Prime Video offers the best in entertainment. This should be fun. Jason Momoa and Dave Bautista... ...goan completely loose in the hilarious new action film The Wrecking Crew. Inbegrepen by Prime. Yeah, I'm pumped. Find the new Game of Thrones series A Night of the Seven Kingdoms. Based on the bestseller of George R.R. Martin. Look by being a member of HBO Max. So be brave, be just. So whatever you want to find, Prime Video. Here you look at everything. Abonnement is revised. Inputs can be found 18+. The general rules are of use. this is the daily tech news for wednesday february 25th 2026 we tell you what you need to know give you the important context and help each other understand today samsung announced new phones and jason howell has the scoop i'm tom merit and i'm sarah lane let's start with what you need to know with that big story. Samsung held its Galaxy Unpacked event, and yesterday, Jason Howell had a little bit of the scoop and gave us his first impressions. Ah, Jason, thanks for bringing us the scoop. Yeah, I love bringing the scoopage. Sometimes I show up with a scoop and peanut butter or maybe a tub of ice cream. This time I'm showing up with a scoop and Samsung News. Oh, a scoop full of Galaxy S26s, I hear. Give us the rundown on the updates here. Yeah, well, I mean, obviously, you know, Galaxy Unpacks, this is where all the new, you know, the flagships for the year, essentially, that aren't, that don't fold into two or three pieces, let's say. These are the non-foldable flagship phones. Yeah, exactly. These are the ones that you're going to see when you walk into a carrier store or whatever that carriers are going to try and get you to buy because they're expensive. So they've got the S26. Speaking of expensive, the S25, I think, came in at $799.99. It's like the entry point. This year, that goes up $100. So just the S26 is $100 more, $899.99. So let's just say $900. The S26 Plus is the second. That's still at $1,000. And then the S26 Ultra, which I believe is 1300 for some reason i don't have it written down here but um nonetheless you know there's a lot here that is just very similar to what you got if you got last year's phone or even the year before that and samsung even told us during an event ahead of this event that this isn't really intended for upgrades from like the galaxy s25 like great if you want to do that but This is really targeting people who have the S22 or the S23, and they're going to see a marked improvement in the capabilities, especially with the processor on board Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 for Galaxy, especially made for the Galaxy devices. And that's important because this is like year three of Samsung's leaning into AI integration on device. And they definitely feel strongly about that. Like, we've done all the baseline AI stuff. Now we're moving into the agentic world. And so I think that's a big story of what we're seeing here. So you wouldn't get the S25 if you're an S22 user because this is the latest and greatest chip and it's got the best integration. But it is interesting to hear Samsung say, if you're on the S25, though, maybe you're fine for a while. Anything else in this? It's interesting to see the base model price go up, but not the other two. implies that they had a little more wiggle room there. What other features or differences or anything that maybe surprised you about these? Well, you know, they're improving the kind of charging speeds. And so the baseline model gets 15 watt wireless, 20 watt for the mid, 25 watt for the ultra, which, I mean, it's an improvement, I suppose, but it's still, in my opinion, kind of a little slower than what we're seeing in competition. Sometimes Samsung does that with their flagship phones. They offer a lot, but they still always give themselves just a little bit of room for next time. The Ultra is, though, I think the more expensive, obviously the more expensive, more exciting. I'm always looking forward to the Ultra because that really seems to be where Samsung is kind of pushing things. They say this is their slimmest and lightest ultra yet. Yes, it still has the S Pen. So people who are worried that maybe that was going to go away, that's been the worry the last couple of years. It's still there. All three devices, this is interesting, have ProScaler, which is their TV upscaling technology into the displays. Sorry, not all their devices. That's the ultra and the plus, not the regular. So they're taking some of the technology that they've been doing in TVs for their upscaling, bringing them into the phones. So that's kind of an interesting overlap there. Camera systems on the regular and the Plus. That was going to be my next question is the cameras. Of course. Because that's always something, yeah, yeah. It's always super important. I think that Samsung does a really great job with their cameras on their flagships. They're some of my favorite. Almost as good, in my opinion, as Pixel, but I think Pixel edges it out. But the Ultra has a 200 megapixel f1 to 4, 1.4 aperture. They're saying 47% more light. And I got to test that out a little bit in some really low light scenarios