Pixel 11 and Pixel Watch 5: Our first impressions | The Vergecast Livestream

12:14Nilay Patel:Yeah. Even Google, even this color is kind of a muted army.

12:17Victoria Song:Yeah, it's a very muted green. But, you know, like I like that there's options. You can have the aggressively pink phone or you could have the muted green phone. They're both beautiful colors. Wonderful, wonderful palette this year. It was really funny because when we were at the content capture for the regular 11 phone, I had a Google guy run up to me. He's like, if you put the case on, it'll lie flat on the table. And he's like, put the case on. So I put the case on. He's like, doesn't it lie flat? Do it on both sides. Does it lie flat?

12:47Nilay Patel:This is because there's a viral video of somebody cutting the camera bump off a Z Fold 8 with a razor.

12:52Victoria Song:Yeah.

12:52Nilay Patel:They're just letting you know that you can spend more money to make the phone lie flat.

12:55Victoria Song:Yeah. Basically.

12:57Nilay Patel:It's good.

12:57Victoria Song:And it was like, look, it's flat. And I was like, he was so excited. And I was like, uh-huh.

13:03Nilay Patel:You know what's not true about this phone, though? And it's expensive. I think the Fold is, what,$1 ,900?

13:09Victoria Song:Yeah, I think it's about$1 ,200.

13:12Nilay Patel:We're in the time of no creases, right? Samsung really got that crease to go away. All the rumors are Apple's going to get that crease to go away. This is one of the creasiest crease phones in quite a while. And I think it's because of the durability. Google's really very proud of how durable this is. You can't crack it, all this stuff. And I think there's at least one hardware compromise here. It's funny because$1 ,900 is not cheap. It's not like the Z Fold Ultra is$2 ,100. I think I can see$300 here.

13:43Victoria Song:Yeah, no, I went home and I was like, I finally got my hands on a foldable because Allison is out until next week. And my husband went and he went like, oh, yoink, opened it. And he's like, there's a crease. Yoink. Passed it back to me. So I was like, okay, well, I'm still having fun. So, yeah.

14:02David Pierce:So I think we can dispense with the specs of this phone fairly quickly. But I do think there's one thing that, Neelai, as the resident display enthusiast, I have a genuine question. which is that one of the big upgrades on the Pro is that it has a brighter screen that this time, instead of being 3 ,300 nits of max brightness, is 3 ,600 nits of max brightness. I mean this absolutely sincerely. Does that matter? Is that a real upgrade that you will notice?

14:34Nilay Patel:It is hard to say without trying to get it to hit peak brightness in sunlight for more than five minutes. because what they all they can all hit their peak brightness and then they get hot and then they

14:45David Pierce:throw and like we've all had this experience famously half yeah uh so who knows i i like it

14:53Nilay Patel:everybody wants more searing hdr content when they're watching a movie on a plane as christopher nolan intended on the back of their phone uh but it the real question is the point of that peak brightness is not hdr content it's sunlight viewing and sometimes these phones can hit it and they pull back pretty aggressively and we just have to find out okay okay but it's great if they can do it i mean they're also claiming vastly improved battery life these are ideas that are

15:22David Pierce:in total tension with one another right yeah i mean there's a lot here that is google trying to convince buyers and users that raw specs don't matter because what they've done is actually make things more efficient, right? That Night Sight will run faster. They're not saying we have some shocking new low light camera technology. They're just saying we can do this thing more quickly. Now they're saying the thing is more efficient, which in theory should be good for battery life. It should mean it doesn't run as hot. There are a lot of upsides and downsides to Google's spec race here. But the thing we have to talk about, which I cannot believe we have to talk about before we get to the software, is the temperature sensor, which is gone.

16:06David Pierce:And I think the temperature sensor to me is like, I honestly could not have told you why it existed, but it turns out that in the, what, couple of hours now since these phones have gotten lunch, there has been an internet-wide mourning of the temperature sensor. I want to talk in a minute about what it's been replaced by but v i think this this feature existed in theory to let you tell the temperature of things like this always struck me as a weird feature why are people worried about

16:36Victoria Song:this feature i don't know okay to be quite frank i feel like it came like sort of after the covet era where you know you might want to take the temperature of things i vaguely remember testing it and being like, sure. Okay.

16:52Nilay Patel:Wait, refresh me. This is an ambient temperature sensor or like a point and click infrared temperature. As I understand it, it was a point

17:01David Pierce:and search temperature gauge that you could take the temperature of a thing by pointing the sensor at it. Oh, sure.

17:06Nilay Patel:Like every single person who's like, I'm making a brisket on my trigger grill is like pointing the thing. I get it. I understand these people. You're my people. I love taking the temperature of things. What are you talking about? I ruled. Instead, I got a notification light. Get out of here.

