The Phone of the Year is...

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Yeah, OK, maybe one dumb one, but I think that actually came from David. Either way, it was a lot of fun and we're excited to do it again. It's all part of the Vox Media podcast stage at South by Southwest presented by Odoo. Visit voxmedia.com slash SXSW to pre-register and get 15% off your South by badge purchase. So that's voxmedia.com slash SXSW. Hope to see you there. ladies and gentlemen it's time for the biggest online argument of the year that's such a good reddit post you know it's funny i watched this and i was like wow i agree with all these and i was like oh wait yeah what is up people of the internet welcome back to another episode of the waveform podcast we're your hosts i'm marquez i'm andrew and i'm david and it's December, which means there's still huge videos happening and still lots to talk about, which is very exciting. We had two really big videos we can talk about from this week. We had the Smartphone Awards 2025, so feel free to argue with me about any of them. And we also had the Xiaomi SU7 video go up, which was a long time in the making. We had to import a car, a whole bunch of living with it, shooting it. It went really well, and obviously that video's been out. Also new Android XR stuff and glass and a pebble ring. but first I just want to shout out that this channel is a mere, at the time of recording 4,000 subscribers away from half a million on YouTube. The Waveform YouTube channel is so close to 500,000 subscribers so I just want to give that little nudge if you're watching on YouTube or even better if you're listening somewhere and haven't subscribed on YouTube go subscribe to the YouTube channel and then we'll be able to celebrate before the end of the year It's the last chance to hype us is the last chance. Oh, yeah. We become ineligible for hype once we cross over the threshold. Oh, true. We want to pass the hypes on to other channels. Yeah, help us graduate from hype. And once we hit 500K, Netflix will put us on the platform. And we will be part of Warner Brothers Discovery. By the way. Oh, my God, yes. Someone, I think it was on Threads. There's a clip. Yeah, there was a clip from us from a year and a half ago predicting that Netflix would eventually buy Warner Brothers. Predicting is a strong word. Well, jokingly. But also it turned out to be right. Unless, you know, that kind of thing. Dude, I can see it now. Netflix, Paramount, Skydance, Discovery, Warner. Don't put this out there now. Waveform. Waveform, that's right. Oh, my God. Waveform, Netflix, Paramount, Skydance. Look, Netflix, I know that you're getting a bunch of hostile bids for Warner Brothers, and you might not even be able to buy it. But if you want a good B plan, we're available. We have, like, $6. I just want to say, speaking of hostile bids, hilarious story that showed up on a timeline this morning. Okay. It was just someone who was squatting on Lambo.com, obviously waiting for a certain car manufacturer to scoop it up, got nothing out of the deal. A judge ruled that they were acting in bad faith. So what? Yeah, I know. They own it. When you just sit on a domain because you know you're going to eventually sell it to someone, that's maybe arguably good faith. That's called capitalism. That's like reserving it for their rightful owner. But I read the story, and it's like this person called Richard Blair from Arizona, he bought this for $10,000 in 2018. Lambo was already well-known to be Lamborghini by then. But then he listed it for $1.1 million in 2020, and then raised it to $1.5 million, and then raised it to $3.3 million, and then raised it to $12 million, and then raised it to $58 million. and then by 2023 just settled at a nice even 75 million dollars i see nothing wrong here that's like having a house on the market and it's not selling for years and you just keep raising the price yeah and he he claims that uh lambo is just a pun on the word lamb and people call him just like lego flegos yeah right yeah so anyway he uh didn't get the money that's crazy i kind of think so i think they had plenty of money to buy that from him a long time ago he took a big risk but um yeah this reminds me of for a while it doesn't seem like it's anymore but steam.com feels like almost the opposite um but for a while like steam the uh video game platform platform is steampowered.com so steam.com used to be you would just go onto it and it was like this white page with background of a bunch of pipes and then it said welcome to steam.com steam.com is the former home of steam tunnel operations and then just says this domain is not for sale damn and now it just doesn't resolve yeah now it doesn't resolve to anything so so is it for sale still probably privately owned i feel like that person just really hated steam i feel like by this point steam doesn't need that domain anymore they don't yeah everyone already has it nobody yeah i just think the whole lambo story if if they didn't buy it by 2018 and lambo was just sitting there as a domain in 2018, that's on them, bro. I don't know why the judge would rule that. Yeah. I mean, you already knew Lambo as Lamborghini by then. By 2018, of course. I guess it was like accidentally people going to Lambo.com. Like, how many buyers are you going to get? I guess that's the thing. What's the conversion rate of someone who accidentally goes to Lambo.com instead of Lamborghini.com? Did you really lose a customer there? Two Lamborghinis. That's a good point. If you're Googling it, you're not buying a Lambo. Yeah, exactly. So it's probably not as valuable to them, but it would be nice to have. And then they sued him instead. It was more just like the judge took the domain from him. Yeah, but they would have had to sue him to get it, right? Did he have anything on the page, or was it just a... He did. Oh, it was something on the page. Oh, I can see that. What was on the page? Yeah, I can see that. Was it just like, pay me this money? Was it something... Because if it's something... I have your children. or yeah like uh he's targeting lambo yeah lamborghini it was a bitcoin wallet address he directed lambo.com to a separate personal website where road track reported that he posted a statement that says i am lambo of lambo.com and i will defend defeat and humiliate those endeavoring to steal any of my domain name brands including my moniker you how many does this man half he was in for a fight that guy a little too much confidence going into that one um yeah it's a little funnier knowing he had that statement and watching him lose that you also have to assume this guy wasn't very good at bargaining because he probably had he was easily making more than 10 000 he paid for it yeah yeah but he had to go up to what 70 million 75 million he probably could have gotten 500 000 out of that pretty easy he won it all he's hiding every single part of this domain on the who is lookup page like he is everything is hidden i think it's not his hidden on that for like three years now yeah i'm guessing he's squatting on more than just that domain yeah so nice maybe he'll get some money out of the other ones well lego if you want to buy league of legos.com for me i still have it available 75 million um i think it was like 12 bucks i don't know wait 75 million starting 75 million is a fair is fair market value do you do they raise the price on you every year no because who'd you yeah who well it was google domains back in the good part of the internet a certain a certain domain seller that maybe is sort of similar to buy mommy every year raises the price of my obscure ass domain switch off for that it's You can transfer it. I can? Yeah. I recommend it, actually. I bought it for $0.00, because it's almost a random string of characters. What's the domain? I don't want to say it. Well, I can say it. Can you bleep it out? You own it. Yeah, it's ellisrow.vin. Oh, that's cool. It's not something that anyone would ever need. It going up is proof that your popularity is climbing. They raised it by over $0.00 times. when I tried to renew it. What? Yeah, like... X? Sweep this out, because I don't want to get the numbers wrong, and like, yeah, but I bought it for $1,000, and when they renewed it, they were like, that'll be $1,000. What? Yeah, for the year. And I was like, I'm going to do this, but you're acting in bad faith. Yeah. I feel like I shouldn't say this into a podcast microphone, but mkbhd.com has not changed in price once. What? Yeah. Since we first got it. I think you're getting scammed. I wonder if all VIN domains went up in price. Maybe that's what happened. Yeah, maybe like the global winery industry experience. Or cars. No, VIN is the one for vineyards and wineries. Oh, the Italian word for wine. Maybe they're