This phone starts fires on purpose

Summary

The Vergecast: "This phone starts fires on purpose"

Date: March 6, 2026
Hosts: Nilay Patel (lead host), Sean Hollister, Allison Johnson, Dom Preston
Theme: Exploring a week of wild gadget news from Mobile World Congress (MWC), new hardware trends overseas, Android’s shifting landscape, Google/Epic settlement drama, and a parade of quirky devices—from cigarette-lighter phones to racing car phone chargers.

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Episode Overview

This lively episode sees Nilay back in the host’s chair alongside Verge editors Sean, Allison, and Dom. With David Pierce on parental leave, the team dives into one of the most eclectic weeks in recent gadget history. The focus is on the weird and wonderful devices on show at MWC, the fierce pace of hardware innovation outside the US, shifting Android dynamics (including Google and Epic’s ongoing App Store battle), and a lightning round full of fresh hardware oddities. The tone is candid, nerdy, skeptical, and frequently hilarious.

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Key Segments & Insights

1. Personal Gadget Joy: Kaleidoscape, the $13,000 Movie Streamer

[05:48–16:44]

• Nilay shares his experience with Kaleidoscape, an ultra-high-end movie server/streamer setup (Mini Terra Prime + Strato E player, $13k setup).
  • "It is the single most incredible experience I've ever had watching a movie in my entire life." (Nilay, [07:36])
  • Local server+clients setup, as the 100Mbps, uncompressed video files are too big to stream.
  • Watching movies in uncompressed video/audio (Atmos, DTS HD) is a revelation compared to standard streaming (15–25Mbps), causing him to rewatch titles like "Incredibles 2" and "Pacific Rim" to spot new visual details.
  • Gripe: Needs installer configuration, no remote control (expected AV system integrator/butler scenario), and no movies included.
• Nilay's analogy: "It's like driving a car on a racetrack after years of commuting—you realize how much potential your hardware had all along."
• Notable Quote: “It is a crime how much compression these streamers foist upon us.” (Nilay, [13:02])
• Downside: Most people would just be using this setup to watch "Bluey" or kids' movies, which makes the extravagance extra comedic.

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2. Mobile World Congress: A Parade of Weird Hardware

[18:50–44:08]

a. Hardware Innovation Outside the US

• Theme: Phones and gadgets launching at MWC are “getting weird” due to openness in markets outside the US (more accessible, more Android users, hardware-based competition).

b. UKITEL WP63 "Camping Phone" with Built-in Fire Lighter

[18:50–22:31]

• The phone that "starts fires on purpose."
  • Rugged device, 20,000mAh battery, outdoor speakers, camping light, and a literal cigarette lighter—a small resistive heating plate original to old car lighters.
  • Demonstrated at MWC by lighting cigarettes (unreliable, device often broke during demos).
  • Nilay: “I respect it. It is very much a 1980s cigarette lighter. Like this is the thing that like was in, in my parents cars.” ([20:49])
  • Allison: “We tried to see this thing work 3 times ... every time I went, it had broken about 10 minutes before I arrived.” ([21:42])

c. Honor’s “Robot Phone” (Gimbal Phone)

[23:07–30:39]

• Phone with built-in gimbal (DJI OSMO Pocket style) folds out of rear camera, dances to Imagine Dragons (and no other song in the demo!).
  • “The robot phone name is a real stretch. This is the gimbal phone…” (Allison, [23:07])
  • Not yet accessible, first working demos at MWC, promises future versions for Europe.
  • Nilay is enamored with the stabilization but rightly skeptical of long-term durability, repairability, and waterproofing.

d. Xiaomi 17 Ultra & Leica Leitz Phone

[32:20–36:47]

• Xiaomi (numbers now“match Apple”) launches Leica co-branded phone with a rotating camera ring for hardware zoom/focus—a “Leica nerd” status symbol.
  • Noted for lavish branding, but the manual focus ring implementation is awkward due to its small size.
  • Nilay: “Neither of them [Leica collectors he knows] have any children. And so the money you would spend on college goes directly to Leica.” ([35:04])

e. Vivo, Tecno, Unihertz: Modularity Galore

[36:58–44:08]

• Vivo: Cinema-centric accessories for phones like 400mm telephoto lens, camera cage attachments; honest about "status" of pro phone shooting (“this is what you need to actually shoot videos on a phone”).
• Tecno: Concept phone that’s super-slim, modular via Pogo pins and magnets to add battery packs, full-size cameras, speakers.
  • “The magnets are not strong enough ... it just immediately wanted to fall off.” (Allison, [41:46])
• Lenovo: Modular laptop concept, detachable port modules stored in a jewelry box-like case (“You just made the world's most inconvenient dongles”). Also, a removable second display.
  • Sean: “I am all over this...Theoretically you could plug in eGPUs and giant solid state drives...” ([45:02])

f. Nothing Phone 4A/4A Pro

[45:40–50:52]

• New Nothing phones: One sticks to the brand's transparent design; the 4A Pro moves to opaque metal with a dot matrix display. The team debates the practicality and fading appeal of “transparent phone” as a core differentiator.

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3. Big Story: Google & Epic App Store Settlement

[55:12–75:19]

Context Recap

• Epic Games' lawsuit with Apple and Google over App Store fees/restrictions; Google’s case seen as more clear-cut anti-trust due to more direct control/leverage over OEMs/carriers (and ample “do what we want or die” internal emails).

Recent Twist

• Unexpected post-trial attempt to settle the antitrust case:
  • Judge highly skeptical (dubious about a secret $800M deal between Google and Epic, plus non-disparagement clauses).
  • Google to decouple billing and reduce fees (from 30% to 20%), inspired by the verdict, and roll out these features globally—except in the US, pending final legal ruling.
  • Nilay: “They're just front running the judge. They're like, judge, this has already happened. Don't you want to be cool?” ([62:23])
  • Part of an “epic” truce: Google may now treat Fortnite not as a game but as a “Metaverse browser” (!)—potentially reducing fees further.
    • Nilay loses it: "I'm so mad at you for making me consider the idea that Fortnite is a metaverse.” ([65:12])
  • New Google OS (Aluminium/Aluminum) for PCs enters the picture; concern whether Google will use it to sidestep future antitrust obligations to the Android ecosystem.

Broader Takeaway

• US Android/phone market is highly constrained (carriers, less hardware innovation) compared to rest of world, partially due to Google's tight controls—while overseas manufacturers run wild with hardware experimentation.

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4. Lightning Round: Quirky Gadgets, News, and Rants

[77:47–end]

a. “Brendan Carr is a Dummy” Minicast

[77:47–83:59]

• Mocking FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr’s proposal to force US call centers home and require “American standard English”—with Nilay predicting the real result will only be more AI call centers.
  • “If you bring...call centers over here, they're not going to pay the higher labor rates. They're just going to let AI answer the phone.” (Nilay, [79:04])

b. Plastic-eating Brick Machine

[83:59–88:17], Sean

• Review of the Clear Drop plastic compactor: 61 lb machine turns household plastic into bricks, which (at launch) were being mailed—a bit sketchily—to a company exec's home (!), then to a recycling center.
  • "You put it in the machine. Eventually, weeks later...it will compress it...and you mail that off across the country to some guy's house." ([84:41])
  • Not environmentally sound or economically sensible yet.

c. Infinix Note 60 Ultra Racing Car Wireless Charger

[88:17–90:35], Allison

• A racing car-shaped Qi wireless charger (“really strong Simpsons ‘I sleep in a racing car’ energy”). Phone’s car theming otherwise mostly cosmetic, but the SIM card tool doubles as a toy car.

d. Lock Screen “Wisdom”

[90:35–92:16], Nilay & Allison

• Infinix phone’s lock screen presents grandiose, randomly assigned aphorisms (“There is no chance, no destiny, no fate...”).

e. Favorite Audience Detail: Kobo Page Turner Remote

[92:20–94:11], Nilay

• On Apple launch day, Verge’s No. 2 traffic story was the $30 Kobo remote for turning e-reader pages—proving their audience’s priorities ("what you actually want...a remote for your e-reader”).

f. Reviewing New LEGO Smart Brick

[94:16–99:34], Sean

• New interactive LEGO sets (Star Wars-themed): bricks can detect orientation, proximity, make sound effects—but fun is limited, battery life poor (~45 mins). “It does seem like what Lego has made here is like one of those crazy sound effect boards for morning zoo cruise radio shows.” (Nilay, [96:35])

g. US White House Tweets CoD Footage as Iran War Propaganda

[99:41–102:09], Allison

• During IRL conflict, White House tweets out a highlight reel combining video game (Call of Duty) footage with real missile strike videos.
  • “This is like a video...genuinely from Call of Duty. ...The animation of when you call in a nuclear strike.” ([100:48])
  • “We rarely contend with the fact that people are routinely confused by video game footage all the time.” (Nilay, [101:52])

h. Ticketmaster Trial Watch

[102:14–end], Nilay

• Live Nation/Ticketmaster monopoly trial—new allegations that the company threatened venues and artists (withheld Billie Eilish show as retaliation for contracting with SeatGeek).
  • Larger point: biggest monopolies in modern life are "just weird databases;" AI/disruption coming soon for many of these models.

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• "It's like you're seeing reality for the first time." — Nilay, on the Kaleidoscape ([07:53])
• “Have you ever driven a go-kart on a racetrack?...oh, this is how it's supposed to be!” — Nilay ([08:47])
• "We're just in an age of modularity in specific ways...not you're going to build your own phone out of parts, but you can clip a bunch of magnets [accessories] to our phone." — Nilay ([40:13])
• “I love the dream of pogo pins…but it is true that the dream of modular accessories is going to live forever.” — Nilay ([42:38])
• “Judge, this has already happened. Don’t you want to be cool?” — Nilay, on Google/Epic settlement tactics ([62:23])
• “I'm so mad at you for making me consider the idea that Fortnite is a metaverse.” — Nilay ([65:12])
• "It does seem like what Lego has made here is like one of those crazy sound effect boards for morning zoo cruise radio shows." — Nilay ([96:35])

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Timestamps for Major Segments

• 05:48 — Kaleidoscape movie streamer review
• 18:50 — MWC wrap: wild hardware overseas
• 22:31 — Cigarette-lighter phone demo woes
• 23:07 — “Robot” phone w/ gimbal camera
• 32:20 — Xiaomi/Leica and camera phone branding
• 36:58 — Modular accessories: Vivo & Tecno
• 45:40 — Nothing Phone 4A / Pro and brand evolution
• 55:12 — Google/Epic legal saga, settlement, and Android future
• 77:47 — Lightning round: call-centers, gadgets, dystopia
• 99:41 — War propaganda with Call of Duty footage
• 102:14 — Ticketmaster trial/watch

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Episode Takeaways

• Hardware innovation in mobile is thriving—outside the US: the lack of regulatory/customer lock-in allows Chinese and global OEMs to launch bold, sometimes ridiculous, new ideas (from built-in fire lighters to dancing “robot” phones).
• Android’s future is at another inflection point: Control and fees are (again) being reshaped by antitrust cases like Epic v. Google, with potentially highly variable impacts in the US vs abroad.
• “Modularity” is coming back—but as a series of side bets, not the old all-in vision: From camera cages to magnetic batteries, vendors are targeting niche needs.
• The US market remains in a silo: Less innovation, more carrier and platform lock-in, and a narrower set of hardware options compared to Europe/Asia.
• The lines between tech, media, and reality are blurred: From war videos using video game footage to the way databases quietly control entire industries (tickets, apps, food delivery).
• Listeners still love e-ink and strange accessories.

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For listeners who missed it:
This jam-packed episode captures a time when gadget news got delightfully weird, legal and market forces were redrawing tech industry boundaries, and the tiniest bits of hardware (from page-turner remotes to car-shaped chargers) sparked as much passion as any new phone. It’s a window into the global, restless, slightly absurd heart of gadget culture in 2026.

Transcript

[Neil Cybart]

Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct taped spreadsheets, slack workflows and whatever else they could cobble together. Not because they want to, but because building internal tools means weeks of waiting on someone else's backlog. That's where Retool comes in. Build custom internal tools just by describing what you need. Prompt something like build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data and Retool actually builds it on your company's data in your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to retool.com vergecast we all need to retool how we build software. Membership means more with American Express Business Gold earn four times Membership Rewards points in your top two eligible spending categories every month, including eligible U.S. advertising purchases in select media and U.S. purchases at restaurants, including takeout and delivery. What are you waiting for? Get the card that flexes with your spending every month. Terms and points cap apply. Learn [e-mail] Business Gold MX Business Gold Card built for business by American Express Zootopia 2 is coming home to Disney. Let's go get ready for a new

[Sponsor Voice]

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[Nilay Patel]

time new friends Gary the Snake and

[Sean Hollister]

your last name the Snake Dream Team and new habitats. Zootopia has a secret reptile population.