that, of course, were curated at the event that I went to. But still, it was interesting that they are improving the low light performance, not just on the main lens. They're scaling it across all of their lenses. So even when you're like recording in video and you happen to be on one lens and then you switch in the middle of the recording to another lens, it's going to dynamically on the fly kind of balance the color temperatures and really kind of, you know, improve that low light imagery that you're getting through all of the lenses equally. And so that's going to look really good. And I tested it out in person. It does look really good. Any other significant hardware stuff before we move into the Galaxy AI part of the announcement? I know that that could easily be the dominant. You know, as far as the Ultra 3X optical as well as a 5X periscope. So you're getting two different ways to do like an optical zoom on there. That's pretty neat. They've got a redesigned vapor chamber. They're really going as they do with the Ultra, you know, designing this thing to be the best of the best for the power user or the gamer, that sort of thing. But yeah, nightography, ocean mode. So if you're taking these in the ocean, maybe you don't want to dive into the ocean. It was funny. They were showing this off oceanography mode and it required this massive case that no one would ever just like walk around. You do need to put it into the right kind of case. But what they were showing is not that it can survive the water deep down in the depths of the ocean, but that it can take the color information and the light information that it's finding down there and use the processing on the device to turn it into a really rich, saturated, beautiful image. And what I saw, what they showed off there anyways, was really impressive. Another feature with the camera that I thought was cool, 4K auto framing. So that's based on an 8K sensor in real time. And so it basically allows you to do all these gimbal-like kind of movements and framing and stuff. It really kind of spooces. See, 8K is good for something. There we go. Yes, exactly. 8K is good for getting 4K quality and stabilizing and that sort of stuff. Yeah, giving you flexibility. There we go. It might not be the end game. necessarily. Yeah. All right. Let's talk a little bit about the software updates. Honestly, these are usually my least favorite parts of announcements and they are the ones that companies tend to try to spend the most time on. But is there anything that stood out to you in these Galaxy AI features or any of the other camera processing software oriented stuff? I think what stood out to me immediately as I was looking at some of these features, which we can talk about is how they really seem to be checking the boxes of what what the pixel already has it's kind of like here's samsung's version of that uh you know they've got photo assist which is like conversational editing inside of the gallery so you can use natural language prompts to edit your pictures in your gallery direct in the gallery so it like oh here a picture of me put me in san francisco it does it uh creative studio which is just image creation Again natural language editing creating sticker sets blah blah blah It showed off a document scanner, which is kind of boring right on its surface. It's integrated into the camera app. It's just like it recognizes if there's a sheet or something that you're pointing your camera app at. That's nifty, though, because I have plenty of document scanners, but I have to open them. It's kind of nice to have it just there in the camera. I totally agree. Actually, while I was there and playing around with it, it reminded me of the document scanner that's integrated into Drive, at least on my Pixel. And I've felt, because I've used it so much in the last year, that it's one of the unders, like the unsung heroes of Pixel software is that document scanning integration because it's just so dang easy to use. And I use Dropboxes for the same reason, because it's just right there. They've come so far, Tom. And we've been dealing with this stuff for years and now they're finally at this place where they they do really cool magical things right like as far as this one is concerned it will detect if you have like if you're using your fingers to hold down the remote it will remove your finger from the from the final receipt nice it'll smooth it out wrinkles stuff like that so okay is it necessary no but nice to have um now nudge in the samsung keyboard so you got to be using the samsung keyboard but if you are You get these little integrated kind of clips that appear in that are contextual to what you're doing. So if you're in a messaging app, for example, and you say, hey, let's let's meet up tomorrow for pizza and you're using the Samsung keyboard, it will surface a button to go to your calendar and drop that into your calendar. We've seen this on Pixel before. This is like Samsung's version of this. Yeah. Yeah. And then and then there's automated app actions. And this is kind of broader than just Samsung. This is Google, Gemini, kind of a new feature that Google