mad at me because I'm not making wine. As far as they know, I am. They're trying to price you out. I will say, going back a little bit further, I think it's a bold move to hear a story about a guy holding onto a website to try and get money and then immediately say, hey, Lego, I'm willing to sell me doing the exact same thing. You think Lego's going to want that domain? Either Lego or Riot. And I've got League of Lego and League of Legos. Well, League of Legos isn't correct, right? No, no, no. League of Legos. It's League of Legos. Is it Lego not Sports Bar? Irish Sports Bar that sponsors the soccer league. But you don't use Lego as a plural, right? It's Lego bricks is the plural of Lego. Yeah, it's like Apple AirPods Pro. Yeah. Yeah, Lego Bricks. Yeah, there's no Pro. So you can ditch that one. Wouldn't it be Lego's Brick? Yeah. I want everyone to know we do have actual news coming up. Oh, right, right, right. Right, sorry, yeah. Are we still on topic? Are we still on that? I don't know what's happening. Anyway, okay, so what happened this week? What do you want to talk about? There was actually a lot of stuff this week. I'm very happy that things keep happening because it's usually around this time of the year that we're like... That things stop happening? Yeah, that things completely stop happening. that molecules stop vibrating, the absolute zero starts entering. Although in New York, it's close to absolute zero right now. Yeah, it's the heat death of New York. It sucks. But one of the things that did happen this year, this month, this week, was the Android show XR edition, which Adam was very hyped about. I was. I watched the whole thing on 3X. I could be hyped, but I didn't watch it, so it's your job now to hype me on this. Well, so now they're doing more Android shows per year. They're sort of trying to, like, just have Android be this rolling update thing as opposed to those big platform releases. And one of them is XR. And clearly, you know, the Vision Pro style of XR is falling out of popularity. However, something that they really wanted to kind of, like, drive home during this Android XR edition show was that we have four versions of XR currently in development. which felt extremely similar to the video that we did about the difference between the oculus version of vr and like the meta like ray-ban smart glasses but they put two more in the middle because there is a new product coming out called project aura which is made by xreal with gemini and have you ever used like those xreal glasses before yeah they're like the they're they look like regular glasses but then you essentially flip down like blinders i guess in front of you and then they can project a screen so you can watch stuff on them. They have the screen no matter what. The cover is just to black out the background so it's easier to see the screen. And then you plug them into a device. Yeah, you can either plug them into... They now have wireless casting, which is cool. That would have been so nice for our third-person video that we did. Oh, if that lagged, though, that would have been... Yeah, there was definitely some lag in there no matter what. I have a stupid question. Go for it. X-Real and N-Real, the same thing? They rebranded from N-Real to X-Real. It's the same thing. Stupid. Yeah. Anyway, so, yeah, you can project virtual experiences onto it, sort of have, like, multiple displays. The battery puck looks extremely similar to the Vision Pro battery puck, but it is also a trackpad. Amazing. That's kind of sick. It's kind of interesting. Yeah, you can use a trackpad. I was not excited about this until I saw them use it as a trackpad. I was like, that is so clever. Yeah. You can plug it directly into your computer to get an additional screen above your floating screen, but also your screen. And then because it is built with Google alongside them, Gemini is available anytime about anything. So that actually, in my opinion, is probably the most beneficial feature is that you just constantly have this Gemini assistant who sees what's on your screen and you can talk about things with and it can provide actions for you. Yeah. Yeah. So that's being developed right now. They still don't have like a price or availability for it, but they did show it to a number of journalists as well as detail them a little bit more. Can I confirm something real quick? Sure. So it's wireless casting, but there still is a wire hanging from it for the battery. Okay. So it's not totally wireless. I believe you can also plug it in directly to your computer if you want. Yeah. Cool. um okay they are also working on ai glasses which have a display and which do not have a display because they're with warby parker and gentle monster which are very different brands they showed they showed like this video of the warby parker people talking about glasses and they were just very like suave and kind of casual and then they jumped to the gentle monster which is like korean high fashion high fashion um and they did it for like a minute it was like five minutes of straight A, B back and forth between the two sets. And I was like, this was a choice. Exactly. And it seems like the way that they're thinking about the Android XR platform is that it's going to exist across multiple different types of devices. Yeah. You know, just kind of like how Android exists across multiple different types of devices. But the biggest benefit about making this ubiquitous platform that works on multiple different devices is that they've made it so you don't have to code your apps differently for different types of devices, right? So if you're using, like, the Xreal glasses, for example, and they have the screen, and you have an Uber app integration, say you're wearing the Xreal glasses, or say there's a future in which there is a smart glasses with the screen. Because the Xreal glasses in this context are just, like, showing you what Android XR will look like on more, like, meta Ray-Ban display type glasses. But imagine you call an Uber with your glasses. You get the little notification in the bottom that shows how long it's going to take for the Uber to get there. Then when you look down, you can see a map of the area around you and where the Uber is. So then you can walk to the Uber. That was their big kind of showcase. But the big benefit was that they said that developers do not need to code anything differently. So as long as they still have these integrations for their actual Android app, it automatically adds all these features for Android XR, which I think is a pretty big deal. They also unveiled new likeness features, which is their equivalent of Personas. And honestly, they looked very, very good. They kind of look like the new generation of Personas. So they skipped that really creepy, gimmicky, weird part. Just keep forgetting what each one of them is called. like is apple's called personas and then likeness and then there's samsung's whatever that one's called they all have a different version yeah yeah the better all of these get the more they look like um old bad portrait mode photos where like yeah the things everything in the middle is really good but then the cutout of it gets worse and worse and like more fuzzy yeah like a really good visual Yeah. Also, you can now turn any 2D content that you're viewing in Android XR into 3D content. Including YouTube videos, which I found very interesting. So you know how Apple in the Vision Pro has that feature where you can spatialize anything, and also on your iPhone? Now you can spatialize literally anything, which is, I think, pretty cool, because it makes you want to actually wear it more because you're actually getting a novel, different experience in the headset. I want to try it out because I'm curious how different kinds of content are going to behave with that. Do we have the Project Moonhand headset? Do we have one? We don't have it here. Oh, we don't? Okay. Well, we could try that. Or no, we do have a Galaxy XR. Yeah, we should try that then because I think it's out. Oh, the update's out. It's across any Android XR device. Okay. Yeah, I will try it. And then they also introduced a travel mode, which is basically the travel mode that they introduced for the Vision Pro. So when you get on a plane, it doesn't have your windows flying behind you at 500 miles an hour? Perfect. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Cool. Okay, and then kind of as a secondary to that, they did give some hands-ons with Google's Project Aura smart glasses things. I'm excited for these. Yeah. Victoria Song at The Verge said that Google told her to consider it a headset masquerading as glasses, which is an interesting way to put it. But they have a 70-degree field of view, which is quite wide. Sure. Like, I think usually these kind of headsets have about 40, so that's a lot. And they do have integrations with the Pixel Watch and other smartwatches. So basically, you can take a photo on the headset, and then it'll appear on your Pixel Watch. And the reason they're doing this is because as they expand the Android XR platform, and they know it's going to be across multiple devices, there might be some XR devices that don't have a screen. Yeah. So if you take a picture on that, you can just see it on your watch to get a preview of what it looks like. Oh, that's smart. Yeah. Okay. So they're kind of trying to make this whole XR ecosystem. And then the big news that they announced was that iOS users can also use the glasses as long as they have the Gemini app installed. It's actually an enormous deal. Which is actually a big deal. Here. So if Apple never gets into making glasses, just like they didn't get into making cars, then, you know. Then there will be a fight for the iPhone users. Yeah, there won't be a fight. Pixar made cars. Oh, right. I forgot. uh and cars too and cars with glue speaking of wait for it wait for it there's a good segue somewhere hold on things that have microphones in them that you can wear on your body speaking of wearables oh my god that was obvious speaking of wearables speaking of wearables pebble announced a ring with a microphone in it yeah okay it's at first i was like this is the dumbest thing i've ever heard and then i just read through it there's obvious use cases for it you want to just like whisper into your ring you know a nice command that nobody else can hear in the room and it's like an easy way to say it and no one else can hear it yeah you just whisper it it literally said whisper on the website and i was like picturing that's interesting i was wondering why you immediately went to that and not just like that yeah a ring's right there and you can talk to it well yeah i guess so it's that it's convenient it's on your hand you always have it in your hand basically but it's also you can like hold it right up to your face and it doesn't seem insane yeah and so you can whisper to it nobody else can hear you yeah the way eric mitchakovsky the guy that made this who is the founder of pebble brought it back we talked about that a lot the way he pitched it to me was that it is a second hard drive for your brain because he says he has things all the time that he wants to remember or like create a task for a calendar event for but he always forgets to do it unless he does it like in the moment so he put a button on a ring it's it's a physical hard button there's no wake word and you press it and it's very hackable so you can do single taps you can do double taps you can do triple taps you can do tap and hold and it can do different actions but the main point of it is to be able to record some audio into it which it has local memory that stores on the ring and that sends it to your phone and it uses the mcp protocol which is like this new ai protocol the anthropic made they just They donated it, by the way. Yeah, they donated it to everybody, which allows it to perform actions for you. So right now in the Pebble app, you'll be able to, like, save a reminder, or you'll be able to make a calendar event. And the whole point, basically, is just to have something that is just instant, easy access that you won't have to, like. And you can only do that in the Pebble app? You have to have the Pebble app. But it can take actions in other apps. But the Pebble app is just the connecting, like, thread. but for example eric told me that when he saves notes he always does it in notion so he has it immediately save a note to notion which i thought would get you guys excited yeah i kind of want this yeah you can only use it for two to three years though because it's a one-time use product that was that's the this is the weird i've seen rings charge i'm not sure why they chose to do this this is the weird thing so yeah it has about it has about two years of battery life because it can And, you know, it has a battery that they send in it and you record a certain amount of audio and it can last that long. And Eric's kind of like reasoning for this was that you would have to have a proprietary charger. And if it lasts two years, you're going to lose the charger. That was his reasoning. I lose the ring before the charger. My charger just sits in a spot. Yeah. So it's I don't I don't love that it sort of feels like it's EYC. He said you can send it back to them and they'll recycle it. And then you just buy another one because they're $75. I feel like that is e-waste. It doesn't feel like e-waste. Well, it depends how they're recycling it, right? It's like if they're taking it apart and putting a new battery in it, then it's different. And if you get money off the new one. You should get money off the new one. Or I should be able to. It's literally just sending it back and getting a new one because the battery died. Or a charge should be pretty cheap or free. Right. I shouldn't have to pay full price again, right? I agree. I think they haven't thought that far ahead yet because it lasts two years and they're just releasing this. I, by default, don't really love single-use products like this in general. But we'll see how they're recycling it, I guess. It's a cool idea, but I just wish you could charge it. Has he confirmed this is not coming to the watches that they're making that are also on wrist that you can talk to? You can do that on the watch as well. You can do it on the watch? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. It's just he said that it's for people that prefer to just, like, wear a ring or you can use it with your watch, and it can sort of do multiple actions. So you can ask it to do an action adding something to your calendar or whatever, and then it'll show up on your watch to confirm if you want to do that kind of stuff. That's cool. So it's sort of they're building, like, a pebble ecosystem in a way. And they're $75. So, again, it's, like, fairly cheap. They come in matte black probably just for you. All right. You got me. Gold and silver. It says if you record for 15 straight hours, then you will kill the battery. Yeah. Yeah. 15 hours roughly total. That's sort of the, yeah, the estimate that they made for the two years was like if you use it for like one minute a day for two-ish years, then you get about that. So. I think they're missing a great opportunity here where instead of putting a microphone in the ring, they should put a speaker in the ring and make it thumb-sized and then make a much smaller microphone ring for the pinky bluetooth it every phone call yellow damn that'd be dope pebble the cool thing though is like eric is like very hardcore about things being open source and hackable so everything about this ring is open source so the community can do whatever they want with i don't know it's an extra button that you just have on you all the time so it's sort of like an action button but it's on your hand instead of on your phone I think that's cool. The concept is super dope. Find a way to not turn this into key waste. Yeah. This is really cool. I mean, you know, or it dies and you just use it as a ring, I guess. There is that too. But I agree. I don't love the idea of just a single-use product like that. I'm mostly hyped that this is coming to the watch because I've been more and more wanting to get the watch lately. Totally. And this seems like a cool thing. Isn't this just what Gemini is going to be doing? Like, you know, the raise to talk to Gemini thing? on like on pixel watch yes sorry or if you have glasses that are listening for your wake word i like the button though i like pressing a physical thing yeah like that's cool and theoretically in the future it'd be nice to have multiple ways to interact with this depending on the way that you like to wear things you know if you don't want to use a pixel watch and you want to use your a ring instead if you're a ring guy it's also waterproof i feel like if i get all my best ideas in the shower and i don't have my phone or my glasses on yeah you don't have a google home in your shower no i don't wait is that good wait a minute no i don't have that you have to be just outside enough to where you would be like yelling through the curtain or door and probably annoying and yeah and splashing it yeah allegedly ad week in minecraft posted an article claiming that advertisers working with google at least two different ones have indicated that ad And policemen inside of Gemini's AI mode will be rolling out in 2026. This is obviously the AI mode just in the search results, or rather the results, the separate mode. But that's all there really is. And Google denied that? So, yeah. According to Google's VP of global ads, Dan