17:20David Pierce:Okay. So this is the problem. They replaced it. There have been rumors about the Pixel for some time. This, again, in Google's infinite wisdom, it loves to just launch its own phones months before it launches its own phone. This thing has been leaked to death. And there was this feature. I think people were calling it Pixel Glow or the Glow Bar or something. There was this idea that there was going to be some cool new light feature. What it actually is, is a feature called Highlight, H-I-L-I-G-H-T. Hate that. It's a light that says hi. No, thank you. But anyway, what this thing is, is it's a little light on the back on the camera bar that does precisely two things.

18:00David Pierce:It glows when you're talking to Gemini, and it will glow when you get calls, phone calls only from favorite contacts. that is that is the least interesting feature you could possibly launch in this space kind of cute

18:18Victoria Song:i think it's cute uh i i don't really see the point of it lighting up while you're talking to gemini because it's like i i feel like we're trying or at least some people are trying not to advertise that they're using ai as much or whatever unless you like to have a robot book

18:37David Pierce:club to that point actually i think i think you just answered your own question which is that the the whole idea here is that you can do this stuff with your phone facing down and i think you are going to get a lot of people who want the tiniest little indication that gemini is working yeah without actually having to look at their phone and talk to ai this is the same exact concept

18:54Nilay Patel:is any echo dot any sonos speaker with a voice light like the home pod right the phone's upside down your table you say hey big g i'm trying to be polite to our audience hey big g and then it boops at you and now you're talking to your robot girlfriend yeah right aaron roger is going to talk to his wife but it's trying to be there's a conspiracy theory that i'm hinting at here that i want everyone to latch on to i won't ever understand what i just said but right this is the idea that we're going to have a screen free future and there's a class of devices that are totally natural language operated and maybe your phone can be that if you just replace the extraordinarily useful temperature sensor with a little light.

19:36Nilay Patel:And now you're going to have that thing. And it's going to be, I guarantee you the, put all of your meeting notes in the notebook LM happen in some way with this. Yes.

19:45David Pierce:Yes. The idea of being able to do things with your phone down and get some bit of information without looking at your phone. These are all good things, right? V, this is the stuff everybody's doing in wearables, right? How do we give you this like little bit of ambient information about what's going on without making you look at a screen or pull out your phone or do whatever. Even if this was just a light that there was a settings menu for that you could be like, make it this color when this happens, make it this color when this happens, make it blink Morse code at me. Like you and Google sort of intimated to David that it's planning to do these things.

20:17David Pierce:But right now it basically does none of them. And this is just a useless feature in my, like what a weird, incredible miss from Google on this to me.

20:26Victoria Song:I don't know if it's a miss. I just even if all you did was have like it light up when a certain contact comes, I think I find that kind of useful. I keep my phone face down all the time anyway. But like if I know that a certain special person is calling that I've allowed, I will pick up the phone. Otherwise, I don't. So I don't know. I find it kind of useful. Maybe I'm in the minority, but why are we measuring things?

20:50David Pierce:What is what is it? Anything? Well, sure.

20:54Victoria Song:Like I just find that infinitely more useful.

20:56Nilay Patel:I'm going to get you a cheap temperature gun and you're going to, your whole life is going to change.

21:00Victoria Song:I have a temperature gun and it's just like, oh, 98.6, just what I expected for a human.

21:07Nilay Patel:I'm just saying. We live different lives. I live more of a data-oriented life. And that's what it does.

21:13David Pierce:Was your experience of getting a temperature gun like my experience of getting a label maker where it's a real, like, once you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail situation? Yeah, that's right.

21:21Nilay Patel:You're like, how much, what are these children? Oh, they're a little bit under. Like, it's fine. It's good.

21:28David Pierce:diagnosing strangers children at the park that's not weird you don't walk around the park with a

21:33Nilay Patel:higher type gun so there we saw the comments like you can get the 20 gun off amazon yes that's what i have and i i patrol my local playgrounds good lord i'm just saying here okay i want to get to the camera it's very important to me the one thing i'll say about the light and the flipping the phone over and the whole point of flipping your phone over in social situations is to indicate to communicate to everyone around you that you're not paying attention to this thing because otherwise you just keep it in your pocket yes right but if you're like me and you just carry your phone you're looking all the time i'm actively gonna not look at it is a thing you communicate by by putting it face down putting a light on the back that has your robot wife on it is the opposite of that right it's now the phone can interrupt you and you can interact with it even though it's upside down the table i'm not saying that's good or bad i'm saying it is a change to the etiquette of putting your phone face down on the table.

22:26Nilay Patel:And I'm very curious how that plays out with this device in particular, given how much every AI company wants you to record everything all the time. And that is the point of this light in like a very important and meaningful way is to make sure the AI is present, even though you've done the thing that says your phone is not present.