[Neil Cybart]

You can watch the record breaking phenomenon at home. Disney Zootopia 2 streaming 3-11-11 on Disney. Rated PG. And right now you can get Disney and hulu for just $4.99 a month for three months with a special limited time offer.

[Nilay Patel]

Ends March 24. After three months, Plan Auto renews at

[Neil Cybart]

$12.99 a month term supply.

[Nilay Patel]

Hello and welcome to Vercast flagship podcast with binding non disparagement agreements. It's contentious this week. Who is allowed to say what about whom? I think I got the who and the whom right there. I'm your friend Neil. I'm here. I'm running the show for the first time in years. I'm gonna kind of remember how to do it. It's gonna be great. David Pierce is off because he has the temerity to have children and need to care for them. And I think that's. That's completely inappropriate. But so it goes. Anyway, to replace David, we have an all star crew. Sean Hollister is here.

[Sean Hollister]

I am here. I am not David Pierce.

[Nilay Patel]

Dom Preston is here. Hey Dom.

[Allison Johnson]

Hey. Also here. Also not David Pierce.

[Nilay Patel]

Maybe we'll summon him throughout the show. No, it's fine. David had kids to have to take care of. Well deserved break. We've got Sean and Dom. It's a huge week of gadget news. If you've been paying attention to the show. You know we did all of the Apple news in a live stream earlier this week. You can go watch that. You can watch me get a spec wrong and then just melt into a puddle of embarrassment. I got texts from my friends who told me it was okay because they have not seen me be embarrassed by getting a spec wrong in that way in quite a long time. Thank you to everybody in the chat who corrected me. We got it right in the end. It's an OLED display. I don't want to talk about it anymore. That's it. That's all you get from me. But aside from Apple, it was an enormous week of gadget news. Dom was at Mobile World Congress along with Allison. A million Android phones are launched there as well as 6G, which. Sure, Sean, you covered Google and Epic settling a giant dispute in the Play Store. There's all kinds of other gadgets to talk about this week. I actually want to start by talking about a gadget. One second. I do want to say there's other news in the world. There's a war going on. There's a massive conflict between anthropic and the Pentagon. We've got all that on the site. In particular, particular we're gonna have Hayden on with David to talk about the anthropic Pentagon situation in detail on Tuesday. One of the reasons we're not doing it right away is as we are recording more things are changing. So we're just gonna hold for that story to resolve one tick further before we dive all the way into it. But there's a ton of coverage from Hayden on that on the site. It's some of the most in depth reporting anywhere on what the contract terms actually mean. So go, we'll, we'll link it in the show notes. Go read that. She's gonna be on the show on Tuesday to dive into that in full. So we have all that coverage and there's more coming on the show. It's just literally as we were going to record today, more happen. Like the Pentagon said, more stuff today. So we're just gonna wait for that to resolve. And then the last thing I wanna say before we get started, the new season of version history starts on Sunday with Furby, which is wild. Do we have the Furby trailer? Travis, do you remember the most exciting gadget of 1998? It was a robot that ended up in millions of. And it was very high tech. It Had a light sensor, it had a sound sensor, it had fur. Hey, on this season of Version History, we have six stories about the tech that we talk to.

[Sean Hollister]

What's the first rule of Fight Club? Don't talk about Fight Club. What if a conference call was a social network?

[Nilay Patel]

An attack that talked back? Hello, I am Macintosh. Oh, listen to the podcast. Watch it on YouTube every Sunday starting on March 8th. I think this is you guys best podcast.

[Sean Hollister]

It's great.

[Nilay Patel]

That's very good. It starts with Furby, which I believe is one of the most politically intense episodes of Version History we've ever done. I mean, we did the MacIntosh, like the 128K Macintosh this season. It was really fun to do, but I think the Furby is going to inspire even more emotions. Version History now has its own YouTube channel. It's ersionhistory podcast. Go subscribe to that channel. I can't wait for you guys to see the season. I think David's, like, really cracked the code on Version History this time around. It's great. I'm excited for you all to see it. And in particular, tell us how you feel about Furbies, because there's more going on there than you can possibly know.

[Sean Hollister]

I cannot wait for you to see V's Furby. It will haunt your nightmares.

[Nilay Patel]

Okay, so on Wednesday, I promised that I would start this show with like five minutes of me just being happy about a gadget. And so I'm going to keep my promise, and I'm not. This review isn't published. We're not ready to, like, issue a definitive ruling on this product yet. But if you will recall, when I went away on parental leave over the summer, I said, I'm going to get a Kaleidoscape, the high end movie streamer. And I'm going to. That's all I'm going to do. I'm going to watch movies with my baby. I did not do this because the idea of reviewing a gadget while on leave is dumb, because the baby has many more needs than I do. It turns out this is our second time around. You'd think I would have realized this, but I had this dream and I failed to realize this dream. Then we hired John Higgins, who is like a legitimate expert TV and AV reviewer. He knows way more about this than anybody I've ever met. And he knows everybody. And so the Kaleidoscape people are like, do you actually want to review a Kaleidoscape? And so they've sent John and I Kaleidoscape Systems. If you don't know what a Kaleidoscape is? It is the single highest bitrate movie streamer you can get. And the way it's supposed to work is you don't just get one device. You get two. You get a server, and you get clients that you place around your house. So the reason you have to have a server and clients in your house is because the files are so big, the movies you download are so big, you can't actually stream them over the Internet. You have to download them first and then stream them locally on your own network. So the server that they sent me was a Kaleidoscape Mini terraprime. It's an 8 terabyte SSD. It can only hold 115 movies. The files are so big. And then I have a Strato eplayer which has its own little storage, and you can just buy the thing by yourself if you want. The Strato E player alone is $2,500. The mini Terra prime server that I have is $10,000. So I have $13,000 of movie streamer at my house right now. It's out of control. It is the single most incredible experience I've ever had watching movie in my entire life. I've never been so happy.

[Sean Hollister]

And it.

[Nilay Patel]

You know, my. I have a Sony A95L, which is one of the best TVs you could buy. Some would argue it's still the best TV you could buy. And then we have a 514 Atmos system running through a big Sony receiver. So we have four speakers in the ceiling. We have five all around and a huge subwoofer. And basically, the experience of watching, like, full uncompressed 100Mbps video files with full uncompressed Atmos audio or fully uncompressed DTS HD Master Audio is mind blowing. It's like. It's like you're seeing reality for the first time. This is a very niche thing to say, you know, like, you can drive your car fast on a highway, and you know that you're not supposed to do that, right? And you're like, you're having this thing. You're like, oh, that's pretty cool. Have you ever driven a car on a racetrack? Like a fat. Like, have you ever had this experience? Or even, like, a go kart? Have you ever driven a go kart on a racetrack?

[Sean Hollister]

Go karts are a thing. I love my go karts, right?

[Nilay Patel]

And you're like, oh, this is how it's supposed to be. Like, I'm supposed to go this fast. Like, My car is much faster than the highway. This is very much the experience of lighting up my TV and my speakers with, like, full uncompressed audio and video. You're like, oh, wait, all of this stuff I've been watching looks like shit. Look at how much more headroom there is. It is incredible.

[Sean Hollister]

I love that you've picked a solution to watch movies like reality that you can actually share with other people. Whereas I am in my living room on my couch with a pair of glasses watching 3D movies. I cannot stop watching 3D movies.

[Nilay Patel]

Oh, my God.

[Sean Hollister]

Because that feels like seeing reality for the first time to me. But everybody around me is like, what are you doing in your living room with glasses on? So all I have to ask is, is this a better TV than the Vision Pro that you are. You are now?

[Nilay Patel]

Yes. So here's the thing I'm saying it's like, I already had the tv. I already had the Atmos system. It was to your point, Sean, about wanting to be with other people. Uh, in our previous house, where, when we lived in the woods in the pandemic, I, you know, I put up all that stuff in the basement. And no, literally, no one wanted to go to the basement with me. Like, I was like, do you want to watch a movie? And everybody like, yeah, then we. I'd be like, let's go downstairs.

[Allison Johnson]

Like, no.

[Nilay Patel]

And so it's like, I would go alone to the basement to watch a movie without my camera, like, all the time. And then, so when we moved here, I put all that stuff in the main room. Right? We don't have, like, a separate theater room. We don't have any of that stuff anymore. We just have kind of the one big TV with all that stuff. And, like, that means mostly we watch is Bluey. Like, the reality of this setup is, like, very expensive in theater, is that we mostly watch Bluey on it. And then you watch Disney streaming or Netflix streaming, and all that stuff looks fine. And it's like, appropriately that. But, like, we're watching basically kids movies, right? All the time. Because we have kids.

[Sean Hollister]

I want to hear about the nature of reality when you are watching Bluey uncompressed right now.

[Nilay Patel]

But let me get to it. So all that stuff is still streaming at, like, 15-25 Mbps. Like, on the high side, you're getting 25. That's a lot of compression. And in particular, it's a lot of color compression that is, like. It's very wonky. But, you know, see those numbers when you set up Your HDMI signal, Like, do you want 422 or 444 or whatever? Like, that is a way to describe color compression. And people have a lot of feelings about bits versus It's. It's fine. But that is a way to describe color compression. Um, and you. You get a lot of that on streaming. Just a lot of color compression on streaming. That's why red, like the color red in digital video often blocks so hard. That's just an artifact of the amount of color compression that happens. And then compression, generally bit rate compression, is why when there's fast motion at the super. Like the confetti comes down, the whole image blocks up. Like, there just isn't enough bandwidth to. To show you the motion happening it all at once. So you've got a lot of color compression. You got a lot of motion compression at 1525 megabits per second. This is like fine for blue. And you don't see it. We get the Kaleidoscape and we're just watching Incredibles 2, right? The same movie that we watched on Disney, and you're like, oh, this is way better. Like, I'm actually seeing more of this movie. I'm noticing more things in the image of this movie because there isn't any color compression or it's much less color compression. And the overall bit rate is so much higher that frame to frame, there's more detail. This is crazy. I accidentally watched all of Pacific Rim again because so much of Pacific Rim happens in the rain that when you watch it on streaming, you're basically not watching anything.

[Sean Hollister]

A 1080p Blu Ray still looks better than 4K streams from Netflix because of this.

[Nilay Patel]

Absolutely. Because the bitrate is so much higher on 1080p Blu Ray that you actually get motion frame to frame. So anyway, I have this $13,000 for the Movie Streamer House, and I'm watching Incredibles 2 and rewatching Pacific Rim for some reason. And it is. It's not necessarily the TV and the speakers. Like, obviously, the one I have has so much ability to show you the quality that. That's what I mean by. It's like driving a fast car fast. You're like, oh, this car is meant to go very fast. And like, mostly I putter around at 30 miles an hour. Like, you're like, oh, this car could actually go 100 miles an hour. Like, that is what that feels like.

[Sean Hollister]

So what I'm hearing is you're going to invite the Verge over to have really nice.

[Nilay Patel]

We should all have a Kaleidoscape bite. Um, but what you really get is like, oh, it is a crime how much compression these streamers foist upon us. Like there's a big delta between 25 and 100, right. And I would pay more to a lot of these streamers to get higher quality. The only one, it like Apple's a little bit better. Like Apple I think will peak out at 30. Like it's like moderately better. It's like not that much better. The only one that I think you can get, which I also have on my dumb Sony tv is Sony Pictures Bravia Core or whatever it's called now where it will stream only Sony movies at up to 85. But that's like you can only get Sony movies. Like you can watch Spider Man 2 as many times as you want at 85Mbps into the Spider verse.

[Sean Hollister]

That color compression, you're going to like having less of it.

[Nilay Patel]

There you go. All of that. All Sony's IP but the Spider Escape in 3D. It's just a movie store. It's got everything. It's got TV shows. I'm going to. They sent me Night of the Seven Kingdoms which I haven't watched yet. But I'm excited to watch it on this thing. And I'm like your, your options, if you want source material that can live up to the quality of the display that you've bought, are to collect Blu Rays, which I think a lot of people are into. Or $13,000 escape. That's right. That's it. That's what you get. I don't know. I mean obviously it's reviewing it. John and I are going to write reviews of this. I'm sure his review actually far more technical. Like he has things to say other than this is sick. So I'm excited to co buy. I mean there's some really truly wonky stuff about this pro. Like I had to, I had to open a. To configure it. You have to go on the web and then like log into a little web portal on the device. It's like ridiculous. Like the. It's meant for installers to put in for rich people. It's not meant for normal humans to have I. But I had to do that. Not for any particular like complicated reason. You have to do that to enable HDMI CEC. Because it doesn't. Because for $13,000 you do not get a remote control. Because the assumption is this is true. Because the assumption is that your high end AV installer has put this in as part of an integrated system. And you're just like sitting down in the theater and your butler is beginning this for you.

[Sean Hollister]

I feel like far too much of the tech industry has been premised on the idea that hdamic is a viable solution to solve everything.

