AI gadgets, bendy phones, and more from MWC

0:02Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of region locked phones. I'm your friend David Pierce, and I am standing outside of the Alamo Drafthouse where I just saw Dune Part 2. Now, I don't know if I'm like the expert on whether Dune movies are any good. I saw Part 1 just the other day on an iPad on a train. I haven't read the books. Love the first movie. Loved the second movie. It's really long. It's really intense. It's really loud. I had a great time. Everybody should go see it. Ideally on the biggest screen you can possibly find. But Dune is not what we are here to talk about on The Verge Cast today.

0:35Today we're talking about Mobile World Congress. MWC is one of those trade shows that some years is kind of boring. It's just a bunch of companies being like, look, an Android phone. And some years is really interesting. And this year was one of those interesting years. So we are going to have John Porter and Alison Johnson, two Verge reporters who were at the show in Barcelona over the past week. And they're going to tell us about all the interesting gadgets they saw and maybe whether we got a hint of what the future of gadgets really looks like. All that's coming up in just a sec, but first, I'm going to go home and sleep for a bit because it's really late because that is a three-hour long movie.

1:13Then we'll get to it. This is The Verge Cast. See you in a sec.

1:34developers. MongoDB is ACID compliant, enterprise ready with the capabilities you need to ship AI apps fast. That's why so many of the Fortune 500 trust MongoDB with their most critical workloads. Ready to think outside rows and columns? Start building at mongodb.com slash build. How do more than 100 million Fortnite players join the battle without lag? AWS is how Epic Games scales up to keep them in the action. AWS powers next-level innovation for millions of businesses. All right, we're back. I got some sleep. I'm now deep in the dune behind-the-scenes YouTube rabbit hole. I've learned a lot of fun facts about Austin Butler's hair.

2:22Let's get into the show. So Mobile World Congress is, I would say, typically the second most interesting trade show of the year, at least most years. CES is the big one in Las Vegas for the whole electronics and tech industry. But MWC has for years had kind of a special niche as a place that is all about one thing. And that one thing is obviously mobile. Often that just means lots and lots of phones. And this year it meant that too. But the thing about mobile right now is that the definition of that word is starting to change. So thanks to AI, we're getting new kinds of devices altogether. And because Apple and Google have so thoroughly dominated the smartphone era, there are lots of companies that are looking to figure out what's next, even in the smartphone world.

3:08The idea that your phone should just be a slab of glass that runs a bunch of apps that come from an app store that's run by either Apple or Google. There are so many good reasons for companies and for people, frankly, to try and get past that idea. And so not only are we getting lots of new phones, we're getting lots of new ideas about what a phone or a mobile device in general should look like and how it can work and what it should mean in our lives. This is my kind of stuff to talk about. So we're going to talk about it. The Verges, Alison Johnson and John Porter were both at MWC last week. They played with all the devices and they tried to figure out what they all say about the future of mobile.

3:43And somewhat miraculously, they both made it home safe and not sick. And they're here to help me dig into all of it. Alison Johnson. Hello. Hello. John Porter, welcome back to the Vergecast. Hello. So you guys survived. Yes. Tell us a little bit about what MWC is like. I confess it's been a bunch of years since I went and it's like in Barcelona. So it seems very romantic and lovely in a way that like going to Vegas for CES does not seem romantic and lovely. But like, give me the 2024 vibe check of MWC this year. So I read a lovely comment that referred to MWC as a very nice overseas trip for this journalist.

4:21And I read that comment whilst sitting in a dingy hotel room with a bathroom ceiling that was leaking at approximately 11.30pm on a Saturday evening while I was just writing my third embargo of the weekend. So I think that kind of sums up maybe how glamorous MWC is. But I mean, like a lot of trade shows, I think a lot of companies want to kind of get out ahead of the show itself. so it means the weekend is kind of filled with with these press events and you kind of end up kind of rushing from from one to the other to the other kind of like barely keeping track of what's happening because every single company is just trying to jostle and not step on each other's toes too much but maybe step on them a little bit and then the show kicks off on on monday in earnest and then it's just this frantic rush to to see the kind of the smaller players that aren't able to hold a big press conference uh over the course of the weekend and actually kind of get hands-on time with with the gadgets themselves.

