The Perfect Phone If You Don’t Care About Photos - DTNS 5167

0:04This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, December 17th, 2025. We tell you what you need to know. We gave you some important context, and we help each other importantly understand. Today, OnePlus releases its$700 15R phone. And if you don't care all that much about cameras, you might want to snap it up. You're speaking my language. I'm Tom Merritt. And I'm Sarah Lane. Let's start with what you need to know with the big story. There are some big fans of OnePlus out there. So a lot of people are very excited that OnePlus has released the OnePlus 15R. R stands for affordable, I guess. It is a more affordable version of the flagship phone that was released five weeks ago.

0:47So they just released the 15 five weeks ago. And now we've got the 15R. Sells for 700 bucks. That's about 200 bucks less than the 15. Takes away the telephoto camera. So you only have two cameras, not three. That's one of the biggest dings against it. You also give up wireless charging, which may or may not be a big deal for you. The screen is only slightly bigger, but it is a little bit bigger. 6.83 inches has the same 165 hertz refresh rate and 1800 nits of brightness as the flagship. So you're getting 165 hertz refresh rate in a mid-range phone. Has a slightly bigger battery, 7400 milliamp hour silicon carbon battery versus 7300 in the flagship, which you may think, wow, so it's got a bigger battery.

1:29but it's also the first phone in North America with the Snapdragon Gen 5 chipset, not the Gen 5 Elite. And that chipset is a little less efficient. PCMag found that the 15R got 23 hours of battery life versus the 15's 26. Not a huge disparity. Yeah, exactly. But it's a little less. Also has an underscreen ultrasonic fingerprint sensor. Another nice feature in a mid-range phone right down there toward the bottom third of the display. It's IP69K certified against moisture and dust, which is the same as the OnePlus 15. Runs Oxygen OS, has the same four years of software support, which is a little low.

2:07Six years of security updates. Generally, like I said, the reviews ding the cameras, but otherwise find the phone quite satisfactory. So if you don't care much about photos or video, it's a good buy. It's going to be decent at those. It's actually the performance kind of suffers in low light. if you do care about the camera though you might be better off with like a pixel 9a or galaxy s25 fe you can order the oneplus 15r right now for 700 ship in january 8th you know i i definitely at one point uh and i've been on ios since 2007 so that's you know that's the only kind of cameras that i've been working with and various third-party apps you know for for manipulating camera photos.

2:51I really do feel like many of us get stuck on, well, you have to have the best camera. What are you using the camera for? Now, some people say, well, for this, that, and the other, like that, this is my livelihood or just something I really, really care about. I like to have the nicest stuff that is totally fine. So this might not be the phone for you. But I think for, for a lot of us, we get caught up in these specs that don't really matter day to day. I mean, I would consider myself an amateur and certainly an enthusiast photographer, but I could be using an iPhone 13 right now and the camera is fine.

3:31Yeah. You know, so it really just your mileage may vary. Absolutely. I just thought of a shortcut. If you're the kind of person that has the grid on in your photos all the time, maybe you actually care enough that you won't like this this camera but if you just take pictures like me that's why i said you're speaking my language it's like i just want to take pictures i get i get criticized by friends and family because i'm like not doing all the settings you're supposed to do to make the camera look better but i'm like i just i just want to take the picture i'm not trying to be fancy about it uh and it's kind of a bummer that maybe this one doesn't work well in low light but most of the time it seems like it'd be just fine they're fine photos.

4:12They're just not the best photos. Yeah. The battery life is impressive to me. I mean, sure, you get docked a few hours a day. But otherwise, this seems like a really nice phone. And anything sub 1000 at this point, down to 700 for a good phone that is going to do your business, running oxygen. Anybody who's an Android fan, if you're familiar with it, it's right up there with anything else that's going to work well for you. And you don't have the telephoto lens. I mean, I would, if my pocketbook forced me to buy a phone tomorrow, I'd be like, 700 sounds a lot better than 13. Yeah, 700. I mean, this has, what, 12 gigabytes of RAM, I think, in it?

5:05With RAM prices, you might want to just buy it for the RAM at$700. Just buy it for the RAM. and then figure out where to put that RAM elsewhere. Yeah. I know we got OnePlus fans in the audience. So if you've got a thought or maybe one of you are going to buy the 15R, let us know feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. Indeed. Well, DTNS is made possible by all of you listening and some of you watching out there. Thank you to Carmine Bailey, Chris Beneteau, Jeffrey Zilks. And we want to thank Nate and Nick, who each gave us a raise. We really appreciate that. Tis the season. Thank you.