is also announcing and releasing on these phones as well as the Pixel 10, which is just the ability to do more agentic cross-app actions using Gemini on the device. And so that's going to launch on the S26 series as well. Okay, so Galaxy won't have to catch up with that on the S27. They're getting that one right away. Totally. That's not a Pixel-specific one. That's good. But was there much talk about the perplexity integration or any of the other models that they're adding? Yeah, kind of the multi-model agentic device. I didn't hear much of anything about perplexity, to be honest. And so if it was spoken, I didn't catch it. So I thought that was kind of weird. I don't know. Full disclosure, we recorded this obviously earlier than the event that's going on at the point that this podcast is probably about to be released. So I can't tell you if they mentioned it on stage. But in my briefing, I didn't hear anything about perplexity. I do think it's interesting that Samsung is going for a kind of a multi-model approach on the devices. I think it's great to have it there. Anything else to add from what you saw that cut your eye? It seems pretty good. Oh, you know what? I totally forgot. One of the features that is definitely going to get a lot of play, and it's back to the Ultra, is this privacy, what is it called? Privacy display. And so this is when you activate it. So it's an option. you can keep it off and your display will be normal. Essentially what normal is in this case is if you look at it off axis, you'll see all the contents of your display. If you have privacy display active, there's a way that this display is set up on how the pixels are oriented so that when privacy display is active, if you're off axis, it doesn't darken it completely to black, but it really dims it down. And the idea is that, you know, say you're on a subway and you're checking a really important but private email or something like that. You don't want people looking over your shoulder and seeing these things. You can activate that in your little quick settings pull down. And it will make it so that if you're the one facing the display, you can see everything. But off axis, it starts to fall off and it starts to get darker. It makes it harder. It obscures it more. Very cool. Well, we will shortly update you with anything else that they didn't tell Jason if it's out there. But Jason, if folks want to follow your Android coverage, where should they go? Yeah, I mean, timed with this event as well, we're releasing this week's episode of Android Faithful. So, you know, AndroidFaithful.com, DTNS YouTube channel, it's on there as well. We've got Flo and I, Florence Ion and I, actually from the event for a good 15, 20 minutes, actually holding the phones and talking about them so you can see more coverage there. Fantastic. Thank you, Jason. Thank you. All right. So, yes, they did mention perplexity on stage towards the beginning of the announcement. Here are a few other details that they're going to talk about. Galaxy Buds 4 and 4 Pro. These have a newer design with flatter stems, cases clear and opens flat, not from the top. 4 Pro getting 11 millimeter super wide woofer and a 5 millimeter planar tweeter. and the Buds 4, the non-Pro one, has an 11 millimeter dynamic speaker. Sits in your outer ear, no tips there. So you do have active noise cancellation, just, you know, it's not going to be as effective. The Galaxy Buds 4 Pro will give you six hours of battery life with active noise cancellation on. The regular Galaxy Buds 4 get five hours. And then if you turn noise cancellation off, that jumps to seven hours and six hours respectively. Galaxy Buds 4 are $179. Galaxy Buds 4 Pro $249. They're available for pre-order now. And like everything else, shipping on March 11th. And Samsung Galaxy Book 6 models also come to the US starting March 11th. Both the Galaxy S26 and S26 Plus and Ultra launching on March 11th. All of that stuff available for pre-order now. Not a, you know, going to break over in the universe kind of announcement, but I thought it was interesting Samsung's like, yeah, we made it better. If you're on a couple of generations older, you might want to upgrade. I mean, I feel like that's what the companies do these days. Yeah. That's pretty far for the course, right? Are you ready for a new laptop or new earbuds or, you know, new cell phone, whatever it is. We, we have, we have the better versions of them and slightly better processor, couple of interesting features like the, you know, the privacy screen, all of that. If you're a few cycles behind, then that's a valuable upgrade. Yeah. Well, if there's anything else in the announcement to catch you up on, we will add it in tomorrow's show as well. But big thanks to Jason for getting us the scoop on that. Indeed. Thank you, Jason Howell. And also thank you to everyone who supports us. DTNS is made possible by all of you listening right now. Big thanks to Mike Akins, Norm Fazekas, and Chris Allen. Thanks, everybody. Thank you. There's more we need to know today. Let's get to the briefs. With Mobile World Congress in Barcelona kicking off next week, Samsung is not