5:17Allison what was your read was this this wasn't your first MWC was it? This was my first MWC it lived up to the hype I guess yeah I was surprised by how busy yeah the weekend was it was just like darting around Barcelona just to see different stuff and just the added like difficulty level of like I don't understand any of these street names but I'm gonna find this place where I'm gonna look at a phone that bends But it was great. It was you can't beat eating some meat and cheese in your hotel room at 1130 writing embargoes. Glamorous job we do. It really is. It really is. It did seem like watching from afar, not only kind of an unusually newsy show, but an unusually cool show in the sense that there was like not just kind of the giant slew of all the phones that are kind of the same as the other phones that MWC falls into every once in a while.

6:10where it's just like every company shows you their version of the same phone that everybody else is making. And there's 60 ,000 of them. And that's MWC. This year, it felt like there were some big, weird swings in a way that I don't remember seeing in a while. Did it feel like that on the ground? Like, was it cooler and more exciting than maybe some of these we've had in recent years? That was my impression. It was kind of a lot of running around to see like weird little things. Like the Samsung Galaxy ring was kind of out on display for the first time. So we got to go see that. The humane AI pin was kind of an unannounced guest appearance.

6:48So we got to see that in action. I think the Deutsche Telekom booth, which in the US is like T-Mobile. It's a very like T-Mobile vibe of like everything was magenta. There were like blinking lights and stadium seating and kind of like carnival-ish. I was like, wow, this is really wild. We saw some cool stuff. Yeah. I made a list of kind of the coolest gadgets that I read about you guys seeing. And I just want to sort of run down your experiences with a bunch of them. And it seems to me that if you were going to pick one that was kind of like the star of the show that everybody was talking about, it feels to me like it's Lenovo's transparent laptop.

7:30Do you think that's right? Is that the great answer. I love Lenovo's transparent laptop. I can't articulate what I would ever use it for. It filled me with joy hearing Lenovo themselves trying to articulate what you would use it for. But then that feels like a kind of part of the process with unveiling a concept laptop like that. You show this thing off to the world and a bunch of people see it and a lot of people go, I don't know really what this achieves. But then maybe like one person right in the back raises their hand and goes like, what about? And then you can take it back to your lab and kind of like optimize it for that kind of like idea that just came up.

8:04I will say Lenovo's big idea for this laptop, which if you haven't seen, firstly, go see it. It's a transparent micro LED display gets as bright as like a thousand nits, but it doesn't have a kind of a contrast layer. So that thing is just transparent in a way that you can't control when all the pixels are lit up, like when it's bright white. So if you say had like a notepad open or something, you can't see through that but kind of other than making the whole screen white you kind of don't have don't have control over this thing so it doesn't have like the there's that lg tv at ces that could sort of roll up the thing behind it so that it would have something to to contrast against this doesn't have that it is just see-through all the way it doesn't have that uh a thing lenovo told me when i asked was like oh yeah we'll definitely try and include something like that if we this were over to make it to to production but their idea for why you might want this was they kind of had this artistic idea for it that oh maybe you're an artist and you're sitting there and you're sketching and you can see things behind it so maybe you put some sunflowers behind behind the screen and then you're then which then brings me onto the lower half of the tablet which is this kind of drawing tablet where when you bring a stylus close to it the keyboard the illuminated keyboard disappears and suddenly it's kind of like a Wacom surface type thing and then you can kind of sketch what's behind the laptop which i think would make sense if this thing was the size of a tv like lenovo's thing but when you're talking about i forget exactly how big the screen is i think it's maybe like 14 15 inches you can just look around it like i don't know anyone out there that's like oh are the unknowable joys of what could be behind my laptop so mike my theory for who would buy this thing if it did ever make it into production and like to be clear They're not making any promises about being introduced.