[Nilay Patel]

I got it. It works. Kind of. So now we can at least click around with my tv, but to turn it on, I have to open an app on my phone. So there's some real edges here. But then you like. It's a video playback device, so who cares? Once you're in it, you're in it. And I've just been rewatching all of these old movies that are in the catalog that came with the device because I'm like, oh, it's like I can see what's actually going on for the first time. Highly recommend it. It's very much that, that Ferris wheeler scene with a Ferrari, like, if you have the means. Anyway, it's the gadget of all gadgets. I've never been happier. We're going to write an actual review of it. Like I said, there are some rough edges around this thing that make it not a consumer device. And of course, just to get the whole system as delivered to me, you're $13,000 in the hole and it doesn't come with any movies. You still have to buy or rent the movies.

[Sean Hollister]

Do they cost more than usual? Is it like 70 bucks a movie, 100 bucks a movie?

[Nilay Patel]

No, that's about the same. All the ones I've looked at are. It's like 6 or 7 DOL to rent and $25 to buy. So it's not out of, it's not out of Blu Rays.

[Allison Johnson]

That's fine.

[Nilay Patel]

I'm conf. You can also buy a used Blu Ray player for like $150 and just buy Blu Rays. This is a thing you can also do for now.

[Sean Hollister]

They're, they are discontinuing a lot of these Blu Ray players for now.

[Allison Johnson]

Finite resource.

[Nilay Patel]

But like I've, like I've been saying it is. I, I, I just haven't been happier with a gadget in, in ages. Because this thing isn't trying to do anything. It's not trying to like, replace all white collar work. Right. It's like these movies will look better than the regular movies. Like, yep, it super does. No getting around that. Even my wife noticed it the other day. Like, I made her watch. That's really good at concerts. So there's a lot of concert because again, it's uncompressed audio. So we're Just sitting around watching the Cure and NXS and the Rolling Stones live for no reason. And she's like, this sounds really good. I'm like, yeah, it's uncompressed audio. And she was like out of the room by the time I finished. But it's like, it's just. You get so much more dynamic range in the audio that they have built a little business doing like concert streams or concert footage rather. Because watching a streamed concert you're like, this sounds bad, but if you have, if you have all the, all the channels uncompressed. I told the people I was a huge nerd and so I had to prove that I'm a huge nerd. After getting a spec wrong earlier this week.

[Sean Hollister]

Just invite a few of them in to testify. I went to Neeli's house.

[Nilay Patel]

I'm sure the Kaleidoscape people would be happy for you to come demo their products. Thirteen G's at a time. But we'll have a full review. John and I are going to work on it. He's got other stuff to do. He's got other products to review. You can imagine what some of the display products he has to review are. They're in the mix. We're working on some of that stuff. But when we get a free moment, we will review the Kaleidoscape just so I can talk about it again on this show. That's what I have for you. All right. We should start with the actual news, which is not just me insisting that everybody comes within a mile of my home. Look at how good my TV looks. Dom, you are at nwc. I haven't been to MWC in years. Since we're Mobile World Congress, since in Barcelona. It's the biggest phone show, telecom show in the world. I think a really interesting dynamic right now playing out for us here in the United States. Phones outside the United States are getting so much more interesting than anything we have here. Yep. And MWC is. Is where that's happening. Describe the show to us. I want to. There's one I want you to absolutely start with, but then I want you to talk about just how different phones are getting over there.

[Allison Johnson]

Yeah, I mean, I think the big theme of MWC for me this year was hardware is getting weird on this side of the Atlantic. And people are pushing hardware in as many weird directions that they can. Mostly in the camera, but not exclusively. The emblematic handset here is the UKITEL WP63. You probably don't know Ukitel. They are a rugged phone brand. So they make these sort of big bulky phones with giant batteries and absurd waterproofing and that kind of thing. The WP63 is pitched as a camping phone. It's got a 20,000 milliamp hour battery. It's got a camping light. It's got a super loud speaker that you can use for listening to music or for sort of sounding an alarm or something. And it also has a fire lighter built inside. It has an igniter and igniter is sort of a generous way of putting this. This is basically like an old car cigarette lighter. It's a tiny little electric plate embedded inside the phone. There's a button on the outside which has a little red fire icon on it. And you push the button. I think you can also do this like within the phone. And this little plate slides out and it is just the size of the end of a cigarette.

[Nilay Patel]

Wait, are they, are they, are they selling it to light cigarettes?

[Allison Johnson]

They are pitching it as a camping accessory for outdoors, for rugged adventurers. But rugged adventures, the way they demoed it at mw, I have been told, is by lighting cigarettes right when you

[Nilay Patel]

need a rugged adventure outside of the bar for five to 10 minutes, we've all been there.

[Sean Hollister]

So this is no more stylus. Instead your pen shaped object is a cigarette lighter now.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah.

[Allison Johnson]

I mean they just need the slot for the cigarettes to slot in the phone as well. And then we're really talking.

[Nilay Patel]

Wait, no. So I'm looking at a picture of this. It's not a pen shaped object, it's just like a, it's a tiny little

[Allison Johnson]

disc that slides out. It really? Yeah, the whole bit that slides out is the size of the cigarette tip. It is like this, you know, quarter of an inch by quarter of an inch square that slides out.

[Nilay Patel]

You know how like we've criticized various phone companies for the battery is not big enough. Like just make the phone thicker and put a bigger battery in there. This is like a, this is like they made the phone gigantic. And they're like, with all of this extra battery, we're gonna do resistive heating on a coil of metal so you can spark up a cigarette. Like, I respect it. It is very much a 1980s cigarette lighter. Like this is the thing that like was in, in my parents cars.

[Allison Johnson]

It's, it's retro tech. And maybe cigarettes are the next retro thing that Gen Z is going to get into and everyone's going to take a.

[Nilay Patel]

This is what I mean about what's happening overseas. Like you, you can start a company where your entire first of all it's called Ukatel. Your entire like, promise to the consumer is like, it's just an Android phone, but this one can light cigarettes. And like, maybe you have a business because there's just more access to the market there. This thing is not going to be in the T Mobile store.

[Allison Johnson]

I suspect not. I'd be pretty impressed if they could pull that off. Not least because I never saw it light a cigarette. We tried to see this thing work 3 times and I was repeatedly in contact with the pls. I know other people did see it work. It did work. I've spoken to other journalists who watch this thing light something on fire every time I went. It had broken about 10 minutes before I arrived. And this happened on three different occasions. Alice and I kept trying to see this thing, but we never once saw it light up because they had one sample and it broke every single day of the show.

[Sean Hollister]

This is the same company that does like the giant batteries in their phones, right? Yes.

[Allison Johnson]

And this one has a giant battery. It's got a 20,000 milliamp hour battery as well. They have others that go bigger than that.

[Nilay Patel]

Once you have a big enough battery, like, what can we do with it? It's like cigarettes.

[Allison Johnson]

Yeah. You can do anything with it and just stick a little resistive heat plate next to the battery and you know.

[Nilay Patel]

All right, so this is what I mean. Like if phones over there are just getting weir. Right. Because there's more access to consumers, the. There's more Android users outside of the United States than not. Like there's just a different. WhatsApp is a more dominant messaging platform that lets people switch more easily. There's all this stuff. And then you can see phone makers are competing on hardware. So cigarette lighters aside, we should talk about the robot phone because this to me is like the most let's compete on hardware phone in quite a while. I know they're calling it a robot, but it appears that they've just put a gimbal on a phone.

[Allison Johnson]

Oh yeah, it is. Absolutely. The robot phone name is a real stretch. This is the gimbal phone or the stabilized camera phone or the DJI OSMO pocket phone. Any of those would work just fine. This is from Honor. It's worth saying this one is China only, but they do say it's coming out. This is the sort of thing you look at and you think, oh, that's some goofy concept device that someone's come up with and. And they made three of them and they're never going to sell it. They insist they are making this. There is a production run. They're going to sell them in China. They talk about it like it's a product line that will have more of them. They talked about the idea that it will come to Europe in the future, or future versions might. This is something they are supposedly exploring. But yeah, it is a phone with a DJI OSMO Pocket style mini gimbal that kind of sits in the rear camera and folds up out of the top of the phone. And then it can rotate, it can look around, it can do stabilized video, it can do subject tracking video. You can swivel it around and use it for your selfie camera. So you're getting this kind of rear main camera quality for your selfies. And then the robot of it all is it has a LLM powered chat app and it makes cute noises and it'll nod its head at you and shake its head and dance to Imagine Dragons and all sorts of horrifying things like that.

[Nilay Patel]

My favorite part of your video, by the way, is you point out it can dance to Imagine Dragons, but no other songs.

[Allison Johnson]

No other song.

[Nilay Patel]

That is the only robotics program dance. Yeah.

[Allison Johnson]

I asked if it knew other dances and other songs and they were like, you know, it will. But, you know, for the demo, the demo, we have this and Imagine Dragons.

[Nilay Patel]

Do you think that they licensed the Imagine Dragons songs or do you think they were just like, they'll be fine.

[Allison Johnson]

I hope they did. If only for how often it was being blasted. I heard it played, I don't know, at least two or three times during the press conference. They had this dance routine on stage at their booth. I heard it played there anytime anyone went on the demo and said like, hey, robot phone, play some music. Suddenly Imagine Dragons drops busting. Imagine that with 10 robot phones in a ring. And it's the one demo everyone wants to see. Is it dancing to music? So I've had a lot of Imagine Dragons in my life.

[Sean Hollister]

I feel like it shouldn't be too much of a stretch for this company to come up with some reasons that you might want a robot. Like maybe the little gimbal could be it's your eyes if you can't see very well. And the phone could describe things into your ears. This feels like there could be legitimate reasons for that.

[Allison Johnson]

Yeah, they didn't pitch accessibility uses at all. The way they went down the robot angle was that kind of it's a companion. So they're talking about having an accessory that clips it onto your backpack. And they were saying it could describe what you're seeing, but in that kind of like, you could be on vacation. And it will describe the scenery and talk about where you are to you and that kind of thing.

[Nilay Patel]

Wait, hold on. I know this isn't the first time we've encountered the robot. This is the first time you've gotten to see and hold it. Right.

[Allison Johnson]

I didn't get to hold it, but this is the first time we have seen it turned on and working. It has previously been shown off in a pure cgi, maybe AI slop concept video. And then at ces, I got to see one, but turned off, and I wasn't allowed to touch it. And the arm didn't move or anything. That was just a. Like, here's a plausibly a dummy unit. You know, this is what it will look like this time. They had a load of them on the booth, working, moving, but no one was allowed to actually grab the thing.

[Nilay Patel]

And so three months from now, you'll be able to touch one.

[Allison Johnson]

Yeah. At some point. Second half of this year, it'll come out. We'll see.

[Nilay Patel]

Right? You can just see that. You can see the progression. Every three months, you get ever closer to the robot phone. I'm just saying it seems like they've backed into needing to make it more of a robot because of AI. Like, if you're like, this is a robot phone, and actually all it is is a gimbal that pops out and moves around mechanically. Like, yeah, that's enough. Like, it doesn't actually have to be a robot.

[Allison Johnson]

The extra bit of context here is that Honor is building towards an ipo, and they do not want to IPO as just another company that makes phones and tablets and smartwatches. And so robots. They just thought, we'll do robots instead. That'll be the thing that pushes us forward. I was told by someone at Honor, they kind of looked at EVs, but the Chinese EV market is already sprawling and enormous and has countless brands. And Xiaomi's there and doing an Apple a very good job so far. So on. I kind of thought, we can't fit there. But, you know, robots. We could probably do robots.

[Nilay Patel]

And so their attempt to convince everyone they're a robot company is by putting a gimbal on the phone. This is all fine. I'm actually very taken with the gimbal on the phone. Like, I watched your video, I watched some other videos, and I'm like, oh, this is neat. Like, you get stabilized video. It can do the tracking. It's tracking Allison in a crowd of People in your video. And then like in the back of my head was, isn't the S26 Ultra doing all this with a crop sensor? Like, there's a real dynamic here right now where they did a lot of mechanical stabilization. And it's cool because people like mechanical gimbals. They like the OSMO Pocket. Yeah, I enjoy the gimbal I have for my phone. And then I'm looking at Samsung and they're like, you don't need that. It's just a huge sensor and we'll just crop it really fast. You're reviewing, like, the S26 for us. That has the Horizon Lock on it, right?

