Airship Successfully Delivers Cell Service in Japan - DTNS 5376

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3:02This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, October 19th, 2026. We tell you what you need to know, give you important context, and help each other understand. Today, a New Mexico company proves you can deliver reliable cell service from a helium-filled airship, testing it out in Japan. I love this story. I'm Tom Merritt. And I'm Rob Nunwood. Let's start with what you need to know with that big story. So the company is called Sky, but they spell it S-C-E-Y-E because they've got their I in the sky, but maybe the one with the K was already trademarked. I don't know. Anyway, it's called pronounced Sky, but spelled that way.

3:40they completed a test flight between august 9th and september 5th of an uncrewed helium airship based cellular tower going from its headquarters in roswell new mexico to japan and back now this is a full-size airship you could have people on it they just don't some of its systems are autonomous but they also have supervision so they can help tell it when to pause and keep track of weather, whole good stuff on the Ars Technica article about this, about all the processes that go into it. After it arrived over Shikoku, the smallest of the Japanese islands, the four main Japanese islands anyway, it demonstrated LTE connectivity to smartphones, laptops, drones, in cooperation with SoftBank.

4:27This is the first time the airship provided actual service, not just test service. SoftBank actually turned off their cell coverage for a small coverage area. I'm going to guess I couldn't find confirmation that they turned off the LTE service. Maybe they had 5G still going or something like that. But the end result was Sky was handling voice calls, text messaging, internet, and it all went great. They had tests that made sure they were getting signals from an open beach, one from a forest, ones from inside a building. Those were the ones they were like, those will probably fail, but they did not.

5:02A server on board also tested some edge computing scenarios and demonstrated an average response time of 68 milliseconds. And they also tested using ground-based lasers to provide a more directional higher speed link. Obviously, you have to keep the airship in a stationary position for that to work, but that could be used to provide a relay station for satellite-based internet. So use the laser to get up to the airship and the airship, which is 60 ,000 feet up, can then more easily get to the space-based satellites. It is propelled by an electric propeller. It has batteries that charge from solar panels so it can fly through the night based on its batteries and then start charging back up during the day.

5:43It's 83 meters long. It's about 273 feet. And as I just mentioned, can operate at 60 ,000 feet above the flight path. Usually flight paths are 30 ,000 or lower, but close to those satellites. Sky's ship can carry 100 kilograms, about 220 pounds, and deliver up to one kilowatt of power for its devices. That's enough for the test, but future designs, they hope to be able to get to carry up to 250 kilograms. That would allow mobile broadband coverage equivalent to around 550 ground-based towers. Rob, I am very encouraged by this story. I know it's just a test, but it's a very successful test. And it's more than just like, hey, we're floating things out there to see how they work.

6:27This could be useful, not just in disaster scenarios, but in, again, providing uplinks for satellite internet and a whole bunch of other stuff. This is a very, very, very cool test. And I had to read the entire story to understand what this is, because my initial thought was, oh, well, we're kind of already doing that with the tethered balloons or the tethered dirigibles they'll put up in a disaster area to just give local coverage right there, this thing could replace 500 cell towers. That's a lot of coverage area. So even though they've talked nothing about the expense of this, if you can cover what 500 towers would do, this probably would be fairly cost, whatever the opposite of prohibitive is, would be cost effective.

7:14Cost effective, I guess. cost effective if you could cover 500 towers with just one of these things, even though this thing might be ridiculous, you know, as far as what it costs. So I thought it was pretty cool. And, you know, when you think about 60 ,000 feet, that's a long way up, but it's not space. So it's something that can fly around. You don't need to put it on rockets to get it up. It literally just takes off out of a hangar, gets to its altitude and just kind of sits there and for the most part just operates on its own. So it is a really, really cool idea. And I think that you could ultimately bring cell coverage to a lot of places to where it may be difficult to just build towers.