9:50They were kind of confident that the technology would maybe appear in a future product. But my guess would be that this would be a thing for kind of really high-end front desks in like banks to buy. And like the kind of place you walk into, and maybe nowadays they have an iMac because they want to project that air of high-tech sophistication. And maybe in the future they go, hey, check it out. We all look like we're in Minority Report. Don't you want to, you know, spend a bunch of money at this business? because it's a real, it's like a, it's a showy thing, but I don't know like where the practical element of, of this thing comes in.

10:26But I hope that like, I hope it started the conversation the way they hoped. And I hope that someone at the back is kind of now thinking, Ooh, actually, I have this perfect use case for the, for a transparent laptop display. Yeah. I appreciate that with the whole transparent display technology happening right now, Nobody knows what to do with it except to put it in fancy waiting rooms, which is so funny. And it's like the LG TV, they were like, it could be a virtual fish tank at your dentist's office. And it's like, all right, like, sure, I'm down. Let's do it. I have no issue with that. I also will never, ever buy one for my house.

10:59But I'm just honestly glad that anyone is doing weird laptops. The world is better when there are weird laptops. And I appreciate Lenovo for not just making ThinkPads, but for also making weird laptops. We should also point out that their very sensible business laptops are probably actually the more impactful announcement from the show because they've kind of done a bunch of work with iFixit to kind of make these things more repairable. So I went through this cool demonstration with a couple of iFixit guys who were kind of like pointing out all the kind of like the little things they've done. So I think for starters, loads of components can be removed with just a Phillips head screw.

11:35and then they've got little icons kind of printed into the shatty to kind of go okay if you wanted to remove the battery you want to remove these three screws and then they've got little qr codes in there that you can scan and it takes you to a page on lenovo's website where it shows you a what part you need and b a little like video showing you how to how to replace this thing and like that's it's like the transparent laptop kind of gets you in lenovo's door and then when they're there they're like okay but this is the less less attention grabby sure uh thing that's actually going to have like a huge impact on like the thousands and thousands of businesses that buy those ThinkPad laptops.

12:08No, I remember years ago, somebody, I think it was at Lenovo, told me that they make really cool colored laptops to bring you over to the shelf so that you'll buy their black laptop. And I have thought about that ever since that they're like, everybody loves this like rad orange thing that we made and absolutely nobody buys it, but it is literally marketing for our other colors. It's just like, you know what? If that's what we do with this new stuff, I can live with that for a while. Allison, speaking of truly insane things that will probably never come to a real product, but I love to pieces anyway.

12:41You saw a thing that I believe you have named Bendy the Bendy phone. Yeah, Bendy phone. Tell us about this. It's a phone that bends. No, this was a similar thing. Motorola, you know, owned by Lenovo. Oh yeah, we're just doing a whole Lenovo thing here. I didn't even mean to do that. Yeah, that's all we saw. at the show. It was Motorola phones. No, they have this, it's a concept phone. So similar, they're just kind of like, we're trying this out. It's just to see if we can do it. They showed it off, I think late last year or earlier this year, but it's an actual phone. They showed me it runs apps and all that stuff, but it just bends backwards.

13:20You sort of get to that point of like, okay, so why? And the couple of things they had worked out was like, there was a little metal bracelet you could put on and then it was the case that the that bendy phone was in would just kind of clamp onto it and then you have this like massive chunky bracelet or watch on your arm and it's like okay probably not though yeah I don't think I'm gonna wear that but like okay that's a thing you can do and then it sort of like it doesn't just kind of bend one way you can sort of like curve the top part of the screen a little more and they had it so it would kind of run a little launcher on like half of the screen just pretty much the way the flip razor phones like cover screen works so you get like little widgets and you can run a full app if you want but it's weird yeah it was just kind of a fun like you see it you're like oh I don't I don't know what is this but then i've come around to like it's a gadget like this is fun why why shouldn't we have fun i totally agree and then i think all the way in the other end of the like is this a thing spectrum you also saw the galaxy ring which you mentioned which i am totally fascinated by i am desperate to become a smart ring person but yeah the only one i have is the aura and it's just like a little big and i notice it too much on my hand and i don't love it but i am very excited about the galaxy ring and you got to try it which we had not before how did it go what'd you make of it.