22:46David Pierce:Yeah, and Google is at the forefront of we want you to record everything all the time, right? Like the pixel recorder gets ever better. Gemini notebook is very much an incredible input machine that is going to want all of this stuff. Like the everybody is doing AI notes thing. Like, good Lord, is that coming for Google Meet at some point? Like Google is going to do this kind of thing. And I think I think you're right at it. But let's talk about the camera. This is fundamentally the thing. The specs are slightly different on the phones. But the big new stuff here is all about the hardware. And in fact, Google is shoving a bunch of new stuff into the camera app specifically, not doing stuff in Google Photos, not putting stuff sort of at the end of the imaging pipeline, like actually changing the way that you are supposed to use and interact with your camera.

23:33David Pierce:And, uh, Neelai, can you just explain what camera looks is? We, we on this show spent, I don't know, 30 to 40 hours talking about the, the photography styles on the iPhone when that launched, this is like that only much more so. Yeah. And I'm very curious how you're thinking about it, but can you explain like what this actually is first? Yeah.

23:57Nilay Patel:Camera looks is a way of altering the imaging pipeline on the pixel itself at the sensor level to basically compete with what Fuji does with film looks on their point and shoots. It's their recipes for HDR to make them look like, I think there's one called Digicam. There's another one called Vanilla, which I think is just a very funny name for a photo look. And you are altering how the camera itself captures light, captures information, does the HDR merge, thinks about sharpening to get drastically different looks off the sensor. I would compare that to Apple, which runs their whole photo pipeline the same way every single time and then lets you sort of adjust how the software cooks all that sensor data at the end.

24:42Nilay Patel:There's two approaches. I really recommend reading David's interview with Isaac Reynolds, who runs Pixel Camera. We've been talking to Isaac for years. He's very sharp about this stuff. And there's some stuff I want to call out from the piece. But I would just say Apple's approach lets you do non-destructive editing. So you take the photo and you can re-edit that photo all kinds of ways and however you want, you can make a mistake. It appears the pixel way is like a runtime decision, right? You're going to take the photo and that's what you're going to get because you're not capturing all the frames of HDR.

25:12Nilay Patel:I think this is one of the smartest moves Google could make with its camera at this time. Really? Yeah. And there's a few reasons for that. One, Apple and Samsung are the volume players and they both have a pretty basic problem, which is they can never get a photo wrong right if you're the average customer of the average iphone and you are like family we're at the restaurant stand in front of this giant window on the way out to get the group shot you cannot underexpose the faces you cannot blow out the window you just got to get that right that same camera has to take a picture of like a receipt and not get it wrong that same camera has to absolutely get the video of your kids singing at the recital.

25:58Nilay Patel:Like the camera can never get it wrong. And so they produce what we're really used to, which are these ultra averaged out, pretty clinical smartphone photos that are over HDR. And then there are some settings you can go in and screw with if you want, but they also really don't want you to make a mistake. So the settings are non-destructive and there's a limit to what you can do. Google doesn't have the volume problem, right? Like they don't have to ship a phone to 10 billion people that can never get a photo wrong. they know what they're doing like they know they're playing a much smaller market and so they've gone and said look we have the ability at hdr capture to not take as many frames to blow out the window to have 50 different looks right in the hdr and instead of picking the default that we'll always get it right we're gonna let you pick and maybe you got it wrong but that's an artistic choice that you've made and now that will attract people who want more control over their camera in ever more dramatic ways.

26:58Nilay Patel:And I just think back to the Pixel 2. The Pixel 2 had a look and people chased that look. Apple had to react to that look. It was contrasty. It was, they talked about Caravaggio, like they were talking about painters and they got away from that and they got to the same average that look is every other camera over time. And the last time I sat and did a really intense camera review with Allison over at last iPhone, my, the point I got to is all these phones are the same. It truly, you cannot tell these cameras apart anymore unless you have a sickness in your mind like I do. And like, but on a phone screen, they all look the same.

27:34Nilay Patel:And I think Google's saying, nope, we're going to be really different. We're going to let you take better photos. And when people on Instagram say, what camera is that? The answer will be the Google pixel out of the box, not I shot raw in halide on an iPhone and put it through Lightroom, which is my answer all the time. And I think that in terms of just differentiating this phone, saying, actually, there's a lot of different ways to do HDR. You can get a lot of different looks out of computational photography, and we're not going to pick the average, so we're always right. We're going to let you pick a literal artistic interpretation.

28:12Nilay Patel:Like, in the smartphone camera market right now, there are very few players doing that.

