How Garmin's Cirqa Smart Band Compares to Other Fitness Bands - DTNS 5314

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2:43this is the daily tech news for tuesday july 21st 2026 we tell you what you need to know give you the important context and help each other understand today google has new models yes

2:54Huyen Tue Dao: but no it is not the 3.5 pro before we get to that though there's a new screenless fitness tracker from garmin and jason i suspect just talking about it and mentioning the name whoop will summon when to it out that's the word that does it whoop and then suddenly she and there it is maybe we don't know we'll just have to find out but in the meantime you're stuck with us i'm jason howell i'm todd merritt and we're going to start with what you need to know with a big story all right yes garmin has introduced the circa smart band this is the company's first screenless fitness tracker. And it's a very minimalist band, as many of the screenless fitness trackers are.

3:36It can be worn on your wrist. It can be worn on your arm, depending on where you want to throw it. I think that flexibility is kind of nice. It has a single side button for cycling between, if you happen to be wearing it, between your favorite activities, let's say. So there's at least some sense of tactile control compared to some of the others out there. Even without a subscription, which is to say that you don't need a subscription to do all the features, but without a subscription, it auto tracks more than 80 workouts, tracks heart rate, blood oxygen, stress, skin temperature, sleep, steps, calories, recovery, which is nice, has insights that are delivered to your smartphone via the Garmin Connect app.

4:18It also taps into the phone's GPS for route tracking, has up to 10 days worth of battery life. So this thing's pretty solid and very capable. There's also a number of strap options as well. Two sizes, seven colors at launch. Though I went to the website to see for pre-order, and I could only see four colors on the order page online. But the colors that I did see skewing very muted and dark. So not a whole lot of vibrant colors in the offering. It costs$200, available to order on July 24th. So I guess the product page that I was looking at was kind of like a pre-order page. There is a lot of competition out there.

4:58But I mean, right off the top, just to start off with, Tom, what are you thinking? What are your thoughts here?

5:05Huyen Tue Dao: Well, I don't know. I don't know what to think. Because where my head goes is how does this compare to the Fitbit Air? How does this compare to the Whoop? and you were about to tell us that. Okay, okay. All right. Well, I mean, there are others out there, obviously, clearly with Screen Without. Whoop gives you the tracker on a display-less form factor. It makes you pay for a subscription though, right? $199 up to$359 a year. Google's Fitbit Air sells you the tracker for$100, makes you pay for a subscription for advanced features for around$100 per year. Garmin has also included some advanced features that are available with a Kinect Plus subscription, but you get lots of features.

5:53Without it, it's$200, like I said. So that's a great differentiator right there.

5:59Huyen Tue Dao: And I think that's the interesting part. It's like, oh, do I want to just pay for the features? Do I want to pay less, but maybe not get as many features with the Fitbit Air? Or do I want to pay more, actually the same amount as I'd pay for a year of whoop, but then I've just got it. You know, so I think this is an indication that this particular product category is in demand, that you have this many different companies trying this different many approaches to see which one is the one that consumers want the most. Totally. And sometimes the best way to talk about fitness trackers like this is to yell into the ether, whoop, and hope that Wyn Twidow suddenly appears to give us her take.

6:46And there she is, Wyn. How are you doing? Whoop, here I am. Whoop, there she is. There she is. Hi, guys. Yes, I happen to be wearing two fitness trackers right now. Oh, wow. I'm wearing my Fitbit Air, and I'm wearing my Pixel Watch 4. So then you'd get one of these, and you'd put it on your arms so that you could wear three at once, right? I could do that because guess what? Armbands are launched and that actually is really exciting. I'm actually really excited about this, you guys. I know I already have the Fitbit Air and I actually really genuinely liked using it and saying goodbye to Whoop.

7:15Whoop, there it went. But the Circa, is that how we're pronouncing it? The Circa? I think so. Yeah. It's really compelling. Or Cirqua. Cirqua. Oh, I like Cirqua. There's no you after the Q.