7:51They just don't have the infrastructure to build the towers everywhere, because if you build a tower, you've got to run power to it. You've got to run lines to it. There's all kinds of things that come when you're talking about building towers. This would allow you to do some things over fairly large areas. So I'm just geeked out about space flight. I'm geeked out about airplanes and stuff like that always have been. This is really, really cool. Yeah. And I like that they did the edge server test. So potentially instead of doing 500 cell towers, maybe they're doing edge servers. They're doing, I don't know if you'd call it a data center, but you could provide data center style service from an airship, maybe in temporary situations, maybe in permanent situations.

8:33The other place my mind went is having these as sort of a backhaul or a backfill, maybe is a better word for an area, and then you have a disaster, you just have the ship fly over to where the disaster is. Right. Where they were providing the backfill now has a little less capacity, but still has service. And the disaster area gets the new service like that without having to wait for somebody to deploy balloons that are smaller capacity and all that sort of thing. I imagine we're not even thinking of all the possibilities that this could be used for. Well, that's definitely one of them because as part of this test, this thing flew from New Mexico to Japan, did the test, and then got back in like three and a half weeks.

9:15I mean, that's pretty impressive. You know, one thing about blimps, they don't necessarily fly fast, but they can go a long distance. And this thing is battery-operated and solar-powered. So the technology that they've done here, the test, you know, for folks who are watching, you can see me smiling. It's just cool tech that has been deployed, you know, with this system. So it'll be interesting to see where it goes. As you said, Tom, this is just a test. This isn't getting moved into production anywhere yet, but it's just showing the capability of what can be done and what can be done is quite cool.

9:44Yeah. And they're not the only ones that are working on this sort of, you know, airborne service, not even the only ones working on airships. But I think that it's significant to give them their kudos for having such a successful test where even the parts that are like, you know, we're going to try it in a building, but we're attenuating the power for local for local regulations and it probably won't work. and they're like, no, it did. Everything went really well. So good for them. It's kind of cool. Just turn LTE off and let's see what happens. Yeah, exactly. DTNES is made possible by you, the listener.

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14:02There's more we need to know today. Let's get to the briefs. Android Authority passed along a tip from a user on Naver that Samsung may launch the Galaxy S27 series in January or February at the latest. Pretty much par for course for this decade. Several sources indicate Samsung has finalized most of the components for the S27 and is moving into schedule management, which could mean that mass production could start very, very soon. Supposedly, one last hitch is that the RAM for the Pro and Ultra models, the Samsung might have to upgrade them to USF 5.0 and LPDDR6 standards, which could raise costs.

14:38There are also reports of heating issues with the Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 on the Ultra, which may lead them to using an Exynos 2700 processor. Samsung used to release the models in late February or March to line up with Mobile World Congress, but shifted to a January or early February release in 2021. Last year, it announced the S26 in late February. Yeah, so it's not a huge shift if they go early, but it's kind of interesting to see them go back to their more traditional, well, I guess traditional, really traditional would be Mobile World Congress, but the more recent tradition of a January release.

15:12They like to do that because it gets them ahead of everyone else for the rest of the year. It's good for their Q1 sales if they go earlier in January. And it seems like other than those two issues that you mentioned with whether they want to upgrade the RAM or not and whether that Snapdragon processor is an issue in the Ultra, everything else has been testing out really well. The component certifications and everything has been going very well. So they have a good shot of being able to do this earlier than they would have otherwise. I'm very excited about this. I am team Samsung. I've been using a Galaxy phone since the S3.

15:47That was my first one. and I have not switched to anything else as my primary driver since. It may be using a Snap, not using a Snapdragon as compared to the Exynos, that has got me raising my eyebrow because it's like, ah, that, it doesn't take me back to 1.0 type release. I'm never a 1.0 type person because I use Exynos outside of the United States and Japan, a lot of different places. But that part is the one that had me raising my eyebrows. Like, ah, I don't know if I want to go to another processor. I've been so used to Snapdragon for years and years and years now. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And granted, I guess if they're having thermal problems, they might not have a choice.