the only mobile company making announcements. We've got Oppo teasing its forthcoming N6 foldable device that looks in photos like it will not have a crease. That's coming to China in March. Honor announced that its MagicPad 4 is 4.8 millimeters thick, making it the thinnest tablet outside the e-ink devices like the remarkable. And China's Techno, which is a top selling phone in Africa, announced a modular phone concept. So the modular magnetic interconnection technology uses magnets, obviously, to make the module snap together in a more compact arrangement than previous modular systems The base device measures 4 millimeters And even with the 4 millimeter power bank module it doesn end up being much bigger than standard flagship phones according to 9to5Google The modules connect by Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, or MMWave. They include a camera, telephoto lens, and an off-grid mesh network communicator. But we don't have word on price or release. Yeah, I'm real, real curious to see what folks on the ground think of Honor's tablet and how close Honor lets people get to its creaseless device. But hey, you know what? Or I'm sorry, that's the Oppo one, the N6 foldable without a crease. Hopefully they pulled it off. I'd be very excited about that. The techno modular phone feels like if it performs well, which is a big if when you're doing entirely wireless communications between the modules instead of direct. But if it performs well, that could be the cracking of the modular concept that so many have tried and failed at up until now. I'm very curious to see how that works in the real world. I also wonder with the whole foldable thing that is, it's a thing, whether you care about it or not, how much the crease really matters. It doesn't. It doesn't. It really goes away because I have the pixel fold and I forget it's there. But when people pick it up, they don't like to see it. So it's a good selling point, right? To get someone over the hump. No crease. I mean, it's sort of like, you know, I don't know, a book where, you know, if you mark a page, you know, it's like you just get used to it. Not a big deal. Now, if that somehow affects your workflow, then that would be something. But I do wonder about how much the crease really matters. Yeah. Well, there is more coming from MWC, like CES. Everybody still calls it Mobile World Congress. We're still going to call it Mobile World Congress because it's kind of confusing otherwise. But it is now officially just MWC, like CES and KFC before it. Pew Research Center surveyed 1,458 U.S. teens and parents from September 25th to October 9th last year to ask them about their use of AI tools. So if you're like, wow, this may not be current, it's fairly current. The most frequent use teens reported was to search for information. 57% of them said they used it for that. 54% of the teens surveyed used it to help with schoolwork. I would thought that might have been a little bigger. Less than half of them used it for fun or entertainment, to summarize content like articles or books or videos, or to create and edit images and videos. That was all down in the 30% range. Most of them do not use it to get news or have a conversation. Only 16% said they just talk to their chatbots. And in fact, 88% do not use it for emotional support. It does mean 12% do though. So if you're concerned about that, it isn't as prevalent as maybe some people think. Teens also don't have a consensus about whether AI will have a positive or negative impact on society. They asked them, do you think this will have a positive or negative impact over the next 20 years? 31% think it will be positive. 26% think it will be negative. 35% don't think it'll be either positive or negative. And 8% just weren't sure. going back to the uh 54 using it for help with schoolwork and you saying that seems low it probably is low because i think a lot of it is self-reported who were pulled yes we're like no i don't use it for that of course not don't want my teacher to know such a thing i would yeah and that that's true of all these numbers they could be could be off because we're talking about self-reporting, but they're in the ballpark usually. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. I think, um, the emotional support part of AI gets a lot of attention because it's associated with, uh, you know, teens having mental health issues and, you know, asking it things that, you know, uh, exacerbate those issues, that kind of thing. And, um, and again, self-reporting, but to know that this is not some rampant situation that we're having. If you have a kid in your household between the age of 13 and 18, that they're just talking to Chad GPT all day, trying to figure out how to make their life better, and it's giving them bad advice, that clearly has happened. But that's a very specific scenario. Yeah. 12% is still concerning, and we still should pursue guardrails and say safety protocols and decide what those should be. Uh, however, it's good to know that this, like you said, that this isn't a widespread. Well, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, who knows a lot about