7:27Huyen Tue Dao: There you go. Circa. Anyway. Anyway. Yeah, I don't know. I actually had just had a conversation with a bunch of also fitness enthusiasts and or developer friends. And yeah, this is like super compelling. It is very interesting that it's kind of positioned price wise, sort of it's hard to tell with a subscription. But there's like a Venn diagram of Whoop, Fitbit Air, and then the Circa and it's got kind of like a wavy. It's not a great Venn diagram because there's a lot of waves in it. But I think there's a lot here that's compelling. And I am going to pre order one in T minus three days, 100%, even though I have this.

8:03So yeah, I think it's really compelling. I think the one thing that I did get from a lot of my friends is that Garmin is a brand that people trust. They make products that last. And so I think if anything else that does say a lot to people is that, okay, this is a Garmin product and it's very proven. I'm actually really excited. I am very surprised that they went with very muted colors because I feel like fitness trackers are generally pretty vibrant. Whoop has like tons of collaborations and colors, which is fine. Um, one thing I actually do think is really interesting is the form factor a bit.

8:36Um, the one thing I've noticed with my Fitbit Air is that I have tiny wrists and this thing is very tiny. So at night it tends to just go whoop, like not whoop. It goes, it slips up my wrist and I have to tie it pretty tight. So I think it might be something that even though it's not quite as lightweight and the Fitbit Air is incredibly lightweight, like I think for the most part, I don't remember that I'm wearing it is that maybe a little bit bigger is better for that. And I mean, other than that, like there's a lot of stuff that is really interesting that is not on the Fitbit Air, that is on the Whoop, and that Garmin is providing.

9:11There's even small things like nap detection, like the GP – like it doesn't have GPS. Like none of these have GPS built in, but the fact that you can actually connect to your smartphone GPS is a thing. I know most runners probably would prefer just to have something like a watch where they have GPS built in. But if you're more of a screenless person, that ability – and I forgot if that was Connect Plus or regular. But these kind of things. There's a lot of things like you can even have like a journal where you can – which was a whoop thing where you can log different activities or behaviors rather like how much caffeine do you drink?

9:43Did you like use your screen at night for how many minutes? It's like all of that kind of as a correlation between all these different like health, all these different fitness factors, which, by the way, Fitbit, Whoop and Garmin are pretty much got all the basics, you know, sleep, HRV, VO2 max. It's all standard. And for the Fitbit Air and the Garmin, they're free. So I think already, like I think Fitbit and Garmin are already starting off in really good positions. Garmin's adding a little more, some of the more deeper, more like fitness enthusiast stuff, which I would have missed from the Whoop.

10:15Like, again, activity behavior logging, we'll call it. Again, nap detection. Freaking armbands. Armbands, actually, by the way, are a lot more accurate way of wearing these fitness trackers. So having those at launch is kind of a big deal. I know that Fitbit Air and Google have been great about releasing CAD so that third-party manufacturers can release accessories. But it's kind of nice just to have it. So yeah, it's really, really interesting. I'm totally going to buy one. And I think if you are a fitness enthusiast, especially if you're already a Garmin person, take a look. I will say the one thing that I'm getting a lot of negative feedback, at least from the initial, this anecdotal stuff from my group of fitness friends, is that the app is okay.

10:54It's not great, especially on Android. Surprising. The app is not great on Android, depending on who you ask. But it is very functional. It's very Garmin. So yeah, I'm excited. I'm going to get one.

11:06Huyen Tue Dao: It feels like Fitbit is striking the balance between – we're not going to give you too many features because we would like to get the subscription. Do you subscribe with the Fitbit error or do you – I have Google – one of the Google subscriptions. It's included in one of your subscription packs. So I do have all the AI accoutrement. I will say – so this is also a thing though. Like, yeah. I think that the freemium – is it freemium? The freemium model is really good. I think whether it's worth it to you is very dependent because a lot of what Google, the Fitbit is offering or Google Health is offering in the plus is that AI coaching and the AI coaching and features, which really your mileage is going to vary on that, which is a good thing, right?