28:18David Pierce:The thing I love about this, too, is that Google is implementing this feature by just giving you a bunch of knobs and buttons. There's a great moment in David Amell's story where he's talking to Isaac Reynolds about this, and they land on, essentially, we are going to give people so many settings that it made Google uncomfortable. Seriously, he says it in the story very directly that he had to have an escalation meeting with PMs at Google because they were going to do something that is considered so anathema to software design now, which is you can't expose how things work. You can't give people choices.

28:51David Pierce:You have to just make a bunch of decisions on people's behalf and then sort of obfuscate the way that everything actually works. What they said is literally, we are just going to give you the controls. We are going to make it so that you can actually do all of the things or many of the things at least that you would do on a camera. And we're going to do it at the very beginning of the image process. I have no idea if people will use this. My sense is most people don't even use the photography styles on the iPhone, which are designed to be vastly more approachable. Like, I don't even think people use the camera control on the iPhone, for God's sake.

29:28David Pierce:It is hard to get people deep in these menus to do things. But just for Google to give you the option that if you are somebody who wants to, and a lot of this is being aimed at creators, particularly sort of small and new creators. And I'm going to talk about that approach in a second. but the idea that just you can if you want to is so nice and refreshing and rare at this moment in

29:51Nilay Patel:time that like i just love seeing that from the picture i'm guessing we mostly android users listening to the pixel live stream just a shot in the dark but if we have any iphone people a thing you can do with camera control to just get a taste of this is you can set it to control tone which is tone mapping right and tone mapping is are the highlights and shadows going to be the same or are they going to be really are we going to have more contrast basically and more complicated but that's what that's what it is and i have it set to that and i slide up and down on tone all the time because when i'm taking the big backlit photo you want tone to be 100 you want the everything to be exposed at the same level and when you want to take something more already set it down to like negative 50 or whatever it is to get more contrast back in the photo this is a wild amount of control over hdr compared to cameras smartphone cameras past but you can see if you use it enough the limits of it become totally clear to you right you're like i basically am just letting things blow out but and and that looks less like a robot took this photo it looks less like cgi than the normal iphone photo you see that with google and you're like oh i get it like in addition to giving people all these additional controls, you're going to let people make the photos look so much different from the beginning that maybe they will come back and pick the pixel again, which is a real problem for Google.

31:16Nilay Patel:And if all this run at creators, everybody wants to be a creator. We see it. It's in the data. Young people want to be YouTubers. Making a phone that out of the box is we're going to shoot clips. We're going to shoot great Instagram photos. We're going to auto edit the clips and put them in folder structures for you. All of that is, to me, actually compelling if what you want to do with your phone is use the camera. Right. In a way that, you know, Marques Brownlee runs around me like, if you want to start a YouTube channel, just start shooting on your phone. And then you're like, my camera roll is a disaster.

31:54Nilay Patel:My plans to be a YouTuber have come to an end because my camera roll is bad. And actually, the first step of being a video creator is considering file structures, right? Like, no. There's something here that I just think is very smart in terms of what people are actually doing with their cameras and how to make those cameras look like anything other than the most averaged out, ultra processed HDR photos that we see young people turning against at pretty rapid clips.

32:20David Pierce:Yeah. Fee, what do you make of all of this? I think about you in this context also as somebody who has spent a lot of time with smart glasses trying to figure out, like, is this the new camera that people want? Is this the camera that I'm going to start toting around with me? Do you look at things like camera looks and these new tools as a big win for Pixel owners? That's a hard no. I don't know. I don't know.

32:45Victoria Song:You just choked. No, I didn't choke. It's just more like, you know, I've played around with it on the iPhone before and been like, OK, cool. But no, I'm just going to do it myself in post if I want a nice picture. I didn't get around to playing with it as much on these because I am the wearable lady. So I did focus more heavily on the Pixel Watch. But I do I do kind of take less photos on my iPhone than I used to in the past just because they do look very boring. And so, you know, I am looking forward to playing around with it a little bit more. I'm a little more interested in the creator suite that they kind of released.

33:25Victoria Song:Like, it's kind of like a thing of our job where having to remember what I'm going to say in a social video, sometimes I'm just like, sorry, sorry, guys, got to do another take. So the idea of having the teleprompter there, I was like, oh, that's useful. I might actually try doing that if I could think of it as a – like, I said it multiple times before. I've never really been into foldables except whenever I see Allison at one of these events just doing maximum productivity and blogging on these things. And so I'm so excited to try and be Allison later tonight with this. But also I was thinking like, oh, you know, if I had the expense for a work phone that did have creator tools and I only ever used it to film social video standups for The Verge, that would be useful because usually in my camera roll when I'm doing like the social videos, it's like 4000 takes of me going.

