story how was your week teaching? How was life? How's it going?
Speaker 3:Long, but I mean overall good. Let's see, this is the third week of teaching. It is Wow, it's just flying by. I know it is flying by already, but it's a good time with the kids. Let's see, also started teaching at the community college.
Speaker 1:That's right, your adjunct thing. Yeah, just one class.
Speaker 3:But it's a good group though.
Speaker 1:Yeah, one class, but a good group. How?
Speaker 3:many students do you have in that? Ooh, I want to say 25 on the roster, but I think after this week I'll probably go down to like 18.
Speaker 1:That roster, but I think after this week it'll probably go down to like 18.
Speaker 1:That's kind of how it always goes at the community college right these kids are usually working most of them full time, definitely all of them usually part time and so they realize, hey, I'm not going to be able to do this. They thought they could sign up for a class and take it. It's going to work out just fine. But then they realize, oh, I couldn't actually handle the class load plus my job, the daily life and other responsibilities I'm certainly glad I'm not back to teaching.
Speaker 1:My old job at the university. They started back for meetings this week and for the first time in 12 years I am not partaking in those meetings. So as hard as I've been working here at Sammy Guru with the site and all the other stuff I've been doing, I try to keep reminding myself, even though when I'm tired at least I'm not doing that.
Speaker 3:Yeah, because that's a whole different time.
Speaker 1:All the work that I do here benefits me and the business directly and I'm kind of working for my own benefit and financial freedom, not making the university rich that I work for, so I'm very pleased about that overall. What else Anything else going on? Did you get sleep this week? Is this finally a week where you've started not getting sleep?
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is definitely the week where I just started not to get sleep. We had open house last night, so that was a very long day as well. Yeah, so we're going to keep moving on, and I even started taking a physics class.
Speaker 1:Oh, you're taking a class as well. Yeah, just online Physics 2?, is that? The continuation of what you were doing, because, remember, when we first started the podcast, the very first week, you were still doing Physics 1. Yeah, and you finished that over the summer and I'm doing Physics 2. Now you're continuing your education Electromagnetism.
Speaker 1:That's a fun subject. A lot of calculus in there calc three and stuff like that so some fun integrals For you guys who are math fans. If you're not a math fan, sorry. Tori and I are mathematicians, so we've got to talk a little math on the podcast too, and your night's not done right because you're going to do something with your girlfriend, you said tonight, so you've got a long night still ahead of you.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it turns out the friends of our sister who was going to be on town. They're only going to be doing some day stuff, so we just kind of switched plans and we're going to go bowling.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, so I'm not going to have to go to sleep, so it's still just going to be.
Speaker 3:I know I would like to go to sleep, but you know you also still have to be present. You know in the relationship. So everything in life is work. You know in the relationship, you too. Everything in life is work, you know.
Speaker 1:Even fun is sometimes work. It feels like it. Yeah, otherwise, I've been just continuing to work on the website. We've made a lot of improvements this week. We're going to have an About Us page contact page up there soon, trying to make the website faster. We had a little snafu overnight, like around midnight Arizona. The site went down for like an hour and I was panicking, but it turns out Amazon Web Services were just down for like everybody, so it wasn't like a specific issue to Sammy Guru. I thought that we were being like attacked, like a denial of service attack.
Speaker 1:I was like oh no we're under attack, but it turns out we're too small and no one still cares about us Enough to denial of service attack us. That's okay, though. We will get there, but we do have now over 1,000 daily readers on the site. That's a massive accomplishment. Just four weeks ago, just a month ago, we were at less than 100. So 10x the readership in only a month. So I highly appreciate everybody who's checking out the website and we love bringing you guys the news coverage. We're hoping to eventually get there to be one of the biggest Samsung news sites on the internet. So thanks for the support.
Speaker 1:With that in mind, let's jump into some news, and actually I put this especially before the news piece here. I want to talk a little bit about one thing from last week, so this is kind of like a little rewind segment before we do this week's news. Last week, we talked about the Team Pixel drama from the Google event, where they were now requiring reviewers or influencers or whatever you want to call them that were part of Team Pixel to prefer the pixel in their content or they would no longer be able to associate with Google. Well, of course, as expected, a PR person from Google came out and said we're sorry, we did that. We missed the mark here. We're going to remove that from the program. So that was like on a day or two after we recorded the podcast on Saturday and Sunday and I went back and updated my article on the website to put Google's statement. I mean, I'm not surprised by this, but it's a good thing that they did. Now did they go?
Speaker 3:back and add me back to the program. No, they did not.
Speaker 1:They still don't want anything to do with us, probably because we are a Samsung-specific website. Now I made this choice consciously when I decided to switch over to covering Samsung more than anything else. One because I love Samsung and two because there's just more to talk about with the customization and everything Samsung does than other brands. So I made this decision. I knew I probably wouldn't get review units from Google or Sony or any of those people, and I'd have to spend my own money to buy the phones. And that's exactly what happened. In fact, this week I bought a Google phone and a Sony phone.
Speaker 1:I got both of them, and I paid lots of money for both of these phones. They were not sent to me, they were purchased. And and I paid lots of money for both of these phones. They were not sent to me, they were purchased, and we'll talk about both of them a little bit in the show. So congratulations and bravo to Google for doing the right thing. I'm glad that everybody who's still a member of Team Pixel is going to be allowed to say whatever they want to say about these devices, because that's really the way it should be.
Speaker 1:The other thing I want to mention because I almost forgot, before we get into the news Jonathan, my four-year-old son. He always gives us some animals or dinos for the videos on YouTube. He has kindly given us one of his larger animals, because we kind of have a more wide shot on the podcast, so you guys could still see it the beautiful earth dragon which I believe we got from Barnes and Nobles. He loves the dragon collection they have there. I think it's from. Schleich is the name of the toy company. It's a German company. They make some really quality toys. They're pretty heavy. Feel that right there, tori? Yeah, I see it's pretty heavy.
Speaker 1:Oh wow, yeah, yeah, they're quality you definitely don't want, like if someone hit you with that like it would knock you out.
Speaker 1:You could use them as a weapon toys as some sort of like projectile, and you could definitely definitely knock someone out. So let's go ahead and get right into the news today a bunch of stuff that I highlighted from the website that samit has covered, and the biggest one which I made a video on and finally, like for the first time in I don't know how many years it probably been two years google finally decided to pick up my video and recommend it in the video tab of Google search. I don't know why they would ever do that anymore.
Speaker 1:I got external views from this and the video already has close to like a hundred thousand views. It's about the new one UI home update. So, uh, it was very short video. It's always like Google doesn't push your videos, where you put a lot of effort into them and then you make a video that takes like 10 minutes and they're like here. You go ahead and have 100,000 views and I'm like okay whatever I'll take it.
Speaker 1:I guess I would prefer that on my really interesting videos that are, I think, more useful to people. But there's a new update to One UI Home and if you have an S23 or S24 Ultra, I highly recommend you go and get it. If you don't have it yet, there's an APK link inside of the article on the website where you can download it. This is version 15.5.03.1. And it basically is the version of One UI Home from the Galaxy's default 6, one UI 6.1.1. So if you have a Fold 6 or Flip 6, you already have this, but it's much smoother on the S23 Ultra and S24 Ultra. So if you do have one of those S line phones, I definitely recommend you go and download this and install it.
Speaker 1:I showed off the animation, smoothness and transitions in my video on YouTube, which I'll also put in the show notes, but it's really impressive how smooth the animations are. Usually I don't make videos. You guys know we've talked about it on the show. I don't really. I'm not an animation nerd, I'm not obsessed with animations like Ice Universe and some of the other guys in the Samsung community, but I do feel like this is a really big improvement and it's something that you'll notice and maybe that's why it was so popular in terms of the video.
Speaker 3:Now the bad news, tori, for you.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I was going to ask about that and I know you're about to ask and, in fact, if you go to my YouTube video and you scroll down the comments and you can probably guess because Tori was about to ask it as well what is the most common comment that you would find Does this work with the S22 Ultra? Because does this work with the S22 Ultra? Because a lot of people started subscribing to my channel when I first started doing Samsung only, and that was with the S22 Ultra. So I have a bunch of people subscribed who are S22 Ultra users still and the answer is, unfortunately, no. The reason is because Samsung is not testing One UI 6.1.1 yet with the S22 Ultra, and so it has to be something they're already testing for it to be compatible. I guess because this APK was supposed to work with those specific phones, so it won't install if you try to install the APK on an S22 or S21 or Fold5 or Flip5.
Speaker 3:See how it is, yeah, so unfortunately, it may work eventually.
Speaker 1:Of course the S22 Ultra will get the One UI 6.1.1 update eventually and then it will work, but for now, I'm sorry, it does not.
Speaker 2:So that's the first thing that we're going to talk about.
Speaker 1:Sorry to disappoint all the S22 Ultra users. The next thing that I think Tori would probably be interested in because he has a Galaxy Watch, of course and that is the Google Maps now is going to work offline on your Galaxy Watch. So now you can save Google Maps data to use offline, which means if you are going on a hike or something and you don't have the LTE, of course we have the LTE version, because the Galaxy Watch Ultra has LTE built into it but there are versions of the other watches, like the 6, the 5, the 4, the 7, that are Wi-Fi only, so you can save that Google Maps data for offline use.
Speaker 1:It's like you're going on a hike or something and you're not going to have LTE to connect to it on your watch and you don't want to necessarily take your phone because it's a hike. Some people don't like to take their phone along or whatever. Obviously, like we said last week, we're not going on a hike right now because it's scorching hot outside it's way too hot.
Speaker 1:People often wonder, like, when I do camera comparisons too. In fact it's relevant because I'm going to post my Z Fold 6 review this weekend. It's massively long. I'm trying to finish it in time. It could be Monday before I post it. It's already 4,000 words long. They ask why I don't have a lot of outdoor camera samples. It's because I don't want to go outside. I mean, I do when I review phones in the winter. So, like for the S25 Ultra, you'll notice my S25 Ultra review I'll have like a lot of outdoor shots because it's fun to get outside and walk around, because it's like 65, 70 degrees in Arizona, and so that's great. But you'll notice that, like if I review a phone in the summertime, it doesn't have a lot of outdoor shots because, well, I don't want to go outside. Why would I?