14:48So as a disclaimer, I do not have an aura ring. I'm not super familiar with the category, but I was allowed to put the galaxy ring on. It's surprisingly light, like the pictures of it. It looks kind of dense and you think, you know, there's like a battery and a bunch of sensors in there. It might be kind of heavy, but it wasn't. It has kind of like this concave shape on the outside. So it sort of like takes up less space on your finger than you think it's going to. And just the overall concept is like, you know, not everybody wants a smartwatch or can really wear a smartwatch. Maybe you don't want like notifications buzzing on your arm all day, but you want some kind of fitness tracking or wellness tracking kind of deal.

15:34And that's where this will come in. And I think that's a pretty compelling pitch. I agree. John, are you a smart ring guy? I'm not a smart ring guy. So I wasn't able to actually hold the ring, but I did peer at it through a Perspex box at Samsung's booth. And that thing looks so slim and svelte. So I'm really tempted by it. But I'm also kind of really in the Garmin health tracking ecosystem. And so the thing I want out of smart rings at the moment is basically for them to kind of be a little bit more commoditized and kind of work across different ecosystems. I believe there's one quote that kind of suggested that maybe the Galaxy Ring would work exclusively with Android phones to start and that they're kind of hoping to support iPhones down the line.

16:17And that feels like that could be the tricky thing to get over initially, that if this thing is going to be a, hey, you're in Samsung's ecosystem or you're in the Android ecosystem, that it works with all that stuff. But there's a wall between that and the kind of like the broader wearables market. Yeah, that is very fair. Speaking of wearables, actually, I think there were two kind of big name watches that dropped at the show, right? Was it the Xiaomi one and the OnePlus watch? Were there any other big watches that people were talking about? I just saw those two. I think that was it. The Xiaomi is super cool because you can take the bezel off and like they have different ones you can interchange it with.

16:55Like instead of just changing your strap out to make it look different, you can actually change the bezel a lot. That's cool. I'm into that. Yeah. Like hypothetically, maybe you got a Garmin watch as a gift and it's in this kind of fetching turquoise color and you can change the strap, but you can't change the bezel around the screen. So it'll never quite look right. So you're just kind of stuck with turquoise. Hypothetically, if you're in that situation, the Xiaomi Watch S3 could be exactly what you need. So Xiaomi actually had two watches. they had the watch s3 which is their kind of like lower end watch and then they had the xiaomi watch 2 which is their kind of slightly higher end uh wear os watch we didn't really get like get too much of a chance to play around with those but certainly from like an industrial design perspective they look they look pretty cool like a lot of xiaomi stuff really the i think allison got a chance to try out the xiaomi 14 and just that's a very nice looking phone it is yeah tell me about it, Allison.

17:49Yeah. Into the straight edge phones these days. And the Xiaomi 14 has embraced, you know, they're on the right side of history with the no curves, the straight edges. No, it's just very nice. And we got to see the 14 Ultra. That's the one with the like one inch camera sensor and all the stuff and the vegan leather back, which I also like. That's the one that has the round camera bump, right? Yes. I love a round camera bump. Yeah, yeah. It's like, we're not trying to hide this thing. It is right here. This is a camera with a phone attached, basically. So I've used the Xiaomi 14 a little bit, but 14 Ultra wasn't quite available yet to us.