Taylor, quote, The story is based on uninformed, anonymous sources who are making inaccurate claims. There are no ads in the Gemini app, and there are no current plans to change that. which is that is a lie intentionally vague like no plans to change that this year yeah exactly it feels oh yeah he does specifically say right in the start there are no ads currently in there are no ads in the gemini app and there are no current plans there are definitely plans they're not current they're future plans to change that this feels yeah crazy because gemini still feels like a beta program it's wrong all the time uh-huh here's some anecdotal evidence i listened to a disc golf podcast and listened to all four hosts the other day make fun of gemini because of how wrong it is oh my god these are non-tech people just randomly getting gemini stuff like yeah but don't trust that they did the same thing yeah really like pretty common knowledge that like no one takes this seriously i had a non-tech person be like you know i saw that like gemini is at the top of the ai leaderboards or whatever and whenever i try to use it it's completely useless What are the leaderboards? There's a website that does a series of trials and stuff like that to try to guess which one. And the newest version of Gemini took over Claude as the top one. Most capable. Smartest. Yeah, although OpenAI's Code Red is coming next week, I believe, or this week. Yeah, whatever that means. If you're plugged in enough, it seems like everyone's panicking over Gemini being so good. Yeah. Oh, wow. But if you're not plugged in, it seems crazy. But if you're the ones using it. Yeah. I just wanted to point a finger here because I think I whittled it down to where tech in the last 10 years has gone downhill I told you I apologize I blaming blaming it on pub g whoa not specifically that but pub g to me feels like one of the first not the first extremely successful alpha paid for games that came out where they made so much money off of this game never even getting to beta let alone a like public full release they claimed but they made so much money that they're just like we can still just keep shipping a broken ass game and people will pay money for it yeah why since then everyone's just like i don't need to finish this project people will pay for it and i hate that and i loved pub g but i think it's pub g's fault so that's really interesting why did people buy pub g so much if it was so broken it was still must have been still really good it was still really good you still have to get over the threshold of being really good so that if it does have bugs it's still worth trying it is but just like in all those scenarios too like people assumed that the game would be finished and you're like paying 30 bucks to get the game and you'll keep it once it comes out as a full release but then they just kept realizing like we're the most popular game on steam right now everybody's playing us that's the thing we just don't need to leave alpha they may if people vote with their wallets and it turns out the thing that they're voting on is we don't actually care if the game is finished we just care that it's good now then everyone takes the hint and just starts copying that yeah what even is alpha and beta and in a game gamma in a game i guess there's just unfinished features that are not ready or like different modes or whatever that they're going to ship that they're not ready to ship yet but they ship one mode and it's like isn't that just all software now though yeah well that's what we're saying all software is forever yeah there was some inflection point where that became the standard to ship something and charge people for it that's not done yet right and people became okay with it because the part that they're buying was good enough. Yeah, like Star Citizen. The game that is still tactically in currently access. I was going to say, I'm minorly wrong already. I guess it did technically get a 1.0 release in 2017. It was out for a bit before that. But the first game became insanely popular in alpha. And I guess they did update it, so maybe it's not all PUBG's fault, but I'm still blaming it. I'll go back further and blame Google. because there's like an inside joke now where you're like all google users are just beta testing whatever new software and features and stuff to do and now they've turned it into a feature with pixel drops it's like hey now you're in on it you know it's like look at this i feel like we're all buying beta software lately the game star citizen which is still in early access alpha has nearly weighed one billion dollars 922 million 579 thousand nine hundred and 78 dollars it's not just it's hardware too yeah like like remember oh no i know remember when when someone was like hey we're gonna sell you this truck and eventually you'll be able to go put an extra battery in the truck just buy the truck now we're gonna sell you this pin you know the story oh we know well I wanted to point a finger, and it seems like I'm already wrong about that, but still just mad about all of this. Didn't Minecraft do this first? Did they? Yeah, you could buy Minecraft in its alpha version, I think, in 2010. I'd rather blame Minecraft. I guess that's also the thing. It's like, if you're labeling it as the alpha version and unfinished, and you're honest about that, but you still make it for sale, and people still buy it and give you tons of money for it, it must have been good enough. I will say also, as someone who was an alpha Minecraft player in the fifth and sixth grade, it at no point was ever unstable. Like, I can't recall it ever crashing. It was just maybe missing a mode or new feature or something. Yeah, it was just like Dirt Simulator. Seems like it was in alpha for five months and beta for 11 months. Technically, isn't alpha supposed to be for, like, internal testing? Dude, I don't know. That's the dog food version. Yeah, I thought that was alpha. and then beta was like external testing like then you release it to users and like check i think that literally everything is in beta now everything is constantly being developed alphas are the ones that need to get paired with omegas in order to anyone so there's a point i'm making is true though like the more i think about dia this browser it's like clearly not finished there's tons of features that they're obviously planning on adding but they shipped it super early because people wanted the core of it allegedly and it's like kind of always in beta like they're always adding tons of stuff yeah so does it feel significantly better now by the way dia yeah yeah i can pin tabs now i have all these like i can double tap to rename tabs there's all these features that they're added from dia or from arc yeah so yes i know it's getting closer to arc but i keep wondering when the point is when i can actually switch because i just love arcs i think it crossed that threshold for me with like two updates ago. Okay. Because of the pin tabs. I still wish I had mobile sync and I still wish I had like two spaces to swap back and forth between sync tabs. But as of right now, it is good enough for me. I don't think they're doing spaces. I mean, Chrome added split view, so it has me back now. I'm back on Chrome. Oh yeah, split view is nice. Anyway, let's duck duck, go to the polls and take it to an ad break. Six, seven. Oh no. Guys, exciting news. Waveform Trivia is allegedly in Minecraft partnering with DraftKings. You listening at home can now bet live on who is going to get this question. I'm just kidding. It's a joke, it's a joke, it's a joke. Guys, welcome back to Waveform Trivia. Android XR is here. And we all know this is not Google's first foray into ARXR. We all remember Google Glass. But between Google Glass and Cardboard. Don't forget Cardboard. That's the answer, right? How did none of you guys see those? None of these are the answers. Okay. I knew that. Project Daydream. Also, everybody, remember Daydream, Cardboard, that is VR. That is VR. True. True. True. True. Yeah. So maybe let me finish the question. None of you are RuPaul on Family Feud, if anyone gets that reference. Nope. Famous clip. Not at all. Thank you, Marquez. Between Google Glass and yesterday's event, Google had a secret ARXR project that was canceled in 2023. What was the code name of this project? What was the secret? It should be really hard for us to know. The Verge reported on it about, I think it was a few months after it got canceled. And then a bunch of Google employees were like, yeah, this existed. And they were really mad. And it got, if I remember this, what happened correctly is Vision Pro came out. Then it came out that Google was working on this and had canceled it. And a bunch of Google employees were like, you know, we could have been competing with Vision Pro. Which is what every company is trying to do. Yeah. Why? We're not sure. I don't think they're sure either. I agree. I don't think Apple is sure either. Well, we'll think about this one. Answers will be at the end, like usual. We'll be right back. All right, welcome back. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the biggest tech online argument of the year. It's time. I took that directly from a Reddit comment about the smartphone awards, but it is super accurate, so shout out to iron underscore quirk. uh smartphone awards are out i gave my favorite and best and worst and most notable smartphones from 2025 i'm gonna go through them all and maybe if you guys have alternate opinions or thoughts on my awards obviously some of you guys helped chip in and we discussed these all kind of as a group so some of you probably already got your thoughts in but for the pod we can go over each of the awards which one won and some thoughts and uh some arguments that happened online about them yeah Afterwards, I took some of the most common comments and arguments I saw. I'm glad you did that. Let's go through the list first. All right. Let's just go in the order of the show. For the beginning best big phone, Xiaomi 17 Pro Max. Huge 6.9-inch display. When are we going to get a 7-inch screen on a phone? We're probably pretty close to that. But 6.9 inches is like as good as it gets without being a tablet. And it had everything. It had the Snapdragon 8 Elite. It had the 7,500 mAh silicon carbon battery. It had all the specs. It had the triple 15 megapixel cameras. And then around the back, it also had a 3-inch full brightness, 120 hertz corner-to-corner screen on the camera bump. And it was actually very useful. Super fast charging, 22.5-watt wireless charging, reverse wireless charging. Hilarious. Just a complete use of space. No argument. Everyone agrees. Just like their car. They just went way too hard. That's actually kind of true. Wait, was this the one that had the reverse wireless charging at 22? Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Still faster than any phones charged with the wire. Yeah. Faster than some battery banks. Yeah. Yeah. Very valid. I don't think there's anything close. Am I crazy? I gave a runner-up to, I mentioned the Aquafind X9 Pro because it also had a lot of this stuff. Just the screen on the back was what separated the Xiaomi. Right. Because technically, if you count the total screen real estate, it's basically 7 inches. That's what I was thinking. Fair enough. screen to body ratio if we were going back to those 20 like what do we start adding this 120 it's funny actually when we had that remember the the concept phone that had the screen and wrapped around the back yeah yeah it was probably was it was the me mix ultra i think it was me miss alpha alpha alpha yeah i think they did quote a number for the screen to body ratio for that phone really and i don't remember what it was but it was definitely over 100 it was hilarious yeah Anyway, yeah, that was Best Big Phone of the Year. Now, Best Small Phone of the Year is where it gets interesting. Yeah. Because, well, we used to give this award to, like, a 5.8-inch screen-sized phone. And then that was the Zen phone that went extinct. So then we started giving it to, like, 6.1-inch phones. Last year it was this iPhone 16, I think. 6.1-inch phone. This year it's like all the small phones are not, like, incredible anymore, and they're all getting bigger. and there's just one type of phone that maintains that preserves like some element of small phone-ness and that is the flip phones yeah and specifically the z flip 7 this year with its like full corner to corner four inch cover screen yeah was more usable than ever as like a take it out my pocket use it put it back in and never open the phone and i was like you know what i think i'm gonna reward that as like the best of a compact phone experience because you can still open it and use it as a 6.9 flagship fine but it was more usable than ever as a closed phone and that's why it's a small phone in the air that's what this should have been this whole time i've been fighting for this for a long time but i'll agree i think this is the most deserving since it has gotten uh runner-ups before and honorable mention i think considering they finally added basically the full screen to the front and in a year specifically where people are doing anything to not use their phone like using apple watches as their phone in a little case or you know just like finding other ways to be able to be in communication with people while not looking at their phone i think a phone that you do not have to open if you don't want to is a very good uh small phone awardee the reason i always felt like this one should have went one small phone is because if you ask people why they got that phone is because it folds into something smaller like yes it unfolds into a bigger screen but that's not why they got i'd always yeah i always mention that because it was like yes it folds smaller but like that's not while you're using it so i didn't i didn't reward it for that i was like yeah you're using a huge phone and then you fold it up smaller and put it away so it wasn't until you really could use it small that i like flipped that switch get it flip but also honorable mention to oneplus 13s which had a 6.3 inch screen but they called it the 13s because it's the small one and it was a pretty good phone all right so yeah yeah that's ellis's next phone the 13s yeah is it small enough ellis will never miss ellis loves oneplus i know but i would never use a oneplus phone again as much as i like the open but i will say the oneplus 13s intro we did i think was my favorite video really good one of my top three this year yeah That was a fun one. All right, next one. Straight into the ones that people had alternate opinions about. But best camera. Oppo Find X9 Pro. Absolutely. Took the win this year. Correct. So good. It was, this is a triple 50 mega, sorry, a triple camera system, 50 megapixel main, 50 megapixel ultra wide, 200 megapixel telephoto. And, you know, I took a lot of sample shots. I was debating this. I was, we literally, I think we had, we had like alternate trophies. Like, we were ready to give this to, like, two or three different phones. And I was testing the Vivo X300 Pro. I was testing this, testing the iPhone. And I just found that this one was the most versatile and the most capable at the same time. Yeah. And it had the fun. Yeah. So great primary camera, really consistent, awesome colors, great detail, great dynamic range and all that. Ultrawide was really good. Then the telephoto, thanks to having 200 megapixels, was very, very croppable. We'll talk more about megapixels in that upcoming bonus episode. but uh that there's also the Hasselblad like zoom lens you could attach to it which I had a lot of fun with it's not the best thing in the world but it was super cool and fun it also had really good portrait mode good night mode pretty good video too you could shoot log it was 4k yeah I like that complete package I think my favorite thing about this phone's camera was how natural the bokeh looked that was important for me over the Vivo yeah so the Vivo very similar set of hardware but just had like this weird over processing going on with it and i was doing a lot of side by sides because i was like really happy with the detail in the vivo shots but the i think because of how much processing and a lot of those ai processing was going on the bokeh started to look weird even on regular shots of just like a single subject uh and it wasn't consistent enough for me to give it the wind yeah that was important i felt that the color the skin texture was like perfect it wasn't overly smooth and it wasn't overly sharpened and then the the naturalness of the bokeh especially on the telephoto but like on any of the lenses but especially on the telephoto with the Hasselblad attachment when you get that long um 10x yeah that long look with like the natural sort of fall off I thought it was like I could not distinguish this between this and an actual dedicated camera whoa yeah it's crazy good yeah the shots from the Hasselblad attachment lens were kind of insane yeah uh so it was a lot of fun does hustleblad now partner with oppo in the same way they used to partner with one plus one plus they are partnered yeah and i think they will probably continue that longer i think oppo and one plus shared that partnership or something i don't even know how to describe the partnership but yeah one plus dropped they're all under bbk that was my fault yeah i mean when you said like i was thinking about giving it to vivo but i give it to oppo i just imagine that picture of obama giving himself the medal