11:47Because it is so personal, whether this is useful to you or not. It is good that that's the part that is the premium part. I do think Garmin is making a good, like, I think that is making a similar distinction, I think. There's some coaching features that are part of Connect Plus and not. Yeah, it's weird, though, because I think because it really depends. Like, I have a real-life coach, so the AI coach is kind of like of middling use and utility. And, in fact, Google Health is kind of noisy because it loves to tell you. It's very AI. It's very, like, affirming. It's like, oh, great job. It's not encouraging.

12:23It is very affirming and encouraging. It's like, you know, you did a good job sitting on the couch today because you worked so hard on Tuesday. today's tuesday you work so hard on sunday you just sounds enabling not encouraging i mean it is very ai but it is very useful especially if you do not have or you cannot afford like if you for whatever reason do not have a real life coach um having that as a freemium feature makes a lot of sense and similarly with like the garmin stuff but you know i honestly you could just get by without a subscription but and i think that's a smart play is to give people

12:52Huyen Tue Dao: the choice because whoop did not it sounds like fitbenair and garmin are pretty close to each other. It's just Garmin is leaning into a few more advanced features without a subscription with counting on like, these are the enthusiasts who use Garmin for other stuff because we're in this space more than Google is. Yeah, 100%. I think Google is leaning into definitely the AI side of it. I think they're very interested in that. Which is their strength. Which is their 100%. So if you are maybe someone who's really looking to get into fitness, want a little bit of extra help with a health coach and don't mind paying for that, that's great.

13:26If you are someone who actually is already in the Garmin ecosystem, like them a lot, don't mind their app for better or for worse. It's really good on iOS. It looks a lot better on iOS. I don't know if they have a refresh coming like Google Health did because looking at screenshots, someone was surprised, like, why doesn't it look that good on Android? That's a whole different story. But if you are more of an enthusiast and you're in the Garmin system, check out the Circa. It might actually be there for you. And if you're somewhere in between, I guess, wait, I'll let you know what I think as I wear three fitness trackers.

13:56like a

13:58Huyen Tue Dao: we're definitely going to have to get you on live with it to talk about these I have thoughts and feelings so I would love to come on live with it and talk to you about all my cornucopia of fitness trackers there it was there it went thank you for dropping in I know this was kind of a last minute thing but we couldn't have properly discussed this without you I obviously always have way too many opinions on these things. So thanks for giving me a lot of time. No, they're good opinions. I think people find them helpful. Well, DTNS is made possible by people. We are made of people like Soylent Green, including you, the listener.

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15:51find 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.

16:04Huyen Tue Dao: Your team just added its 67th AI tool and also your 67th security blind spot. The good news? The Vanta agent works like a GRC engineer in the background, finding every app your team uses, scoring the risk, and drafting fixes for you. Vanta is the platform used by over 16 ,000 fast-moving companies like Ramp, Cursor, and Harvey, who are shaping the future with AI and staying ahead of AI risk. Get started at Vanta.com. Still waiting in line? Again? That's time you'll never get back. Save time and money with Stamps.com. Over 4 million businesses have skipped the line with Stamps.com. Join them to save up to 90 % off carrier rates from your computer or phone right now.

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18:00Huyen Tue Dao: This is Hannah Berner from Giggly Squad. O-Pill is the first over-the-counter daily birth control pill available in the U.S. let's be real getting a birth control prescription is not always easy and it's so much admin in fact about a third of women face barriers to access prescription birth control between scheduling appointments missing work class or just trying to exist it's a lot but now opill is putting birth control in our control opill is a daily birth control that's fda approved full prescription strength and estrogen free and 98 effective when used as directed grab it online or at most major retailers, no prescription or doctor's appointment needed.