Speaker 1:it's like 115 degrees so I mean, I try to put some in there, you know, of course, to review the phone and judge it, but that's the reason why so. But google maps working offline? Uh, if you have a galaxy watch, definitely use that, check it out.
Speaker 3:I think it's very useful uh, it's gonna be really good because I feel like that kind of um shines a light on what they were even going with the unpack event with, like this watch being like a really good accessory for the outdoorsy active person. And so, yeah, there's a lot of friends who don't want to take their phones and there's just even a lot of areas in Arizona where you just don't get, you know, good service and stuff sometimes, but like there are a lot of good trails. That's true too. Yeah.
Speaker 1:If you have LTE, it might not work if you're going on a hike, like it's going to be kind of a remote area, specifically like in the mountains. So even if you have the Watch Ultra, you still might want to use offline maps. So I think that's a feature a lot of people would use. When I start doing outdoor stuff again when it's not super hot, I'll certainly consider using that as well. So that's one that I wanted to bring to everyone's attention.
Speaker 1:Third story is one that's not going to be universally applicable to everybody, but I know if you want this feature, you're going to be super excited about it and if you don't care, you're just going to be like man, I don't care. There's going to be no in between on this one. Google Messages is getting dual-SIM RCS. So right now, if you have a dual-SIM phone that takes two SIMs like even an eSIM and a physical SIM, which, of course, all the Samsung phones can, like this Z Fold 6, your S20, you know all the S-Line phones they can take two SIMs. You can have a physical SIM and then you can also have an electronic SIM.
Speaker 1:So if you want to have two phone plans on your device simultaneously, you could do that.
Speaker 1:So now Google Messages is going to support RCS on both SIMs. Before, if you had two SIMs in your phone, like even a physical and an eSIM, you could only support RCS messaging on one of the SIMs. So that means you would be limited to crappy RCS, old school garbage, quality picture messaging on your other SIM, which obviously, if you're a dual SIM user, this is not a great thing, and a lot of people do this because unfortunately, not everyone is in a position or blessed to have two high-end phones. So they use their same phone for their business and their work, but they separate them by having two different numbers one for business, one for work and so then they have two Sims in the same phone. So obviously this will be great, because if you have two Sims one for business, one for work or, you know, one for whatever and one you know we won't judge whatever you do Like you know, you know, you got two phones, one for the plug and one for the dough.
Speaker 3:You know the song Kevin Gates, you can.
Speaker 1:I won't say the rest because I want the video to go on YouTube and I don't want to get flagged for adult content.
Speaker 1:But, you know, go look up the song. If you have any of that stuff going on, that's fine. You can now use RCS on both of them. So if you have to message some important people, you can send them pictures of whatever it is you need to send pictures of. So that's what's going on with that. Definitely check that out below as well. The S22 Ultra redesigned specs. We saw the redesigned pictures last week, right, and that was great. But now we actually have the redesigned specs of the width across the phone. Now this is kind of like super nerding out, but that's what we do on this podcast.
Speaker 3:That is what we do.
Speaker 1:So I'll read them to you and you guys will be able to see here, because I'm going to insert kind of the screen grab here from the website that Sumit posted. You see, here in this picture the S24 Ultra is on the left and the S25 Ultra is on the right, and what we have is we have the dimensions of the total width of the frame, from left side of the frame to the right side of the frame, and then we also have the total dimensions of the screen itself. So what you're seeing here is the S25 Ultra has a slightly larger screen overall 6.86 inches diagonal versus 6.79.
Speaker 2:It's not a lot, that's 0.07 inches.
Speaker 1:We can do the math, you know that's what we do here. That's very small. That's less than a tenth of an inch, right, that's not much. But Samsung has actually made the distance from frame to frame smaller while increasing the usable screen size. So that's actually something that, even though it seems like it's a super small nerdy detail, you're going to really like that when you get the phone, because now the phone won't be as wide as your hand so it'll be easier to reach side to side and use it to text and do other things, but you'll actually have more screen to actually play games and videos and all that kind of stuff multitasking. So personally I like this a lot. I you know some of the smaller changes. I'm just like I don care, but reducing the bezels and making that distance across 1.4 millimeters smaller, I think people will notice this. What do you think, dora? I think it will actually be noticeable.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, me too. I actually really like it because with the bezels being a little bit more shrunken, just by looking at the rendering here, I think it's just going to make for a nicer display and just a nicer look overall, once you actually do have the phone in hand.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's definitely going to be more immersive, and the one thing that's weird about this particular render is Ice Universe usually has a lot of attention to detail he's the one who posted this originally, I believe and in this render, though it doesn't show the rounded corners on the s25 ultra, it shows the same squared corners.
Speaker 1:So either he was just in a hurry, but usually he. But so this this does not mean that the s25 ultra is losing the rounded corners that we talked about. It is still gonna have rounded corners. It's just maybe this picture was only showing the bezel size.
Speaker 3:The rounded corners are staying, that's, that's still there no well, the no well, the screen still have like I forgot what they call, but like the curved glass. That's what we don't know.
Speaker 1:Yeah, a lot of people are waiting for that I I think a lot of people out there are with you tory, the s24 ultra, which I actually don't have here. A lot of people have asked this too, and I'll answer this. I'm going to answer this in the q a. I'm still using my s24. It has my main SIM back in it. I was using the Fold for a long time with my main SIM, but I switched it back earlier this week and then I got the Pixel 9 Pro though. So then I put my main SIM in here.
Speaker 1:So you know, that's the life of doing phone reviews and stuff. How long will it stay in here? Probably not long. I'll be 100% honest with you. There's no chance that by the end of September that my SIM's not back my main SIM's not back in the S24 Ultra. I love the phone. Obviously, I'll review the Pixel and I'll do some comparisons to the new iPhone. So I might have to switch to that for a week when I compare it, because you have to use the phones. You can't just make a video and be like hey look at these two phones.
Speaker 1:I want to tell you some stuff about it, but I never used this other phone. That wouldn't be fair. I don't want to use the iPhone 16 Pro Max, trust me, I'd rather just use it as a B-roll camera and never have to use it as my daily driver. But that wouldn't be fair because then I'd be telling you guys stuff about it when I don't know anything about it. But definitely my SIM will be back in the S24 Ultra eventually. So I think this is going to be really good overall. Very excited to see the S25 Ultra, those curved kind of corners that are in that device, and we also found out a couple of other things about it. It's possible that Samsung may rename this as the Galaxy S25 Note. Someone was talking about this. There's a possibility.
Speaker 2:I don't know that this is going to happen.
Speaker 1:This is a sketchy rumor. It was not from any of the really like. You know it's not one of the really like trustworthy sources but that they could do S25, s25 Pro and S25 Note, which would be an interesting kind of deal.
Speaker 3:So would the other versions just not have the S Pen? Yeah.
Speaker 1:So basically what people would be thinking is that the Pro would be almost, it would be like take the place of the Plus, and so the Pro would be just like the Ultra, except no S Pen. Now I don't know about this and I talked to some people about this over on Twitter. When this leak or rumor not a leak. I call things leaks if they're from someone who's actually got a track record, like Ice Universe.
Speaker 2:If he tweets something, it's a leak because you can take it to the bank. Like if he says something is going to happen.
Speaker 1:Yeah, if he says something's happening with a Samsung phone or one UI like you could go cash that check. The bank will honor it because he don't think he's ever been wrong fully about anything with Samsung. But there are sketchy people. It's just a rumor. I don't think they would do this because the Ultra already has a lot of good brand identity. It's been around now for quite a few years and I just don't see a reason to rename it to the S25 Note.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I know that's what I'm thinking like as a consumer. That would be um conflicting to me because, like it's already going in, like you're trying to understand all the differences between like the different names and like what you get like with the phone, and so I I wouldn't like it and then like to go back to the note. No, I say no, just keep it as is. Yeah, I don't know.
Speaker 1:I mean it just doesn't make sense. And also the main brand identity value I guess they would gain is if they did change the middle one to the Pro, then you have a direct competitor to Apple. That would be the only reason I could see them doing that. But they don't need to name the top one, the Note, to do that. They could just rename the Plus to the Pro. I would do that If I was in Samsung marketing. I would say yeah, because the S25 Plus is actually a good competitor for the iPhone 16 Pro and so if you name it Pro then they're both Pro and consumers kind of know where they slot in.
Speaker 1:And then it also gives you the advantage that then you have something that's above the Pro and Apple doesn't. So people can be like, oh look, I've got the Ultra. And they're like, oh well, where's the iPhone Ultra? We don't have one. So maybe if I want the best of the best, I go with Samsung. Now there are rumors that Apple is going to bring out like an Apple iPhone Ultra next year.
Speaker 2:But why not go ahead and take that one year?
Speaker 1:Yeah, take that one year advantage where people are like they've got pro versus pro, but Apple doesn't even have anything to rival the Ultra. So maybe I should go ahead and go for the Ultra. So if you like marketing actually I've been reading some marketing books over there in the office I bought some.
Speaker 2:I've been reading up on some marketing stuff.
Speaker 1:I've been learning some things honing my craft. So that's my personal and semi-professional from just having read like one book opinion.
Speaker 3:No, I think that's a really good idea, like if they were to do that, they should go back and find this video and pay you some royalties. They should. Yeah, that was a good idea.
Speaker 1:But I mean, if they decide to do it from watching this video, they'll probably just steal it and not pay me anything.
Speaker 3:Yeah, no.
Speaker 1:They'll probably be like we already paid this guy enough money from affiliate sales From affiliate sales. We can't be giving him any more money for doing marketing. He could at least do that for free. We give him the opportunity to do lots of stuff. Z Fold6 Slim leaks as well. This phone keeps coming up, so it looks like it's real.
Speaker 3:For a while. We're not getting it, though right. We still don't know.
Speaker 1:There's a possibility. If we do, I don't know what to do, because then people are going to be like well, are you doing mystery boxes for the Z Fold 6 Lemon? I don't know, because no one knows if it's coming here. So the thing is, people have actually asked me this question. I always source the cases way ahead of time, so if I don't know they're coming here, I could go and try to talk to some case companies and try to get some. But then what if I buy like $5,000 worth of cases and the phones don't?