the BBK trilogy yeah they they're all part of the same giant group but yes this is like the first time there's a lens attachment that you seemed excited to use not excited to use you've been excited to use once but you use it and you're like wait this is actually like yeah good and fun and also the build quality of that lens is crazy yo Hasselblad's got a reputation they can't just put their name on anything sorry DJI's got a reputation yeah fair enough uh yeah honorable mentioned still goes the iphone 17 pro the video is still undisputed this is the reason the the iphone was winning so much almost every camera award before this is because the video is a head and shoulders and a head and more shoulders above every other smartphone that i use ask anyone who shoots stuff on social media and uses phones to shoot them we have an entire channel that we run just on phones and guess which one is the most reliable that we shoot the most with it's the iphone 17 pro that's because of the ease of shooting that's because the quality of the footage the flexibility the log the dynamic range the look it looks better than ever this year uh and all i did was like add gen lock like they don't even shoot there's no 8k they don't really do much to it every year but it's just great every year i kind of want them to add to it i want them to get rid of some of the the point light problems at night in the low lights i kind of want them to get 8k and improve the mics but it's just it's just the best video i want them to add true raw because right now they only have pro raw and you have to use all these apps and there's all these apps that are blowing up like the moment pro camera 2 app got really big and then halide and if apple just like sherlocked all of those by next year just announcing all right we're just allowing true raw out of this camera in this like promo setting i always wonder about that yeah so that in 8k i always wonder about because it seems like a storage problem and i don't know if it's not even a problem it's just that they don't want to give people the ability to fill up their entire phone storage with an hour of video i think that apple is more afraid of people taking photos that they don't like but they let us shoot log which is yeah like they they give us pro features and and people who know what they're doing can shoot quote ugly videos and then make them look great because like 4k log looks quote bad and they make it look great so i figured they shouldn't be afraid of that i guess so i think that they're definitely leaning more into it finally and i think they're getting a little less afraid of it and honestly like every single year they have to release some new camera feature right because they know that the camera is the main selling point of a lot of these phones that's why they had announced gen lock because it's a pointless feature for literally like 99.999 percent of people even most people on these sets yeah but you know it's a new thing that they can say like look how even more pro this is now so uh notably friend of the show mr mobile michael fisher who hates iphones with a seething passion still carries the newest iPhone on him just for like bcam footage to put there's a lot says a lot he could carry anything but for videos you know what it is so yeah that was my runner-up and my winner and I also mentioned the x300 pro but any other camera thoughts before I move on have you not tried the 8k uploading from pixel up to the clouds so that oh god I have 24 hours I actually remember having really high hopes for that what did they call it it was like a post-processing google photos like you could shoot a certain mode and your photos or videos i think mostly videos would get like this massive quality boost number one the quality boost turned out to not be that big for most of the stuff that i tested and number two is that even a phone feature like you know it's uploading it photos feature post-processing and it's technically pixel only but like yeah that would that was it's good in low light because it gets it gets rid of a lot of the like low light artifacting and noise yeah but it takes like 20 hours yeah so it's not it's tough it is tough and i like the idea of like offloading super high processing stuff to cloud that's not a new concept but that just wasn't it that just wasn't it yeah yeah all right next up best value this is one that gets a lot of chatter every year because this is there's a thousand definitions of best value most phone for the least money best phone under x dollars however you want to phrase it uh I went with the CMF Phone 2 Pro. It's under $300. It's the best phone under $300. But it's also the, I feel like it was really close to flagship feeling. It's like a big, smooth screen. The software is super smooth. It's got great battery life and all these things. It's got multiple useful cameras. And it was just like a very good, usable phone in the price range. And I thought that deserved. It also had like the fun orange color and the modular accessories and all that. So that was a nice cherry on top. But I did give a runner-up or a mention to the Moto G Play, the Pixel 9a. and the base iphone 17 all good values in very different price categories i'll throw something out there to just another reason why i think this cmf phone 2 pro the nothing phone 3a light is the exact same phone and it's ten dollars more and one less camera and has ads on it and has ads on it i forgot about which makes this phone look awesome yeah very good strategy for win an award put out another phone sabotage your own that looks like a way worse deal being able to buy any phone in 2025 under 300 is pretty awesome moto g is under 200 that's crazy that's insane it's funny because moto excels in this category a lot every year and never quite breaks into like true flagships and it's almost like they're destined to have like a cap of like you shouldn't buy a motorola phone over 400 yeah you probably just shouldn't like get the razor or anything under it right don't get the big the edge phone it's just not a good buy yeah edge for a thousand it's like why it's crazy yeah okay best battery this one i also feel really good about one plus 15 ridiculously long battery life i went i tweeted about this i went three straight days i went friday saturday and sunday without charging the phone all day for all three days three hours of screen on time all of those days so i ended up with like 10 and a half hours of screen on time and the phone was still going. Now do this to smartwatches challenge. Garmin. Accepted. It's pretty incredible that we're about to get a bunch of phones with 7,000 million ampere batteries next year, which is silicon carbon. Yeah, so like Samsung doesn't, Motorola doesn't, Apple doesn't. The ones that are big here are not doing it. Pixel doesn't. So they're all kind of capped. And if they did, that's the thing is a lot of these phones would be awesome if they were silicon carbon batteries. Like iPhone Air would be way better. S25 Edge would be way better. Yeah. For this looking carbon battery. These folding phones, their thinness, they'd be way better. Anyway, the point is, this slab phone was just as thin and light as the previous one. It added 1,000 milliamp hours, and it still charges at a bazillion watts. So when it finally did die, I plugged it in for two seconds and it was back to 100%. So it was like, this is no clear. That's how it feels. Yeah. So it was great. It also has super fast wireless charging. I gave runner-up to the Xiaomi 17 Pro Max, and I did also mention the Duji S11 Ultra. It's probably not even the right name, but it had an 11,000 mAh battery. S200 Ultra, I think is what it was called. Are they still doing that? It was the biggest capacity battery of any phone in the studio this year. Dang. When can you not go on a plane with it anymore? It's pretty close to that, right? Oh, it's up. Is that? It's 110 watt-hours. No, 100 watt-hours. So I don't know how that translates because there's voltage and comparisons. Anyway, great battery life in this phone. No regrets. I think that one deserved the award. Can I say this sandstone in this trophy shot? Mm-hmm. Looks great. So good. It does. It's so good. It's my favorite color. It's so pretty. I want to be able to use a phone that color. I just don't like that the bezels around the outside, I can see them all the time. Same with the orange iPhone. Being able to see the orange from the front. Yeah. Wow. It's a little picky thing of mine. Anyway. Yeah. If there was no cap for real for real on American phone batteries or, like, Western phone batteries, that would be nice. Because we're just locked and loaded down to, like, 4200 or whatever. All day. I have it all. The OnePlus 15 is available for pre-order on AT&T. Really? I still