


Daily Tech News episode focused on Amazon’s new AI conversation-wearables (Bee Frontier and Bee Eclipse), Google’s new “GoogleBook” laptop platform, and broader tech briefs (YouTube Music AI labels, possible YouTube audiobooks, NVIDIA RTX Spark laptops, plus multiple industry updates).
Ayaz Akhtar (PCMag reviewer; used an Intel-based Asus “GoogleBook 14” for a week). Other voices are hosts Tom Merritt and Sarah Lane.
Akhtar is a PCMag tech writer who reviewed/used GoogleBook hardware and apps; he discusses performance, Gemini features, and Android-app compatibility.
Bee devices record and summarize conversations without a subscription for limited use; transcripts are encrypted on-device with user-controlled keys, but Echo-based sharing reduces privacy. GoogleBook has “good bones” but lacks system-wide Gemini control and has app/UI limitations (e.g., Gmail is a PWA, not a unified app view).
Bee Frontier ($75) and Bee Eclipse ($100) with up to 14 days memory; Akhtar’s inability to rename files via Gemini and Gmail search/menu inconsistencies; NVIDIA RTX Spark laptops (agentic AI focus, expensive).
Written by AI. May contain mistakes.
Discussion about new wearable devices from the company Bee post-Amazon acquisition.
“Bee is actually the company that announced its first two new wearable devices, hence the plural, bees.”
Delve into the features and pricing of the Bee Frontier and Bee Eclipse.
“So you can integrate, obviously, with stuff from Amazon, but also Apple HealthKit, Gmail, Google Calendar and Microsoft Outlook, among others.”
Discussion on the practicality and privacy concerns of AI wearables.
“and I find it to be, it's very good at what it does.”
Hosts discuss the implications of using transcription technology in meetings.
“So they did a good job of constructing this to say, we won't see your stuff if you just keep it on the eclipse and you never share it with us.”
Hosts express gratitude to listeners and patrons supporting the show.
“Speaking of people who email us, we love our patrons.”
Learn about YouTube's initiative to label AI-generated music and their potential entry into the audiobook market.
“YouTube Music is rolling out new labels identifying songs made with generative AI with the main YouTube app on track to do the same.”
Explore the features and pricing of NVIDIA's new laptops powered by the Spark Superchip.
“The generated voice, a little repetitive.”
Discuss the gaming capabilities of NVIDIA's Spark laptops and their target audience.
Catch up on the latest tech news including Opera's new browser and smartphone market trends.
“Xreal released the upgraded One Pro Plus AR glasses.”
Discusses Bank of America's job cuts and the state of the EV market.
“As a Bank of America customer, I'm happy about this.”
Introduces the Google Book platform and guest Ayaz Akdar who shares his experience.
“Google released its new Google Book platform on October 4th.”
Ayaz shares his thoughts on the hardware of the Google Book he's using.
“It's really sturdy considering it's so light.”
Ayaz discusses the strengths and weaknesses of the Google Book OS.
“It's just very early days is what I'm saying.”
Detailed discussion on the limitations and issues in the Google Book's software.
“So I just asked Gemini, change that file name to something else.”
Explores the future prospects of Google Book OS and who it's intended for.
“On my phone, I can have a unified view of my email.”
Ayaz shares his recommendations and thoughts on the usage of Google Book.
“And everyone who uses it is like, this isn't done.”

Get the gist, explore an idea or ask about something said.
On Daily Tech News Show, what are the key points of this episode?
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.
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2:40This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, October 15th, 2026. We tell you what you need to know, give you some important context, and try our darndest to help each other understand. Today, Ayaz Akhtar from PCMag is joining in on his week using, his first week rather, using the Google book and Amazon launches some AI hardware. I'm Tom Merritt. And I'm Sarah Lane. Let's start with what you need to know with the big story. Bees. Bee is actually the company that announced its first two new wearable devices, hence the plural, bees. These are their first new devices since being acquired by Amazon last year.
3:18The Bee Frontier is for wearing. You can pin it to your clothes. You can use it as a pin or a brooch, or you can wear it on your wrist. It's IP67 water resistant, has up to seven days of battery life, comes in onyx, sage, and lavender, or as I call them, black, green, and purple. The Bee Frontier sells for$75. It's available now. So it's a bit cheaper than comparable alternatives like the Plod Note, which is$159. Pocket AI,$129. Then there's the Bee Eclipse. This is a card. It's a credit card size device that you can attach to the back of your phone magnetically. Comes in midnight honey and blush, aka yellow and pink.