16:22Exynos, if anybody doesn't know, is Samsung's in-house processor. They tend to mix it in, like Rob was saying, but they don't rely exclusively on it. I think they're going to want to have the Snapdragon in there if they can at all make it work, because that's a lot of explanation to try to tell people why your top line ultra one doesn't have the Snapdragon 8 uh elite extreme gen six there's that and the fact that they build their own x-nose it's like oh samsung you're just trying to save money but not but not help us save it no matter what the reason is i'm thinking that so i know other people are going to think it as well so even if what they're saying is absolutely true that there's heat problems and i believe them that there probably are i've still like i said i'm just raising my eyebrows like well we're using these snapdragon you know chips for you know for a long time why are we not using them now yeah is this the real reason.

17:12Even if you know it's not logical, like, well, why would they take it out of the ultra? If they were going to save money, they'd take it out of the lower priced one. Still, it's yeah, it does make you raise your eyebrow. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told the Sources podcast that OpenAI is going to build a humanoid robot. He explained that the world is built for humans. You know, locks are at human height, doors are human sized, all that stuff. So he said matching that form factor seems good. Altman says the company is focused on the brain that makes the robot work rather than the look of the robot, at least at this point.

17:45And Gadget notes that OpenAI is recruiting people who understand motion control, state estimation, actuator control, and whole robot behavior, as well as the machine learning infrastructure to train physical AI systems. They are also hiring some people to work on the bodies as well. So don't expect that they're going to abandon that part, but they really want to get the control aspect down first. Altman expects a demo sometime next year. He thinks it might be two or three years before you actually see OpenAI bring a product to market, but we might see a demo soon. And they're behind. OpenAI is behind in this race.

18:18That doesn't mean that's bad. Sometimes first mover advantage, you know, ask Friendster isn't always the best way to go. But China is ahead of everybody in physical intelligence right now. Yeah, the humanoid robot is, is a new thing. You know, we're just now really in the last few years starting to see robots that look like us because I can remember back when I was in high school, you know, Lordstown plant, GM plant in Ohio, they were using robots back then. Those things did not look like robots that we think of today. They were giant boxes with arms coming off of them. They just did all kinds of stuff and welding and all that kind of stuff.

18:51But they built the building around those robots. These are robots that can be built to go into buildings that already existed or made for people, which makes sense. But Tom, I did see that documentary. I think that they got Will Smith to star in it about the NS5. So I'm just always leery about robots that look like us. They could do things that us can do. Yeah. You know, I'm being pedantic, but not really. What could possibly go wrong? Yeah. I mean, Xpeng in China just had one of the robots walk off the assembly line, like finished being assembled and it walked itself off. Bit of a publicity stunt, I know.

19:31But we are getting closer to that being another one of those things like autonomous cars where we're not talking about the future anymore. We're talking about the now. There's a lot of movies, Tom, where there's just people and robots working right next to each other. I'm thinking like half of the Star Wars movies, that's literally what's going on. You got robots, you got people just working, doing what they do. Whoever partners with Disney on a humanoid robot C-3PO is going to sell a few of those. Apple invited people to an event in Los Angeles on October 28th at 1 p.m. Eastern called Pro Intel.

20:05The smart money is on new touchscreen MacBooks and an OLED iPad mini. Meanwhile, orders for the iPhone Duo opened on Friday and within minutes, shipping dates were pushed out to January. January 9 to 5 Mac notes that some users, mostly in Japan, have reported their later dates being moved up earlier. One user with a December shipping date got moved to launch day, October 23rd. Our producer Amos had his order for the duo delayed. And any updates to earlier dates than that? Are there any updates to that earlier than you, you know, for you, Amos? You know what you got going on? My date has stayed the same.

20:38My story is basically I was going to order it. And the earliest ship date was the 30th of October. By the time I could get in at three minutes after the hour. I tried to pick up locally and then it didn't let me do that. So I went back and got a November 6th delivery date. So two weeks post. Were you doing it on a phone or a laptop? Phone. Phone. Sarah Lane had a problem. She was using the laptop and trying to order and just couldn't get in. And by the time she got in, her shipping date got pushed out to January. I had it all set up in advance and just kept reloading the App Store app at 5 a.m.