Speaker 1:come here, Then I can't do the mystery boxes? What am I going to do with those $5,000 worth of cases? I can't sell them overseas because shipping would. I would just lose five grand.
Speaker 1:So I don't know how likely I am to do that. I would have to have like if Ice Universe says like Z Fold 6 Slim coming to the US tomorrow, then I'll go out and order the cases and the mystery box page will be up tomorrow. But until like him or someone super trustworthy says like the Z Fold 6 Slim is coming to the US, I don't want to lose $5,000 for nothing because it would be completely wasted. I wouldn't even be able to give them away because I can't ship them overseas. It would cost me like $60 per package. I would lose even more money If I could give them away or sell them on eBay locally in the US. I could get some of the money back. But I couldn't even do that if it doesn't launch here.
Speaker 2:But we do have some interesting info about it.
Speaker 1:Okay, z Fold 6. What were you going to say, torin?
Speaker 3:Go ahead. No, no, do you think, and you probably are going to go say this right now, but when you initially told me about it, I was telling some other Samsung enthusiasts about it. Like you know, bob obviously wouldn't be coming here, but they seemed like that was something that they were really excited about. But I was wondering for your opinion. Coming here, but they seem like that was something that they were really excited about, but I was wondering for your opinion, do you think it would cost more or the same price or cheaper than the current price for the galaxy full? Because I mean, if it launches here, it's going to cost more, way more.
Speaker 1:Yeah, because it's going to have a wider cover screen and it's going to be slimmer, and those are two things people want in the foldable right. When something gets better, the price usually goes up they're not changing the processor.
Speaker 1:There's still going to be a good processor in there. It's still going to have all the same features as the other one. This is going to be slimmer and wider, and those are both really appealing things. They are the only way the cost would go down. Is it like they decrease the materials? And in fact, segueing off your question into Sumit's article, they're putting a titanium backplate on it, apparently, and that's going to cost more money. This one doesn't have a titanium backplate, so the price is going to go up for sure. This one has titanium frame but not backplate, so adding more premium materials plus making it slimmer and a wider cover screen.
Speaker 3:That's going to be the new luxury, if this came to the US, it would probably cost $2,500 would be my guess.
Speaker 2:Jeez, my goodness.
Speaker 1:Now, because the exchange rate's not one for one. Now you guys know, you already know this comes to Korea. I know people in Korea. I will have this phone as quickly as I can.
Speaker 2:We will have one to play with.
Speaker 1:Will all the cellular bands work very well? Probably not so. Will I ever be able to use it as an actual phone? I don't know, but we're going to make videos on it because that's what we do. This is Sammy Guru. If they have a better Z Fold 6, I will be buying it for sure. That's a good investment. I can definitely make my money back off, but yeah, yeah, I don't think it's going to come here. It still looks like it's going to not launch globally Korea and China only. I mean, that's really like where Samsung is targeting because, like we talked about before, they got all this competition. Huawei, xiaomi, oppo you know everybody over there has a slim foldable with a wide cover display. So people are looking at this in Korea and China and they're like what the heck is this? They're like this thing is so thick, it's so slim, it's so narrow. I can't use this as a foldable. Everybody else has basically an S24 Ultra size cover display that's almost as thin as the S24.
Speaker 2:Ultra so.
Speaker 1:Samsung needs to step up their game. I would love to use it. I hope that a lot of the bands do work because of course, I'll be out using it everywhere. No one will have ever seen it. That's one of my favorite things to do, like have a phone that nobody else has. That's actually fun to use. The other thing that was leaked that to me covered 5-megapixel under-display camera. So the under-display camera is going to get better on the interior, so I don't know if we didn't talk about this much.
Speaker 1:This is an under-display camera on the inside, so on the inner part, this right here. See that little.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:It's really crappy the quality. So one of the things people have asked for a long time is that Samsung upgrade that as well. It's something I didn't talk about much during the launch, because I don't take a lot of selfies. So you know, I mean, I'm 38 years old, I have two kids. I mean, I'm not a selfie enthusiast. I'm not a 19 year old female influencer on Instagram. If I were, though, I would be very disappointed with the selfie camera on this phone.
Speaker 1:I've taken some to test it while I was doing my review. You guys will see, actually, cause, like I said, I'm going to post my full written review on Sammy gurus, and there's some samples in there I took some selfies. I do it for the love of the people, not cause I want to. There's some samples in there. I took some selfies. I do it for the love of the people, not because I want to, but I just take the selfies and then I just email them to my wife. I'm like here, I know you'll want to see these. She loves me. No one else wants to see them, but she might want them, so I let her hang on to those, but they're terrible. They're not good. The quality is bad on this under-display megapixel upgrade. It's supposed to get better in low light and performance, so that'd be another upgrade. So this thing's definitely expensive. Titanium backplate slimmer, wider cover display, better under display camera. I mean, hey, why don't they just bring S-Pen support to the cover?
Speaker 1:display while they're at it, at that point yeah, why don't you just go ahead and put S-Pen support on the cover display? Go ahead and just give us the whole package.
Speaker 1:Then they can just charge $5,000 for it and everyone will buy it. They'll be like that's everything we always wanted. But yeah, so probably not coming to the US. Unless you're just like crazy like me, I don't think you should import one because most likely I mean, of course, I'll tell you when I get it, but I have all the different, I have SIMs from all the different carriers, so I always test this when I get imports Most likely it's not going to work with like 5G and Wi-Fi calling on all the carriers, so you're not going to get the best service everywhere.
Speaker 1:That's actually the case with this phone too, the Sony phone. This Sony phone is not released in the US. I had to import this from the UK. They actually stopped selling phones in the US We'll talk about it later but this is the Sony Xperia One 6, and it's not officially released here and it doesn't work on all the carriers. So you really don't want to import one, unless you're okay with not having 5G. Oneui7.0 beta we're still waiting, like that meme. Well, we're waiting. Samsung we are, and it's not here. So people are like by the end of August. Well, august is almost over.
Speaker 1:No, beta I basically said by the middle of September. So my prediction is still alive. According to Sumit's article and sources, people are saying internally with Samsung the beta is going to be a lot shorter this year, so they're focusing on smoothness. In the past we've had like five or six betas iterations. They would do updates. This year it might only be like two or three because they're launching it later.
Speaker 1:So the good news is that means that at least we know the stable launch isn't going to push out to like December, because before I was like it could be Christmas before we get the stable.
Speaker 1:So I don't think that's going to happen. It could still be Thanksgiving, but we probably won't have to wait till Christmas for stable because they're going to shorten the beta cycle. So if you're waiting for the beta, keep your Samsung members app fired up, make sure you have the notifications on for our Twitter page and my YouTube channel, because as soon as the beta is live we'll be tweeting about it and I'll have a video up within like 45 minutes. You guys know I'm always first for the most part. If the beta goes live at 11.45 pm at night, I will drop everything I'm doing, go down to my basement and record the video, with whatever equipment I have. I'll drive to the office, I don't care. So the beta is like one of our biggest things of the year to cover and I will drop whatever I'm doing, of course, unless something's wrong with my family, but assuming that's not the case, whatever I'm doing watching TV, wasting time- any other work.
Speaker 3:He will even wake up.
Speaker 1:I will, I've woken up in the middle of the night and sometimes when the beta is about to run the corner. Woken up in the middle of the night and sometimes when the beta is about around the corner. I always check my phone. Saw on Twitter that it released Got out of bed at like 2.30. Made a video and posted it by like 3.30.
Speaker 3:And then go back to sleep. And then go back to sleep.
Speaker 1:But yeah, I will cover it, you know, if I can, to the best of my ability before anybody else. Tab S10 removed from the upgrade cycle. So this is absolutely insane. We talked about these rumors that the tab S10 plus was going to be deleted from the tab S lineup this time, and so now to me post an article with new sources. These are credible sources, not ice universe, but two other credible leakers who in the past have been right about things. Now they're saying the base model, not the middle one, is going to be cut, so the only tablets they're going to release are the tab s10 plus and the test s10 ultra. I don't understand this at all.
Speaker 1:I don't understand that either the tab s10 small one is like the only one that you could use for real tablet stuff, because for those you don't know, samsung small tab S model is like 10.5 to 11 inches I don't know exactly what it is, it's somewhere in that range. The plus is like 12.4 and then the ultra is 14.9 or 14.6 inches. You can't use those as tablets because if you're holding them in your hand they're massive, like this is not something you can you can't hold it to read.
Speaker 1:You can't hold it to like. You can't hold it to read. When I used to teach in university, I used to use them for lecturing. I held the Tab S9 Ultra one day as my tablet while I was lecturing. The students thought I was insane because it looks ridiculous.
Speaker 1:I had nothing else that day, but you really can't do that. It's super heavy, it's not comfortable. I have no idea why they deleted the base model. The only thing I can think and I talked about this with a bunch of people over on X, including a couple of writers from Sam Mobile that maybe Samsung is just like we're giving up with competing with Apple and the iPad on like tablet market and we just want to try to market our tablets to people who want to use them as a laptop, because that's the only way you can really use the S10 plus and the s10 ultra yeah, because they're so big. Yeah, you could just use it as your laptop and with samsung dex mode, you could use it as a laptop. I've used my tab s9 ultra as a laptop before. It's actually lighter than any laptop and it does work well if you have the keyboard case. The only problem is samsung charges 350 for their keyboard case, which is absolutely insane.
Speaker 3:That is insane.
Speaker 1:That's a lot and at the end of the day, I can't recommend anyone use the Tab S9 Ultra as a laptop, because if you buy the one terabyte version and then you buy the keyboard case, it's like $1,800.
Speaker 2:This laptop right here that Samsung sells, which is actually better as a laptop because it runs Windows.
Speaker 1:No hate to DeX. Dex is great, but it's not as good as Windows for work and productivity. The Galaxy Book 4 Edge doesn't even cost $1,800. You could buy this right now with a discount for $1,200. So I can't recommend someone going to buy that tablet and use it as a laptop.
Speaker 3:No, I just feel like they're going to lose a lot of consumers. I mean, you're definitely in the area of if someone does want to buy a tablet and they're just like a regular consumer, they want something that's on a cheaper end, that's portable and that they're going to get a lot of use for, especially for trips or on their commutes. But to just get rid of it, I don't like that move. Yeah, I mean the Tab S9 Ultra honestly, I love it.