4:05I think there's also black and white. The Bee Eclipse costs$100 and it will be available soon. You can see the details, but you can't order it yet. But they both do the thing where they record conversations and then summarize them for you, maybe help create to-do lists out of that. You can do it for free. You don't need a subscription to do it. It gives you up to 14 days of memory, though there's a limit on how many summaries you can generate. So for$12 a month, you can pay to get a subscription that gives you unlimited summaries and integration with apps. So you can integrate, obviously, with stuff from Amazon, but also Apple HealthKit, Gmail, Google Calendar and Microsoft Outlook, among others.
4:43You also get to do suggestions if you're paying. It'll suggest things to you. It'll give you something called daily memories, conversation templates, and a chat assistant with a paid subscription. And part of that integration with the subscription is with an Amazon Echo, where you could give the Echo permission to record a conversation and then share that with B for processing as well. Audio recordings are processed in real time by the B device and then immediately discarded. So if you use the Amazon Echo, you're not getting all those privacy protections. But if you're just using the B device as you are, the transcripts it creates are then encrypted on the device with keys that are under your control.
5:23Amazon cannot access them, of course, unless you share the transcription with Amazon for some reason. I'm still on the fence about any AI device that you're pinning to your lapel. wearing on your wrist is not that weird unless you're already, you know, wearing a smartwatch and you're running out of real estate. You've got a aura ring and a Fitbit banner and an Apple watch. We're tracking everything. But it wasn't that long ago that a lot of us were scratching our heads like, who's this for? Who's this really for? I've got the Plodno Pro, which is comparable to the Eclipse that does attach to the iPhone.
6:04and I find it to be, it's very good at what it does. I also am not a person who's sitting down having lots of meetings where I'm needing to take notes afterwards. I mean, we all take meetings here on DTNS and talk to each other, but we're pretty good about just sort of taking our own notes for just general purpose, like, hey, I need to remember to do this and that and maybe make this into something that's more of an action item uh you know something for me that's all good i and there are many people that i know who live by this stuff um not everybody wants to wear something you know you've got the granola folks not not hippies but people who use the the app granola which is right it's software-based yeah and does a lot of the same thing but there are i feel like there's been such an uptick in people saying, wow, this actually is really, really helpful for me.
7:01But I think it really depends on what you're doing for work. And it doesn't even have to be career stuff, just sort of how are you organizing your day? So I think that Amazon offers, I mean, they're certainly not more expensive than the alternatives and Amazon's very good at that. Yeah. And I think the big concern people might have with Amazon is the privacy. So they did a good job of constructing this to say, we won't see your stuff if you just keep it on the eclipse and you never share it with us. So that should allay some of those concerns. There's still the concern of whether you should be recording something, you know, without making sure that everybody's okay with recording it.
7:40But like you say, in a workplace, I think that's pretty normalized now. I'm more curious about how many people do use this in their everyday life, where, you know, you're sitting down to coffee with your best friend and planning your trip to the wine country are you using one of these to like you know that that's one of the examples that they gave well it's like it's like it's like the the ai maxing people are like oh it's so much easier yeah just taking notes also you know going back to that conference room scenario that you're talking about like hmm you know like does everyone know i'm recording i i feel like it's almost akin to somebody being you know the secretary in a meeting and writing down stuff like Sarah said this, Tom said this, Roger disagreed, Sarah's going to follow up.
8:24Does that bother you? Because this is not supposed to be very different from that. Yeah, and I think that's one of the things Amazon did well in designing this. I think one of the things that gives people the heebie-jeebies is when you're like, yeah, but the secretary isn't recording my voice, right? There's not like a recording. And maybe there's nothing wrong with that, but it creeps me out. This doesn't do that. That this takes in the voice, makes the transcription and gets rid of the voice recording. So there isn't a recording of the meeting or the conversation after the fact. So maybe it's a little less creepy in that situation, too.