18:31And I really want to get my hands on that one. It looks awesome. You have a pull quote in the story you wrote about it that just says, I witnessed the aperture moving, which is such an ominous thing to say, but it's also like, it means it's a camera. That's so exciting. Yeah. That's their thing this year is that it has a variable aperture that actually, like every smartphone camera basically has a fixed aperture. This one, the aperture can get bigger and smaller, just like a dedicated camera lens. Is that a good idea? I don't know. I don't think It's actually that practical. I kind of put it in the category of like Sony Xperia phones that had like a actual continuous zoom between two focal lengths.

19:15And it was like very small. And you're like, I don't know quite what the point of this is, but you did it. It works. You did do it. You can't argue with that. I did. John, you got to see nothing's new phone, right? at what seemed like one of the more bizarre showings of any kind of gadget that we had at MWC this year? Yeah, this phone is ostensibly being launched on March the 5th, but nothing is at the point in its hype cycle where it's just posting full-on unboxings on its YouTube channel. And we kind of, we know the processor, it's a MediaTek Dynasty 7200 Pro, I think. And then we We kind of went along to this event in the evening.

19:57So of course nothing like the MWC show floor is so stuffy. It's just that's for like Deutsche Telekom and Qualcomm, you know, nothing doesn't play by their rules. So nothing instead has this kind of evening event where we show up and like everyone's kind of like milling around and there were just these like 2001 style monoliths just kind of like dotted around. And I just like catch Alison's eye and I'm like, I'm betting you there's a phone 2A inside that monolith. so we just kind of spend the rest of the evening just like standing by one of these things and of course then nothing stand up on stage and they go oh you know thank you so much for coming everyone this is our it's going to be our third smartphone we're so so excited to reveal it to the world and and then suddenly like all of these monoliths that the the sheath gets taken off and it's oh look it's a perspex box with a nothing phone 2a in it and oh it's the flashing gifs oh so we got uh we okay i don't know like how much inside baseball you want here david very keep going Okay, cool.

20:53So, Alison and I gameplant this. We were like, we're going to stand by where we think the phone is going to be revealed. I will have my camera. You will have your iPhone 15. I will snap the photo as quickly as I can, and I will hand you the SD card. You will quickly put the SD card into your USB-C adapter, put that in the phone, get that uploaded on the verge, and then rather than tweeting it or putting it on threads or whatever, we'll have the images on the verge super quickly. and then of course just way over-engineered this entire situation it all fell apart it's so quickly and the iphone sucked up the raw file well first off like alison opens up my sd card and is like why do you have so many pictures of keyboards in here john are you having to scroll through it was 1 000 pictures of keyboards and then right at the bottom we had the nothing phone 2a shots and then she kind of copies them over and we upload them into our cms chorus i had to log back into chorus it logged me out of course and then of course it's like we can't we can't take a raw file we're sorry and so just the whole it was not nearly as quick or seamless yeah this was in the category of you know luxurious trip to overseas countries where i'm like literally standing under a plant like there was a big plant like right and i had my laptop out at this fancy restaurant and i'm like opening i mean camera raw like retouch some photos and upload them with chorus and i'm like this is, I just don't know how to explain this to any normal person.

22:23Yeah, waiters and waitresses kept on coming by and like leaning because we were on the kind of maitre d table and they were trying to get like cutlery out of this. And then of course, friend of the vote, Sam Byford, just like shows us his phone. He's just like, you should have just taken on your smartphone. Smartphone cameras are real good. He was just watching us, like not saying I told you so, but it was like all over his face. If you're listening to this and you're wondering if you should get into tech journalism, the answer is yes, but also that is what all of your days will look like. It just is what it is.

22:50All right, we're going to take a quick break and then more MWC talk. We'll be right back.

23:00Support for this show comes from LinkedIn. When you're a small business owner, your business is on your mind 24-7. So when you're hiring, you need a partner that works just as hard as you do. That hiring partner is LinkedIn Jobs. When you clock out, LinkedIn clocks in. LinkedIn makes it easy to post your job for free, share it with your network, and get qualified candidates that you can manage all in one place. LinkedIn's new features can help you write job descriptions and then quickly get your job in front of the right people with deep candidate insights. Either post your job for free or pay to promote.