18:39Huyen Tue Dao: So if you're thinking about birth control, check out Opill to see if it's right for you. Use code Giggly for 25 % off your first month of Opill at O-P-I-L-L.com. That's code Giggly at O-P-I-L-L.com. Birth control in your control. We love to see it.

18:58All right. There's so much more that we need to know today. So let's get to the briefs.

19:01Huyen Tue Dao: Yeah. Jason, you're going to have to tell me what this means. Google has not rolled out Gemini 3.5 Pro, which everyone wants it to do, but does say it's being tested with partners. However, instead, it rolled out Gemini 3.6 Flash Cyber, 3.6 Flash, and 3.5 Flash Light. I think I said six for Flash Cyber. It's 3.5 Flash Cyber, 3.6 Flash, and 3.5 Flash Light. 3.5 cyber is for finding vulnerabilities and has as has become normal in the united states only the government and its approved organizations have access to it so far it's also cheaper to use for them they say it's a cheaper per token that's the big thing around 3.6 flash which uses 17 fewer tokens and actually costs less per token so this one is going to be cheaper to run as well and 3.5 Flash Lite is now Google's fastest and least expensive model for high volume workloads and small tasks being done in agentic systems because it's using even fewer tokens at actually less cost per token than 3.6 Flash.

20:10Huyen Tue Dao: In fact, according to artificial analysis, Gemini 3.6 Flash is cheaper per task than GPT 5.6 Terra Max, Kimi K3, it's cheaper than Kimi K3. Google's going to make out of that. And QEN 3.7 Max, and of course, 3.5 Flashlight, even cheaper because it's a smaller model. So what do you make of this, Jason? It's a lot of word and number salad, isn't it? Yeah, right. Keep it all straight. I mean, it just, I think what it says to me is it's just another proof point at how fast these things are moving, that Google has two separate models, that it's like two entirely different point divided models that it's developing on different ends of the spectrum, right?

20:53So Google. So Google, right? But I think they're all kind of in this weird zone because of the competition. The competition is moving so fast that they have to be working one, two, three steps ahead. And then you end up with this garbled kind of release. 3.5 Flash came out a couple of months ago, right? So their 3.5 Flash model is already out. Now they're kind of catching up some of the other kind of level points. I don't know what you want to call it. Capability points of that model while they're also working on the next one, 3.6 Flash, 3.5 Pro. We still quite don't have the Pro. Once that comes out, yeah, it gets really confusing.

21:32But I mean, at the end of the day, this is just Google trying to make sure that it's still part of the conversation at a time where the last couple of months have been really saturated by Anthropic, really saturated recently by OpenAI as being a, oh my goodness, look out Anthropic because here comes OpenAI releasing something similar to what's been getting you all the news. And Google's like, hey, we're over here. We're still playing the game. You know, it's a horse race through and through.

22:00Huyen Tue Dao: I wonder if releasing 3.5 Cyber became a priority for them because of what's going on with Fable and all of that. I would guess so. That would be a strong guess on my part as well. It really does seem that way. And it's also kind of proving that this held back release with the review is quickly becoming the norm here in the U.S. And the impact that that has will be interesting to watch. Indeed. So there you go. It's confusing, though. Not going to lie. Even trying to follow along with it and everything, it's just like it's number salad and it makes my head spin. I think if we had to sum it up for people, though, the takeaway is don't be confused.

22:44Huyen Tue Dao: Google just came out with a bunch of cheaper, faster models, if that's your thing, and a version of the will patch vulnerabilities for you, but only the government and select organizations have them. Yeah. And actually, I will also tack on that. There is a lot of expectation around 3.5 Pro, right? People are like, okay, when are you going to show us your best of the best? This is a great way for Google to re-invigorate itself in the news press to be like, see, we're giving you these things. And by the way, that's coming soon, so that you don't feel like they're completely silent, I guess. So what's new in the smart and smart-ish glasses world?