8:58Well, if you have any thoughts, do email us early and often. Feedback at DailyTechNewsShow.com. Speaking of people who email us, we love our patrons. DTNS is made possible by everybody listening. And sometimes you're watching as well. Thanks to James, Technical T, Mike Akins, and Norm Fazekas. And it's been a couple of days since a new patron. So this space reserved for you tomorrow. Sign up. Indeed. Patreon.com. You want to be a hero? Oh, we'll give you hero status. Episode prep gets messy when research, Slack threads, and script trackers are all in different places. That's where ChatGPT work comes in.
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14:00There's more we need to know today. Let's get to the briefs. Let's do it. YouTube Music is rolling out new labels identifying songs made with generative AI with the main YouTube app on track to do the same. So YouTube Music for now, YouTube app maybe coming sometime in the future. So as a listener, you can tap a label on the player for details and music partners can declare tracks that are fully or partly or not at all AI generated. Tools that just fuss with the output like autotune, not part of this. This is very much AI focused. YouTube has its own detection tools as well. And using AI doesn't necessarily prevent monetization.
14:38They just want it to be a little bit clearer to everybody what's going on. Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal sources say that YouTube is talking with publishers about an audiobook service that could launch in 2027. Again, these are just sources. And may be bundled with its roughly$16 per month premium subscription. Pricing, listening limits, individual book purchases, none of that stuff is ironed out just yet. And YouTube hasn't even confirmed these plans. But it does already host unauthorized audiobook recordings, including AI-narrated versions. So one would think YouTube would like to get in on this market.
15:18Yeah, they probably want to push out those unauthorized ones if they can. There's authorized ones too, but I think they'd like more of a cut than they already get in that situation. I'll be honest, YouTube getting into audiobooks makes a lot of sense to me. I think a lot of people would like an alternative to Amazon, whether Google being the one that provides it is going to be as big of an advantage as if it was somebody else. I don't know. Amazon's going to have the advantage of being tied into its ebook system. I quite often these days will buy the ebook and the audio book together so that I can switch back and forth.
15:53I don't think YouTube's going to get into ebooks. That is something Spotify has been getting into though. So Spotify is a big competitor in this space. It's good to have competitors in this space and a shout out to downpour there's a couple other drm free audiobook companies out there as well that don't get as much love uh so yeah there's i'll just say on the audiobook part welcome youtube the more choices i have for audiobooks the better um as for the ai generated tools i really really really really would like youtube to give me a filter option as well it's nice that they're labeling these but i can usually tell uh so the labeling isn't bad but it's not the thing that you mean just to filter out ai stuff yeah just be like you know keep these out of my recommended uh that that kind of thing would be would be good to have i think a lot of people agree with you on that uh you know because it gives gives many people the ick uh and you know it depends on the content creator and and what you're looking for but but uh to know is is a great first step yeah and and many platforms are already trying to help you know a little more about this to coin a phrase yes uh but uh but yeah i i we're we're getting into a situation where we're just going to have too many arguments about there is is this ai or not you know just tell us yeah if there's no label you still don't know it's not like a hundred percent but at least you'll if you see the label you could say okay that one's for sure not or partly or absolutely.
17:27My problem with the AI generated music is just not very good. You know, I like to, both Eileen and I like to put on these like, you know, long music blends and sometimes it's like jazz. I'm like, great. You know, I'm going to hear some Charles Mingus. And then it's like some Jack Johnson sounding generated voice. I'm like, Oh, it's kind of annoying. What do you have against Jack Johnson? I like the actual Jack Johnson. Right. Yeah. The generated voice, a little repetitive. Well, tomorrow is not only iPhone Duo pre-order day, it's also the release of PCs built on NVIDIA's RTX Spark Super Chip. In fact, tomorrow we're getting the laptops.
18:04To fit an on-device model into the 24 gigabytes of memory they want to fit it on on these machines, NVIDIA announced Tuesday that it will use its Nematron 3.5 Bolt 74B model. That is a 74 billion parameter model that activates 9 billion parameters per token using what's called a sparse mixture of experts design. In other words, it can take advantage of 74 billion parameters, but it won't use all of them at the same time. These are powerful laptops. They're expensive laptops. We're talking like three, four,$5 ,000. NVIDIA is going to offer two configurations, a 20 core CPU with 6 ,144 CUDA cores.