[Allison Johnson]

Yeah, that has Horizon Lock as well. It doesn't have the giant 200 megapixel sensor that the Ultra does, but it also has Horizon Lock. And I tested it out after seeing the robot phone. I thought, I'll go play with Horizon Lock a bit and see how they compare. And yeah, Horizon Lock seems to work really well. It seems impressive. What it's doing on the software side is kind of amazing. I think it's plausible the hardware solution will be better in terms of, like, pure quality. You're going to get. You're not cropping into the sensor as much. You can have the full resolution. You can do all this other stuff. Maybe even the actual stabilization will end up being better because they have hardware and software going all at once. But you get all these other problems. You know, this thing is probably going to cost a load whenever it comes out. I can only assume it will be unreasonably fragile compared to any other phone on the market in China. I don't know how well set up Honor is for a repair system, things like that. They are a big company. They have a big presence in China. Maybe they're going to be able to repair people's broken robot phones if they ever launch it overseas. I would never really put my faith in them to be able to handle fiddly repairs on this tiny little gimbal arm. I assume the waterproofing will be near zero and the dustproofing. I assume we're going back to the early foldable days where they just have to shrug and say, we can't protect this in the way that we could have slapped.

[Sean Hollister]

I will say, as somebody who does use an OSMO Pocket three all the time. I film all my videos. You're actually looking at me right now through one. I can probably, probably get its gimbal active track going. This thing is wonderful, but I always feel like I can't quite tell what I'm filming on it. The postage stamp size screen is not big enough. So you kind of want to pair it with the phone. So I can definitely see.

[Nilay Patel]

Got our first robot phone customer right here.

[Sean Hollister]

Yeah, Put it together, Put it together.

[Allison Johnson]

I've used a pocket as well and had the same thing. The postage stamp screen is very hard to work with sometimes getting that experience on a big phone screen all in one device, you get to edit on that device. Right. If you are willing to edit on your phone screen that you can edit on a phone better than you can edit on an OSMO pocket. So there's a logic, but I think

[Sean Hollister]

the most important thing is getting the sensor out of the phone so you can make it bigger and you can pick up much better load.

[Nilay Patel]

It's not much bigger. Well, we don't know actually the size. Right. But it's still a 200 megapixel sensor.

[Allison Johnson]

We know it's 200 megapixel and that is it. Honor has said zero other camera specs. They've said nothing about the actual sensor size, the aperture or anything like that. It will also have an ultra wide net telephoto and even still has a selfie camera built into the screen. Because they, I asked them about that. They did explain. It kind of makes sense that you might want to use face unlock or something and you don't have to wait for the robot to pop its head up every time you want to do face unlock on your phone.

[Nilay Patel]

But I'm just saying, all this stuff, the AI stuff they're trying to do to make it a robot, it's like just put googly eyes on the gimbal and call it a robot. And I remember it's fine. Honestly, half the people would still be like, it's alive, you know, like it's like the presence of Google AI. Yeah, that's definitely alive. Like, you don't need to do this AI stuff. By the way, you mentioned dust resistance. They also announced a new foldable. What's the V6?

[Allison Johnson]

The magic V6.

[Nilay Patel]

That's sort of the most toughest foldable around. Right.

[Allison Johnson]

It is now IP68 and IP69 beating Google's Pixel temporary fold, which are just IP68. The difference between those is that the 8 is for submersion in water and the 9 is for high temperature and high pressure jets of water. So it has both ratings. It can survive submersion, but also, I don't know, a really intense pressure wash. If you want to subject your phone to that.

[Nilay Patel]

You know, it's funny, I still like, get nervous about putting my phone, my regular phone, underwater. And then it's like, oh, this folding phone you can put in a car wash. It's like, I don't. I'm not going to do that.

[Sean Hollister]

But you should. The IP ratings, that sealant is good once, twice, maybe, as salt gets into it, as chemicals eat away at the sealant. It's for that accident. But do not rely on it to do it more than once.

[Nilay Patel]

All right, well, I'll keep my folding phone out of the car wash.

[Allison Johnson]

I've heard stories of a Google employee I know in the UK who once, in the early days of an IP68 pixel, very proudly demonstrated the waterproofing on his Pixel phone by dunking it in the swimming pool, which it did not survive.

[Nilay Patel]

Brutal. Xiaomi was there, they had a bunch of Leica phones, some other stuff. What's going on there?

[Allison Johnson]

Yeah, they had a huge launch. They had all this different stuff. The main things are the Xiaomi 17 series phones which had launched in China very late last year. This was their big European unveiling. So There was the 17, which is their iPhone 17 S26 Pixel 10 kind of compact, ish flagship phone. They jumped from the 15 series to the 17 series. They quite explicitly said at the time they did this in China that it was to match their numbering to Apple's, which is delightful. I love that. For them, the more exciting thing was the 17 Ultra and then this kind of Leica branded spin on that, which is officially the Leica Leitz phone.

[Nilay Patel]

What a name.

[Allison Johnson]

It's great. So this is actually the fourth Lights phone, but the other three were all made by Sharp and they were only available in Japan and they were this kind of weird little phone that a lot of Leica nerds got excited about and could never buy unless they made a trip to Japan. So this is the first Lights phone to be global, by which I mean not the US but everywhere else. It is kind of extraordinary. As cameras go, it's basically just the 17 Ultra. To be clear. Like the Lights phone is not a whole different thing. It's the 17 Ultra but with a load of extra Leica branding. They put the Leica red dot logo on it. It comes with Leica branded accessories. The software has been not totally co created with Leica, but tweaked with Leica. Leica. Leica's aesthetic has been put all over Android and all over the camera Apple, so it feels a bit more like you're using a Leica device. From that kind of UI experience. Just like the fonts that run through it and things like that. And then the big, fun, silly, gimmicky bit on top of it is that the rear camera ring rotates. So if you get the Leica version of the phone, you can use that rear camera. You can twist it around and it can control zoom or exposure, or you can set it to sort of move between different filters in the camera app and things like that, which is fun. And I thought, I would love this. I was so excited for it. And then I discovered that although in my head, the camera island on these Ultra flagships feels enormous, and they are enormous, they stick out of the phone loads. There's these huge black circles on the back of the phone. They look really outlandish compared to what Samsung and Apple do. But when you compare it to actually a camera and you try and hold it and grip the lens mount with your hand, you discover it's tiny. It's really flush against the camera body. There is nothing for your hand to hold onto. And it's really awkward to actually try and use that as like a zoom control or focus or something. It doesn't actually work in the way you really feel like it should.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah.

[Sean Hollister]

I've always wondered, who are these branded camera phones for? Are they for Leica nerds who are like, I want to have a Leica phone in addition to my Leica camera, or do these people just. They pull out the actual camera, not bother with the phone?

[Nilay Patel]

So I'm lucky enough to know two Leica nerds. They buy everything Leica makes. And I'm going to just say this out loud. Neither of them have any children. And so the. The money you would spend on college goes directly to Leica. I hope Leica starts like a scholarship fund or something, because that would be the true circle of life. But, like, literally everything down to there's like, I made like, a subscription camera app and my buddy was like, well, I have to have it. And I was like, no, you absolutely do not. Like, just download Halide. Like, you will be fine. And there was no, like, they're gonna buy this phone, I'm sure. And they're gonna buy the lens cap, which is by far the best accessory for the phone. The huge lens cap that goes over the back.

[Allison Johnson]

Oh, yeah. For anyone on the video, you've got this, like, Leica branded lens cap on the back of the case that comes with it. And it's brilliant.

[Nilay Patel]

Okay, how to feel about the fact that the Leica logos on the back are meant for are in portrait. Because I think this is the, the mistake of this phone is that those logos should be to be holding the phone in landscape.

[Allison Johnson]

So the funny thing about this is, is that this originally came out in China as the Xiaomi 17 Ultra Leica Edition and it had a slightly different design there. It had a two tone finish, whereas it's now just a single color on the back. A couple other small tweaks and in China it's landscape. And then the international version, they changed it to portrait.

[Nilay Patel]

No.

[Allison Johnson]

And everyone is furious about it. All the sort of like that is the thing everyone has said. Why did they change the logo orientation?

[Nilay Patel]

They ruined it because that's what makes it look like a camera. All right, well, hopefully this is never going to come to the United States. So hopefully if you're buying it on the gray market, you can obviously choose, right? So I would say buy the Chinese one. Other companies, Vivo Techno, There's a Unihertz phone to talk about. Walk me through these.

[Allison Johnson]

Okay. Vivo didn't bring like a full phone launch, but it did a tease of its X300 Ultra, which is going to be its equivalent to this Xiaomi phone, its rival. It's similarly priced, top, top spec, similar giant camera module. It announced for the first time that it's going to bring that phone to Europe, which it's always been China exclusive before. They said that this Ultra will come out internationally and it teased a set of ridiculous accessories to go with it. So last year, Vivo was the first of the big Chinese phone brands to release what they called a telephoto extender lens, which I reviewed at the time. It was a 200 millimeter lens that you strap onto the back of the phone and you stick it on top of the existing telephoto on the phone and then you get this full 200mm telephoto experience. They're now doubling that with a 400mm telephoto extender, which I think might be more millimeters than I need for my phone. Focal length, to be honest. It's gonna be a lot of zoom.

[Sean Hollister]

I love all of Alison's pictures of this one because it's just all the gear around the phone. You can't see the phone at all

[Nilay Patel]

in any of your pictures. It's very good.

[Allison Johnson]

Yeah. Then they are releasing a camera cage together with smallrig, which is the company that basically makes all these camera cages and other kind of OTT professional ish accessories for phones. And so this is a dual hand grip camera cage with A fan on the back and a mount for a light. You can mount a tripod to the bottom and all this stuff. And they're really trying to pitch this as now like you can be have a professional cinema setup with a phone at its center and this can be the phone. And you know they're announcing some other like video features, support for 10 bit log across all three rear lenses. The new stuff they're doing with lookup tables and complex video things that mostly go way over my head. And at some point I'm going to have to get my head around because I'm going to have to review this thing somehow. But they're really leaning in on this idea that cool. What we can do to stand out is just go full in on professional cinema as what this phone does. Which I will say in their credit. One thing I like about this is it's kind of refreshingly honest for a company like this to confirm that that's what you need when you want to produce this kind of. Hey, all of this was shot on a phone content. And part of their hype spiel for this camera cage, this grip rig thing is oh, this is what we use when we shoot our product launches and produce all the promo videos for it. It's a nice contrast compared to other brands which love to tout. This thing was shot on the phone and they leave this big blank around what that means, right?

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah. Samsung just did this at the S26 launch.

[Allison Johnson]

Yeah.

[Nilay Patel]

And I mean Apple does this every time, but Samsung literally just did this weeks ago at the S26 launch. And you saw the photo, the actual rig they were using to shoot the S26 launch and you're like, where's the phone?

[Allison Johnson]

Yeah.

[Nilay Patel]

Like you kind of get to a place where it could be any phone.

[Allison Johnson]

Exactly.

[Nilay Patel]

Because you've put so much around it.

[Allison Johnson]

Viva's demonstration of this, they literally had a setup you could go and try it out where they had taken this whole rig and mounted it on a dolly and you could sit and use the tracking dolly to take a shot and try out the new pro video app they have. And again, I just love that they're like cool. When we talk about using this for cinema grade stuff, we mean with all these other thousands of dollars worth of equipment around the phone.

[Nilay Patel]

Well, it's interesting. So their approach to modularity is stuff around the phone. Then you've got this company techno which is it's all just like pogo pins and magnets like can make the phone bigger and weirder. And then I Actually want to end by talking about Lenovo, which I have a lot to say about this Lenovo laptop and its modular ports. Talk about the techno because it's. We're just in an age of like modularity in like specific ways. Right. Not you're going to build your own phone out of parts, but you know, in this case you've got. Okay, we're going to be honest that what you need to do is mount the phone in a rig and then mount accessories to the rig. This techno company is like. We're going to be honest that you're just going to clip a bunch of magnets to our phone and then I think Lenovo is on drugs. But let's talk about techno first.

[Allison Johnson]

Yeah. So the techno one is back into this is full concept territory. This is not a product that they're intending to release. We've seen modular phones before. I like this. I think this is one of those smarter implementations of it I've seen imagined. It is just a very, very thin phone, thinner than a USB port and it doesn't have a USB C port. It has a tiny battery. But they have various pogo pin and magnetic attaching points on the back where you can slap on power banks and you can stack multiple ones on top of each other. So you could kind of keep stacking these various 3000 milliamp hour power banks on until you've got as many as you want to have. They had microphone attachments, speaker attachments, they had various types of camera attachments. They had sort of small little action camera things you could slap on the back. But also you could just put on what basically looked like a full mirrorless camera and pogo pin that to the back of the phone.

[Nilay Patel]

This is the dream.

[Allison Johnson]

It is the dream. The magnets are not strong enough. I held this thing and if you were not spotting the full weight of the camera lens with one hand, it just immediately wanted to fall off.

[Nilay Patel]

This is the reality of our pogo pin.

[Allison Johnson]

Yes, it is not quite enough for a full camera to stick on the

[Nilay Patel]

back of the camera. Can be done.

[Sean Hollister]

The Essential Phone had a magnetic camera attachment.

[Nilay Patel]

Just to ask you a real question about the Essential Phone. Is that company still around?