haven't been able to switch my eSIM to it because the whole, like, government shutdown, FCC didn't approve any new phones for a while thing. So I still haven't been able to get my AT&T SIM in it. But it's coming to 8. Are you going to mainline it? Yeah. Really? Yep. Even with the bad cameras? Mm-hmm. Yeah. Because I'm going to have the iPhone in my other pocket and the Hasselblad in my back pocket. Right. Back pocket? Is that a Hasselblad in your pocket? It's a big pocket. Yeah. Yeah. Metaphorically. Okay. Design Award is next. Yeah, there's some comments about this one. Are you doing other comments at the end? Am I doing? Yeah, I'll do comments. If one particular pops out, but yeah, I'll do most of the comments at the end. So Design Award. I gave it to the iPhone Air. And there's probably six phones I could have given this to, but the iPhone Air was so uniquely, like, this is not a good phone for me, but I want to be the type of person who could use this phone. Because when I was testing this phone, I was loving it. I was like, dang, this battery sucks. Dang, this lack of an ultra-wide sucks. But, oh, man, holding this phone, using this phone, it's so ridiculously light and thin. using any other phone directly after it feels shockingly bad yeah weird you know quinn was uh quinn snazzy labs on on youtube was was posting online he's he has been posting about how much he loves the iphone air and how much it like just is an awesome phone that feels amazing it's awesome and then he posted either yesterday the day before like oh no the iphone air just feels like a regular phone now and everything else feels insane yeah yeah you get to this point ruins you so like i tested it i think i used it for like a week and a half for my review but continuing to try to use it after you do get to this point where it feels it starts to feel normal and you're like oh it's finally worn off maybe i'll switch back and then i use this iphone 17 pro and it was like this is heavy this is a thick phone it's not even that big of a phone but it's like it changed it just warps your perspective of phones yeah um yeah but new york is not a real place because i keep seeing the air everywhere like yesterday i saw five yeah and it's what like a failure by sales standards yeah it's all 10 of what they thought it would sell yeah oh but it is but it is out there and it is really clever they rearranged the internals you got to think on apple scale that's still a lot of phones it's a lot of times you're seeing that many yeah and they were all in new york and and san francisco yeah the highest density of iphone airs and z folds i will say one comment i liked about the thin phones is and this goes for the s25 edges well uh a phone is only as thin as its largest part which i thought was interesting and the way they described it the best was that actually um if you had so what what is this again 5.6 i think it's five point something yeah so like if you had a 5.7 millimeter hole to slide this phone through it wouldn't make it all the way through because of the camera bump right and same with s25 edge i think the thing with that is is like yes i agree that it still doesn't fully mean something but also i just don't think there was a ton of other design things this year maybe the xiaomi 17 pro max yeah yeah i'll give you others because i had some other mentions um i will say the the like thickest part of the phone thing i i in hand feel you never hold the thick part so it's like the thinness is the part you're holding anyway uh i mentioned the xiaomi 17 pro yeah which had the screen on the back and that design was awesome very complete phone yeah i mentioned the s25 edge which had better spec execution not better design execution it's more of like a brutalist square version of the thin thing but it had a primary like real flagship camera to match the s25 ultra and it had a second camera and it had a bigger battery so it was like it felt closer to usable every day but wasn't as like shockingly awesome to use still very cool overall battery life was probably still worse though right because worse than the big phones yeah yes no worse than the air um i don't know if i've compared them directly but they're both not great yeah and then holding both i think the iphone air feels better which is like buying this is like a hand feel thing and kind of but like yeah because you can emphasize yeah you can emphasize thinness with like the curves and the the chamfering and the they just did it very well yeah i also mentioned fairphone 6 which has obviously the most repairable most sustainable phone design maybe ever and actually kind of feels pretty close to a regular phone it still a little thick but it it feels very close to a regular phone this year Nice accent color power button You loved the Switch too Yeah So shout out to the Switch on the side The Switch, too. Wait, how are we going to talk about a phone design award and not talk about the Nothing Phone 3? Because I like to award good design. No, no, no, no, no, no. That design, it was brave. You love spinning the bottle. That's one way. Yeah. I play spinning the bottle every day. the phone yeah the the weirdness of it never quite wore off to me of the nothing phone three oh the pointlessness there are a lot of comments about nothing phone three we'll get we'll get there i thought that design age like fine wine the more i looked at it the more i was like that is a good looking i like the i thought the prettiest phone of the year was the oneplus 15 personally if we're just going off pure aesthetics which i know is different than design interesting i think the nothing phone three aged like wine similar to that bottle of snoop dog wine that's been laying outside the parking lot for like six months no that thing is cool man that thing is cool is there still wine in it i think it finally exploded there might be vinegar in it uh yeah that's an interesting take the one plus 15 would you the samsung one you think is the best looking that one looked so nice that's like purple violet one that was interesting to look at yeah well and like the way the light comes off of the uh ceramic back too is like really pretty i know it's like sort of a matte not matte but like it's not it doesn't exactly have a texture but the light does come off of it in a really cool way i like the matte black one it is yeah you would say that well it is the darkest matte black phone i've ever seen oh that's a good point so i thought that was nice that's a good point yeah can i throw a design award out yeah actually i almost have two but that tcl next paper bro that switch that switches it from like color e-ink to regular e-ink. I think it's one of the most jaw-dropping things a phone has done in a long time. I want to rewind that. It was like when the sermon in church hit a really good bar. Everyone was mmm, mmm, mmm. Preach, Andrew. I feel like we barely showed that thing off. Just the animation. I know we barely showed that thing off. I still get tweets. They're like, what are you going to talk about the TCL Next paper? Make sure we show a clip of B-roll in this but like it has the switch that goes between colored e-ink to black and white e-ink and the animation it's awesome is chef's kiss i think when i first saw it my jaw literally dropped it kind of looks like the harry potter uh mag whatever the magazines are called in harry potter like the quibbler that was called where the images move on the paper and you're like this seems crazy yeah it's like magic it's pretty cool i have to throw that that's valid okay yeah yeah you know Ultimately, I gave it to the iPhone Air. I don't regret it. And I just need them to give it a silicon carbon battery and dual cameras next year. I just I know they're not going to do it, but I need to put that out there. I have a suggestion for next year. OK. What if we remove the best small phone award since there really are none anymore? Go on. And then we add like a best technical achievement award. because we had the screen on the back of the phone this year that you can actually use best gimmick i like the gimmick the best gimmick is cool that's interesting because there's a lot of stuff that comes out that qualifies for that you could say the screen on the back you could also say like one of those super thin foldables with like no crease could be interesting you could also say the display that we just spoke about valid okay yeah best gimmick i love the idea of it adam but you have to put yourself in the in the perspective of these tech companies right boardrooms across the world are saying, look, market research shows people don't want small phones. The things people do want in their phones will not fit in a small phone. But we have to win the MKBHD Small Phone of the Year Award. This is the only thing keeping the category alive. It's why the OnePlus 13 S exists. But all they did was make a not small phone and put an S next to it. The only reason that's small is because they said it was small. I'll take it, man. Slightly smaller. I'm open to bringing the award back if they actually release the small phone. We should hold the award hostage until someone brings it. I know this phone had some issues, but shout out to the minimal phone. That was a small phone. I'd say the light phone was smaller. The light phone was even smaller. I never used that. The light phone was like a little box. A little box. Yeah. The light phone design looks so cool that I want to use it, except that I literally couldn't survive. I couldn't work or do anything on it. You know, I thought the design was nice. Eric Mijakovsky, the Pebble Guy, owns the website smallandroidphone.com because he wants there to be another small Android phone. 