18:46that's for both laptops and compact desktops and an 18 core 5120 CUDA core variant which is just for the laptops these machines run windows on arm because nvidia is using an arm architecture in addition third parties have started to optimize versions of their apps to be ready to go for these machines adobe announced versions of photoshop premiere pro and substance 3d for spark that are all supposed to run even better now that they're optimized, even better than any other version because they can take advantage of the full processing power. Blender 5.3 launched beta RTX Spark DLSS compatibility on Tuesday.
19:26And if you're a developer, you might be interested that Microsoft released PyTorch Conda Windows Arm for Windows Arm. NVIDIA also announced a few dozen AAA titles will be game ready for Spark machines at launch with support for DLSS 5 and anti-cheat We also have some of the first benchmarks. Tom's Hardware has tested the Surface Laptop Ultra from Microsoft and found the Spark Superchip outperformed Apple's M5 Max by about 25 % in agentic completion models. and they were using Quinn, if you're curious. Tom's Hardware's notes say they were using a normal 96-watt power adapter for the 14-inch Mac, while the Surface has a 140-watt power adapter, and they suspect the result might be a little closer if they were to use a 16-inch MacBook, which has a 140-watt adapter and higher thermals.
20:19But the fact is, the NTX Surface, really good at agentic stuff. Gaming benchmarks were less impressive. It's not the primary focus. Tom's Hardware called it a fine enough time to play a game. It's not bad, but you probably don't want to buy this just for gaming. You're going to use it for games because you bought it for agents. Spark laptops, again, come on Friday, October 16th from Asus, Acer, Dell, MSI, HP Lenovo, and of course that previously mentioned Microsoft Surface Laptop Ultra, and then desktop versions with RTX Spark go on sale in November. How many independent developers do you think are going to buy these?
20:57A handful. People who've cashed out their stock options and gone independent, sure. You know, they got a couple thousand dollars laying around. And that's my thing is like, these look awesome, but they're also very expensive. They're incredibly expensive. Yeah, I don't think they're meant to be mass market devices. I imagine some small startups are going to buy them with some of their seed money. Some enterprises are definitely going to buy them. And I think, yeah, a handful of independent developers here and there will splash out and get one of these because of what they can do with it. But it is very much for the agentic AI enthusiast, right?
21:32This is not a mass market device anyway. Well, I think it's interesting. We said to gamers like, well, you can do it too, but this is not really the gaming system. You know, that if that's what you want to do all day, every day, or at least that's, you know, that's your number one reason for plunking down a bunch of money. These are different machines. Yeah. And it's NVIDIA. So I think people expect it to be games and NVIDIA is working with AAA game titles to be optimized for it. So they want it to be good at games. And maybe it'll be better once more of these optimizations come out and more benchmarks come out.
22:09well everybody if you want product reviews from people who put gadgets services platforms to the test maybe an nvidia laptop in the future then your exact style of show is live with it each week we talk about all the tech in our lives we go robots we go home theater solutions camping technology uh this week scott johnson is talking game controllers specifically how the many game controller Scott Johnson already has compared to valves steam controller live with it is on youtube at youtube.com slash at live with it show subscribe lets other people find us we appreciate it and big thanks to all of our patrons who are keeping us going you can also become a patron at patreon.com slash live with it
23:22We'll be right back. a year after two starter doses. Don't use if allergic to SkyRizzy. Serious allergic reactions, increased infections, or lower ability to fight them may occur. Before treatment, get checked for infections and tuberculosis. Tell your doctor about any flu-like symptoms or vaccines. Thanks to SkyRizzy, there's nothing like clearer skin and better movement. And that means everything.
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24:43While it has most of the features of regular Opera, The interface doesn't have shortcuts or notifications or promotional content, but it is free for Mac and Windows at Opera.com. Xreal released the upgraded One Pro Plus AR glasses. The Plus makes all the difference. It has 1 ,200 nits of peak brightness. That's up from 700 in the one that isn't a Plus. 60 hertz 2D to 3D conversion instead of 30 hertz. HDR upscaling. and a more comfortable and stable nose pad, which if you're going to be using it for a long time, maybe a couple hours, is important. You can buy it now at the same$600 price as the previous model.