21:13Pacific. and once it was in, I was just like, yes, yes. And I got the October 23rd date, luckily. At the time I thought, oh, this wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. But I think, you know, one of the keys was sometimes those platforms, sometimes it's being on the laptop that's the better thing. You just kind of never know. It kind of depends on where everybody is. And I think not trying to do store pickup probably was the thing that, you know, helped me out there. But you can never take these lessons and apply them to future popular orders. I guess the other thing to ask is why? Is it that they didn't make enough?

21:50Because we have a lot of stories that the yields for these were like 60%, which is awful. A lot of stories that it's quite popular and people were putting off buying the iPhone 18 to the point where they had to reduce some of their iPhone 18 part orders and increase their Duo orders because of this. What do you think, Rob, from the Samsung side of the fence? You just stole my thunder. I kind of was wondering because we did see 18s are not selling quite as well as they thought they had to reduce that. So is that because people are saying, well, hey, this is going to come out in a month. Let me wait and get the new hotness that folds open.

22:24I'm kind of wondering that. And I am I'm one of those people as well. Now, I was never going to be a day one. I wasn't going to get up early to try to order this thing. I will be the person that sometime, you know, after the holidays, try to walk into an Apple store and you see if I can. Hey, can I just give me one of those? It'll be one of those type of impulse buys because I really do want to play with iPhones foldable. But I was shocked that they said that these things were sold out in minutes. Usually Apple's a little better than that. And if they were said like it was sold out within the second hour, I wouldn't have I wouldn't probably be talking about this right now.

22:58But the fact that it sold out within minutes on this brand new phone, that was kind of interesting to me. So that told me either you guys didn't build nearly enough of these things or you're not, you know, the building of them is not as easy as you thought it would be. Or people are really, really, really wanting to get a foldable iPhone. It does seem like there is a lot of demand. And that's always, you know, a relative number for sure. but there is the kind of talk around this that you would have even before the order day that you would have around one of apple's highest level selling products the fact that they didn't have the duo available at the same time as the 18 did make a lot of people decide which side they wanted to be on and the folks who chose duo and then got ship dates in january are very vocal right now right amos yes very much so yeah they uh they actually announced ahead of time well i don't of the say announced but it was leaked ahead of time they were going to be doing a rolling rollout and it's been since the iphone 10 since i've tried to get one like day of yeah i don't know if that's been the norm but it was definitely felt this time because i couldn't get in until three minutes after the hour and again my as soon as i had already pre-set everything and went down through the list and just clicked the okays and it was a week later i wouldn't even launch day for for me.

24:16So it was definitely different than, it felt different than most iPhone launches. Yeah. I think they aren't able to make as much. Just all of the credible reports are saying that, and that is paired with high demand. People really want to try this out. So I think it's a combination of both of those. We're not seeing any shortages where there were no issues on the iPhone 18, which is probably selling in larger amounts than the Duo will, just because there's more of them available, but not as much as they thought they would. Certainly the new Apple TV and the Home View and probably these new Macs are not going to have this kind of demand.

24:54It's just, once again, that kind of cross of supply and demand not quite matching up. Yeah, I do wonder if you will see the 18 Pro, if you will see demand for it kind of go up, if it'll start creeping back up, because there probably are folks who were saying they wanted to get this, maybe wanted to get it before the holidays, and now that they know that they can't, I'll just get an 18 pro and get one of these things next year. I'll trade it in or something like that. Because my gut tells me if you get an 18 pro and trade it in six months, it's going to have ridiculous trade-in value. So I know enough people who would do things like that.

25:27I would do something like that. So I do wonder if you will see maybe the 18 pro, maybe those numbers tick up a little bit just because folks are saying, I'm not waiting until next year to get a new phone. No, that's a really good point. In fact, my wife, she has the plan that lets you upgrade every year if you want to, she put it off, not because she was going to get the Duo, but because that made her start to think, well, do I need the new one? Is the camera that much better? Maybe I can just stick with the one I have. So I think that and the added new lease option just made people think about whether they were going to get a new phone rather than just automatically doing it.