23:26Well, a couple of things. I'm happy you asked. Halliday, if you remember them, their last smart glasses, the ones you controlled with a ring on your finger, almost universally panned by reviewers. So let's just say they've learned a few things, apparently. Now they're launching Halliday G2. New smart glasses, the ability to record and playback audio. view text inside of a wave guide display instead of this little prism that they did on the previous one. It has no camera. That's a pretty crucial point. And you control it with the touchpad on the surface of the arm instead of having to wear a ring on your finger.

24:04This is going to cost$599. You can deposit$10 right now if you want to get in early, and it's going to ship in September. I did not get a chance to check out Halidays while I was at CES, though I wanted to. I just remember like a couple of years ago, Halliday had really big buzz at CES 2025.

24:24Huyen Tue Dao: Yeah, that was the first one with the ring, right? Yeah, yeah. And then they came out with this one and yeah, people didn't like it so much. Yeah, no, that was the one with the ring that people hated, I think, right? I think it's definitely notable that the major review point on the G2 is not bad anymore. Yeah, totally. I don't know that Halliday – Halliday is going to have to do some work to get this into stores and get it in front of consumers and all of that because I don't see anything particularly differentiating about it. Yeah, totally. I will say, though, in my experience with rings versus touchpad on the arms, I personally prefer touchpad on the arms because it's integrated.

25:09It's embedded. It's always there. It's not yet another thing that you have to remember to put on and do I like the look of the ring and does it work that well? And that's my personal preference. So I'm happy to see that. In other news, there are a few things here. XMEMS announced the XMC1200. It's a fan on a chip micro fan for smart glasses and AR and XR headsets. It's designed to reduce internal temperature, which can do up to 10 degrees Celsius. One watt load draws 70 milliwatts. So it's meant to kind of do that cooling and not take a whole lot of power off the entire design. The chip is designed to fit inside the temple arm of smart glasses.

25:49So it's pretty small. XMEMS expects the chip to be product ready by Q4 2027 in consumer products by around 2028. And I support this because, holy moly, heat on smart glasses and display glasses is a really big deal. It reduces your desire to wear and use these things if you feel that heat on your face. It's just very unpleasant.

26:10Huyen Tue Dao: Especially with things as hot as they are everywhere in the world right now, at least in the northern hemisphere. Yeah. Yeah. This is an interesting complication that I don't think people realized was needed to address. And so I'm glad to see it's being addressed. I'm wondering if this is the kind of thing that you just don't even realize it's there and you're like, oh, smart glasses are cool now. They used to be hot. Now they're not. Or if this becomes a thing where you're like, oh, yeah, the fan causes whatever, right? Like a weird mild vibration or it broke and now it's hot. Yeah. Oh, interesting.

26:48Yeah. I hadn't considered that. I mean, the thing is tiny. When you're thinking of fan, you're thinking of moving air. And then you see this tiny, tiny little thing.

26:56Huyen Tue Dao: It's so, so small. You're right. How is that moving air? Yeah. It's moving just enough. Just enough. I guess. Apparently. We'll see. And then finally, while we're on the topic of glasses wearables, I thought – because I've mentioned it on the show before when I have some display glasses reviews on my YouTube channel. And I just recently reviewed Xreal's entry-level XBX A01 Plus glasses on my channel. And I would say just kind of like the highlights, overall, super impressed. These things are really inexpensive,$300. So definitely entry-level price point. They have a narrower kind of depth when you wear them, so they kind of fit more like regular sunglasses close to the face.

27:35They don't look weird and awkward like some of these often do. The displays themselves I found to be super sharp and accurate. Micro OLED displays, HDR, very bright outside, actually brighter than some others in the same price category. um and i didn't i speaking of heat i didn't really find personally the heat to be too bad on these which i expected because it's closer to the face um depends on the content that you're watching but i would say the standout for these for 300 that you don't get on other glasses like this is you get stabilization so instead of the display just being absolutely pinned to every jitter and judder of your face it kind of glides into into place and it just it improves the situation tremendously.