[Sean Hollister]

Obviously not. They had so many other issues. But magnetic and pogo pins was not the problem.

[Nilay Patel]

Name a progopen product at scale that still exists.

[Sean Hollister]

All I am saying is the only reasons to buy a new phone in the world anymore are because your battery is too old or because you want a better camera. So the sooner we get to just slap A new camera on your phone, slap a new battery on your phone, the better we will be.

[Nilay Patel]

I know the dream of pogo pins is alive, by the way. I just like saying pogo pins, but it is true that the dream of modular accessories, you just bink onto the thing, it's going to live forever. By the way, I think I can answer my own question. I believe the only at scale still existing Pogo pin product is the Surface, because I think the Surface keyboard is pogo pins. That's it. That's all I got. You correct me if I'm wrong, I think that might be it.

[Sean Hollister]

There are so many pogo pins in my life, I don't remember which ones are still sold at retail.

[Nilay Patel]

Who are you? All right, the reason I want to bring this up in modularity is because I want to end by talking about this Lenovo concept, which is a concept. It is basically a framework laptop. Sean, you've covered the framework at depth. Talk about another company that is just chasing the pogo pin dream to its complete conclusion. So this is just a laptop you can take apart. I know you've seen it, Dom. The thing that gets me about it, and this just kills me, is they're like the thing you should do with modularity is be able to replace the ports. And so you can swap in an HDMI port, you can swap in a USB C port. This is all very funny because they also made a little case for you to carry your ports around so that when you need the HDMI port, you like, open your little ring box and it's like, no, this is just dongles. You just made the world's most inconvenient dongles that you can never replace. But now you have a little jewelry box for your modular ports. Dom, what was the idea here?

[Allison Johnson]

I can't speak to everything they were thinking with this, other than someone wanted a port pouch like you said. I mean, this was like a weird concept that combined two things at once. It was the modular ports, which you could swap in and out, which I think were USB C, USB A and hdmi. But then it also just had this odd setup with a screen that was mounted on the back of the laptop lid and could detach. You could then connect it as an external monitor with a cable. And so it was sort of an external monitor that magneted to the back of your laptop when you didn't need it, but you could also grab it and stick it on the bottom and have a dual screen laptop setup. So just screen where the keyboard should be and More screen where the screen should be.

[Nilay Patel]

You know that I'm fixated on the ports. When I don't mention the removable screen that can go either on the keyboard deck or the back of the existing screen, I'm like, yeah, that's fine. That's some normal stuff you'll be playing around these ports.

[Sean Hollister]

It will not surprise any long time readers of the Verge to know that I am all over this. I want this to exist. And I am especially excited that these modular ports are not now tiny USB C connectors that go into your motherboard, but rather tiny M2 connectors that go into your motherboard so that theoretically it won't just be HDMI to usb. Theoretically you could plug in egpus and giant solid state drives and anything else that could run over a PCIe large

[Nilay Patel]

bus, really for 2026 in which buying GPUs in fast storage is completely achievable for most people.

[Sean Hollister]

I have a lot of dreams.

[Nilay Patel]

I love it. It sounds like MDC is crazy. Dom, you are also at the Nothing event today. A true hero leaving Barcelona to go to the Nothing event today. They launched 4A Pro. Briefly. Tell us about that and then we got to take a break.

[Allison Johnson]

Yeah. So nothing launched two phones. The Phone 4A, the Phone 4A Pro, and also a pair of headphones, the Headphone A, which are basically just a $100 cheaper version of their over ear headphones that they released last year. The 4A and the 4A Pro are kind of interesting because they are two near identical phones. In terms of specs. There's very little, like tiny little variations in the exact chipset and how bright the screen is, things like that. They're basically the same phone, but they look totally different. So the 4a, which is the cheaper one, which is not coming out in the US that one's just Europe and India. The 4A looks a lot like a regular nothing phone. If you've seen any nothing phone they've done over the past five years. It's got this transparent back. It comes with this design where you can see what are meant to look suggestively like the innards of a phone, but are in fact not the innards of a phone. They're just some other bits of plastic and screws. And it comes in some nice colors. There's white, black, but they've also got a really punchy blue and pink, which I actually kind of love. The only real kind of shift with the foray is they've got a new glyph lighting setup. This is Nothing's kind of design. They put on the back of all their phones with some sort of funny set of weird lights that you can use for notifications and alerts and timers and things like that. Here they have a new setup, which they call the glyph bar, which is just seven vertical lights in a strip, a red one at the bottom that can be a video recording light, and they just go up and down. So you can use like a volume slider and it's, you know, how many of the lights go up, tells you what volume you're on, and you have a timer where the blocks count down and things like that.

[Nilay Patel]

I do love changing the volume on my phone by looking at the background of it.

[Allison Johnson]

It's very satisfying. You know, I tried this for a video and I was like, it goes up, the lights go on, it goes down, the lights go off.

[Nilay Patel]

Great.

[Allison Johnson]

You could do that for 20 seconds, tops. The 4A Pro is a bigger shift for nothing. It's their first metal phone, so they have had these transparent designs all the way along. This one drops that. It's a big shift to their aesthetic. Suddenly the bulk of the body is just metal. It comes in silver or gold, black or a kind of suggestion of a pink.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah, this is a very. It's blush.

[Allison Johnson]

Even blush feels a bit generous. It's a silver with kind of a hint that there might have been some pink near it once. But then they have a camera module which looks a bit like the other previous nothing things. So once you get to the camera module, that bit's transparent and that bit again has these little bits of, you know, plastic doohickeys underneath, and you can see and it looks fun and exciting. And then that phone has what nothing calls the glyph matrix, which is basically just a round dot matrix display. This they also did on the Phone 3 flagship last year. This isn't totally new. The version on here is bigger, but it's also substantially lower resolution. There are a lot fewer square LEDs to light up in there, so it's actually a lot less useful in some ways. I was really ready to like the fact that it was a bigger size because I found the Phone three one a little unhelpful. I liked the idea. I didn't actually find it very useful in any sort of practice. This one, I feel like, is going to be even worse. They have options like, you know, a glyph mirror where you can see yourself lit up in the squares, but it's now so low resolution, you cannot make out any meaningful Shapes in this display, it's just a blur.

[Nilay Patel]

This I will say I look at this photo of it all. You posted a photo of it all lit up and my immediate reaction is, okay, there's a clock. There's almost nothing else you could put on here. It isn't one big sort of eight bit icon like you could put like a rain cloud on here to be like it's raining.

[Allison Johnson]

And that's basically what I think will end up being a lot of the use case they suggested before and that I think they're going to push through here. It's just the idea of like you can set a custom little emoji esque icon for say different notifications. You know the joke they made in the keynote is have a crying face emoji for when you get slack notifications or something like that. So you can customize it and do things like that, which is fine. It's all very manual from the Phone three at least when I reviewed that before. You really have to go through by app and come up with these designs yourself. You can upload images into it, but it doesn't do anything smart like just automatically pull the app icon and suggest that as a thing here. You'd have to go and download the WhatsApp icon if you wanted the WhatsApp logo to be what appears when you do it.

[Nilay Patel]

That's ridiculous.

[Allison Johnson]

Yes. I can't believe they didn't join that up. It's the most obvious part of this. But yeah, I think this will be a kind of controversial design for nothing fans because the transparency is so central to all the design aesthetic they've had all the way along since they started the company. But I kind of see the logic because they did go transparent with the Phone three and everyone hated that design. It was not popular at all among the fans of it. I personally thought that phone was really hideous. This one is different, but I also think it kind of works. There's more of a symmetry to it. It looks a bit more thoughtfully laid out. I like the look of it, but we'll see.

[Sean Hollister]

Did they say why? Why are they changing it?

[Allison Johnson]

I think part of it is that it can get slimmer. This is their thinnest phone yet. Partly from going to the metal rather than using the plastic. Otherwise mostly just evolving the design language and things like that. You know, they talk a lot of not moving away from transparency, but evolving the transparent design, refining the transparent design, things like that.

[Nilay Patel]

I feel like nothing. This is like the challenge of being a sort of Android phone maker in a Market like Europe in Asia, where you're up against the robot phone in a Leica Co brand. Like, this phone has Fogo pins. Like, the market there is so aggressive now that nothing started as being like, we're the solution to the iPhone. Like, we're going to be the counterculture rebels. And they got locked into. And that means our phones are transparent. And that is not enough at this point. Like, you have to do something else. I'm, you know, you. Carl Pei is out there and he's like, we're going to be an AI company, like everyone else says all the time. But I think they got kind of backed into. The phones are transparent, and that's our whole brand. Because the brand was not supposed to be about transparent phones. It was supposed to be about much bigger ideas. We'll see what they do next. All right, we got to take a break. It's funny, we talked so much about, like, the Android market, the hardware market for Android. You can just see it and it. Dom, it seems like it was very much on its way to mwc. There's stuff happening in the market that is just not. Not coming to the United States. Like, our market is much more constrained. We have different carrier relationships. We've got all this other stuff going on. And then we're going to come back and we're going to talk about on the software side, it seems like Android is up for yet another round of changes that Sean has been digging into. So we got to take a break. We'll be back. We're going to talk about Google and Epic. We'll be right back.

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[Nilay Patel]

All right, we're back on this, the episode of the vergecast in which everything about Android changes forever. We did it with first we did it with robots. Now we're going to do it with in app purchases and video games. Ying and the Yang of Android. Sean, huge news this week. Google and Epic reached a new settlement. I'm actually, you know, I was covering Apple this week and this happened like on the same day. So I only skimmed over the top of it really. My understanding is Google and Epic already tried to settle this lawsuit about antitrust Android and the judge basically said, I don't trust you, go away. And then now they're just like, whatever, we're settling anyway. What is going on here?

[Sean Hollister]

Let me just preface that it was incredible to be in the courtroom for the settlement hearing with Judge Donato trying very, very hard not to say out loud, but instead to make the people in front of him make Epic CEO Tim Sweeney and make Android boss Samir Samad. He was trying very hard to make them say instead of him that the two companies are completely allies. Right now they have a secret $800 million backdoor deal that Tim Sweeney basically said he would never do anything like. And him being careful, the judge being careful not to break this confidentiality. But they can't get around this as they're evaluating the settlement and eventually Tim Sweeney just blurts out what's going on.

[Nilay Patel]

All right, so I want to get to that. So just to put it in everyone's brain, Epic, which makes Fortnite very famously sued both Apple and Google for antitrust violations in particular because they don't want to pay the 30% fee for in app purchases in Fortnite which is all their money. And Fortnite's so huge that they basically could afford to get kicked off of both of these app stores and not have Fortnite in mobile because they will just collect money from children buying dances

[Sean Hollister]

on every other platform, PlayStation especially.

[Nilay Patel]

And this has been going on now for most of my adult life from what I recall.

[Sean Hollister]

Six years.

[Allison Johnson]

Yes.

[Nilay Patel]

It's every day I wake up and Epic and Apple and Google are suing each other and that's the way it's going to be. So we've. The Epic and Apple case is totally different. The dynamics of that case are very, very different. That isn't undergraduate its own machinations. The judge in that case is very mad at Apple in particular. All kinds of stuff going on there. Put that out of your brain. This is a different case in the Google case because Google runs Android and then it has to ship Android on other companies phones. There's just more evidence of Google doing monopoly stuff. Like there's just more emails from Google to Samsung and Google to honor. Like Google has to run its ecosystem and every now and again a Google executive is like do what we want or we'll kill you. And they just have to like write it down an email and send it. Which is not what Apple has to do. Right. Like Apple is like come to Tim's office and then you'll, you'll net. You don't know what happens there. Like right. Apple's integrated company. It's all one stack because the Android ecosystem has to be controlled. There was just vastly more evidence in the Google case of Google doing monopoly stuff.

[Sean Hollister]

Tremendous amounts of emails. So so many. And, and also evidence that Google was trying to cover up some of this by deleting some of those emails. The judge was very angry about this at the time.

[Nilay Patel]

Right. So Epic wins, like, running away in the Google case in a way that, you know, you can argue about the results of the Apple case thing, and that one's still ongoing. But in the Google case, because there was so much evidence, Epic just wins running away. And then there's. There. I'm still. I'm still trying to wrap my head around this timeline. And then they. The judge is going to, like, issue a remedy, a ruling, say what the punishment is. And then these two show up and they're like, we've settled. And then somewhere in that settlement, Tim Sweeney just admits that there's, like, a secret $800 million deal. And the judge says, no, I don't believe you. This is bad. And. And this is the part. And now they're just doing it anyway. What is going, like, truly, what is going on here?