25:24Microsoft announced the Xbox Nano controller, speaking of gaming controllers, a 3.5-ounce 5-inch game controller, shorter than many smartphones. The idea is to have a more portable controller that you can use with more platforms. You can order it now for$50. It's shipping in November. what would scott johnson do he'll be glad it's small so it doesn't add much to his collection xda developers has a good write-up of the fact that windows 11 26 h2 has saved some users up to two gigabytes of ram usage after installing lots of reports all over reddit and elsewhere however it doesn't save it for those who need it most anecdotal reports indicate that people with 8GB of RAM are not seeing the efficiency, while those with 16GB or more are, and those with 32 to 48GB are reporting the biggest gains.
26:18I await the technical explanation of why more RAM means more RAM efficiency. But yeah, it's very sad if you're the person who needed it with your paltry 8GB of RAM. It's like the rich get richer. Yeah, totally. IDC reported that smartphone market declined 22 % year over year last quarter, with Samsung and Apple seeing only slight declines while Xiaomi, Oppo, and Vivo took the brunt of the hits. Yeah, people don't like those big prices unless they're ready to pay a flagship price, which is why Samsung is still leading and Apple's right behind them. The U.S. states of Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, West Virginia, Arkansas, Arizona, Idaho, and Montana.
26:56I'm starting to feel like Johnny Cash. I've been everywhere. All eight of those states have individually sued OpenAI, claiming ChatGPT is unsafe for children. It has harmed them and that OpenAI deceived parents about those harms. Those are the allegations. Apple is planning to launch Apple Intelligence in China for the first time this December. So just a couple months from now, Chinese users will get the original version that launched in the U.S. two years ago. Not the most recent version. Oh, they finally get Memojis. Anthropic told potential investors that its revenue nearly doubled in the last quarter, though that is slower than the rate earlier this year, which was more than doubled.
27:38Anthropic also continues to claim it is profitable on an adjusted basis. It's not a lie, though it's not profitable on the more standard net income basis. Bank of America said it hired 1 ,000 contractors on top of its 3 ,000 existing internal developers in order to patch a large number of flaws found by advanced AI models. As a Bank of America customer, I'm happy about this. Me too. Potentially, yeah. The contractor is still on the job. Bank of America did cut the jobs of approximately 5 % of its managers last year, and the CEO said he expects not needing as many contractors going forward, but we'll see.
28:20But the managers were in more danger than the contractors in this particular instance, which is interesting. The Linux Maintainers Summit has deprecated the assisted by tag, which was required to be used by coders contributing to Linux who had used AI tools. The tag was adopted in January and now it's been dropped. A report from Cox Automotive shows that electric vehicles made up 6.1 % of the U.S. market last quarter. That's the largest percentage since Q3 of 2025, right as tax credits were expiring. We've got Toyota, Rivian, and Subaru increasing sales the most, though Tesla is still making up more than half of all sales.
29:01Still down 20 % year over year. Yeah, I think I said as soon as the subsidies go away, eventually the price comes down and you'll have a lag in sales until then. And that seems to be what happened in the U.S. And something that happened in Germany as well previously. All right, those are the essentials today. Let's dive a little deeper. Google released its new Google Book platform on October 4th. And a lot of people have been wondering how good the laptops running Android are working in the real world. Thankfully, we have PCMag's Ayaz Akdar, who's been using one of these and has thoughts. Thank you, Ayaz, for joining us.
29:40My pleasure to be here. It's good to have you, man. Let's talk about your wonderful week with the Google Book. Which Google Book were you using? So I've received the Asus Google Book 14. I believe all of them are company name, Google Book, and usually a number. I've got it right here. It's really light. This is a 2.2-inch. Very thin. Sorry, 2.2-pound laptop. It's super light. It's really sturdy considering it's so light. It feels good. The hardware itself is solid, right? This might be a chassis from another device. Unsure about that, but the hardware is very, very, very good. So that's the one I got.
30:18That's the one you got. And it's an Intel-based one, not an ARM-based one. Yeah. So I had the Intel-based one, and Google said, or at least the companies around this have said, that the performance should be exactly the same. Since it's natively compiled for Intel and Snapdragon, it should run really well. Now, I had some issues, and when I talked to some of my colleagues, they were surprised at how slow animations were happening on my Google book, and they cannot figure out why. So is it an Intel issue? Is it an early days issue? I'm unsure. Yeah. I watched your video. So let's start with the shorter list.