Apple says Apple plans to release touch screen MacBooks toward the end of this year. That would not be part of this March release that we're coming up on right now. A version of the dynamic Island would be reportedly located at the center top of the display and that you'd be able to switch between interfaces, optimized either for touch or point and click. All right. So the big question is, Sarah, when these new Macs get announced in March, do we want to wait until autumn to get the touchscreen version or are we going to just jump on the ones now? Yeah. Part of me is curious. I would like to have the option of a touchscreen just to see if I use it, but I have been waiting since the M1. So I feel like I might just pull the trigger in March. Sounds like you're in the same boat. Yeah. I mean, I'm sort of half kidding. I don't use an iPad regularly. And a friend of mine, when I sent this article around to some folks who are looking for new MacBooks and they always kind of ping me like, Sarah, what should we do? And I'm like, maybe wait, let's see what's going on here. You know, a few of them were like, but isn't this just an iPad and a keyboard? It's like, well, I mean, form factor wise, yeah, but OS wise, no. Right. And that's why I use my MacBook at all times throughout the day. Sure, I can use iOS, I can use iPad OS. I actually don't have an iPad right now, but but I can, but that's different. It works differently. And there's nothing wrong with any of these solutions. I, you know, I, I know people as you do, Tom, who can, can work all day on iOS and it just works fine. That doesn't work for me. Um, I just, I want Mac OS. I want my keyboard. I want my screen. Um, the idea of having, um, the ability to touch the screen, it's like it's sort of like it's a solution I don't know if I need yet. I mean, maybe if I could rotate the hinge, he didn't say anything about a hinge and turn it into an iPad. I'd be a little more interested, but it doesn't seem like it's a convertible. Right. I have a Chromebook that is a convertible, so I don't really ever turn it into a tablet. Uh, so I'm not even sure if it had a hinge, if I would use it anymore. Uh, but I would love to hear from the person who says, this is exactly what I've been waiting for. And iPad is not right. I mean, I want Mac OS, like Sarah was saying, but I also want that touch screen. Uh, give us, give us a shot. That would be, yeah, that would be a really interesting hybrid. Um, you know, someone else said, oh, but you know, all the smudges, but that's what you're doing with tablets already. Yeah. My MacBook that is not a touchscreen has smudges because, you know, I'll just point at stuff or whatever anyway. Right. Yeah. Or you have kids who don't really know the idea of not having a touchscreen. So, you know, the smudge life is going to happen. Well if you want honest reviews from people who actually buy and live with tech like this it sounds like we might do that later this year then you need to hang out with us on Live With It. That is the show where I host a weekly look at the tech that we've been all hanging out with in our daily lives. In fact, I'm currently living with a new smart robot vacuum. Boy, do I have thoughts. That review is coming very soon. Listen to Live With It wherever you get your podcasts, but it's even more fun to watch at youtube.com slash daily tech news show. Now some quick headlines that are just good to know and might make you look a little smarter in the future. Adobe Firefly is adding a feature called quick cuts that lets you describe in text where what you want from video B roll and then have it automatically create a draft edit with that B-roll in the right places. Let's speed you on a little. We got that B-roll. Amazon is rolling out three additional personality styles for its voice assistant. Brief, which I'm going to use, gets right to the point. Sweet, which is even a little more encouraging in personality. And Chill, which is kind of a stoner. It's like all about good vibes and stuff. You can ask your Echo device to change it or change it in the app's settings. I think I'm going to go with Brief as well. In fact, I find Alexa Plus to be a little too familiar. Yeah, I wouldn't make her sweeter. She's like, we got it. Thank you so much. Apple has begun enforcing age verification for users who want to download apps marked as 18 plus in Australia, Brazil, Singapore, and the US states of Utah and Louisiana. However, Discord is going to hold off rolling out global age verification. It'll still do its legal obligations, but it's not going to turn it on for everybody until the second half of this year after revising its policy based on all the complaints it's hearing from you about it. Yeah. Turns out if you complain enough, sometimes companies roll things back. Users of the cheaper $8 per month YouTube premium light can now download videos for offline viewing and listen to videos while they're in the background. Checking in on Ramageddon during its Q1 earnings call, HP Inc. said that memory now accounts for 35% of its cost of materials for a PC. That is up from 15% to 18% last quarter. Anthropic modified its