[Sean Hollister]

Okay, okay, let's see. Years after Epic wins unanimously in this jury verdict, and we've gone through, We've gone to the appeals, and we're waiting to see if the Supreme Court takes this up. Suddenly, yes, Epic and Google come out together and say, we're settling this. Now, what does that settlement mean? Because you have to remember that these companies are already past the point where any company would usually settle here. The judge has already issued a permanent injunction here that says, hey, Google, you cannot do all of these things anymore. You cannot make these, you know, these secret deals that incentivize companies to bring games exclusively to Android. You cannot. You cannot have all these apps on this platform completely under your control. You need to create a place where rival app stores can exist inside the Google Play Store, and you need to give them access to the full catalog of Google Play apps so that an upstart app store could possibly compete against Google Play from within. It's like this. This entire. This entire host and carrier process here where these other app stores can maybe now break Google's monopoly. The judge agrees to all of this, incredibly. And now that that injunction has not only been in place for a long time, but been upheld by an appeals court, now suddenly, Google and Epic want to be friends, and the judge is incredibly skeptical about all of this. But after this settlement hearing, where judge is incredibly skeptical, and Sweeney bullets out all this stuff about secret deal, we find out that they're, you know, Google and Epic are now joined at the hip for whatever happens next. They come out this week and they say, we are moving ahead with many of these things that the judge was skeptical about being proper remedies for the monopoly that Google had. They are going to move ahead with lower App Store fees, which sounds great. Traditionally you'd have this 30% fee that app developers would have to pay to Google. They'd take 30% of what was going through the App Store, unless the app in question was a subscription fee that you were paying, which case would be less, or unless it was going to be the first million dollars of revenue for an app developer. There was a smaller fee for that, but generally 30%, that is the standard App Store tax, quote, unquote. Now, that fee is going to be less for one reason. Because Google is going to reduce it to a 20% standard, down from 30 for in app purchases. And also because Google is decoupling billing, its billing fee from its service fee. One of the things that we decided, that was decided in the Epic vs Google case is that billing and services were illegally tied together. Google is not supposed to be able to say, you have to use our billing system. The judge decided you cannot do that. You will not be able to do that anymore. You'll have to have rival billing systems. App developers should be able to choose another provider like stripe or PayPal or something to process those transactions. So Google's saying, we're going to go ahead and do that everywhere around the world. We're going to reduce our fees and we're going to decouple billing from payments. But since things are still going ongoing in the United States, it's not really a settlement here until the judge is approved that this is a better idea.

[Nilay Patel]

So they're just front running the judge. They're like, judge, this has already happened. Don't you want to be cool?

[Sean Hollister]

And it's going to happen almost everywhere else around the world. Google. You know, I talked to Google Android boss Sameer Samad, and he's like, we're going to do this everywhere else where we don't need to wait for a judge to approve this. We're going to do this everywhere else we can. We're going to do this in everywhere where we don't already have an ongoing case with Epic. We're not being sued. We'll just go ahead and just roll this out everywhere else. And so you, United States, you can do this different, more onerous process if you want, but maybe you should do it the way we're doing it everywhere else. Why not? And so they're now proposing that the judge modify the permanent injunction yet Again, to reflect the new state of things that they're doing everywhere else around the world.

[Nilay Patel]

So basically they're like, here's our conclusion that we've come to it with Epic. Judge, don't come up with your own system. Just do the thing we did with Epic.

[Sean Hollister]

Pretty much. There are a couple other weird things going on in there.

[Nilay Patel]

Well, I'm just curious because they've obviously paid Epic. You reported on various terms of this payments Epic, this weird secret deal that we don't know a lot about. Right. They're, they're, they're going to do Metaverse apps. I don't, I don't know what we're doing here. Tim Sweeney is very unhappy with us because we, we. You wrote a story pointing out that he's not allowed to disparage Google's Play Store or App Store policies. And he has to say that they're like a pro competitive actor. And he's out there being like, I can yell at whoever I want. Like, I don't know about that, buddy. But like, they've. Google has gotten a lot out of this. Like, it seems like Google is driving this car. And Epic, which one is suddenly just like, along for the ride? I don't. That dynamic, to me only makes sense if there is hundreds of millions of dollars changing hands.

[Sean Hollister]

Well, in this case, it's probably $800 million changing hands over a number of years because that is the number that came up publicly now, because they have a secret Unreal Engine and Services deal of some sort where Google is now going to be using possibly some Unreal Engine things and Epic is going to be having Google hosting, I think, for these servers. But there's also the whole Metaverse app things. We don't know what that's about yet. It was revealed in this term sheet.

[Nilay Patel]

Well, it's a massively successful Metaverse concept that everybody loves.

[Sean Hollister]

If you believe that maybe the phrase Metaverse browsers refers to Fortnite refers to possibly.

[Nilay Patel]

I decline. Can I. I would like to be excluded from this narrative.

[Sean Hollister]

No longer being considered a game.

[Nilay Patel]

Can I stop this here? I don't mean to. Sean. You are just the messenger and you're my co founder here at the version. I love you deeply. I'm so mad at you for making me consider the idea that Fortnite is a metaverse. You know, like I. Stop it. Stop telling me that Fortnite is a Metaverse.

[Sean Hollister]

I'll jump to the conclusion. There is a huge redacted section of the term sheet that we have now seen go through the court filings, this huge redacted section, it might just be about this formerly secret $800 million Unreal Engine Services deal. Or maybe the fact that it is redacted and a large portion of this Metaverse Browsers section is redacted might have to do with maybe Epic has gotten some kind of secret suite heart deal for Fortnite in general, and maybe Google is agreeing to no longer consider it to be a game. And so they might even have a more favor than the 20% or 15%.

[Nilay Patel]

Because it's a Metaverse browser?

[Sean Hollister]

Because it's a Metaverse browser, not a game. We don't know this for sure. It's all redacted, lots of blacking.

[Nilay Patel]

So again, I'm going to just try to bracket my level of upset from you personally. So that's fine. I'm still very upset with you. This came up in the Apple case, right? Is Fortnite a game? Is Roblox a game? It's hard. It's hard. You can make these arguments that like in particular, for example, Roblox is actually just an app development environment in which games are routinely expressed, and Roblox is itself not a game. You just have to leave reality behind to do this. Like most people do not experience these things in this way. And you're saying there's some evidence here that Google has decided that Fortnite is not a game, but rather a Metaverse.

[Sean Hollister]

A more generous reading might be that there's some future Metaverse browser that is not Fortnite and something else that Epic wants.

[Nilay Patel]

Every time you say Metaverse browser, I think about getting up and leaving. Like, I don't shut this down.

[Sean Hollister]

Another interesting thing, which we've not spent a lot of time reporting out yet, but might be interesting to listeners of this vergecast, Epic and Google, in these revised permanent injunctions, in these settlements that they want to make, they are trying to define Android as. As. As the subtle as. As the injunction refers to it. Like when. When you. When you're trying to decide where can Google not make sweetheart deals? Where you're trying to decide where can Google not impose various things that maybe seem monopolistic. Epic and Google are trying to define Android as the. As Android apps, as things that are running explicitly on phones and tablets. And I will tell you right now that while Android is this one thing, Google's currently working on another operating system called Aluminum or Aluminium, perhaps.

[Allison Johnson]

I would say technically it's Aluminium.

[Sean Hollister]

Aluminum.

[Nilay Patel]

I don't even mean like a US vs UK English thing. I mean Like, I believe it's actually called Aluminium.

[Sean Hollister]

It is spelled that way. It is spelled with the, with the British English spelling. So, yes, aluminium it is. This operating system, it is also revealed in court filings, is basically Android for PCs. And so if, if Epic and Google can somehow say, well, you know, apps for aluminium shouldn't be, shouldn't be subject to all of these, you know, permanent injunction things that we don't like very much. And all of a sudden aluminium is everywhere rather than Android. And Google effectively manages to quietly rebrand everything it's doing to aluminium. I wonder what that's going to do to this, you know, this attempt to restrict Google's monopoly.

[Nilay Patel]

That's a lot of very subtle, very coordinated moves for Google. Do you know what I mean? This is true. I like everybody over there. They're, they're nice, nice people. But like, we're gonna, we're gonna do a series of very subtle, very stealthily coordinated moves that add up to a big result at the end. Google, like what? Come on.

[Sean Hollister]

Like, is it possible? I don't know.

[Nilay Patel]

I. The thing that I don't understand is why they think the judge will buy this. Like, just laziness, just the docket's full and, you know, I'm tired of you two. Like, fine. Because the judges already seem so skeptical of all of this.

[Sean Hollister]

On my call with, with Samir, head of Android, he, he tried to be very deferential out loud to the judge. He did not want to suggest that in any way the court would like, take this modified injunction that Google and Epic want and run with it. We talked a little bit, myself, Samir and Tim Sweeney, about the two worlds that might exist after this is all said and done. And they were very clear that there is not going to be a world, there is not a third world where there will be rival Android app stores living within the Google Play Store and registered app stores that you download from the web and put on your phone. It will be one or the other, and the judge gets to decide which of those is. It is in the United States, but it might be the whole world is going on with registered app stores and everybody gets their non Google Play stores by downloading through the web. That's how it's going to be around the rest of the world. Or it might be that the United States is the exception where the United States has to carry rival stores within its store and you'll download the Epic Games store from inside Google Play and it will have all the Android apps inside it. But everywhere else in the world, you might have to do something different and download that rival app store from the web. It might be that two world scenario.

[Nilay Patel]

I feel like bringing that to the judge and be like, don't you want to be like the rest of the world? Is one of the least convincing things you can do to a judge in the United States of America possible. Like, they're like, yeah, I don't, I don't care about that. I don't. Who cares? And then you're like, well, yeah, because in the rest of the world they've got robot phones. Like, it's already totally different out there. Like, just as a point of leverage. Just seems very confusing to me. Like, don't you want to be like the rest of the world? Historically is one of the least convincing things you can say to any person in the United States. Like, I. No. The answer, like, wholeheartedly is like, no, we will not have health insurance. Like, at like, at no point is anyone here like, yes, the rest of the world has it right.

[Sean Hollister]

I think it just might be different here in the US from here on out. And I wonder if maybe that's a good thing. All of the reduced fees that Google is going to spread around the world, the best versions of them, are contingent on app developers joining very specific new programs that incentivize them to be very closely tied to Google, use Google APIs, bring their apps to more devices, and to be, you know, play devil's advocate for a moment to make their apps run nicely. I would love to have my phone app run great on a tablet and run great in XR and run great on my, you know, my TV or my car. And that's the thing that Google would like to see happen and is incentivizing.

[Nilay Patel]

This is one of the more interesting dynamics between the Apple and Google cases. With Epic, you can see that Google desires the level of control over the app ecosystem that Apple has past. And the mechanism of Apple's control is like a long history of beautiful design. And like Apple bloggers saying that apps are ugly and like, there's a normative culture around Apple. And then it has the App Store where it's like, would you like to be featured? Make your app beautiful, right? And there's just like a, there are layers of control there, some of which has nothing to do with Apple itself, and a lot of which have to do with Apple's control over distribution. But because it's all just Apple, you can't be like, they're a monopoly over the App Store because if you buy an iPhone, you get the App Store. Google to exert the control over the ecosystem has to be like, how do we get leverage over Samsung? And then they do. They have to go get it and use it and like, write the email. Being like, we have identified our leverage over you. Here it is comply or death.

[Sean Hollister]

Neil, you and I have been here long enough that we have. There was a point that you and I were to able advocating for Google to have this control. We were tired of fragmentation. We were so tired of Android fragmentation. We were like, look at these Skyhook filings. Yes, Google's cracking the whip and making sure Samsung doesn't fuck up the phone every time.

[Nilay Patel]

You can write us an email and explain what Sean means by look at these Skyhook filings. I will find a way to get you some merch. That is a deep cut, my dude. No, I'm with you. Right, but that was also a reflection of the fact that all the skins that the manufacturers are putting on Android are bad. I'm saying here in 2026, we're not looking at whatever water droplet, Samsung, TouchWiz garbage. We're looking at a bunch of phone makers around the world legitimately pushing that platform beyond the boundaries of what anybody considered it could do. Right? And it all kind of looks like iOS and it all kind of looks like this. And that's like, you can have whatever feelings you want about that, but we're not in the crazy era of fragmentation. We're at like boundary pushing on the platform. And Google's need for control is kind of like completely tangential to that. Right, Dom? Like, do you see there's not a lot of Google influence at mwc. They're there, but none of these devices depend on Google's innovation.