30:54What was good? Okay. Like I said, the hardware is good. I liked that you could run certain Android apps with it. Once the app casting feature, this is a feature that lets you take an app from your phone and you can basically mirror it on the device. Once that feature was turned on for Samsung devices, I liked it. But when I first got it, that was an option. So I was able to pull up apps through that, and it's been usable that way. Google Chrome is really good on it. There's some weird inconsistencies. What's good about it? What else is good? It's just very early days is what I'm saying. So it's kind of hard for me to pull what was good about it.
31:33It's just got a lot of potential. It seems like when you compare it to a Chrome OS, it's better. When you compare it to any other kind of laptop, it's got shortcomings. So let's talk about some of the shortcomings. Well, I mean, the idea was, I've talked to another colleague of mine, he was telling me that the reason why Google Book OS is even a thing is that people in the Chrome team, they wanted to add a feature from Android, and it would take like a year to make this happen. So let's make it easier by just putting Android on this device. And it kind of works, and it kind of doesn't. I forgot the actual question.
32:08What's not good? What are the shortcomings? You're getting there. You're getting there. Okay, so look, I wanted everything to work. I know I'm known for hating stuff and I'm angry all the time, but that's not really the case with this. So I was trying to use this in replacement of my regular laptop. I relearned all of the shortcuts. I'm using its keyboard shortcuts. It doesn't have a window manager like I'm used to. Okay, fine. I found that even though Gemini is a really big part of this machine, I couldn't use Gemini to do system-wide kinds of things. Like I wanted to rename a file. So I just asked Gemini, change that file name to something else.
32:46It said it didn't have access to that. I said, make it light mode. And it said, here's how you do it. So like this idea of going from using the AI to take your intention and then make it happen. It's more like when you would get those, if you ever use like Microsoft Word in the old days and you had the help feature and it tells you exactly where stuff is. And you're like, couldn't you just link it or press the button? It feels like that. And I haven't had a lot of success getting things like finding things on it. So this is one of my craziest things about Google. I hit the G key, which is like the command key on a Mac.
33:20A menu pops up. I search for mail because I want my Gmail app to show up. Nothing is found. Just web searches about MailChimp and other stuff. When I type in Gmail, it actually finds it. So I was so confused that Google, what was known as a search company at one point, couldn't get this right. I also had file transfers fail by using the built-in files app. There's so much wasted space in a lot of these apps. It's oddly, very oddly, it appears that these are phone apps that are being blown up and not the tablet versions, which is even more confusing because the tablet version is optimized for a larger screen and you would have like a second pane and you have like a preview window.
34:02Gmail, the app, so to speak, is simply a progressive web app. It's just the browser. So what's the point of this if I can't have it in a particular app? So it was just, it had some limitations when it came to that, as well as, I'm going to complain about this forever. On my phone, I can have a unified view of my email. So all my email addresses in one Gmail app. It's the Gmail app from Google, right? You can't do that with a Google book. You You have to open up another window or you need to switch accounts. So all the cool stuff that I loved about my phone is not a thing. Yeah, because it's not using the phone app.
34:43It's using a progressive web app. That's wild. That would annoy me too. That's one of the things I need most in this world. It's just like, show me all the emails I got today. Give me everything I got. I can do whatever I want with them. I mean, Ayaz, you mentioned the kind of weirdness with just looking at your own Gmail. Is there anything about the Gemini Assistant that works really well? It works as – so the Gemini Assistant works well for pretty much what works well on any device. So random questions, just trying to make plans and stuff like that. So it works like Gemini should. There is the magic pointer feature, which is kind of nice.
35:27Basically, you wiggle the mouse, and that's not turned on by default. So if you want this feature, you turn it on. You wiggle the mouse, and then Gemini will search what you're on top of, and it can give you suggestions as like, oh, maybe you're looking for this. Maybe you're looking for that. So it's a really smart version, essentially, of circle to search, which I like. And I've used it only a couple of times because I didn't really need to use this in my day-to-day. So it's got really good bones, but it just doesn't have the flesh yet. Yeah, this seems very Google, where they're like, it works, put it out.