34:19Victoria Song:And I forgot what I was supposed to say because the script that I wrote is over there and you can see my eyes moving over to the script and I feel bad. They'll just cut that in post. But like it's, you know, I get it. And my like 11 year old cousin has told me that she wants to be a better version of what I do, like creating stuff on YouTube. She's like, I could be so much better than you.

34:43Nilay Patel:Look, the Google Pixel is a phone for every aspiring real estate influencer in America.

34:47Victoria Song:Yeah.

34:47Nilay Patel:Now's the time to take your walkthroughs to the next level.

34:51David Pierce:You say that like it's a joke, but that is a way bigger market than anyone thinks, it turns out. We should actually pivot and talk about the Pixel Watch and the Pixel Tag and the other stuff that's coming out. But first, we have to take a break. So here's an ad, then we'll be right back.

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39:16David Pierce:all right we're back v hi pixel watch 5 i was i was gonna say because you just talked about your video prowess i'm gonna i'm gonna play a video of v2v but that seems cruel so instead i just want you to explain what's up with the pixel watch 5 well not much in terms of hardware

39:34Victoria Song:you would be very forgiven for thinking this is the same thing as the pixel watch 4, but there is a lot of software updates this year.

39:43David Pierce:Wait, to that point, though, real quick on the hardware thing. Yeah. That seems fine, right? Like, I feel like the story of the Pixel Watch 4 is, like, this hardware is very good. I don't know that anyone came out of the Pixel Watch 4, like, furious about the way that it looked. I like the Pixel Watch quite a bit. Did we have big hardware dreams that didn't come true?

39:58Victoria Song:No. Well, I think some people want the Pixel Watch to have, like, sapphire glass to be more durable. you know the big thing last year hardware wise is that they made the pixel watch more repairable which you know chris welch god rest his soul because he's dead to us now um he cracked the first one uh we still have the mystery of how my pixel watch 2 got scratched up to hell and back the theory is it was pd my cat as a kitten did something to it even though he had baby cat teeth at the time. We don't know. They actually took the scratched up Pixel Watch 2 from my house to a lab to like discover what happened to it.

40:39Victoria Song:We don't know. It's still just detectives. Yeah. Yeah. Like detectives because they were like they didn't detect cat hair in the thing, but they were just like all we can tell is that there were abrasions. And I was like, I don't know how it happened. But you know, that hasn't happened since then. But it was a thing that a lot of people had issues with at the time. So, you know, they did the repairability last year. So, you know, hardware wise, you have a slightly faster Qualcomm chip in here. Cool. Like an itty-bitty little battery boost. Like we're talking 10 milliamp hours, depending on the size.

41:11Victoria Song:So nothing too crazy. There is a new pyrite, a satin pyrite finish. Cool.

41:19David Pierce:Sure. Those are words that I've heard before.

41:21Nilay Patel:None of this is making your heart race, is what I would say. Correct. And we know that For sure. It's very obvious to me how excited V is right now.

41:31Victoria Song:No, because I did bring up the heart rate on there all of a sudden. Yeah, no, so hardware-wise, you know, the Pixel Watch has finally reached a point where it's like, okay. And, you know, I would say that most smartwatches have reached a point where, like, we've hit kind of max smartwatch innovation in a lot of ways. like the hardware, unless they figure out a way to make things even tinier, you know, like the hardware is, here's a new sensor. Here's this. It's more efficient. So, like, right now, a lot of the hardware bumps in smartwatch land is, like, we figured out a way to cram more battery life in there.

42:07Nilay Patel:I mean, that's what everyone needs. Let me ask you this, though. Yeah. We've been talking about the whoops of the world for quite a while.

42:13Victoria Song:Yes, the screen lists.

42:14Nilay Patel:Obviously, Google just launched the Fitbit Air. the opportunity for the Pixel Watch, unlike the Pixel phones, is to go get the whole Android market, right? They work with all the Android phones.

42:25Victoria Song:Yes.

42:26Nilay Patel:At least that's what it says on the tin. So you could go much bigger and you could say, well, we have the Google Health platform, we have the Fitbit Air. If you don't want to wear the watch, you can wear the Fitbit. It's going to catch on our platform. There's a whole argument you could make, especially to the wider world of Android owners, why this ecosystem, this watch, this health fitness system is the one. And it doesn't feel like Google is making that argument.

42:52Victoria Song:I actually think they are.

42:53Nilay Patel:You think they are?