responsible scaling policy to say it will not delay development of products that it thinks might be dangerous if it believes a competitor might create those dangerous products. Yeah, before they just always would delay. Now they're like, if somebody else is going to get there first, we want to keep developing it so we can push for safety. It kind of makes sense. According to Edison Research's share of ear study, 40% of US listening time is given to podcasts versus 39% for radio. That puts podcasts ahead of radio for the very first time. Yeah, yes. I mean, I guess. I listen to a lot of radio. I don't consider it a competition, but yes, very interesting. This is kind of a fun story, given that I'm actually testing a robo-vacuum in my house right this second. Sammy Asvidal hacked his DGI Romo vacuum cleaner so he could control it with his PS5. Yet somehow, the valid token from his own ROMO gave him cloud access to 7,000 ROMO vacuums worldwide. So this is basically being able to spy on somebody in their home because the vacuums have cameras. He notified DJI of the issue. DJI said it patched it, but he was still able to demonstrate it for The Verge. Yeah, he didn't do anything. He didn't try to do this. He put in his token and realized, wait, I have access to all the vacuums. That's not right. Obviously, he knows what he's doing in the first place. And to his credit was like, I think the company should know about this. But just a good reminder that if you have internet connected cameras in your home, make sure you trust the company. The Economist surveyed 639 senior decision makers at companies in London, New York, Singapore, Sydney, and Tokyo. and found that 62% of them do not have a budget for training people on the tools, and 92% have not instituted a government framework for safe use. Thanks to Motang on our subreddit, who noticed a 404 article about an app called Nearby Glasses that scans for Bluetooth signals from smart glasses and alerts you if it finds them nearby. That's nice. A Russian court fined Google 22 million rubles, that's about $288,000 U.S., for distributing VPNs on the Play Store. An increasing number of people in Russia using VPNs to get around government blocks of services like Telegram and WhatsApp. Not a huge fine, but a fine nonetheless. Bloomberg sources say Stripe is emerging as a candidate to acquire PayPal. Wow. And U.S. District Judge Rita F. Lynn dismissed XAI's lawsuit against OpenAI. She said the complaint, quote, does not point to any misconduct by OpenAI. I guess the complaint was all about employees from XAI. And she's like, yeah, but it doesn't show OpenAI did anything wrong. So your thing is dismissed. Goodbye. Well, I think some people on one side of that argument are probably pretty upset about this. May not hear the end of it. Well, we do end every episode of DTNS with some shared perspectives. Today, we've got Bill, who has a plausible explanation about why new Xbox head Asha Sharma just created a gamertag in January. This is good. I like this way of thinking, Bill. Like, okay, but what would be the explanation if it wasn't nefarious? Bill writes, a very possible reason that Asha's Xbox is so new is because it is the account she wants the public to see. She could very easily have one she's been using for years. Heck, maybe it's an embarrassing one. Maybe she has a gamer tag of Furby fart lover, or maybe her account would reveal that she played 340 hours in Barbie Project Friendship. Not shaming anyone for liking that game, just trying to think of the most ridiculous game to have hundreds of hours in. And yeah, it could have like huge gaps where she didn't play that she doesn't want people looking at. So yeah, I think it's pretty reasonable for somebody to be like, oh, I'm in a very public position running Xbox. I need a new gamer tag. I don't want my history to be litigated by the Xbox playing public. Oh, I mean, we see this all the time. Somebody takes a new position of political power. It's like all of a sudden those tweets are gone. Yeah, right. Exactly. You know, and it doesn't necessarily mean that you have something to hide. No. You're just kind of being like, you know what? I've got a new job. I'm scrubbing some stuff. Yeah. There's a new context around everything I do that wasn't there before. So, you know. Yeah. I like this theory, Bill. It's a good one. Me too. I mean, if you looked at my Google search history, you would think I was very insane. I think that might be true of all of us. Again, I'm not running for president anytime soon. So, you know, we'll see. what are you thinking about out there do you have insight to any story that we talk about that we touch on share it with us we'd love to hear from you feedback at dailytechnewsshow.com big thanks to jason howell for getting us the scoop on the samsung galaxy s26 and to bill for contributing to today's show thank you for being along for daily tech news show you folks keep us in business here's your chance the show's over head right on over to patreon.com slash DTNS and subscribe now. The DTNS family of podcasts. Helping each other understand. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.