[Allison Johnson]

No. You don't see a really big push for them on how googly their phones are. Like I said, all the UIs are very different to what you'll see on a Pixel. Often, like you said, closer to an iPhone than a Pixel phone. A lot of them will have their Android and they've got Gemini and things like that, but they're not talking about Gemini. They're talking about their own AI tools, their own AI assistants, all this stuff that's built on top of it and built around it. And no one's even comparing themselves to Google and to Pixel phones and taking them as a yardstick of what counts as success in the industry or an idealized version of an Android phone, or what they should be aspiring to or building from whenever they want to talk about any other company. It's just Apple or Samsung. Google is there. There's this bit called Android Avenue where you can go and play with demos of new Android features, and that's kind of about the presence it has.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah, I don't know. We'll see. I just like the idea that they're going to show up to a judge in the United States and be like, don't you want to. You don't want the United States to be different? And it's like, well, even if you just look at the market, it already is so different. And then who cares anyway? Sean is deep in it. We're going to keep hovering. This quasi settlement. This. It's not a settlement. If you know what's going on with the secret $800 million deal and whether or not Fortnite is a metaverse, Bradley, you just let us know we're in the game. I'm very curious what all that means. We got to take a break. We'll be back with Lightning Round.

[Neil Cybart]

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[Nilay Patel]

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[Nilay Patel]

We're back. It's the lightning round, unsponsored for flavor. By the way, we keep saying that we have some, like, wacky ideas about all of this sponsoring and flavor in particular.

[Sean Hollister]

You'll see.

[Nilay Patel]

I'm just teasing that here. You'll see. I think you're going to like some of these. It has nothing to do with me. No one can ever pay to tell me what to do. But other people who don't work at the merch, you could pay to tell them what to do. You just think about that for one minute. Think about what that might mean. All right, let's start. We got to start. Gentlemen, I apologize for this. We do this to start the lightning round every week. It's time for America's favorite podcast within a podcast. Brendan Carr is a dummy. Travis tells me we don't have theme music this week, and I'm looking at the note for why, and I just want to tell the audience, I'm very disappointed in you. And the note for why is that? Apparently we're being overrun with AI slot music for Brendan Carr's dummy, and we don't want to play the AI slot music. I'm sorry. So if you can make really, really good AI music, which we have played in the past, I believe, Travis. Correct. We'll play that. If you want to make your own Gregorian chant, which we ran last week and which I believe, Travis, we should run again this week. We'll play that, but no mid tier AI slop. That's the rules.

[Sean Hollister]

Can we get some, like, Brendan card beatboxing?

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah, some of that. We've played some very avant garde Brendon Carr themes. Travis, can we just run the Gregorian chant one more time to start this one for Brendon Carr's dummy? Brendan Carr is a dummy dummy. So this week, this is a very short ren Car is a dummy because we've had too many gadgets and quite frankly, Brendan's a dummy. But it waxes and wains. This isn't true first amendment, Brendan Carr stuff. This is just the man is dumb and lives in the past. So this week, he proposed a rule. The FCC is going to vote on it this month trying to incentivize United States companies to bring their call centers back to America and then further require the people who work in the call centers to be proficient in American Standard English. I just pointing out the reason the call centers are abroad is because the labor is cheaper in other countries. And so if you bring, if you force the American companies to bring the call centers over here, they're not going to pay the higher labor rates. They're just going to let AI answer the phone. I can't say it any clearer than that. They're already trying to do this because the AI is cheaper than the already cheap foreign labor. And so if you're like, you have to have your call centers in the United States. They'll be like, yes, they're in data centers now. He's such a dummy. Like I don't. This is such an obvious outcome of this rule. So the way he's doing this is he can't actually tell people where to put their call centers. He can put limits on call volume going to other countries which would then force you to put your call centers in the United States. This is the most incredible kind of rate regulation you could have in 2026 on a global like telecom network. This is the exact sort of stuff that like when they argue against net neutrality they're like, why would you regulate the networks and do rate regulation? The free market should decide. And he's like no, no, no, no, no. People don't like hearing foreign accents. So I will do intense rate regulation on the phone network which I have legislation over, which I have jurisdiction over. And I'll move the call centers to the United States where all these companies will happily pay full freight American labor rates and not use AI. Very dumb, man.

[Allison Johnson]

I've got to say Neely, I don't know why you're so, so skeptical about this. I mean Trump Mobile managed to set up its call center in the US quite successfully from what I understand.

[Nilay Patel]

But that's the only thing they do. They set up a call center to just accept your money and send you nothing. That's a great business. Like if you could set up a business where you employ a bunch of very kind people in Kansas to answer the phone, take your credit card and then charge you $200 like at scale. Like that is a. But then do nothing else. Great business.

[Allison Johnson]

That's a good model.

[Nilay Patel]

At some point you've got collected enough, you've collected enough pre order payments to just run your call center on the interest alone while you buy crypto which I'm confident is what Don Jr. Is doing. Yeah. Anyway, Don, by the way, do you have a Trump Mobile update for us this week?

[Allison Johnson]

Only that it was not at mwc. I did look, I looked for, I searched Trump in the MWC database. I looked for Liberty Mobile, which is the sort of MVNO that really feels like is Trump Mobile behind a sort of gold sheen. But there was no sign of them whatsoever. I really tried, you know, I was hoping they'd be there with some sort of flag waving booth asserting American exceptionalism abroad or something.

[Nilay Patel]

When you said you were going to look for them there, I was like, I don't. Why would Trump Mobile be in Europe? Like, they don't go there. That's not allowed. We don't acknowledge Europe. But I was kind of hoping you'd see them because they actually branded a

[Allison Johnson]

stamp, a US flag on Barcelona soil. I mean, while I was there, there was a lot of stuff in the news about Trump saying very angry things about Spain and Spanish politics for reasons I didn't fully understand. So we're doing the perfect excuse to go and, you know, lay down the law. MWC too.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah, it does. All right, that's been Brendan Carr is a dummy with a little side show into the Trump phone. Brendan, if you're listening and you would like to investigate Liberty Mobile, which is just collecting payments for a phone that doesn't exist, by all means, we would love to hear the results of your investigation. In the meantime, I'll remind you that it's 2026. No one's watching broadcast television and if you move call centers in the United states, they will 100% be entertaining. Answered by chat GPT it is as much of a guarantee as I can give you. Brendan, you're always welcome to come on the show. I think you're a coward and a dummy. That's been Brenda Carter's A Dummy American's favorite podcast for the podcast. I mean, that alone is so much more high quality thinking than anything Brendan has done for the past year. I don't know how else to say it. All right, we got a lightning round. Sean, what do you got?

[Sean Hollister]

I have a 61 pound machine that eats plastic and spritz out bricks. I'm waiting for the return label. This is the Clear Drop soft plastic compactor. We saw that this thing was going to be at ces. It pulls in all of your household plastic, all the thin household plastic, the bag that you took off your comforter, your snack wrappers, your Ziplocs, all that kind of Stuff, you put it in the machine. Eventually, weeks later, it will compress it and then heat it into a 3 pound brick. 2.6, 3.3. It varies a little bit. And then you mail that off across the country to some guy's house. But properly, after they change the shipping labels, it won't be some guy's house anymore. It will then go to.

[Nilay Patel]

Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Let's just wait. Pump the brakes. Whose house?

[Sean Hollister]

It went to Matt Daley's house. Matt Daley is an advisor and kind of a head product and marketing for the company. He seems to be a very nice guy who gave us a great virtual tour. Also on the website for this product of which he is an advisor, there are two testimonials from him about how good the product is. And for some reason the bricks were going to his house to make sure that they didn't have too much stuff. I don't want to heap too much criticism on Matt daily. He gave us a great virtual tour and has been very patient with our questions throughout the entire process. But, but where the bricks should go, and eventually did go in our case is to a facility in Indiana where they get ground up and turned into down cycled plastic products in the future. So they might be in composite lumber for decking or lawn furniture. They might be in highway, the highway guardrails. The way they get connected to the poles that they're on is sometimes through a very cheap piece of plastic. It might be in those. This is what you can do to keep your plastics out of the landfill. Assuming you want to pay $1,400 over two years for the machine and for the mailers that let you send these bricks to them once a month.

[Nilay Patel]

I mean, I read your review, I watched your video. I have to say I enjoyed the part of the video where you were like, what happens if I stick my hand in here? Seemed ill advised. The answer is, Sean remains intact, has not been turned into a brick.

[Sean Hollister]

It's all good.

[Nilay Patel]

And then even it's essentially a negative review where you're like, this doesn't make any sense and I wouldn't buy this. And the company was like, thank you. And that happens so rarely that the company is like, yes, you've pointed out a number of flaws in our idea.

[Sean Hollister]

The best I've ever gotten before today from a PR representative after a review vaguely like this is, you're tough but you're fair. This one was like glowing. Verge does real journalism. You should read this site, by the way. We think we should fix These things,

[Allison Johnson]

we're gonna go fix them.

[Sean Hollister]

So this was wonderful. And from the guy who I accused of having us send the bricks to his house and writing those testimonials. He says he wrote them before he started working for the company. So it's all good.

[Nilay Patel]

There's a number of products in this zone out here. There's a bunch of smart composters. It all feels like you can buy consumer goods to make you feel good about buying other consumer goods. And at the end, none of them ever math out. That's just how that feels to me.

[Sean Hollister]

The idea. And Justine. Justine, our senior science reporter, Justine Kalma, who co wrote this piece with me and tackled the plastics section of it. She is adamant, and she has the experts to back it up, that we cannot fix the plastics problem by getting rid of the plastics that are already out there. We need to make fewer things out of plastic in order to not have a tremendous amount of plastics overwhelming our world and our landfills. And so she came in this worried that this might actually be a project that the plastics industry might have funded to make it look better, to make the use of plastics look better. Because some of the advisors for this company have some ties to the plastics company. We didn't really find that out. I don't know that this is necessarily that they put a lot of work into creating device and that actually seems to exist. But still, this is not the solution right now, and it may never be.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah. All right, Tom, what do you got?

[Allison Johnson]

Okay, I have the Infinix Note 60 Ultra, which is another stupid weird phone. But what I really have is the wireless charger that Infinix shipped to me with it, which is shaped like a racing car. It is an enormous Qi charger, which the actual Qi charger is just a small puck in the center which you can kind of pop out. But it's in this enormous, quite like weighty, solid plastic base, fully shaped like a sort of chrome and carbon fiber racing car. It has really strong like Simpsons. I sleep in a racing car. Do you energy to it. It's incredibly nice. The whole thing has happened because the phone, Infinix, for what it's worth, are a company. They're one of the Chinese manufacturers. They're owned by a bigger company called Tranchen, who also owns techno, who we spoke about earlier with the modular phones. Infinix are very big in Africa, parts of South America, parts of Asia, and particularly Southeast Asia. No presence at all in Europe, really. This phone, their first ultra, is a partnership with the car design company Pininfarina So the whole thing is ostensibly car themed. But what's funny is the actual phone itself has almost no car theming whatsoever. There's like one RGB light on the back that they call the. I think it's the floating tail light. And it's just like. Sure, there's a light. Cars have lights on the back too. That checks out.

[Nilay Patel]

Oh, this is like a tail light. Yeah. This is like a big red bar across the back of the phone.

[Allison Johnson]

Maybe I'm doing it down. It is a bit like a tail light, but that's the only carish touch to the whole thing. There's like a dot matrix display on the back of the phone. That is not a car thing. Cars don't tend to have dot matrix displays, last I checked. But they just went all in on these accessories which I don't even know if you can buy. You know, like, they sent this to me, but that must be some weird thing they sent to the press. It also, like, they sent me a SIM tool which is shaped like a racing car. Like, I can just like pop out my SIM with my tiny little racing car sim tool. And I love this. I'm going to treasure the SIM tool at least. I don't know if I quite want to charge my phone on a racing car every night, but I swap sims a lot because I'm reviewing phones all the time. And so I do have a sense of the SIM tools I like. I like some nothing ones because they have a kind of chunky plastic handle to them. But I think the racing car might be the pride of my collection now.

[Nilay Patel]

Okay, two things. One, Pininfarina is just a very funny company. I don't know if you're as deep into car world as I am.

[Allison Johnson]

I am the opposite of a car guy, so I know less things. Okay.

[Nilay Patel]

Pininfarin is famous for designing some of the most iconic Ferraris of all time.

[Allison Johnson]

Time.

[Nilay Patel]

Like you would and like part other Italian brands.

[Sean Hollister]

Testarossa. Give me a Testarossa.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah, just like hilariously, Pin and Finina was like, they were the ones and a bunch of Fiats. Like they're a car design company, but now they make their own cars. They make their own weird EVs. So like they're constantly trading on this history that is long gone because, you know who designs Ferraris now? Johnny. I've. So like, that's gone. And then second, it's just like this picture you have of the lock screen where there's a random quote on the lock screen. Let me just read you what? The lock screen says there is no chance, no destiny, no fate that can hinder the firm resolve of a determined soul. And it just says that on the lock screen.

[Allison Johnson]

I think it's beautiful. Wells to live with.

[Nilay Patel]

Can you change that, or is that just what it always says on the lock screen?