28:19So I'm a big fan. XPX A01+. Still tethered, right? You got to plug it in. Oh, yeah, yeah. Still tethered. You got to do USB into a device that supports it and can support HDR. But there again, your device has to support exporting HDR out of that port, which not all devices that support HDR do. So you got to be aware of that.

28:41Huyen Tue Dao: Yeah. I think that's something that people are going to have to wrap their head around, as this product category gets bigger, which is there's the tethered and the untethered. And we talked about both in the course of this conversation, right? The holidays are untethered. They're meant for just wiring around. They don't have a camera or anything. The X-Rails don't have a camera either, but they're meant for sitting down and plugging into a thing. I guess - Yeah, I mean, these are really meant for consuming. You know what I mean? Yeah, yeah, yeah. These aren't meant for interacting with your day or giving you contextual notifications and whatever.

29:13It's like, show me this display that I'm looking at, but in these glasses, you know.

29:17Huyen Tue Dao: Yeah, they're basically a monitor, right? Yeah, that's basically all they are. Yeah, you just wear them on your face. Yep. Well, tomorrow is the big Galaxy Unpacked event from Samsung. We're expecting to see their new foldable, but Samsung wanted to get a few items into the news cycle before they suck all the air out of the news cycle with their foldable. Announcing the first ever U.S. credit card, the Galaxy Card Visa with 5 % cash rewards for Samsung purchases, 3 % cash rewards if you use your Samsung wallet, a$200 bonus if you spend$2 ,000 in the first 90 days, and no annual fee. So yeah, those foldables, they're going to be expensive.

30:01Huyen Tue Dao: Charge it on your new Samsung Galaxy Card Visa and forget about it. At least that's what Samsung hopes for you anyway. This compares very well to the Apple card, I'll be honest. It's got a little higher cash rewards, a little better bonus for you. It's well done. And I think there's even a cash bonus on streaming services that Apple doesn't even have. Yeah. When I think of Samsung and new device announcements, for years, they've conditioned me to think about the bonuses that they throw in if you pre-order. And now things are different in the market, right? And so this just kind of makes me think like Samsung's like, How can we still give people something?

30:37Hey, we have a credit card. Just buy it over here. We'll give you a bonus then. So things are changing.

30:43Huyen Tue Dao: And I think this one's through Barclays. Apple's through, well, Apple for now is through Morgan Stanley. Although there's a lot of rumors that they're going to change that. I don't know. I wonder if that means Apple changed to Barclays now that Barclays is doing this. Samsung also launching a health assistant that uses data from your Galaxy phone, your watch, your ring, whatever you've got, and offers you personalized wellness insights. The assistant taps into Samsung's personalized data engine for a mix of health metrics and using context. So if you've got your calendar plugged in there, you got your schedule, other personal information, it'll be able to tune its recommendations specifically to you.

31:21Huyen Tue Dao: That's going to roll out next month in beta that you have to opt into. But if you do that, you'll be able to try it out. Okay. I mean, I feel like this is just kind of, Yeah, they're all doing this in one way, shape, or form. And if they hadn't yet, they're catching up now. There's the table. You've put the steaks on it. Well done. Yum. I was thinking table steaks, but also delicious steaks, which your health tracker will then tell you you ate too much. Samsung has also created a new robotics division for centralizing all of the company's robotics and physical AI development under one roof, reporting directly to co-CEO Rote Moon.

31:59Huyen Tue Dao: The new division will not be starting from nothing. Samsung increased its holding of Korean robotics company Rainbow Robotics back in 2024 to about 35%. That gives them a strong foundation to build off of. They've also been on a bit of a little robotics hiring spree. They hired somebody away from Hyundai who was working on the Boston Dynamics stuff for Hyundai over there. Samsung says the near-term focus is to build factory humanoids. humanoids. So I think we're going to see a Samsung humanoid robot going into Samsung factories would be my guess is the first place you see it. But are we going to see a Samsung humanoid robot on stage tomorrow showing off a wide foldable phone?