5:45There's more we need to know today. Let's get to the briefs. All right. Warner Brothers Discoveries board officially recommended that shareholders reject Paramount's unsolicited offer to buy the entire company for cash. The board still believes that Netflix's original accepted offer is the better one. The board's letter called Paramount's funding into question, saying documents contain gaps, loopholes, and limitations that put you, our shareholders, and our company at risk. The board alleged that Paramount had consistently misled Warner shareholders. Paramount responded by saying Warner's board seeks to mislead its shareholders into believing this is a complicated question about legal documents.

6:31So a little bit of a, you know, ping pong back and forth going on here. Paramount didn't raise the amount of its offer, although David Ellison, CEO, originally said when they went into this hostile bid, they might consider doing that. Hasn't happened yet. In addition to the board's response, Jared Kushner's Affinity Partners has backed out of the Paramount deal. A shareholder vote on the Netflix deal is expected to happen in the spring or summer of 2026. So it's not happening tomorrow, expected sometime next year. Paramount would need 90 % of shares in favor of its proposal before then. Yeah, they need a lot of shareholders on board to get this.

7:11I still hear a lot of analysts who follow the markets really closely, especially in the media space, saying they expect Paramount will prevail. They think it's close. But this all looks good for Netflix to me, which is the board as expected backing that they wouldn't have accepted Netflix's offer in the first place if they weren't going to back it. Paramount not raising the offer makes it easy to reject. Paramount, like you said, still might raise the offer. That could change things. I think a lot of people have overemphasized the involvement of the U.S. government in this and the president and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, backing out is supposedly because they don't want that to be part of this.

7:51They don't want this to be involved. At least that's what Affinity is saying. So that makes it a clearer, let's make the best deal win kind of situation. Yeah, I'm not a shareholder, so I don't have a lot of skin in the game. But I would assume that, like you were saying, some analysts say that Paramount is likely going to win this war. If the price goes up enough, then you get shareholders saying, all right, we like that price. It's just better for us. Everybody likes money. So there's that. But at the same time, you've got Warner Brothers Discoveries Board emphatically saying, no, it should be the Netflix deal.

8:40So there is – we're not going to know what happens before the end of the year. Certainly not. The Warner Board is starting to imply that Paramount is not being upfront with them about their funding sources. Sure. Gaps, loopholes, limitations that we didn't know about otherwise. And if they actually believe that, then the Netflix offer is clearly better, right? The Netflix offer is better right now because they're buying a smaller part of the company and giving you Netflix stock. So depending on how you value the other part of the company they're not buying, it could end up being a better offer on its own.

9:14But even if you value the cable companies less, which Paramount does, the Netflix stock is going to rise in the future. And so that makes the whole deal better. Of course, like you said, Paramount can bring in an all-cash offer that's higher. And then that would require Netflix to bid. Netflix has lined up debt sources though. So it looks like they are ready to outbid Paramount, which they could, and they've got solid backing. I just, I look at this and I actually am a Paramount stockholder. I don't own that much. It's all old CNET stock that got converted to CBS and then eventually to Paramount.

9:47It's less than a thousand dollars worth of stock. But I think Netflix is going to get this. I know Though all the experts disagree with me, but my gut tells me Netflix is going to end up with Warner. That could be one of your predictions for our end of your prediction show. Maybe. That we haven't done yet. No, we absolutely, because it's not December 31st, we of course can't have done our prediction show yet. Yeah. All right. Lots of new tools coming from Google today. Coding Assistant Opal, which lets you create mini apps called Gems being integrated into the Gemini web app. so you can use that right inside of the app.

10:25An email assistant called CC, get it? Like CC, like you CC somebody, but also like a name, CC. CC launched in Google Labs. It can make a summary of your day ahead based on what's in your calendar, Gmail and Google Drive. You can also email CC to add to-dos or teach it preferences, have it remembered notes, ask it to look for info, that kind of stuff. CC is available to pro and ultra users in Canada and the United States. And Gemini 3 Flash is now the default model in the Gemini app and the AI mode search, replacing 2.5. So it's the last of the three series to get put in everywhere. I played around with gems this morning because I've got Gemini running in Chrome, which is my predominant browser.

11:11And I told you because you can tell gems like, here's the personality that I want you to know about me. And that's how we move forward. Right. So it's like it's it's little personalities that you can use for different situations. So I said, I'm, you know, I'm a podcaster. I talk about tech news and going into the holidays. I'm feeling really stressed. Now, am I feeling really stressed? I mean, I don't know. It depends on the day. Sure. Right now. No, I'm fine. But, you know, holidays. And but I just wanted to see how it would respond to me. And it actually was it was it was very personable. and you know just sort of like hey Sarah you know you got to give yourself a break but here's the information that you were asking about and I felt like it was it was pretty solid it felt fluid it didn't feel forced did you make an app out of it because that's what the gem part of it is no well I mean technically it's a web app that I made that you could go back to and Yeah.