42:54Victoria Song:Yeah. Like, it's so, like, when we were talking about the phones earlier, about how, like, Google knows it has a niche phone audience and, like, you know, they're not catching up to Samsung. It's opposite in the wearable land. Okay. Because Samsung has been coasting in the wearable watch field for a very long time. Like, from the Galaxy Watch 6 to the Galaxy Watch 9, I was like, well, the biggest change that I can tell you off the top of my head is that they made some really wonky health metrics like i fooled a antioxidant sensor last year with a cheese it like that's what i was doing when i was testing

43:26David Pierce:these things that's the title of v's memoir yeah i pulled samsung's antioxidant sensor with a cheese

43:32Victoria Song:it that's my memoir uh and you know like the big thing last year was like it's a squircle now everything's a squircle yeah and then you look at the galaxy watch 9 it's sure is a watch that is Like last year's watch, very, very much kind of coasting. It's a good product, but it's just coasting for a long time. Whereas the Pixel watch, when you go from one where everyone was telling me, like, this will be dead in the air to the two, to the three, to the four. My review of the four last year, I said this is the Android watch to beat. And the five, yeah. Like, in terms of the health space, they are running circles around Samsung.

44:10Victoria Song:Like, it's pretty, like, crazy. Some of the health features that they are releasing with the five, I was just like, this is novel. Like, no one else is doing that. Can you talk through a couple of those?

44:25David Pierce:Actually, the three that you call out specifically are breathing emergency detection, which as far as I can tell, just calls emergency services if it detects you've stopped breathing, which seems good. I'm in favor. And then there's blood pressure trends and insulin resistance trends. And I'm particularly curious to hear more about the insulin resistance stuff, because this is a thing that is obviously of deep personal interest to you, as you've talked about on the site and on the show. So this is also a feature that is not like every smartwatch is getting into sort of similarly niche features.

44:57David Pierce:But this seems like a big one and a new one simultaneously for Google.

45:01Victoria Song:Yeah. So just like kind of going down the orders of things like no one else has a breathing emergency detection feature. And so what it is, is it's like detecting your SpO2 levels or your blood oxygen saturation. And if you go below around 83%, which if you're at 83 % blood oxygen saturation for an extended period of time, go to Hopital. Hopital now. Hopital now. That is a crisis. so you know it's not for people with sleep apnea the feature will turn off after it detects 30 minutes of sleep because smart watches are terrible uh if you're a side sleeper like the samsung watches would always say that like my sleep sleeping sp02 is like 82 which again hop it till hop it till now if that's your sp02 so you know they are mitigating for false positives there it's an extension of last year's loss of pulse feature which if it detects that you have no heartbeat, it will call emergency services.

45:57Victoria Song:So it's sort of like for an acute attack where maybe you're choking and you stop breathing, but your heart is still beating, it'll call emergency services or something like that. It's using a bunch of sensors and AI to like call for help. Not in the US. At launch, it's only going to be in Europe because they have to go through all these regulatory things. But it's like an interesting thing. That's not a feature that we've seen on other smartwatches yet. Google is the first to that, which is like, oh, you're the first to an advanced new health feature. Interesting. And then moving on to blood pressure trends, like speaking of WHOOP again, WHOOP got in trouble with the FDA last year because they're like, we have blood pressure trends too in beta.

46:37Victoria Song:We'll tell you like kind of an estimate of your systolic and diastolic and whether it's high or low. And the FDA was like, that's diagnostic. And WHOOP was like, no, that's a wellness trend. And they kind of got into it. The FDA tweaked the rules a little bit, and then everyone else was like, we also do blood pressure trends. Like Apple did hypertension notifications last year. Aura is like kind of poking around with sleep time blood pressure trends. It's like, OK, you're using a bunch of the optical sensors to measure pulse wave velocity in your fingies and your wrists. And cool, it's not going to give you an actual reading, but it'll tell you if your blood pressure is trending high or trending low.

47:21Victoria Song:And it's going to require a minimum of seven days of data. And then it only gives you that data once a month. So this is meant to be like a check engine light feature, not a diagnostic feature, which is like why for me, the insulin resistance trends thing is super interesting because like do that. but for insulin resistance. But typically, and like I had a 10 year journey trying to find out that I was insulin resistant. That was literally 10 years of going to doctors and them telling me, well, girl, I don't know what to tell you. If you have a hard time losing weight, try like eating less and exercising more.

47:56Victoria Song:And I was like, Jesus. It's an idea. Jesus Christ. Do I have to pull out my exported PDF files of my exercise data? Okay. So, you know, I went on this like pretty invasive journey. I got a lot of different blood draws. I was using CGMs, which I'm also got one in right now.

48:15Nilay Patel:The things you do for this job.

48:16Victoria Song:The things that I do for this job and for all of you, like y 'all don't understand. Like I have three smart scales that I weigh myself on every morning and make me feel terrible. So that's neither here nor there. But the insulin resistance stuff, it's non-invasive. Because usually when you're testing for insulin resistance, you have to get a blood draw. And it's not a typical metabolic panel. You have to get your fasting glucose and your fasting insulin. And then they do a little math equation and you get something called a HOMA-IR score. And then if you fall within a certain range, you're insulin resistant.