32:41Huyen Tue Dao: Is it too early for that? They're just announcing this division or did they have it in the works? And that's, yeah, I'm giving that 50, 50, I'm going go 51 % chance we get a humanoid on stage. Yeah. I mean, that would be pretty neat. Oh, by the way, did you see our news about the humanoid robots? Well, now it's time to meet our news. Because they're not starting from scratch. They've been working with this other company. They've had the person that they hired from Hyundai for a while, for a few months now. So yeah. Could be. I think there's a chance. It'd be a good way to kind of have another piece of the news cycle, another branch on tech meme.

33:16Let's be honest.

33:18Huyen Tue Dao: Exactly. Well, thank you, patrons, for supporting the show. If you're not a patron yet, there has never been a better time. We've got new exclusive perks for people who support us, including right now at the show architect level, you get the green room at least once a month. So right now, people can watch us recording the show and watch us before we record the show as we set things up and all of that. We'll be doing things like that with interviews and things. That's just one of the perks that you can get. There's all kinds of ones, including ad-free feeds and everything. And from now until July 31st, if you use the code EXPERIMENT, you will get 26 % off your first pledge.

34:04Huyen Tue Dao: That could be monthly or annually. So check out the new tiers at patreon.com slash DTNS.

34:36Huyen Tue Dao: We're shaping the future with AI and staying ahead of AI risk. Get started at Vanta.com. This 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.

35:15All right, it's time for some quick headlines to make you look really smart tonight.

35:19Huyen Tue Dao: Yeah, I like this first one. Amazon's adaptive display, which can resize text and UI elements while keeping the images and the art proportionally sized. It's not just blowing up the entire screen. It's finally rolling out. They announced this was coming And it's coming to the Fire TV Stick HD right now. There you go. That's nice. China's Ministry of Commerce is talking to domestic companies about tightening export controls in an effort to prohibit foreign companies from accessing training data and model weights, as well as restricting access to Chinese chip designs. There is a big kind of battle brewing here between open models, China's models, the U.S.

35:59Things are getting crazy as far as this is.

36:01Huyen Tue Dao: You'd still be able to access the services. You just wouldn't be able to download the weights, which would kind of take the rug out of their open weight model advantage. So I'm not sure. Anyway, Serkana analyst, Matt Piscatella, uh, pointed out that only seven PlayStation games sold more than a hundred thousand physical copies in the U S so far this year. In fact, U S spending on physical games has dropped from$11.5 billion in 2009 to $1.6 billion in 2026. So the real reason Sony doesn't want to make the disks anymore is there just aren't as many people buying them. Yeah, but yet people are not happy.

36:38Huyen Tue Dao: Yeah, there's a lot of people who are not happy because they rely on these disks, and I totally respect that. There's a few people out there who are not happy because they just want to not be happy about something, but they don't buy the physical disks anymore. And I have less respect for those people. That's true. nvidia gave dlss5 a second showing at siggraph this time with developer tools like per object masking and intensity sliders um that are meant to preserve a game's art style instead of the instagram filtering that it kind of did in the initial demo months ago that many people probably some of the same people we were just talking about uh did not like this uh feature is expected to release this fall yeah they're doing some more things to give developers more control like you You can apply DLSS 5 to certain objects in a scene, but not all of the objects and stuff like that.

37:26Huyen Tue Dao: So they're at least trying to address a lot of the legitimate criticisms. Nikkei sources say that TSMC has told its customers it's going to raise chip prices by up to 10 % starting in 2027. These are its corporate customers. This is not consumers. This is telling Apple and Amazon, hey, we're going to have to charge you up to 10 % more. We're giving you a lot of heads up. This is not going to start until 2027, but it's going to be across both our advanced and our legacy nodes. And they say they've got to cover the rising costs of equipment and materials and energy that everybody else is facing.