Speaker 1:It's a great piece of tech and obviously I'm blessed to be able to have one and not use it for just have it. I use it for watching YouTube. It sits on my desk because it's too big to use for like tablet stuff. I use tablets for like reading and I use that a lot for reading and note taking and stuff like that. I still use the iPad Pro for those things, the 11-inch because it's just better at productivity because it's small, it's thin, the apps are compatible. Samsung has kind of given up and it's not their fault.
Speaker 1:It's Android's fault and Google's fault for not optimizing tablets for the apps and the developer's fault. So Samsung would have to really work with all those parties to make their tablets, you know, compete with Apple. So maybe they're just like well, we'll just try to market them to people who use their tablets more like a laptop. And actually the guy who owns Sam mobile he mentioned on X an idea that I think is a great idea he's like maybe they should just make it run decks as the default out of the box instead of one UI mode. Just let it run the desktop version, the Samsung DeX, and then people would probably see the value of it more.
Speaker 2:And I think that's true.
Speaker 1:If you're going to market it as a laptop replacement anyway for people who don't want a real laptop. First of all, you should bring the price down so it's cheaper than the actual laptops you sell, because I mean, how can you say you should use this tablet as a laptop when you already sell a laptop? That's better than the tablet for productivity for cheaper? They need to make it cheaper somehow. Definitely not charge $350 for a keyboard case, which I always thought was ridiculous.
Speaker 1:And then let it run DeX mode out of the box. That, combined with the S Pen, should give you a chance to market to people who want productivity.
Speaker 1:That's my thought, because you already have competition with the Windows Surface Pros, exactly yeah massive competition there and they continue to improve those, particularly with the snapdragon elite, which is what's in the galaxy book for edge. Those are coming, those that came out to the surfaces, um, this two months ago when this laptop released as well. Those processors are making those even better, more battery efficient, all that kind of stuff. So there's a lot of competition for samsung. They've got to do something about that if they want to market as a laptop replacement.
Speaker 1:Z Fold 6 and the Flip 6 got their first official updates. They started rolling out. I don't want to say got. When we write the articles we always say receiving, because that's how you get ranked in Google search. If you put they start rolling out, then no one will ever read it. So people are like why does it say receiving if it's not in the US? Samsung does long stage rollouts everywhere. I don't have it yet. So for transparency, I've checked my Z Fold 6 like a million times the last two days Since it started rolling out. It's not on my phone but very exciting, if you do have a Z Fold 6, it does have camera improvements. Z Fold 6. It does have camera improvements and so I had actually considered I was hoping that I could refresh it and get the update Because, like I said, I'm going to post my Z Fold 6 review.
Speaker 1:I would like to take some updated camera samples with the new software so I could give some people some insight into like is it improved or not? Because nobody else has really included that in their reviews because obviously the update wasn't out when people dropped the initial reviews. I'm trying to give people some value. Obviously we had to wait one month to do the review, because Samsung doesn't send us review units yet. I'm very hopeful that's going to change from January with the S25 launch. I've had some conversations with some people. We're getting a lot of readers now so hopefully as a media outlet we'll be able to get our hands on some review units. You don't have to wait a month for me to give you my thoughts on the new phones.
Speaker 1:But this time it does give you some chance to see how the phone performs over time. So if you have a Fold 6 or Flip 6, check your phone. It should be coming to the US pretty soon. If you're a Google KeepNotes user the Google KeepNotes app which we talked about on one episode of the podcast- it was one of the apps of the week, or something like that?
Speaker 1:Yeah, it was one of the apps of the week. It's going to be coming to the lock screen on your Galaxy phone, where you can actually use the app almost fully on the lock screen, not just the widgets.
Speaker 1:So, this is a really cool feature. Google is going to introduce this with Android 15 on the Pixels as well. And of course, as we talked about before, google and Samsung are like number one best buddy partners, and so anything that Google gives to the pixels, usually Samsung is going to get it right away. We're going to talk about some of those features later on in the show. I did a really funny video with the new Gemini Live on YouTube I posted today and we'll try to recreate it here and see how it goes. But Keep Notes is coming, so if you're a Google Keep Notes fan, also Microsoft OneNote some of you might use that instead, which is a good app. I'm just not as ingrained in the Microsoft ecosystem, particularly since I left GCU. You know they use Microsoft stuff.
Speaker 1:And since I left GCU, I don't really. I mean, of course I use Word, excel and that, but like I don't use their productivity, like Google Drive, keep Notes and stuff like that, because it's just easier on Android and also for the website we have a G Suite account, so all my Sammy Guru stuff is also already in Google.
Speaker 1:Yeah it is. It just makes sense to do it that way, I agree, so definitely check for that. With Android 15, we should be seeing that. Of course, I'll have a video on it when it comes out. Now this article very interesting.
Speaker 1:The Galaxy Ring is apparently, according to iFixit, a giant pile of steaming e-waste. Basically, iFixit is the company that you know. They do the teardowns and like repairability stuff. They did a teardown analysis of the Galaxy Ring and they found out that basically because of lithium-ion battery and how small it is after two years, once the maximum charging cycles are elapsed around two years you're just going to have to throw it away. You can't repair it, you can't replace the battery, you can't do anything like that. So basically you're going to have to get a new one almost every two years and this just contributes to more and more e--waste, which is a huge problem.
Speaker 1:It's not a good look for samsung, because samsung has really made a commitment to sustainability. Last year, when I was at ces, I went to samsung's press conference and their whole big spiel at the ces conference was how they wanted to be carbon neutral by 2030 or something like that. So basically no carbon emissions or anything from their products, and so this is not a good look for them, since they committed to that. That's the last Samsung press conference I went to. I always get to go to the CES one because any CES media can go to the Samsung ones, but, fingers crossed, we get invited to the actual mobile conferences eventually. So this is pretty disappointing. I mean it sucks, because if you have a Galaxy Ring, you just spent $400.
Speaker 2:And now, in two years, you have to buy another one, so you spend, spent $400 and now in two years you have to buy another one.
Speaker 1:You spend another $400, at least with the watch, you don't have to buy another one in, let's say, two years. You could probably use this for four years. It's a longer life cycle. The longer life cycle you can have for these electronic devices, the better, because obviously it does.
Speaker 1:We have a huge e-waste problem. There's tons of it, at least with phones. Companies have started to reduce it by using a lot of recycled materials. That's one place where Apple does a great job. I do commend them for that because it's an important thing and I think they're ahead of every other company. Samsung is trying to follow in their footsteps, so hopefully they will realize the error of their ways and hopefully they'll make it right with the Galaxy Ring 2 and offer some improvements that reduce the unnecessary e-waste that's going on there.
Speaker 1:The last story and this is a spicy take from our guys to meet he's digging into a little bit of the updates on the mid-range phones.
Speaker 1:He's really into covering the mid-range phones, which is great, because I never do enough of that on the YouTube channel, so it balances out some of our coverage, and Samsung is rolling out some AI features to several low-cost Galaxy devices, including the S21 FE, tab S9 FE, galaxy A55. Now, I wouldn't call the Tab S9 FE super low-cost, it's more of a mid-range. But they are receiving some different AI devices and it seems like these AI features a lot of them are things that we think could be in the One UI 6.1.1 code base update for the S24 Ultra. So what he's saying is could it be the case that Samsung actually pushed some of the updates that were supposed to be in One UI 6.1.1 before the S24 Ultra, because a lot of those AI features are coming in these updates to these mid-rangers? It is possible, because we don't actually know what the version number of that code base is, because it's not going to show up as 6.1.1 on the S line. They always drop the extra .1 when it comes to the S line.
Speaker 1:It's going to be the same features that are on the foldables, but it's going to be a regular 6.1 update. So it's certainly possible. But the S24 Ultra is also supposed to get a lot of other stuff, not just the AI features, so it still would make sense. This could be very plausible because even if they were pushing that code base with these Galaxy Eye updates to these mid-rangers first, the main reason that we might be waiting for the S line updates, the flagship updates, is because Samsung is still rumored to bring those massive camera improvements to the S24 Ultra, and so I think this is a very good opinion piece.
Speaker 1:If you guys check it out, I'll put it in the show notes. It's very possible's very possible. I mean it's speculation, but kind of putting the pieces together. That's what we do as journalists try to fit things together, fill in the blanks, and samit did a pretty good job of doing that. I mean I think it's certainly possible that this could be the case. Um, and the s24 ultra is still waiting on the 6.1.1 update, so hopefully early september. We see that. I can tell you it definitely needs a camera update, because we're going to get into that in the next segment. Perfect segue, because we're almost done with the news.
Speaker 1:We're going to talk about the Pixel 9 Pro, and the one place that it's way ahead of the S24 Ultra right now is the camera. And that being said, let's go ahead before we get into the next segment and hear from the sponsor of today's podcast. Today's episode of the Sammy Guru podcast is brought to you by our partners at Mint Mobile. Mint Mobile has premium wireless starting at just $15 a month and right now, for a limited time, they have one of their best deals of all time, where all of their plans are just $15 a month. That means that you can get their amazing unlimited premium wireless plan for 50% off the usual cost. All of Mint Mobile's plans come with unlimited talk and text, nationwide coverage and mobile hotspot included as well. The great thing about Mint is they are completely online. You don't have to worry about any in-store sort of overhead. They basically give you all the savings that they can by avoiding those costs. You can also get either an eSIM if you have a phone that supports that, like the Galaxy S24 Ultra or other modern Samsung phones, or if you prefer a physical SIM or need one, they will mail one to you as well. The great thing about Mint is you save a ton of money over the big wireless carriers and they simplify your billing and also try to make sure that you have the correct plan for you.
Speaker 1:I've loved using Mint here in the Phoenix Arizona area for almost the last two years. My family and I have switched over fully. We love their service. If you guys are interested in checking them out, go to trimintmobilecom slash Springer. The link will also be in the show notes if you'd like to click on it that way and sign up. This is a limited time offer for the 50% off the unlimited plan, where all of their plans are $15 a month. So take advantage today. All right, guys, we're back into the second half of the show, or second third, whatever you want to consider it. I never know, because I never know what the final runtime will be.