36:02And everyone who uses it is like, this isn't done. And maybe it will get really good if they stick with it, but it's not there yet. Is that fair? Yeah, and Google said that they were going to support this OS for 10 years. So I would think in about two to three years, this will be very, very good. assuming developers make apps for it because this is still a giant problem you've got this larger screen you need to show what it can do differently i'm i understand the idea of having a unified interface but when i switch devices it should be able to like expand and then contract basically getting a view like you're basically getting a larger window into what you're looking at and that's not what google book os is yet so i think it'll get there uh but there's also a question like will something else eat it up because i mean chrome os is a thing and that's going to be gone although that's being supported as well this is that replacement so how long will google book os be a thing yeah so right now anything you could do on an android phone you can do on this but it's like you're using an android phone on a bigger screen and in a lot of cases yeah it sounds like it does it feel like it has the power to do more though once those apps come along?
37:10I think it could. I don't know how well the Snapdragons do versus the Intel when it comes to that. I think the operating system needs a little bit of, it needs some tweaking because it's kind of too much like a phone in one respect that everything is sandboxed. So Gemini can't just go in and do stuff for you, which is kind of what I want it to do. If you're going to have a whole new system, it should feel different. And it just basically feels like a copy of a PC or a copy of a Mac. It's just not, it's okay, but why get that when you can get, you know, other stuff? Yeah. I saw the review on PCMag that says this is for Android super fans.
37:53Is that pretty much the answer of who this is for? You know, I might have to disagree with, I think it was Joe Osborne wrote that yeah i just think i might disagree because i think android super fans will be the most frustrated with this because there are things that it does well right like i can i can still use all the google suites of apps like if i want to use docs drive whatever by the way docs and drive they have apps but they open up the actual files in a browser just like on your phone yeah yeah yeah well why anyway uh i think that i think because we know what android can do and we know that we can have better multitasking and we think it can the ai should be able to go into different tasks because we know that it's more frustrating so if you want to see a peek into the future it's the google book is it going to get there soon i don't know and it's really early the thing's only been out for 11 days but at least google has a bunch of partners that are doesn't even include them and samsung isn't making a device which i find very curious yeah so i think super fans might get irritated uh but the general public who are like hey i have it i have a google phone what what laptop should i get when they see google book os or google book they will go that one yeah and maybe that'll be enough to to keep them going until they work out all the rest of these bugs i highly recommend watching ias's very entertaining pc mag video uh about his experience with the google book uh it's one of your funniest ones i've seen and very informative as well uh if folks want to keep up with all those kinds of things that you do, where should they go?
39:25Go to youtube.com slash PC mag and go to PC mag.com because we've got tons of stuff going on there. We're going to have full reviews of every Google book that's out there. There's five of them. This is the fifth one. We've got four of them in the office and we're going to have all kinds of good stuff there. So check out PC mag.com and you can get more informed. Thanks, man. Good to talk to you, man. Thanks. Thank you very much. We end every episode of DTNS with shared perspectives Today, Jay is following up on Wen's encouragement of yesterday's emailer to consider himself a developer. Yeah, thank you for this, Jay.
39:59He wrote it on our Patreon. He said, Aceh, as we were referring to H yesterday, as someone that's been developing software the hard way since the 1990s, let me just say, welcome to the gang. You are 100 % a software developer now. And as every good software developer knows, the hard part has never been writing the code. The hard part up front is understanding the problem the code is trying to solve well enough to create the code that solves it. The tools we have used for creating that code have evolved over the years, and we are going through an acceleration in that evolution right now. When used correctly, these tools can make good engineers more productive, and they can help experts in other fields build the ideas they've had in their heads forever.
40:46But just a word of caution to our newest developer, Aceh, you are about to learn about the other hard part of software, maintenance. Software isn't dead. It's democratizing. Thank you, Jay, for jumping in and backing one up on giving Aceh the confidence to call himself a developer. Yeah, confidence and also wise words. Yeah, yeah. Very nice. Well, if you're thinking about anything we talked about on the show today, you have insight into a story. Share it with us. We always want to hear from you. Feedback at DailyTechNewsShow.com. Big thanks to Iaz Akhtar and to Jay for contributing to today's show.
41:26Thank you for being along for Daily Tech News Show. You're the folks who keep us in business. Like I said, your name on the show tomorrow if you become a patron. And there's a secret discount. Go check it out. Patreon.com slash DTNS. Hurry.
41:43The DTNS family of podcasts. Helping each other understand. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.
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Iyaz Akhtar from PC Mag joins us to talk about his experience using a Googlebook as his daily driver. Plus Amazon’s Bee has new note-taking gadgets.
Starring Tom Merritt, Sarah Lane, and Iyaz Akhtar.
Show notes found here.
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