[Allison Johnson]

There are two to pick from. They're not really, like, fully on the lock screen. You kind of, like, swipe up into them, and there's no explanation of what they are, why they're there. Whether you can add more, change them, whether they're gonna, you know, add more in an update or something. I don't know. I'd love to kind of keep getting more of these. I'm gonna see if I can. No, I don't have the other one to hand, sadly. The other one is something about crying and about how if you cry, it's because you're, you know, too strong or something. Crying's not a sign of weakness. It's a sign of strength, but in much more grandiose, kind of upsetting wording.

[Nilay Patel]

That's true. By the way, Sean, they did design Pin, and Ferrara did design a Testarossa.

[Sean Hollister]

I went, sure did.

[Nilay Patel]

And now I think the crying is because Johnny Hyde is designing pin and Ferraris, and they're doing weird EVs. That's incredible. All right, my lightning round one. I think this is the funniest little stat about our audience I can give you. So on Apple Day, cover all the new Apple stuff. The iPhone 17e, the new MacBook Air, the MacBook Neo, which is a huge. Everyone wants to see it. The iPad Air, which no one wants to see. So we're, like, looking at the traffic. David, I are, like, in the car on the way back to the office to be like, what's everyone interested in? We're, like, prepping for the live stream, and it's the traffic. I'm dead serious. The number one story on the site was the MacBook Neo. Guess what number two was. Go ahead, go ahead. Guess what number two was.

[Allison Johnson]

Kobo remote.

[Nilay Patel]

It was the Kobo remote, which is not any of the other Apple products. The number two story on the site on Apple Day was the Kobo remote, which is just a little clicker for Kobo E readers that you can just press the button and it turns the page, and it was the MacBook Neo. And then this, like, I don't even know how much it is. It's like $10.

[Allison Johnson]

$30. So $30, $30.

[Nilay Patel]

It's so expensive. It has a horrible branding on it. It says Rakuten Kobo on it. The thing is incredibly ugly. It's a $30 clicker and it has two buttons on it and one is page forward and one is pageback. We have a great headline. Andrewsky wrote this headline. He's like, I love this thing. I love clicking my E reader in bed. And I'm just telling you, it was the number two traffic on our site on Apple Day. It is my. It is my favorite. It's like everything I need to know about the Verge audience right there. Like, what do you actually want? You want a remote free e reader that doesn't require a weird Bluetooth hack?

[Sean Hollister]

Very good secret is everybody wants to be bundled up in a blanket. Nobody wants to put their hands on a book.

[Nilay Patel]

Books. That's the one. Sean, what's your other lightning round?

[Sean Hollister]

I have the Lego Smart Brick. I have the Lego Smart Brick right here. This is the Lego Smart Brick. I have two of them. I've got four of them, actually.

[Nilay Patel]

So I heard that they were out, like people could buy. None of the software works yet.

[Sean Hollister]

Yeah. So the thing about them is they're not supposed to require any software. In fact, Lego, the LEGO group, just did like an hour long live stream the other day saying that these things work out of the box. You do not need to use the app. Some of the designers said, I've been working on this product for two years, I've never even seen the app. The app is just for downloading updates for future functionality and for turning down the volume. If you are a parent, these are the only things that it is for. It is important that it has both of these functions, though, because, number one, they are loud and annoying and they make the same sounds over and over again, which is not something I expect to go again. And two, they do not have all of their functionality out of the gate. The original sets that. The original three sets that come with them, all of which I have here and can lift if you want. X Wing, Tie Fighter and Throne Room Duel. All three of these, they use light sound color sensor to make certain different sounds they can detect, like a figure nearby. But they don't have all the most fun stuff we saw at ces, like being able to tell precisely where two bricks are from one another, like how you know how close and what their orientation is like. They don't have ambient light sensor functionality yet. They don't have any. They're not using their microphones to like detect sound yet. And there are very few as far as I've seen. Multi brick interactions where you can actually see all kinds of cool stuff going on that isn't simply swoosh and blast and so on. So I have here, this is the X wing with a Lego smart brick inside. Pick this thing up. Is that one dead already, by the way? They only have about 45 minutes of battery life. Lego recommends that you leave them on the charger when not in use. And I did not do that last night. So. Okay, so now this is an X wing. I don't know how well you can hear that. And so we got Luke in there. Plays the force theme. So you know that Luke's in there. You can hear R2 occasionally. If I spin the thing upside down. Yeah, we got some sounds. He's gonna little scream. He's going upside down at some point. And so I can blast by pressing this button maybe. There we go.

[Nilay Patel]

It does seem like what Lego has made here is like one of those crazy sound effect boards for morning zoo cruise radio shows. You know what I mean? That's like the vibe I'm getting from this demo that you're giving me right now.

[Sean Hollister]

When we were at ces, they showed us all kinds of amazing things that it could do. Like you could have a little police car, and you could have a thief try to like commandeer that police guard. Would sound the alarm, wouldn't let him in. And then you brought the police guy over there. And then. Come on, let me shake that thing again. You brought the police guy over there, and he would be allowed to be in his own thing. Let him in. And then the robber would scream when the police guy enters the car. All this kind of fun stuff that's like multiple figure interaction. But with these ones here, the best I've gotten is you can have the sets blast each other a little bit with the multiple bricks. Let me get this Millennium Falcon up here. There we go.

[Nilay Patel]

I do feel like I need to remind you, Sean, although we are on YouTube, this is primarily a radio show.

[Allison Johnson]

Oh.

[Nilay Patel]

And this is some of the most tortured radio that has ever been made in the history of the world.

[Sean Hollister]

I did ask you if you wanted to see them, and I did not wait for your answer. I was going to launch into this thing right here. Okay.

[Nilay Patel]

No, I feel like I understand what's going on here. When these things were announced and you wrote about them, I would say I caught this from you, and I 100% caught it from the audience that. But everyone wants us to be great. Everyone sees potential, and everyone is fully expecting to be disappointed. And I'm watching you disdainfully shake a Millennium Falcon at me right now on a stream, and I would say the disappointment is high.

[Sean Hollister]

Yeah, yeah. The Lego, the smart brick, it deserves better than these first Star wars sets. And I'm worried, I'm a little worried that if this is what they've got for us out of the gate, maybe there are some hidden limitations that they did not discuss at ces. Maybe some of the better functionality uses way more battery life. Somebody's already torn apart one of these bricks. The battery. The milliamp hours in this battery can be measured in the tens. I think it has like 42 milliamp hours or something like that. So it's very small. They recommend that you always leave the thing on the charger when you're not using it. The batteries are not removable, not replaceable. The entire brick has disposal instructions for it when they eventually run out of charge and can't use it anymore. And it's all very expensive. You're paying, you know, 70, 80 for one of the starter sets. And it comes with a few things to do, like you can have a little stormtrooper turret blast at your X wing and you can have a scanning station scan around. My 6 year old loved scanning around for Darth Vader with the scanning station. But after like a day or so of me leaving this stuff on my coffee room table for them to play with whenever they wanted to. They were not playing with them whenever they wanted to. They were watching screens, they were asking for Minecraft videos, they were reading books, they were playing with their dolls. So I don't know.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah, all right, well, we'll wait for that full review, although I suspect I know what it's going to say. All right, Tom, what else you got?

[Allison Johnson]

Okay, so first bit of context here. I've been in Spain for most of the past week. The first thing I knew about the war in Iran was waking up one morning in my hotel room, opening blue skies, seeing, oh, a war started half an hour ago. Cool, that's great.

[Nilay Patel]

Very 2026 situation.

[Allison Johnson]

I've got to go to a phone launch now, so, you know, I'm going to go see a robot phone and I'll hope this war sorts itself out. I was then really busy all week. There were a lot of phones. We'd gone over that. So the second thing I saw related to the Iran war was a minute long video put out by the White House Twitter account, which was a Call of Duty highlight video, including video game footage and shots of missiles hitting Iranian targets. Oh, God, that's the most I know about what's actually happening in Iran right now. This is like a video. They tweeted it out saying, courtesy of the red, white and blue. And it opens with like a 10 second clip which is genuinely from Call of Duty. It's a clip from Call of Duty, Modern Warfare 3. Apparently it's so the animation of when you call in a nuclear strike after you've got a kill streak sufficiently high.

[Nilay Patel]

Oh, good, that's what you want.

[Allison Johnson]

Very reassuring. And then there's 50 seconds of just clips of actual missile strikes that have been hitting actual targets over the past week, presumably some of which have included casualties. The whole thing is set to music. And there's a couple bits with like voice barks which I assume are also from Call of Duty. They sound very much like those kind of like little NPC lines barked out by a character in Call of Duty. I mean, there's been a lot of dystopian stuff, but this one really hit me.

[Nilay Patel]

I do feel like we've spent so much time on this show, on the site, on decoder, talking about deepfakes and reality detection and cryptographic signatures and C2PA and any of this work. And we rarely contend with the fact that people are routinely confused by video game footage all the time. And it's not weird AI stuff. It's literally just screencaps of Call of Duty and, and Microsoft Flight Simulator and like all this stuff. And I don't know that there's like a. You can't be like, we will do deep fate detection of Call of Duty.

[Allison Johnson]

Yeah, it's real Call of Duty.

[Nilay Patel]

It's actually a weird existential crisis. Like, no, that's a real video game that did it, but it happened in the video game. But you're just using it to lie.

[Sean Hollister]

You just need more video game journalists. You need more video game journalists everywhere on the staff of every newsroom to be like, that is not.

[Nilay Patel]

That's Call of Duty real.

[Sean Hollister]

That is Call of Duty. That is. That is Halo. That is, is. That is bad.

[Nilay Patel]

That's horrible. We're doing a story, by the way. Tina Nguyen on our site has been trying to identify the people in the administration who post these things, where they come from. There's a pretty elaborate system that we can kind of like see that the shape of in the world where they're like Discord servers or people like make these things and send them to administration. If, you know, you tip us, you just send us a note because she's. We're reporting that Out. I'm. Once you see a content farm, like, once you've been in media for long enough, you, like, you recognize a content farm from like, a hundred miles away. You're like, oh, the Trump administration is running a content farm. It's just a very weird content farm that posts Call of Duty clips in front of real war footage. But it's a content form. I know what that looks like. So we're trying to find the shape of it. So if, you know, if you have any insight, send us a note because we're chasing that. That one down. All right, my last one. I'll keep this very quick. We're. We're way over. This is what happens when David's not here is they just let me off the. I just off the leash. In the background of all of this, Ticketmaster is on trial for being an illegal monopoly here in the United States. It's a very weird one because the Trump administration has to pick up a case that the Biden administration started, right? And this, you know, this all started with, like, Taylor Swift tickets and all this in the background. There's a lot. There's a lot of history here. But the Trump DOJ is pursuing this case. There was a thought that it would get settled early because previous figures from Trump Won were lobbying for Ticketmaster. There's just endless complexity of this one, but it's at trial right now. Lauren Finer is in that courtroom. It is wild stuff left and right. And the one she filed today, just as we were coming on, is basically a story in which the Barclays center thought that it might leave its contract with Ticketmaster and go with SeatGeek. And in retaliation, Ticketmaster, which also manages a bunch of artists, pulled the Billie Eilish show at the last minute. And you just see this stuff now. It's just coming to light. Like, the whole industry's been talking this stuff forever. But it's in the background of this. And the reason I'm bringing up here on the Vergecast is I keep pointing this out, like, our whole world is run by databases that people control. And, like, Ticketmaster is just a database of venues and artists and literally seats and who owns the seats. And, like, all that's sort of, like, up for grabs lately. And, like, some of the biggest monopolies in the world are just, like, weird databases, and Ticketmaster is one of them. And Lauren's in the courtroom right now is like, maybe it's going to get torn down and, like, more people will get more access to databases in a weird way. Once you start noticing this, you're like, oh, that's all AI is going to do to DoorDash, right? Like, it's the dynamic of, like, who gets to access the database and how and on what terms. Woo. That's up for grabs, right? Like, just like fully up for grabs. That what is the Play Store. It is a database of apps, like who gets to access it on what terms and who has to pay whom for what. All of that right now is up for grabs. And it's crazy to look at the Live Nation case and Ticketmaster case and see the same dynamics. So go read Lauren's coverage because it's all in there. And also it will make you very mad at Ticketmaster, which, from what I understand, is a feeling people enjoy. Four o', clock, it's time for our two minutes Hate at Ticketmaster. It's like a thing people like. So that coverage on the site, it's very good. There's all kinds of other stuff on this. We had a wild week on the Verge this week. Go read it. As a reminder, you can subscribe to the Verge to support all that journalism, to make it so that no one can tell us what to do, which is my favorite thing about working here at the Verge. And you can get ad free episodes of our podcast, including decoder and version history. You get a bunch of newsletters. You can email us@the vergecasthevirge.com, you can also call the hotline at 866 verge11. The Vergecast is a production of the Verge and Vox Media Podcast Network. Today's show is produced by Eric Gomez, Brandon Keefer and Travis Larchuk. We will be back next week. Rock and roll.

[Sean Hollister]

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[Nilay Patel]

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[Sean Hollister]

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