Speaker 1:So I can't predict if it's going to be the second half or the second third, depending on how long the show goes, but in this portion we're going to talk a little hardware, as we so typically do, got a couple things to talk about. I've got two phones in the house. Torrey is going to talk a little bit about his Watch Ultra review One month. We posted that on the website, so if you really want to know what it's like to spend a month with the Watch Ultra from the average user perspective, you should go check it out. It'll be in the show notes, but let's talk about the Pixel 9 Pro XL first, as we get in here. So here it is, pixel 9 Pro XL.
Speaker 1:It is the hazel colorway, as I said, kind of is supposed to be a green, but looks kind of gray in certain lighting. One thing I will say about it that I did say in my video as well the camera bar on the back is certainly polarizing. Some people love it, some people hate it. One thing I like about it, though, is when you sit your phone on the table without a case and you actually try to use it. It doesn't wobble. The galaxy s24 ultra, and probably your s22 ultra as well, will wobble. Most people use a case though, so that's not a huge deal. Um, I will say if you look at this, we gave samsung crap about it, so I gotta give google crap about it. We gotta be fair this phone.
Speaker 1:if you take away the light bar, it looks exactly like an iphone yeah I don't have my iphone here because we use it for B-roll for the camera. I don't have it on the table, but it looks like an iPhone. Look at the curvature of the edges, look at the polished sides around the sides of this.
Speaker 3:You wanted to show me in the front.
Speaker 1:If you just show this, In fact one of the other YouTubers that I follow, tk Bay, he posted an iPhone and the Pixel 9 Pro XL like this, like back-to-back. He took a side view and he said can someone tell me which one's the iPhone and which one's the Pixel? And very few people could. You actually have to look at the color. He posted a gray, the gray iPhone versus this one, because it kind of looks kind of gray. You really have to look at the color closely to tell, because the antenna bands, everything looks like the same from this side and the curvature looks the same. If you took away the G and the camera bar, you could put an Apple here and just change the camera. It would look exactly like an iPhone. So you know we hated Samsung for doing some Apple stuff Apple Watch Ultra I'm talking about you.
Speaker 1:Galaxy Buds 3 Pro we're talking about you A lot of those things.
Speaker 1:But Google did it too, and in fact, this could be more Apple-y, because they actually made the form factor super Apple-y, yeah, but the camera bar is still uniquely Google, so we'll give them that. So they did keep the camera bar. So what do I like about this phone? What do I not? As I already said in the previous segment, this phone is so far. I've had it for three days, I've taken a lot of photos and, of course, I'm going to do a full comparison. I made a first impressions video if you want to check it out. I've taken a lot of photos. This camera is way better than the S24 Ultra right now.
Speaker 1:Now, keep in mind, google typically does most of their magic with software processing, where Samsung usually their camera is mainly on the strength of its hardware, and Samsung does some computational photography too. But in terms of low light situations and even when it comes to like zoom three to five X zoom this thing is vastly superior to the S24 Ultra in most situations. Will it stay that way after the One UI 6.1.1 update? I don't know, but Samsung really should be, in my opinion, as a fan, embarrassed that they launched a $1,300 phone in January that, in August, doesn't take very good photos at small zoom distances and sometimes in low light, does very poorly as well. That might be something I would expect from like a $500 phone in 2024, but not from a $1,300 flagship. So Google's way ahead there, however, and there's always a however to everything in the smartphone world, and everything in life as well everything else.
Speaker 1:the S24 Ultra is basically ahead of Google the display, even though, remember last week we talked about how the display is supposed to be 300 nits brighter If you actually take this outside in the sun, just exactly what I said last week was probably going to be the case. It is. I'm like a psychic or whatever you want to call it. I'm like clairvoyant. I knew it.
Speaker 2:If you take this in the sun one.
Speaker 1:The viewing angles are much worse because, remember, s24 ultra has that anti-reflective coating, oh yeah, and this one doesn't stay as bright for as long. So the s24 ultra can sustain the brightness for a longer period of time and I haven't done full testing yet it seems like with the max brightness the s24 ultra is more efficient. So it actually drains less battery in the max brightness because of the snapdragon processor versus the tensor processor on the Pixel. So don't always believe what you read on paper. You can always believe only about a third of what you read, unless it's from SammyGurucom and then you can believe about 90% of it.
Speaker 1:We'd only put about 10%.
Speaker 2:BS on the.
Speaker 1:Internet. But yeah, so I mean the other problem with the display. I have quite a few qualms with the display. I might be one of the few reviewers to say these things. The the display also has and this is a problem with the the auto brightness sensor. I guess maybe it's not calibrated. I'll try to fix it in software, but it seems like a hardware issue. Um, it does not shift its brightness quickly enough, so, like when you're in a bright area, it still stays pretty dim. In fact we're under. We've got studio lights in front of us right here. The display is fairly dim. The s24 ultra in fact, if you look at like the display on here, you can see the s, the z-fold six is actually substantially brighter yeah than the pixel.
Speaker 1:It's going to be hard for you guys to see on video, but if you turn it towards the light, the z-fold six is getting a lot brighter on the cover display than the Pixel is. So the ambient light sensor is maybe either messed up or maybe it's a software bug? I don't know.
Speaker 1:But, that's also kind of a problem. So three things I don't like about the display. One, the viewing angles are not as good because of the anti-reflective on the S24 Ultra. And this is comparing it to the S24 Ultra. This is not saying it's a bad display, I'm just saying coming from the S24 Ultra. Here's some stuff that's a downgrade. Viewing angles aren't as good, the brightness is not as sustainable and it seems less efficient in like super bright settings. And not only that, but, as I said, the ambient sensor doesn't switch brightness from low to high brightness. It often it feels like it's too dim a lot of the time and, of course, eventually it changes, but it takes too long to change. Any questions you have about the Pixel 9 Pro XL, torian, just looking at it.
Speaker 3:No, I mean honestly, it looks like a really nice, well-built phone and I really do like how the cameras are, which I know you kind of bring that point up a lot in between the Samsung and the Google. But I think, going into Samsung, I was always thinking that they were going to have like these phenomenal cameras.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:But you know, I feel like they've been kind of losing in that department. But I have been losing, they have been losing the pixel in that department.
Speaker 1:In my opinion, that's the one place where Samsung could really step it up in the hardware department is with the cameras, um. But google has also been behind in a lot of other things. This year they finally caught up to samsung with the fingerprint sensor. They've had optical scanners. They finally got the ultrasonic scanner, which is what's on the galaxy s24 ultra as well. Their old fingerprint sensors were garbage, so now they're a little bit better. But there's still a problem. If you don't have the always-on display on, you can't just put your finger on here and open it. You know how you can put your finger, yeah yeah, with the black screen, just open it.
Speaker 1:You actually have to tap this one. It won't turn on if you just put your finger there so that kind of stinks not a big fan of that.
Speaker 1:They could add the software feature to kind of fix that, but that's something that's kind of annoying right now. Um, the tensor processor is also definitely inferior to the Snapdragon agent three. There's no doubt about that. Uh, it's mainly tuned for AI tasks, so it does well with anything that's like AI. In fact we talked about last week. Google reserved a certain amount of the Ram specifically for AI. Um, which, okay, that's great if you want to do AI, but when you're doing gaming and stuff like that, this phone is a little bit slower than the S24 Ultra and also it still gets a little warmer. I'll post some thermal tests when I compare it officially to the S24 Ultra, but it's definitely warmer in the hand. If you're not using it with a case, you can feel it quite a bit on the Tensor chip. It's not terrible. It's not like it gets warm when you make calls the old Pixel, some of the original Pixel 6 Pros, with the original Tensor they would get hot. You're just making a call.
Speaker 1:I'm like whoa man, my hand's on fire.
Speaker 2:All I'm doing is I'm calling Domino's to order a pizza.
Speaker 1:Who does that anymore? I just use it online. I was calling someone and my hand's on fire Tensor is inferior to the Snapdragon processor, In my opinion. I'm going to do a full video on this and may write it up on the website.
Speaker 1:The software on the Pixel. We used to say like back in the day, Pixel software was like the big advantage because it had stock Android. One UI has leaped stock Android. In my opinion, it's smooth on One UI and has multitasking and customization.
Speaker 1:You don't get hardly any of those features on here, Like if you like to multitask. You don't get like the pop-up view windows. The multi-view for multi-window is is much less useful on the pixel experience on the pixel nine pro Excel. Of course it's smooth, but there's also not a lot going on right. It's like it's like if you're not doing much. Of course it's easy to be smooth because your phone isn't having to use many resources, because there's not a lot of customization or you know productivity stuff you can use on the samsung phones, one ui is doing like a million different cool things and it's still very fast.
Speaker 1:Uh, of course google has some cool ai features and other like specific features, but a lot of them aren't exclusive to the pixel as well. We're going to talk about some of them in a little bit Gemini, Live, Circle to Search and the Pixel Studio, which has done some funny stuff. You saw it earlier, Tori, You're a Pokemon fan. I am. We'll talk a little bit about Pokemon's new marketing. They're endorsing some very risque products in the Pixel Studio, but we'll talk about that in a little bit.
Speaker 1:So those are my thoughts so far on this phone. Obviously, I have more to say, oh, and it charges super slow.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I was actually going to ask about that. It charges slower than.
Speaker 1:Samsung, which is embarrassing. Samsung's charging is already embarrassingly slow compared to the other Android competitors in China, this one's even slower.
Speaker 1:It's even slower and it's still not as slow as the iphone. The iphone is still the slowest charging smartphone, but uh, it's slow enough that that's another annoyance. When you come from a galaxy phone it's like, oh man, this thing charts, especially when you go from like 80 to 100. It's substantially slower than from 80 to 100. Um, from like 0 to 70 they're close, yeah, but that extra wattage actually matters when you're going like a quick top up. So if you care about that, a lot of people don't care about 80 to 100 speeds, but if you do, you want to top it up, like I topped it up out of the box to start loading my apps, because I like to start at 100 to kind of see how the battery will perform, and it took a long time. I posted a screenshot on twitter of kind of how long it took.
Speaker 1:So if you guys have other questions about Pixel 9 Pro XL, drop them below. I would say preliminarily, if you have a Galaxy S23 or S24 Ultra, even an S23 Ultra, I would not. I wouldn't jump to this phone personally. I mean, obviously I'm biased. I love Samsung, but I mean you're going to miss the S Pen. The display is still better on the S line.