37:59Huyen Tue Dao: Everybody else. Everybody's there. Get used to it, I suppose. Sony Music filed a second copyright lawsuit against AI-generated music company Udeo, or Udeo, depending on how you pronounce it, covering 30 ,117 sound recordings that a judge had blocked Sony from adding to its original case. So they're su-su-oo-ing-oo-deo. That's good. Is it, though? Yes, I love it. That's my kind of joke, Tom. Thank you. That's why we work well together. TikTok and YouTube have both already settled a social media addiction case. the RKC case in Los Angeles, if you've been keeping track of these. And now Snap has settled as well, and that leaves Meta as the only remaining defendant in the RKC case.

38:49Okay. iOS 27 Beta 4 adds automatic downloads to the Apple TV app. So in other words, it's going to grab the next two episodes of whatever you happen to be watching and then delete them once you've finished.

39:03Huyen Tue Dao: Not bad. Oh, that would be really helpful for when I'm trying to download on 5G while I'm sitting on the plane before boarding, hoping I can get the download to finish before they close the door and I have to go into airplane mode. Yeah, good stuff. Chinese hardware maker XTEINK, X-T-E-I-N-K, announced the X4 Pro e-reader. This is a successor to its wallet-sized e-reader. It's 4.26 inches, weighs 72 grams, and they added a touchscreen, makes it easier to navigate, and a front light, still costs just 99 bucks. that's inexpensive put it in a little pocket you could you could magnet it to the back of your phone that's a nice little amazing federal judge approved anthropics 1.5 billion dollar settlement with authors who accuse a company of using pirated books to train its ai models authors will receive around three thousand dollars per affected work wait if my work's affected i could receive three thousand dollars now i am mad i will join this class action lawsuit uh and finally uh the uk's newly appointed prime minister has had his government end the digital identity card project and therefore save the 1.8 billion pounds or at least most of the 1.8 billion pounds meant to be spent on it no digital id card in the uk you cannot have one we end every episode of dtns with some shared perspectives yesterday we talked about google soon counting all of your android backup data against your Google Drive limit.

40:32Tom and Rob speculated on why they might do this. Well, Mike A has a possible reason to consider as well.

40:38Huyen Tue Dao: Yeah. And I'm curious what you think of his theory here. I think it's a good one. Mike wrote, I wonder if they have also found people using their Android Google storage to operate as a transfer of shipping agent to move on device and therefore huge local large language models between environments. I have seen some activity in this space. That starts to feel like the real reason you do this is somebody figured out how to use your Android backup for something it's not meant to. And Google's like, okay, we got to crack down on that. Because at the end of the day, your Android backup of this data is actually pretty small.

41:16And that's the outlier kind of point is kind of like, why would Google care about that small amount? And yeah, this is a pretty good, this is a pretty solid reason. And who the heck knows if this is actually the case, but he's saying, I've seen some activity in the space. So it's happening likely to some degree.

41:32Huyen Tue Dao: Somebody's doing it. That's a good idea. Yeah. And when you usually get these like, we let this go for years and now we suddenly have to change. Everyone thinks it's greed or they're trying to make money. And sometimes it is. But it's often people figured out a workaround to use this for something they shouldn't. And so now we have to change the policy. I think Mike may have nailed it. I think so. Yeah. Well, what are you thinking about? You got some insight into a story like this? Please share it with us. Feedback at DailyTechNewsShow.com. Yes, and thank you to Mike A. for being brilliant on today's show.

42:06And thank you for being along for Daily Tech News Show. You can keep us in business by becoming a patron. That's Patreon.com slash DTNS. See you tomorrow.

42:26understand.

42:26Huyen Tue Dao: Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this broker.

43:25Huyen Tue Dao: Transcription by CastingWords risk. Get started at Vanta.com.