23:34Promoted jobs get three times more qualified applicants. At the end of the day, the most important thing to your small business is the quality of candidates. And with LinkedIn, you can feel confident that you're getting the best. Based on LinkedIn data, 72 % of SMBs using LinkedIn say that it helps them find high-quality candidates. Find out why more than 2.5 million small businesses use LinkedIn for hiring today. Find your next great hire on LinkedIn. Post your job for free at linkedin.com slash track. That's linkedin.com slash track to post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply. Support for this show comes from LinkedIn.

24:13When you're a small business owner, your business is on your mind 24-7. So when you're hiring, you need a partner that works just as hard as you do. That hiring partner is LinkedIn Jobs. When you clock out, LinkedIn clocks in. LinkedIn makes it easy to post your job for free, share it with your network, and get qualified candidates that you can manage all in one place. LinkedIn's new features can help you write job descriptions and then quickly get your job in front of the right people with deep candidate insights. Either post your job for free or pay to promote. Promoted jobs get three times more qualified applicants.

24:48At the end of the day, the most important thing to your small business is the quality of candidates. And with LinkedIn, you can feel confident that you're getting the best. Based on LinkedIn data, 72 % of SMBs using LinkedIn say that it helps them find high-quality candidates. Find out why more than two and a half million small businesses use LinkedIn for hiring today. Find your next great hire on LinkedIn. Post your job for free at linkedin.com slash track. That's linkedin.com slash track to post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply. Support for this show comes from Figma. Figma is the collaborative design platform where teams come together to turn ideas into the world's best digital apps, websites, and experiences.

25:34And now there's a faster way to bring those ideas to life. Introducing Figma Make, an AI-powered prompt-to-code tool that helps you turn ideas into something real, fast. Figma Make is a different kind of vibe coding tool. With just a few prompts, you can turn any idea into a code-backed prototype or app that anyone can explore, iterate on, and share. And it's all connected to Figma, so you can start from scratch or from your design file. Figma Make is made for designers, product managers, and builders who want to move fast and explore more ideas. Try it now and see how quickly you can make your ideas real with Figma Make.

26:11Just go to Figma.com slash Vergecast. That's F-I-G-M-A dot com slash Vergecast.

26:24All right, we're back with Allison and John. So the last thing I had on my like cool things you guys saw list is also kind of the big picture thing that I feel like was happening at MWC, which is basically what is a phone if it's not just a collection of apps that Google or Apple runs? And John, you wrote about this going in as kind of what you were thinking about entering into the show. And I think it really proved out, right, that the idea is what is sort of the post app smartphone look like. And Allison, you got a demo, I think, of a phone or an app, or I don't even know what to call it, from a company called Brain AI that is doing something along these lines, right?

27:03I still, I have trouble explaining what this thing is to people, but you've now seen it. Can you explain what this thing is? Yeah. So they're kind of billing it as an appless phone. And the spoiler alert is that the phone has apps. It's like a regular phone. But this company, Brain AI, is launching it. We're planning to launch it with Deutsche Telekom, aka T-Mobile. And it's right now what it is, is it's sort of like you have the normal OS and then there's this like almost like digital assistant where you can launch a page. And it's it looks a little bit like a chat GPT kind of text box where you're like, tell me about this.

27:41But the idea is you you ask for things, you want to book a flight, you want to look for a gift or something. You kind of type it in and it starts building this interface around whatever you're asking for. So you're not going directly into like a travel booking app. You just sort of like ask it to become a travel booking app and it builds it around you. But instead of just doing text for everything, it'll actually try and like redo the interface for whatever you're trying to do. Yeah. They say they've trained this AI on interfaces. It's not like a large language model. It's sort of like, here's how you present information so someone can do something with it.