Speaker 1:The S24 Ultra display is still better. One UI is superior, the processor is superior. The only thing you're going to gain is the camera. So if you're a real camera aficionado, maybe, but sacrificing all that other stuff for a camera, that's a little better in certain situations. I don't know, because the camera is not mind-blowingly better if you have good lighting. It's just better in low light and zoom situations most of the time. So those are my thoughts. Let me know on social media. If you guys have other questions, I'll try to address them in my full comparison video.
Speaker 1:So now let's talk a little bit about Tori's Watch Ultra one month review. Tori went in on that on the site. He talked about various pieces. So what are some of the key highlights? Tor highlight story that you want to emphasize to people after one month of using the watch ultra uh, overall, uh, honestly love the watch.
Speaker 3:I think is really good for daily commutes. Uh, now, I was a big fan of the rotating bezel but now, after owning a watch for so long, like I kind of forgotten all about that. They even had rotating bezels. Now the digital. I still don't use it that one very much. I don't know about you, jeff, but sometimes I, you know, I still miss whatever you know app I'm trying to get to by rotating too fast is very responsive using the touchscreen to get to where you need to get started to get to where you need to get to, so need to get to. So I just often opt out for that. But overall, this is like a very solid watch. I definitely recommend the Trail Band. I find that to be way more comfortable than what's it called.
Speaker 1:The Marine Band.
Speaker 3:Yeah, way more comfortable. Yeah, honestly. But if you do get it, it you got to be careful with the um what was this part, yeah, yeah, the class part, because you have to like kind of pull it out and then it comes into like two pieces. Yeah, that's the one thing we talked about, that band before I got it.
Speaker 1:I finally got mine, in the one thing that I think is annoying about this band and I agree with tori it's better than the marine band but, um, this little pen that you have to pull out to adjust the band. It'd be better if you could slide it along here.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's what I was hoping that would do, so if anyone's used the TrailBland you kind of have to guess as to where the pen needs to go Because you have to physically take it out and reinsert it into one of these little holes of the ridges and that is not ideal because if you could slide it you can gauge how far you need to clasp it back on your wrist to have a comfortable fit. That's kind of annoying, but I still like it a lot better than the Marine Band. One thing I really agreed with in Tori's review is that this is the first Samsung smartwatch ever, in my opinion, that doesn't have any lag. So the smoothness and fluidity of navigating around the UI it finally feels like it's on the level of the Apple Watch. Because in my opinion, even as a Samsung fan, when other companies make great products, including Apple, I'm willing to give them credit for it, and the Apple Watch Ultra and the Apple Watch Series have been the gold standard for smartwatches since they started, in my opinion, in terms of smoothness, particularly, and battery life. But this watch, in my opinion just adding to Tori's comments and everything he said, I mostly agree with the smoothness here is fantastic. You're not going to see lag with this particular device. I've never had a hiccup Old Samsung watches. If you were trying to go into the settings or go into the app view or I'd switch into payments for my Samsung wallet to make a payment, or try to use voice search with Bixby or something, it would lag, but not this watch. So performance is great. Battery life is great. Overall, you know, there's not a lot of things I would criticize Samsung for.
Speaker 1:It is still a bummer that you can't use face or watch faces with this. A lot of people care about that. I mean to be honest with you. A lot of the stock bands and I'm still rocking one of the stock bands I have. I don't know if people can see it on the camera from there, but I'll actually let me try to unclasp it and I'll show you.
Speaker 1:I'm using the stock band that has like the big number. I forgot what it's called. Let me zoom out because I don't remember what this band is called. Does it tell me the name here? It doesn't tell me the name anyway, I'll drop the name in the show notes. Got like the big number it. It's a very simplistic one, this one right here. I also use the ultra analog face that they had, which is a really good one. They've got quite a few good stock bands, so like you don't need to necessarily go and go out and get a third-party band. In my opinion, Now, of course, there's still a lot of people who and no shade if that's something you like to customize that great, because of course I love to customize a lot of stuff on my phone and that's one of the big things we cover on my youtube channel. On the website is customization. But watch fans, watch faces I don't necessarily change them as much as I do my icons or my widgets on my phone. Um, maybe I should.
Speaker 1:Maybe I should start doing more videos like that but I do think it's a bummer for people who do want to use face or watches. Hopefully they'll sort that out, because people paid a lot of money for that. I researched it. Someone commented it's actually $20 to buy that app, so that's a lot of money to have bought it in the past and now you can't use it on your new watch.
Speaker 1:That kind of sucks. So I hope they fix that. Otherwise, I don't have a lot of other complaints. For the most part I will say remember in the beginning I said that I had some notification issues where I was like not receiving certain notifications.
Speaker 1:Here's what I'll say and this has always been true of Samsung and I think it's on purpose I don't think it's something they, it's a bug. I've talked to a lot of people about this um on the Sam's community forum, on on X people who know some people inside the Samsung watch team, I think because of the way where OS works, they send you notifications based on like a priority meter and some of them are silent, regardless of what you choose to save battery life.
Speaker 1:So like if you're someone like me and I'm not saying I'm famous, I'm not like Kim Kardashian famous but imagine that you are someone who gets like 200 social notifications per hour.
Speaker 1:I probably get maybe a hundred, but let's imagine you're someone like Kim Kardashian you get 15 million per hour because, you've got like a billion followers on Instagram, you don't want your watch to actually be vibrating for everyone, because your watch would be dead in like 20 minutes, because all those notifications would drain the battery, drain the screen on. So I think it only sends you stuff that it recognizes as priority, with a vibration once it learns your usage patterns, to save battery. Because, honestly, if I got all my social notifications in real time on the watch, it probably would have terrible battery life just because of the number I get. So it does send me all my important emails, my Slack messages, my Facebook messenger, my text messages. I've never missed any of those. I kind of researched this a little bit more in depth and so it's mainly just like likes on Twitter or, you know, studio, youtube, studio comments. They don't send me all of those just because I think it would truly kill the battery, and so I think Samsung's made a cognizant choice to do that.
Speaker 1:If you have other notification problems, just as a quick shameless plug, I wrote a full guide on the website this week, a tutorial on how to fix any notification issues you might have, aside from this one Cause, obviously, like I said, I think this is an intentional thing Some social notifications just won't vibrate if you have a certain volume, I think. But if you have other notification issues, I wrote a really detailed guide to help you and you can check it out in the show notes. Anything else, tori, you want to add to your one month thoughts? That pretty much wraps up our thoughts on the watch ultra. I would say if you're a galaxy watch fan and you have the galaxy watch flagship, don't hesitate to go out and buy this, do you agree?
Speaker 3:Seriously, yeah, no, I really get stamp approval and I really do like it. Isn't this titanium? Yeah, the feel even like when you first get it out of the box, just like it really feels like a nice premium product, something that feels really good. And just about everywhere I go when they see the watch they're like, oh man, that looks so cool. It really does feel like a cool current tech watch to have on your wrist.
Speaker 1:And it's built like a tank.
Speaker 3:So you can bang this up against anything.
Speaker 1:Usually, when I'm wearing my nice, like my Tudor watch, which is my non-smart watch when I wear it out going places, I'm always nervous about banging it into the door or something Like.
Speaker 3:with this one, I'm just like wow, yeah, yeah, I just bang it into whatever I want.
Speaker 1:If I'm holding the kids and they're like pulling on it because my my five month old, the baby, he likes to like play with it. Rip at it like you can have at it, because this thing is built like a tank. There's nothing's going to break this um, and I've banged into a bunch of stuff. I don't have any scratches on it. I was looking at it the other day this thing is an absolute tank.
Speaker 1:So, uh, if you're a galaxy fan, you have a Galaxy flagship phone and you want to get the best watch experience you can. It's very expensive $650, but trade-in deals are still out there. You can get some good deals and I would say go for it, why not? So that brings us into. I want to talk about these three Google features that came to Samsung phones this week. I made a very funny video over on YouTube and you guys will have to go check it out and watch it. I'll actually play. In fact, I can do it. Hey, it is my own video.
Speaker 1:So hey no one can. No one can put a copyright restriction on me, so maybe I'll just go over here and we'll take a quick look at it. I can insert the clip of it if you guys want to see it. Quick look at it. I can insert the clip of it if you guys want to see it, and I can kind of show Tori as well. I made this Google Gemini video where I asked it some questions about the. I asked it questions about a baseball game that was in progress it was the Arizona Diamondbacks game and it told me some truly crazy stuff. Let me see if I have it yet.
Speaker 1:Let me see if I have it on the fold. Yet I don't know. I do have it on the fold. Let's try to do it live instead of doing the video. So what? I I'll tell you what it did before and let's see if it does any better, cause there's a Diamondbacks game going on right now actually, so we can try it again.
Speaker 1:I asked like what inning it was or if they were playing, and then I said, okay, does Corbin Carroll have any hits? And it told me originally that game was in the third inning, but then it told me Corbin Carroll had a hit and he had homered in the fifth inning. And I was like, well, wait, how can that be possible? Because you just said it's the third inning. I said wait, what inning is it? And then it said it's the seventh inning, and so they were in the third inning. He hit a homer in the fifth and then the inning all of a sudden was the seventh.
Speaker 1:So let's see what happens here. So, gemini Live if you have Gemini Advanced, you can tap this little live icon here on the right side of the phone and it will enable the conversational view and you have to turn the volume up so you can kind of hear it. It tells you to do that if you don't have your volume up, and then you can go live and it's going to show you this little animation and it makes that little noise and scream. Are the Arizona Diamondbacks playing right now and if so, what's the score?
Speaker 2:The Diamondbacks are leading the Red Sox 2-1 in the middle of the fifth.
Speaker 1:Does Corbin Carroll have any hits?
Speaker 2:Unfortunately, I couldn't find any recent data about Corbin Carroll's hits. There's a couple of things that could be going on. If this is about a specific game, it's possible the information isn't available yet or the stats haven't been updated. If you tell me the date of the game you're curious about, I can try and find that info for you.
Speaker 1:I'm interested in the game going on right now. Who are the D-backs playing right now?
Speaker 2:again, I'm interested in the game going on right now. Who are the D-backs playing right now again?