48:54Victoria Song:But that doesn't – we're getting really into the weeds here. But basically what this is doing is it's looking at your lifestyle trends. And they said because they have such a large data set, they're able to kind of tell whether your metabolic stress, which is what insulin resistance is, it's your body being unable to use and unable to use blood glucose effectively. So your pancreas has to work harder to create more insulin. So they're saying like, well, you know, based on certain factors, your lifestyle factors and the data that we're collecting passively over a minimum of a seven day period, we can tell you within a month whether your insulin resistance is trending high or low.

49:34Victoria Song:And I was like, show me the science. Where's the paper? Show me the science. They have it. It's published, peer reviewed in nature. the sensitivity and specificity, which is like whether you're going to get false positives or false negatives and is always inversely related. I looked at that and I was like, it's not like super high in the 90s numbers, but it's decent. I'm very curious to see how it'll work on me because I'm building a digital AI twin for my metabolism at the moment. I'm psycho, guys. I'm really psycho. I'm getting so much blood drawn.

50:06Nilay Patel:You're building a digital AI metabolism twin?

50:09Victoria Song:Yes. So they're going to be cool. They're not going to be cool, but it'll be able to like tell how I will personally personally react to certain.

50:18Nilay Patel:Can you give it a cheese?

50:20Victoria Song:Yeah, I can basically go like if I eat a cheese, it how is it going to affect my metabolism? And we can model it basically. Sure. It can help me taper off some of my medications. Hopefully.

50:31David Pierce:I see what you're saying. Yeah. My digital metabolism twin is such a good hang. You guys like you don't even know. Most twins are evil.

50:38Nilay Patel:Like, I don't know.

50:39Victoria Song:Oh, my God. No, my AI metabolism will not be cool. That is very true. But the whole point is, is that I'm so excited to test whether it says that I'm insulin resistant or not. One, because I'm on medications that mess around with my insulin sensitivity. Two, I am very insulin resistant. I have, it used to be called PCOS, now it's called PMOS, which is polyendocrine metabolic ovarian syndrome, which Fs up my metabolism and all of that. It's been a journey, guys. But the point is, is that a lot of people have insulin resistance. It is a precursor to type 2 diabetes. It can be invisible for years.

51:21Victoria Song:So getting this kind of detection, if it works, which is the big if it works, could be really helpful for people. Because like I said, I went on a 10-year journey to find out I'm insulin resistant. And it was a lot of poking with needles. And I'm not good with needles. Like, ironic considering my giant tattoos. But I'm not great with needles. I'm always like, please.

51:42Nilay Patel:I do feel like America 2026. Google has a big data set. They could just be like, most people are probably a little insulin resistant. And then it's like a short hop to, and Google Shopping is going to order you a GLP-1. You know, like the agents are going to do it. Like you see where this heads inexorably, given what we see all over the rest of the wellness space. As you cover, it's like Maha adjacent.

52:08Victoria Song:It's Maha adjacent. It's peptide adjacent. The Whoop is so peptide adjacent. That's right. Like there's a thing that every Google demo ends in a transaction.

52:17Nilay Patel:And I'm always like, where is the transaction going to come from?

52:20Victoria Song:This is kind of an interesting thing because Google also announced a partnership with Abbott to pull in their CGM data, which I was like, ah. Health tech right now is very focused on metabolism and tweaking metabolism and all the things that are happening there. But it's very hard to get any kind of data or insight non-invasively. So that's the thing that I'm very much like that's it's huge of true. It's huge of true. I'm curious to see what will result from the insulin resistance trends. Lord knows I am. Finally, finally, this is like a health detection check engine light feature that applies to me because they're doing sleep apnea and I sleep with almost no snoring.

53:12Victoria Song:So I'm useless test subjects.

53:13David Pierce:I can't do this for you.

53:14Victoria Song:I can't do this for you.

53:15David Pierce:I also think it is like everyone on earth who buys one of these should spend a long time staring at themselves, deciding whether they want to put their information into Google Health. Because I've been using a Fitbit Air for a while now, and that thing wants you to have such a specific and different kind of relationship with your ongoing health data that even if you are a person who is just like, I want very basic sleep and step tracking and, you know, screw the rest of this. you can't do that right like this thing wants all of this data about you and it wants to spit it all back at you and tell you a lot of things about yourself and give you a lot of recommendations and tell you all sorts of things all of the like this is not just a simple relationship anymore with technology and you should you should look at it carefully interesting

54:05Victoria Song:because um i was talking with rishi chandra and sandy borag who are kind of in charge of fitbit and the pixel wearable things. And it was like a really big philosophical debate about what a health experience is now because wearables are at a very weird inflection point. And on the health side, they are just cramming AI into every bit and corner that you can get into. And to your point, I spend a lot of time hand-holding the Google Health AI coach because you have to. Like, I lose my mind on a weekly basis. I actually went screenless during my two-week vacation prior to this week because I was like, I have so much data and AI health training fatigue.