26:05Yep. Well, thank you, Amos. Appreciate you popping in with the personal experience there. Uh, folks, if you like seeing us live, we do a live stream every Friday where we answer the big tech question of the week. Uh, it's, it's really fun. Uh, it's round table debate style, all of that sort of thing. Uh, so join us live on Fridays at 2 PM Eastern. That's 1 PM central 12 mountain 11 AM Pacific, uh, at youtube.com slash daily tech news show.

26:40This episode is brought to you by Capital One. Capital One's tech team isn't just talking about multi-agentic AI. They already deployed one. It's called Chat Concierge and it's simplifying car shopping. Using self-reflection and layered reasoning with live API checks, it doesn't just help buyers find a car they love. It helps schedule a test drive, get pre-approved for financing, and estimate trade-in value. advanced, intuitive, and deployed. That's how they stack. That's technology at Capital One. When demand slowed for HydroJug, Amazon Ads rising star Hayden Wadsworth pivoted. When our bank account hit near zero, my brother Jake and I had one last shot to save HydroJug.

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27:42Let us get to the quick headlines, Rob. Reviews are out for the new Even Reality's G2 smart glasses. The glasses look like glasses, but use a waveguide display to show notifications and other info and have no camera. The G2s are lighter than the G1s and have an IP65 water resistance rating. You can also control them with an even smart ring sold separately. The even reality's G2 smart glasses start at$599 and the ring is$249. Nintendo released a modified version of the Switch 2 with a replaceable battery. This is complying with the European Union's right to repair laws. So it is only available in the European Union.

28:23A teardown from Modify Cat or Casper found that the only other changes were to the motherboard itself, not the processors on it, same processors, but just the kind of motherboard they used, and a slightly different cooling fan. The internet has convinced itself that a new screen was coming for this model, but it does not seem to be the case. At least according to this teardown, it had the same screen as before. Sorry, rumor mongers. And Nintendo said they would adhere to the law. After reports of apps in the Apple App Store that let users create new versions of uploaded photos, Apple has updated its App Store submission guidelines to say apps containing hidden or undocumented features are also prohibited on the App Store, including apps that misrepresent their purpose during review and only reveal harmful capabilities such as notification after approval.

29:14So I wonder if they went, so obviously people were getting their app approved and then adding this function later. I wonder if Apple went to take them down and ran into some flack where people like, well, show me in the guidelines where it says I can't do that. And so they're like, great, we'll write it into the guidelines. Now you can't do that. Get out of here. Exactly. Anthropic announced that it will commit 5 % of its upcoming public shares, once it does its IPO, to a public benefit fund directed to make charitable donations or distribute profits directly to people affected negatively by Anthropic's own products.

29:51Microsoft terminated an agreement with N-Scale to build a data center in Essex after Electric power interconnection delays pushed the launch to the 2030s. Yeah, Microsoft was rushing to point out like they're not canceling their relationship with Nscale. It's just this particular site is not getting the approvals it needs. But it did not do well to Nscale's stock price for this story to get out at all. Snorri Foggerland, principal threat researcher at Norforge, observed about two dozen instances of hackers using an open source problem solving platform called Cairn, C-A-I-R-N, for malicious activity.

30:33In fact, one Chinese speaking hacker used the agent to attack more than 1 ,200 sites, successfully compromising around 100. So not a huge percentage, but enough to get into 100 sites, including John Deere, Shark Ninja, and Cummins. New features in Microsoft 365 E7 and its Project Perception security system treat agents as potential insider threats. It also has an increased ability to detect agents running on employees' computers. Guardian agents can find and fix security problems, as well as recommend steps to contain potential rogue agents. That's a good way to do it. I think that's smart. CyberSN's latest jobs report shows there were 26.4 % fewer security job postings in the first nine months of 2026 compared to 2025, while postings for AI security engineer have risen 268.3 % for the same period.