Speaker 1:The Arizona Diamondbacks are currently playing against the Boston Red Sox and does Corbin Carroll have any hits in that game?
Speaker 2:Yes, corbin Carroll has one hit so far in today's game. He's batting leadoff and playing center field.
Speaker 1:Great. When did he get a hit? What inning?
Speaker 2:Corbin Carroll got his hit in the very first inning of the game. He reached first base on a single.
Speaker 1:Okay. So it seems to have done better If you guys go and check out. So maybe they improved it, even since I did this two days ago. That's cool. So this looks like it's all accurate. I kind of checked it here on MLBcom while I was doing it. I basically I'm impressed. Man, I thought it was going to mess it up again. So it really Did some weird stuff in my video. You guys can go check it out. But this is a really useful tool Basically. Unfortunately, here's the negative thing about it, Because there's always a negative, like we say, with everything. Basically, Google took all of the Assistant functionality Because you know, there used to be Google Assistant.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And now there's Gemini, but there's still Google Assistant. You could change between them and some of them have overlapping features, which is confusing. I'll just give you this Gemini.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I don't know why they didn't just get rid of Google Assistant, but here's the thing what they're doing is they're putting a bunch of the old free features from Google Assistant behind Gemini Advanced, which costs $20 a month. So if you want Gemini Live, you have to have Advanced and that costs $20 a month. And so some of these features like real time, like info about various things that might eventually all move to Gemini advanced, you can still do some of it with assistant right now, because right now they both live together. And it's really weird because, like some of the things that you're trying to get info about, sometimes Gemini advanced will tell you hey, I need to ask Google assistant about this. Like, why do you even tell me this? Why are you telling me you're asking Google Assistant? Just do it. I don't care, you're Google's chatbot and obviously Google Assistant is also Google's chatbot. Just work together and come up with the answer I want.
Speaker 1:Mkbhd talked about this in his Pixel 9 Pro video this week. I thought I'd talk about it as well. It's kind of a huge cluster. You know what?
Speaker 2:Right now. They really should do something about that and fix it.
Speaker 1:It's not a great look right now. They really should do something about that, uh, and fix it because it's it's not a not a great. Not a great look right now for google. Um, the other google feature that came to galaxy phones this week and again came to is you know they're coming to, because I don't know if I have it. I'm going to try it again right now live. This is the circle to search music feature. So, basically, if there's music playing around and let me be careful because I don't want to get us copyright violation Let me go to Spotify and do let me do non-copyright music really quick so that we don't get a copyright.
Speaker 1:So let me go ahead and play this song and now I'm going to do circle to search and let's see if it gives me the music option. If it does, I'll show you guys what it looks like here. And it does not. So there's circle to search. If you have it, there'll be a little music note down here in the bottom right corner. I don't have it yet. So basically, if you have a song playing, it's supposed to give you that little music note. It seems like it's rolling out very slowly and it playing it's supposed to give you that little music note. It seems like it's rolling out very slowly and it might only be rolling out to some of those mid-rangers first, which remember Samit was talking about earlier that he thought maybe those mid-rangers are getting One UI 6.1.1 code base before the S series. Strangely, it seems like some of those mid-range phones are getting the music search before your flagship phones.
Speaker 1:I'm actually going to go try. I have a Galaxy Tab S9 FE in here. So I'm going to go try to charge it because I haven't used it in a long time and take it home this weekend and update it, because I haven't used it in a long time and it needs an update and see if it has Circle to Search music and I'll report back. So I'd like to show that off on a video because it's a cool feature and a lot of people would like that. But it's not on my flagships yet, so it's probably not on your flagships either, so but you can try and check it out. Um, the last one, which is, uh, definitely not good news for google. This is a really funny one. I haven't made a video on this yet, but I might.
Speaker 1:Pixel studio so that's something I didn't talk about earlier for the pixel 9 pro excel on purpose, because I knew I was going to talk about right now. Pixel studio is the new feature inside of google's uh phones that allows you to generate any ai image you want using just a text prompt, and so, as you guys know, with galaxy ai on the galaxy phones, like, if you use sketched image, which is something new for one ui 6.1.1, samsung will refuse to do like explicit images or obscene, vulgar anything that would make like. If you try to have like a person or a brand do something that would be obscene, samsung will say, no, I can't generate that image and do it, however. So I thought, hey, samsung does that. Maybe google also implemented the same protections. Let me check it out. So I got my Pixel 9 Pro XL out today while I was eating lunch and I said hey, can you give me a picture of Pikachu promoting a vodka brand? And here's basically what it gave me.
Speaker 1:There's a little text bubble, right here of Pikachu and it says drink a drinka and it make it a little brighter Drink a drink, a Drink, a drink, a, and it's got drink a vodka right there next to him. He's got a little thumbs up going too. You give a little thumbs up to the vodka. Pikachu's like yeah, alcoholism, all right.
Speaker 2:So that's not a good not a good look.
Speaker 1:And look, I can even make a sticker out of it. I can make a sticker out of my Pikachu guy and I can use that as a little emoji on my Twitter or whatever else I want. So this is probably not good for Google. It'll do any weird stuff. Let's try another one just for fun. While we're here. Let's say create. So what should we create, tori?
Speaker 3:Let's see here. Let's see we're going to get Pokemon. What's another popular little?
Speaker 1:thing let's do Bluey. You know the children's show. My kids love Bluey, so Bluey, I always Bluey. Bluey the dog is a sales person for Bud Light. Let's check that out. How does that look?
Speaker 3:And look what you got.
Speaker 1:Oh yes, Perfect Bluey's selling some Bud Light. I know I don't think that our friends at Nickelodeon would like that.
Speaker 3:That looks too realistic, man. I don't think that's juice, that's not. Would like that. That looks too realistic, man.
Speaker 1:I don't think that's juice, that's not good man, I mean we think it's funny, but this is not good because, unlike Samsung's phones, you'll notice what's not on here. There's no watermark. Yeah, so on the Galaxy Eye it puts a watermark. So you know it was made by AI. Yeah, this looks like it could be a real image, like image Like the bluey character from Nickelodeon is, you know, promoting Bud Light beer. It doesn't seem good.
Speaker 1:So you could do some really bad stuff with Pixel Studio. I've seen people do worse. I was just trying to keep it pretty PG, but some people have done some worse stuff. If you search on X or Reddit, you can find some worse ones. Google's going to have to do something about this. They won't allow you to edit pictures of actual people yet, but they obviously missed the fact that other bad things could be done. Even if you don't allow you to remix photos of real people, there's still other things you can do, and a lot of brands are probably not going to be too happy with this. I would imagine Google will be issuing another apology, just like they did for Team Pixel, just like they did for that ad. Remember we talked about that Olympic ad where the girl was writing her hero a letter with AI, with Gemini. They had to apologize for that. Google is just on a tour of apologies right now, and I think their next apology will be Pixel Studio. So next week on the podcast, look for the very beginning, right after the intro.
Speaker 2:It's going to be google reading me reading a statement.
Speaker 1:We missed the mark with pixel studio, blah blah. So check that out. Let us know what you guys think in the comments below. Um q a. So we are there, we made it, we did it, we got to the end of the podcast. It's always a great feeling because you know, you never know, you never know if you're going to arrive safely at the end of the podcast and today we did.
Speaker 1:So, a couple of questions. The first one, which was a great question, let me fire it up here. I actually had it open on the Pixel.
Speaker 2:A very detailed question.
Speaker 1:It's one from the video version of last week's podcast. It says what are some big things that jump out to you in terms of differences between DJ Co's regime and TM Rowe's regime? When it comes to Samsung, I believe the fold was originally conceived while DJ Co was still with the company, and part of me suspects that, had the transition happened sooner, I don't think there would even be a foldable market. Tm Rowe seems much more cautious. Overall, it's a great question, very good question. We really appreciate it. This guy, what's his name? I've got to give him a shout out because he puts good questions to his name.
Speaker 2:At.
Speaker 1:GLXYNXS on YouTube. Very good questions two weeks in a row. I entirely agree with his sentiment. The difference between DJ Co and TM Row is massive. We've talked about it a little bit on the podcast a couple times now. Dj Co was all about Samsung innovating and being at the edge of technology. He wanted to bring the greatest technology he could to the consumer market as fast as he could. He was never like okay, we have this cool thing we could bring to the consumer market, but there might be this little problem with it. Should we wait five years to put it out? He'd be like no, there's a little problem with it, it's going out. You should throw it out the door.
Speaker 1:I mean, this is a guy who put out the Galaxy Note Edge, which was cutting edge at the time. It had a curved edge. There was only one side of the phone curved. You might not even remember it. It was a Note. It was released with the Note 4, but it was a separate release just for people who wanted to get like really on the cutting edge. I bought it but I was making videos on YouTube that. But when I was making videos on YouTube, that was one of my first falls on YouTube and it was at the bleeding edge.
Speaker 1:It was not the most amazing phone in the world, but the concepts that it laid the groundwork for, like the apps, edge and a lot of the design language that they had later on was massively important to Samsung. Tm Rowe though he's more like of the cautious mindset, like we've had these PR disasters in the past, like note 7 debacle let's tighten it down, let's become more like apple, where it's all about like stability, and let's focus on the polish and not the innovation. So I entirely agree with the sentiment that if we had had tm rowe come in sooner, obviously yes. The answer to his question was was the original Galaxy Fold developed under DJ Co? It was. It had been developed for a long time. It was originally called the Galaxy X concept before it became the Fold, didn't? I know that?
Speaker 1:I don't think TM Rowe would have ever spent money to develop a foldable. He would have been like let's just stick with these boring slab phones because they sell millions of units. We can just polish them up like Apple, put them out the door and make maximum profit margins. Because innovating something like this and I've said some things about the Z Fold 6 that it needs to step up in certain areas like the camera, but this is an amazing piece of innovation I mean, at the end of the day, we're critical, because that's what I do here. We review phones, we critique the tech.
Speaker 1:This is an amazing innovation, and Samsung did this before anyone else.
Speaker 2:Now they've let some other people get ahead of them.