54:51Victoria Song:It was driving me a little cuckoo. But everyone's going to have a different health journey and everyone's going to have different things that they're kind of zeroing into for their health trends. So you can go into the Google AI Health Coach and have a bad time. I went in because I have no concept of health data privacy thanks to this job, and I gave it everything. I was just like, here's everything. I'm going to handhold you through everything that I possibly want. I actually had a decent experience with it. Like, I've had a trash, garbage experience with every AI health coach, and I've tested every single one basically at this point.

55:30Nilay Patel:My whoop is often like, good job drinking all that bourbon. It's like, that's not right. That's not the right answer at all.

55:35Victoria Song:I mean, my smart bed told my spouse to drink every night. That's not relaxation.

55:39Nilay Patel:That's smart recovery.

55:40Victoria Song:It's like, sure it is. Sure.

55:42Nilay Patel:Yeah.

55:42Victoria Song:It's not great. And there are a lot of issues with the Google Health AI coach, which they acknowledged. It's very fixated on how my calves and shins are feeling because one time I mentioned I'm prone to shin splints. So it still has a lot of those issues. And, you know, I talked to other reviewers and some of them have been like, it's trash. And others have been like, it's super helpful. Which is really funny because, you know, we talk about personalized health. We talk about everyone having their own bespoke experience within these apps now. And that's all dependent on how much information you're willing to give it.

56:18Victoria Song:And I think if you are not willing to give it a lot, your mileage is not going to go very far. So it is a thing that you have to sit and think about what your goal is. What are you trying to solve? But if you do have a chronic illness and you're very well informed about your chronic illness, like I am, and a little bit the most annoying patient to ever exist for any doctor anywhere, you can do a lot with it. It's just it's a very steep learning curve at this point in time. Yeah. So that's my health spiel. But GPS, we should talk about the GPS.

56:54Nilay Patel:on this thing because shots were fired.

56:57Victoria Song:Shots were fired.

56:58Nilay Patel:Do them very quickly because we promised a half an hour we're over. We need to get out of here.

57:03Victoria Song:Basically, the shots fired is that they said that the GPS, which has historically been shitty on these watches, is now two times improved and will be better than the Garmin Fenix 8 and the Apple Watch Ultra 3. And I was like, wow, you guys are beautiful. That's shots fired because you do know.

57:19Nilay Patel:You're going to have to go on a long bike right now.

57:22David Pierce:You do, but also we're going to need to come back and do a whole thing about the GPS wars here because it turns out there is a whole like years long GPS battle among wearables that I was completely unaware of that everybody has incredibly strong feelings about. And we're going to have to get into that. But I think weirdly that is the piece of this review that I'm most excited to hear about from you is like, does it know where I am? Important question. So we do need to get out of here. But I'm curious before we go whether obviously all of this stuff is pending reviews. We need to test the cameras on the phones.

57:56David Pierce:We need to test the GPS. We need to see if the insulin resistance stuff works. Is there anything here that sort of screams huge immediate upgrade? People should run to buy this phone.

58:07Victoria Song:Absolutely not. All the a lot of these health features are coming to the Pixel Watch 3 and 4.

58:12David Pierce:So we've gotten a bunch of questions in the chat about, like, why wouldn't i go by last year's model or the year before and i don't i think the answer to that is go by last year's model or the year before for most of these things i mean what about you is

58:23Nilay Patel:there a shot that some of this stuff is meaningful i mean it's android and the pixel like will this version the pixel camera come be brought to the previous versions of the pixel i don't who's to say david but that's why i would buy the new one i would just maybe wait one turn to see what the community brings to you.

58:45David Pierce:I would say several years running last year's Pixel has been one of the best Android phones on the market and that may well still be the case. Especially when this year's Pixel

58:53Nilay Patel:is the same hardware.

58:55David Pierce:That's true. Judging by the fact that V is holding one of these, I suspect reviews of these are going to come soon. We'll be back on the show talking about all of these. When the reviews drop, V has Trevor Noah to go hang out with. Neelai has to, I don't know, go be fancy somewhere with fancy people. I have to go pick up my kid at preschool. So we all got to go get out of here. thank you to Travis our producer thank you to Eric and Denise for getting all this done thank you to everybody who made all this happen including fixing our audio problems thanks to all of you for watching and listening hanging in here with us this long we will see you back on the show regularly scheduled programming tomorrow Neelai take a stab rock and roll