12:14Yeah. Yeah. It's I've been trying to use just because obviously we have many AI different chat bot options. Chat GPT was kind of my just go to option. I've been trying to use Gemini and Claude more just so I can say, all right, well, here's how, you know, one or the other does better because they're not all going to be the same. Yes, many of them are trained on the same information in the internet and the world, but they do act differently. So I think for anybody who's sort of like, oh, I've got AI fatigue, girlfriend, I'm with you. But at the same time, you might have fatigue because you're only used to a model working a certain way.

13:05So I think that even though some of the stuff is like incremental upgrades, it does remind us of how they're getting smarter and how you might be able to use it for your specific life and your purpose. Speaking of. Speaking of. OpenAI launched a new image generation model in ChatGPT and in the API under the name ChatGPT Image 1.5. It promises to generate better images, to edit better, and do everything faster. An images tab has been added to ChatGPT. Yeah, I have found Gemini in general to be better and even found the Nano Banana image generator to be better. And so I was interested to see this because the other day I just needed to put some text on something and I used ChatGPT and Gemini and Gemini Nano Banana did a better job.

14:03They both did a decent job, but I liked the one from Gemini better. And now I wish I would have waited for this so I could be like, ooh, let me try the new image. Because to me, that's the fun thing that's going on now is all of these companies are trying to get better and better and compete with each other. So you're always getting a slightly better thing from one of them over the other. I mean, it kind of goes back to our conversation about having the best camera in a smartphone from earlier. It's like with a lot of these tools, you need that less and less, depending on what, you know, if it's like a family photo that you don't want to get doctored up to make you all have Mickey Mouse ears, then no, you know, maybe some of these models aren't interesting to you, but they can do good work.

14:48Yeah. I mean, I was using it to put text on something, something that it couldn't do a year ago. Remember, like the text was always just gobbledygook on these image generators. Yeah. And now I was like criticizing them because one of them put more of a block font and the other did a scripty style. I was like, oh, I think I like the scripty style better. And I had not specified that. So, yeah, getting better all the time. The battle to sell chips to these companies continues. CNBC confirmed a report from the information that OpenAI is discussing a deal with Amazon. Supposedly, that deal would see Amazon invest at least$10 billion in OpenAI, which then in turn would use Amazon's Tranium chips for some of the OpenAI data centers.

15:34OpenAI already has an agreement to buy AWS Capacity, so this would be buying the chips. Amazon has invested more than$8 billion in OpenAI's rival Anthropic. So if Amazon throws$10 billion into OpenAI, that's really hedging its bets. And meanwhile, Google working closely with Meta, according to Reuters, to make its Tensor processing units better at running PyTorch, which would make them more attractive as an alternative to NVIDIA chips. Google would like to start selling its chips to people who are buying NVIDIA chips right now. Part of the work that Google and Meta are doing would include a deal to sell Google TPUs to Meta as well.

16:10So it's a wild west out there as far as chips. NVIDIA doesn't quite have the lock that I think everyone thinks it might have. I mean, I don't think NVIDIA needs to worry. It's in the lead. Yeah, yeah. It's got a nice big lead, but there's a lot of companies trying. I mean, if you're listening to this right now and saying, wait, so who is investing and who and what is happening? You're not alone. I mean, even following this stuff every day, it truly every single day, it seems to be a different story. Amazon investing in OpenAI, I guess my knee jerk reaction is, okay, so OpenAI wants to back away from Microsoft being kind of their investor.

17:02Not that that means that Microsoft goes away, but just that, you know, Amazon is now a player. $10 billion these days when we're talking about AI, not the kind of money that it was 10 years ago when we would have been talking about it, but very significant. Yeah, the deal we talked about earlier this year of restructuring OpenAI's deal with Microsoft allowed them to go and pursue these kinds of deals, which is why it's trying to diversify its sources and diversify its investments. Well, Oracle's largest data center partner, Blue Owl Capital, has withdrawn from a deal to build an Oracle facility near Ann Arbor, Michigan, for OpenAI to use.

17:43Blue Owl previously helped Oracle build sites in both Texas and New Mexico. Oracle says its partner, Related Digital, which is doing the actual construction, has another funding partner but didn't reveal the name. The Financial Times speculated it might be Blackstone Group.