Speaker 1:TM Row let that happen. But DJ Co developed the original ideas behind this, and Samsung was the one leading the way in foldables. We can't forget that. So, yeah, do I wish DJ Co is back? I kind of do. I'll be honest with you, I like the Samsung that takes risk and sometimes, even if the product isn't fully baked, it's still an exciting thing. Like every time I bought a Samsung phone that was developed under DJ Co, I felt like this is going to be like change how I use my phone. There's some feature in here that I have to have, and now, with TMRO, I still like their products and I use them. I just feel like, oh, the phone I'm getting next year is going to be a slightly refined version of the phone I had last year.
Speaker 1:It's still great but every year that DJ Co released something, it was like there's a new feature that you felt like you needed to go and upgrade, because if you didn't go upgrade you were not going to have the coolest tech, and so if you were a fan of tech, I do miss him. So that's my kind of answer. What do you think, tori, about Samsung's trajectory now?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so when did TM come in?
Speaker 1:It's been about. I don't remember the exact date offhand, but I think about seven years, Seven years. Yeah, I don't remember the exact date offhand, but I think about seven years, seven years.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, because I remember around the time when Samsung was starting to creep past all the other Androids and they were just starting to dominate a lot of the Android commercials and stuff I was seeing, the feel was that I needed to have a Samsung phone. I was like that is something cool. I was looking at all the iphones are coming out consistently. I was like, oh, that was towards the end of dj co's. Yeah, middle end of his reign.
Speaker 1:Um, you know he was responsible for all the really important early galaxy devices and you're talking about around the s6 time yeah that was, you know. You know him kind of pushing the envelope of, of greatness and he really kind of just annihilated every other android manufacturer he took out htc he took out lg he took out google's nexus program and pushed them. He actually pushed them to create the pixel.
Speaker 1:Google used to make low-cost phones called the nexus lineup it was basically it was just a software show, and then they reinvented it to the Pixel so they could try to get some hardware share, because Samsung was like 99% of the market share around S7, s8 time. Because they just eviscerated everybody, they destroyed everyone in their path.
Speaker 3:I remember distinctly the S7 being like. I've seen commercials for that everywhere and people were talking about getting that if they weren't already a hardcore Apple fan if they were on the fence or already had it. Yeah, the. S7 Edge so many people were thinking about upgrading to that phone.
Speaker 1:You gotta get that there's different approaches to go about getting different market share from Apple, but the way that DJ Co did it was just by. You know this is a piece of tech that DJ Co did. It was just by. Like. You know, this is a piece of tech that when you show it to someone while you're out, they're going to be like maybe I need to switch to Samsung and they're like ooh, what else does it do?
Speaker 3:Yeah, and you would.
Speaker 1:You would show people that phone. When I had the S7 Edge, that was like the third year I did YouTube, so I had it from the beginning and I would go everywhere People would ask questions about that. And when I had the original foldable, the original Z Fold, like that was like everywhere I went, Like I, even if someone like, even if someone was like a hardcore Apple user you know, if I was at a restaurant, every waitress I went to, like if I had that phone and I unfolded it, they would ask, like what is that?
Speaker 1:They would want to know, and also I talked about this a little bit before back when Samsung used to have magnetic stripe technology, when you could pay with Samsung without using NFC. I don't know if you remember this. No, I don't. You used to be able to pay with Samsung Pay without having an NFC reader on the reader, just using a magnetic stripe. It was called Magnet MST technology.
Speaker 3:Is that like where you had to like put it yeah, yeah, on the side?
Speaker 1:yeah, and that was amazing. I don't know why they got rid of it again. That's tm row trying to streamline some things that would. That would blow people's mind. I'd go to target right that's one of my favorite things. They'd be like oh no, we don't have apple pay or google pay. We don't have nfc here. I'd be like boop. And they'd be like whoa, how did? And they'd be like whoa, how did you do that? They're like we don't have an NFC reader.
Speaker 2:I'm like this is a Samsung. I'm like this is a Samsung, you have a nice night.
Speaker 1:That's why I wish they would bring MST back. I know why they got rid of it. It's less secure than NFC, and TMRO is all about the security and the stability and all that stuff, but it's cool having these cool pieces of tech that nobody else can compete with. And so yeah, I do miss DJ Co. I kind of wish you know, maybe DJ Co hit me up, we'll go grab a beer. Yeah right, I don't think he'll listen to this.
Speaker 3:Well, I'd like to finish answering your question, you know, because I'm reflecting on the past but moving towards the future. I think you bring up a really good point. A lot of the people that I know who are interested sorry, who are Apple, but they're interested I think where they could win would be the foldables.
Speaker 2:Yep, I agree.
Speaker 3:Because I feel like that is such an innovative thing that I think Apple users are probably looking at like will apple ever come up with one?
Speaker 1:and they do have one in the pipeline.
Speaker 3:But it's now been told, rumored from their leaksters from the apple leak side, it's not gonna be till 2027 yeah samsung has three years to still dominate yeah, right, you know, and so like I think, uh, because obviously we talked a lot about it on the show already Even as a consumer I'm looking at stuff and now that I've only really been using Samsung products for the last few years now, does them taking it safe for me?
Speaker 3:I'm like, all right, it gives me enough time to get used to Samsung and just what they have to offer, without a crazy innovation here, here and here and having to feel like I have to shell out a lot of money because I want to get the next best thing. But I know they're going to reach a point where we still need to kind of push that envelope, because that is what Samsung is. And so I'm just hoping that once they kind of get the user ability down because I feel like that's what they're focusing on that we can get back to some of that cutting edge stuff and definitely improve the foldables. And you know, I think they need to get a better price tag if they really want to try to move some of these iphone users and stuff over on the foldables. I feel like that. That's.
Speaker 1:That's the next war, the great war you're definitely right because, if you remember, a couple episodes ago, when I was getting rid of my z flip 5, my lady who does my pedicure she bought it from me. She was an Apple user, so she left her iPhone. She had an iPhone 13 Pro and moved the Z Flip 5. She purchased it from me because she wanted a foldable. That's not because she wanted necessarily to go to Android or One UI or anything else. It was the form factor that appealed to her.
Speaker 1:So Samsung has the opportunity. They have this several year head start. By the time Apple releases theirs, samsung will have been doing foldables for 10 years. So they really should take advantage of that, because when Apple does come, they're going to come correct, I promise you. They always make sure that they iron out all the bugs. So Samsung needs to get as much market share as they can, because when they release a foldable, it will be good for their users. I'm not saying something I would want to use as my main device, but it will appeal to Apple users. It will be very Apple-y, it'll have a lot of Apple taste to it. It'll taste like apple pie.
Speaker 2:That foldable will.
Speaker 1:So if you don't grab those users now then later on they're going to just see the Apple one. They're going to be like oh, I can keep all my Apple stuff, I'll just stay here.
Speaker 2:So in the next three years, Samsung needs to decrease the crease.
Speaker 1:Add more features up the cameras On the book-style foldables, make it wider and thinner and lighter and don't make it $2,500, because no one can afford $2,500.
Speaker 3:No one can afford that.
Speaker 1:And then you'll start poaching some of that Apple user base. No. So that was a long question, but are there any other stories? I forgot what are the other?
Speaker 3:questions. I think it was just the small ones towards the end. This was from iHus9950. Hello, jeff, keep checking store but not getting any app updates since the last security update on my S22 Ultra. Have you heard of any issues?
Speaker 1:I haven't heard of any specific issues, but what I would say is, whenever you do an update and you have this kind of issue, there's a couple things you can do. Clear the app cache I have a video on that so I can drop a link. Clear the cache partition on the phone I have a video on that so I can drop a link. Clear the cache partition on the phone I have a video on that so I can drop a link. And you can also repair all apps from the reboot menu, and that can sometimes help.
Speaker 1:Worst case scenario if none of that works, go back to the previous Galaxy Store version, which you can do in the APK mirror and this guy he watches my channel all the time. So if you have any issues with this, just hit me up on X and I'll get you a link to the previous galaxy store and you can roll back and then it should work fine. So those are the three things app, cash, cash partition and then you can roll back to the next galaxy store and should work okay yeah, there's actually one more question, and this was actually a question that I had this past weekend, um with the trail band.
Speaker 3:Oh, this comes from jerome gold 3216. Um, great content. I'm surprised you didn't talk about the galaxy watch ultra, but I love the watch. But here's the question with the trail band can you swim, shower with it, um, without ruining it? Yeah, you can the?
Speaker 1:fabric is breathable.
Speaker 3:Yeah, okay, yeah, that's what I was wondering, because I was going to go swimming with my watch this past weekend but I was like, wait, you can, I don't want to ruin the trail. Yeah, yeah, you can.
Speaker 1:I jumped in the shower with it just to test it. I didn't go swimming with it yet, but yeah, it's not going to hurt it dries out pretty quick too. Oh, this is like the moisture wicking, like quick dry kind of material, and I kind of suspected that. I mean I actually didn't read what samsung says about it, I just tried it, so I could have wasted my I could have wasted my 80 dollars band and had to buy a new one.
Speaker 1:But I was like I'm pretty sure, because the apple watch ultra also has a similar material band and I had used that one before in the shower and it worked fine. Um, I don't always wear my watch in the shower, just trying to test it out and see. But yeah, you can Marine band and this one, they're absolutely fine.
Speaker 1:Now you know you're going to have to let it dry when you get out, unless you want to walk around with this soggy band on your hand. But will it ruin it? No, it's not going to ruin the band long term, so that's good. I think that's mostly it from us yeah, I think so.
Speaker 1:An hour and 31 minutes. Not too bad there for the run time. We'll be back next week, of course, just three weeks away, I think, from our first live stream podcast. That is going to be interesting. Tori and I are still kicking it around. That may be on Saturday, so we might move things to Saturday when we start live streaming, just because I don't know how many people are going to be able to tune in Friday evening because everyone's driving home on the West Coast or they're just getting home and they have plans for the night.
Speaker 1:If we do it Saturday in the middle of the day, people might join the chat. So I'm actually going to send out a Google form poll in the newsletter next week and probably up front X if you want to vote, if you would come through the chat different times so we can schedule it. That'll be very fun. Lots of new improvements coming. We've got the sign, we've got the green screen. We're going to get it going here. It's going to be super professional and, speaking of professional, just to close out this podcast, I'd like to remind you guys this week to never stop expanding your galaxy.