31:29Tom, I wonder why that could be. No one could know. No one could possibly know. It's unknowable. In September, Apple announced iPhone handoff, which lets users access an eSIM on multiple phones. Verizon will charge$10 per month for the privilege. T-Mobile will charge$5 a month. And the UK's EE will offer the feature for free on its full Works Plus plan and£5 per month on its other plans. Oh, so just showing off that EE is the slightly more generous of the three. I haven't seen Deutsche Telekom yet. Maybe they'll just give it free to everybody. Let's see. Google DeepMind. DeepMind, Google DeepMind says four agents running on Gemini 4 Argon defeated Minecraft for the first time without human input.

32:17They defeated the Ender Dragon in 27 hours and 14 minutes using$1 ,620 worth of tokens. Ridiculously cost effective. Yeah, anybody can do it. Go try it out. Prosecutors in the case against former OpenAI employee for planting a bug in a conference room argue he is a flight risk, in part because he previously allegedly discussed job opportunities with the Saudi royal family. Yeah, also his wife and children made it out of the country, so they're not even here. They're in Saudi Arabia as well. Finally, just a good to read note. Ars Technica has an article on how to build your own virtual reality headset for half the price of a MetaQuest.

33:00240 bucks is what the Ars Technica author ended up spending in total. That includes some of the tools they had to buy specifically for this. So if you want to make more than one, then you got some sunk costs there. Anyway, DIYers, take note. You might want to read that. well folks we end every episode of dt nessens to share perspectives today robert explains why he does want ai recording devices to keep the audio recording yeah so we were talking about the amazon bees uh and and how they were being very privacy protective by discarding the audio immediately robert writes audio recordings are processed in real time on the device and immediately discarded.

33:41Transcripts are encrypted on the device with keys under your control and Amazon cannot access them. This is why I would not use them. Recently retired from government and libraries. And the key issue with all of these devices is they do not give you an exact reproducible record of what happened. We need that archive for public record searches, etc. A summary is great, but we also need the original. So and because he quoted this directly, I assume he's like, the transcript isn't enough for Robert. Robert's like, I need that original audio recording to be available. Uh, I think it's a great example of one of these things where when you think only about one issue, like your own personal privacy, you're like, well, why would they ever have the audio?

34:24And Amazon did that. And Robert's like, actually, actually, I need the option for that. Uh, it is bad practice in my profession to not have that audio available. And those are in situations where everybody knows they're being recorded. Right. Yeah. And I am with my namesake on this one. If I want to use a recording device to record, give me the recording at the very least. Now, if you can go do some really cool AI stuff and give me summaries, that's great. But if I'm recording it, I would like to have the recording so we can go back and hear things because it's like I could tell you this. You could say what had happened was and that can mean very, very different things depending on your voice inflection that the AI words may not actually show you.

35:02So I want to see, I want to hear how somebody sounded when they said something, not just see the words that they said. Every product designer listening right now is just shaking their heads to themselves. Like, yeah, exactly. There are always multiple use cases. Not every product is designed for every use case, but you know, there are multiple use cases out there. And I think Amazon would be justified in saying like, oh yeah, for Robert, this is not the product he should get. There are other options out there for him. This is a more consumer focused product. Um, and yeah, uh, if, if you're just using it for your own note-taking and you just want the summary, maybe the B the Amazon B is fine.

35:43Cause you're like, eh, I don't care so much about the nuance and the, and the voice. I'm not trying to prove anything in an argument later. I just kind of want the summary then that's fine. But if you're like Rob and And you're like, no, I need to make, you know, in my situation, I need to make sure that I've got the evidence. Then, yeah, you're going to need something else. And part of it is just because I'm me. I can read my own words and have no idea what I said. I need to hear how I said it to just understand myself. So this is totally fair. Yeah, it's just it's just just to be fair. Folks, we want to know what you're thinking about.

36:14So if you've got some insights into a story, please, please, please share it with us at feedback at DailyTechNewsShow.com. Yes. Big thanks to Robert for contributing to today's show. Thank you for being along for Daily Tech News Show. You're the folks. Keep us in business. If you're not a patron already, do it right now. Patreon.com slash DTNS. And I'll be thanking you by name tomorrow.

36:38The DTNS family of podcasts. Helping each other understand. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.

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