18:26And it's saying, I don't like the delays. I don't like how this deal constructed is, I think, significant. It doesn't mean Oracle's just going to collapse or anything, but this is one that's worth paying attention to. If you're trying to understand all the stories about Oracle, you can think like, ah, yeah, so they did have one significant investor, Blue Owl, pull out. And then look for whether this is the last of that kind or if it's the owl in the coal mine that tells you that Oracle's going to have further troubles. Yep. All right. Finally, some quick headlines that are just good to know if you want to understand the news in the future.

19:04Serkana estimates that U.S. game console spending fell 27 % in November to reach the lowest spending since, wait for it, 2005. Game consoles are getting long in the tooth, but that's a huge drop. following LG's announcement earlier this week of micro RGB TVs coming to CES Samsung revealed it will also show off a line of its own at CES micro RGB TVs adding to the previously announced 115 inch micro RGB I'm calling it micro RGB definitely going to be one of the buzzwords out of CES are you gonna buy in a 115 inch micro RGB TV if I get someone backing us on Patreon at 30 thousand dollars i will use that to buy a 115 inch micro you heard it here people tom will do it uh if someone comes through online learning company corsera announced it has agreed to acquire rival udemy ah the consolidation in online learning uh thanks to fred for passing this next one along on subreddit daily tech news show dot oh wait it's not anymore it's subreddit.com slash r slash daily tech news show a u.s federal judge has blocked the state of Louisiana from enforcing its 2023 age verification law for social media companies on free speech grounds.

20:22Louisiana's attorney general does plan to appeal the ruling. So this won't be the last world, but for now it can enforce it. Speaking of legal situations, an apparent response to a startup's attempt to claim that X has abandoned the Twitter name, X updated its terms of service to say that nothing in the terms gives you a right to use the X name or Twitter name or any of the X or Twitter trademarks, logos, domain names, or other distinctive brand features. That probably includes a Bluebird. X also filed a lawsuit against Operation Bluebird, alleging trademark infringement. Yeah, so they added Twitter back to the terms of service.

21:02Big surprise. Yeah, and Operation Bluebird knew they would get sued. That's not a surprise to Operation Bluebird, but yeah, that's going to be interesting to see if they can win that lawsuit. another lawsuit administrative law judge in california has determined that tesla engaged in deceptive marketing around its autopilot and full self-driving features uh the california department of motor vehicles has issued a stay on that decision and given tesla 60 days to fix any of its deceptive claims apple doesn't appear to be ready to kill the iphone air so uh rumors of its demise greatly exaggerated the information says that apple is considering adding a second rear camera uh that was one of the docks uh well the the docks against it uh that it had previously and lowering the price when it comes out with the iphone air 2 which it isn't supposed to do until 2027 so it's it's going to be a while but yeah this is speculation uh yeah uh folks if you are headed to ces we were just talking about all those micro rgbs maybe you want to talk micro RGBs with me and Rob and Amos and KT Data, we are going to be at the Resorts World Food Court Wednesday, January 7th at 6.30 p.m.

22:20We'll have some stickers to give away. We'll love talking about tech. It's very informal. It's not something you have to RSVP from. Just show up at the food court. We're all going to gather there Wednesday, January 7th, 6.30 p.m., Resorts World food court. Hopefully I will see you there.

22:38We like to end every episode of DTNS with some shared perspectives. Today, Andre has thoughts on Netflix acquiring video podcasts. Yeah. Andre wrote, I have watched The Breakfast Club, one of the iHeartRadio podcasts that'll be going to Netflix. Andre says, I've watched it on and off for years. In addition to listening to the podcast, the appeal of Netflix would be the option if watching the shows in their entirety without ads. There are only video clips of popular segments on YouTube. The full show is audio only. I know there are several ways to watch or listen to it and being able to watch the full show on Netflix would be great.

23:17So we got one fan, one Breakfast Club fan who's like, yes, please bring it to Netflix. Breakfast Club, it's a very popular podcast. Oh, super popular. Yeah, yeah. It's a newsmaker. So it's a good get among all the gets. Well, thank you, Andre. And if you have thoughts on Netflix, getting into video pods, let us know. And just let us know what you're thinking about in general. As we head into the end of 2025, you might have insight on a story. What are you thinking about in tech? Share it with us. Feedback at dailytechnewsshow.com. Yeah, thanks to Andre for contributing to today's show. If we read your email, you get thanked at the end of the show.

23:56Thank you. I'm thanking you now too for being along for Daily Tech News Show. You can keep us in business by becoming a patron. You haven't done it yet. Come on. It's easy. Just sign up at patreon.com slash DTNS. You get all kinds of free, cool stuff. Do it now. Bye.

24:12The DTNS family of podcasts. Helping each other understand. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.