75 million bad faith. If you're going to make a ring, I feel like you could make a small Android phone, Eric. Don't let your dreams be dreams. Yeah, come on. This could be awesome. This could be real. Yeah. Bring it back. There's a whole award waiting for it. Bring it back with a six pack. Yeah, no, we'll play with this. I think this small category award will be really interesting next year. for the design category. What would be the best gimmick of the year for you? Okay, the screen on the back. I think it's the screen on the back. I'm trying to think of it on the Xiaomi, right? Yeah, the Xiaomi 17 Pro. So we've got that. We've got the Nothing Phone 3, which is a bad gimmick. That sucks. What about the Hasselblad camera attachment? I think that's a cool gimmick. That's really cool. That's a good gimmick. Yeah. Trillions of dollars spent on AI assistants and not one mention in this conversation. Apple intelligence. I will say I shot the Xiaomi car review on the Xiaomi 17 Pro, and I've always been doing this thing where I use the primary cameras and I flip the camera around. Oh, now you can see yourself. And I've gotten really good at that with not being able to see myself, but I could see myself on that phone. That was, like, super useful. That's pretty cool. I think it's got to go to the Xiaomi 17. I think best gimmick would be great, because there's all these Chinese phones that we can't use consistently, but they all have awesome weird gimmicks. Yeah, 1,000-watt charging. Yeah. What? Not actually 1,000. Gimmicks used to be bad And now I think there are actually useful gimmicks On phones On good phones There's a spectrum There's definitely good gimmicks There's definitely still bad gimmicks The LG G7 ThinQ With it's blood sensor Palm sensor? Palm, it was the glucose sensor You could do this And it never worked That's a good candidate for next year's award That's a gimmick Alright We had one more interesting one. Best foldables and maybe the last boring one. Samsung Z Fold 7. Any questions? No. It's the safest. It's like the only one that I could really daily and be like happy. I want to point out like the Pixel 10 Pro Fold. I liked it. No, I'm not saying that I want to point it out to win. Because no. that's the thing but this is the thing is because the the original pixel 10 pro fold to the pixel 9 pro fold was so astronomical this is why businesses every year with their year over year growth only want to have like one percent because if they have 50 in one year and then the next year they don't have another 50 their stock goes down yeah right so google did too much of a good thing in one year and then all they did was add magsafe or q2 which is big which is big pixel drops but it It kind of sags a little bit. Pixel snap. Pixel snap. And then they made it waterproof. That's important. That's pretty cool. It's important and good. That's super cool. But like in a year when the Galaxy Z Fold 7 came out and was super thin and had a really good screen to body ratio and was just like a great. Same size battery as the thicker version. Exactly. And then you got the Pixel, which is just like it's better than it was. But now it's, you know, now they feel really behind. So I feel like next year, Google is really going to have to try to make it thin. New strategy, go way backwards next year. Way worse. Make it small again. And then step up again. We're back. We'll be great. We're back, baby. The Windows strategy, just go worse, better. Worse, better. Exactly. Yeah. I gave a mention to the Z Flip 7 and the Pixel 10 Pro Fold, but it was the Samsung to lose this year. And Becca recently just put out a video about Z Fold 7. She said it was the best one of the year, and she said, sorry, MKBHD. There's two categories left. There's the bust. Let's do bust last. No, we got to do the bust now. All right, all right. Because there's interesting chatter about this one. All right, let's bust. The bust of the year for 2025 is the iPhone 16e. And I think that was pretty clear. A lot of people actually said they forgot it existed by the end of the year because it was that forgettable. Which proves the point, yeah. Because, number one, if you actually had $500 to spend on a new iPhone, you should just get the 16 or the 15 Pro or something. There was no reason to buy a new 16e and get a 60 hertz screen and no mag safe. And that was just camera. Yeah, it was just silly. It just didn't have any reason to exist for regular people. Then I got the comments about like, oh, it's a B2B phone. It's really just like the fleet phone for all the, you know, the old e phones that are all getting replaced at once, which is valid. But you still that's not that doesn't make it good. Yeah, that doesn't make it a good deal or a good phone. And so the cherry on top is the one I reviewed was a 512 gig 16e, which was $900. So there was just no reason for this one to exist at this price. Doesn't mean it's a bad phone. It's just a bad price. If it was $450, it would be just like the other iPhone SEs. $375. Take it or leave it. Dang. Single camera, no mag save, 60 hertz notch. What are we talking about? It's 2025. why does it still have 60 hertz to be honest well they just added 120 to the new ones the moto g play is 180 and it has 120 hertz display but it doesn't have a little apple on the back of it that's actually true yeah that's true yeah um yeah anyway yeah bad regular phone bad price so that one bust of the year bad phone bad price pretty bad yeah don't buy that one this i think this may have gotten the most chatter comments on go on my favorite thing about this was the nothing community hates the nothing phone three so much and they were almost they almost seem mad that an iphone one bus because they think the nothing phone three should have won bus of the year they they were pretty hard so much yeah that phone's fine i mean it was too expensive nothing strategy with phones is just all kind of all over the place this year like the 3a and the 3a pro were pretty interesting and then they they got rid of the glyphs with the three and then three a light and then three a and then community edition there's just a whole lot it's a whole lot i don't it was a seven that was 799 that phone when it launched that's actually a lot so it was not good for the price either and i think people expected a very different direction with like making the glyphs on the back more functional and instead it was like here's a little screen spin the bottle and we're like, what are you doing? So yeah, that actually did get a mention in Bus of the Year. I think it got posted as, this is the runner-up, and everyone's like, it should have won. No, the E is worse. Sorry. The Nothing Phone 3 is a fine phone. It's just that they went with the worst possible gimmick and tried to make it seem good. That's really the problem. And it was too expensive. Those are the main problems. Otherwise, the OS is fantastic. It was a usable phone. It's a fine phone. I think the Nothing 3A Lite is a worse phone because of the CMF Phone 2 Pro Pro 2. Oh, interesting. Like, I think the Lite is a... Just as a... There's no reason to ever buy that phone when the CMF Phone 2 Pro is around. Yeah, the budget company's budget lines budget... Pro phone. Pro phone is better than the... I'm not even going to do this. I can't even do this. Because you forgot already why you... Yeah, I did forget where I was. Can I throw one more in here? Mm-hmm. Maybe this is self-loathing. Mm-hmm. Interesting. pixel pixel 10 man what i thought you said phone of the year i heard some of these takes did i say that i have a hot take later okay well yeah i think this segues into phone of the year very well but like wait a sec pixel 10 base yeah being it was 800 right yeah yeah 800 yeah it got triple cameras but all but they're downgraded cameras yeah compared to the pixel 9 yeah pixel 9a sensors or whatever the 128 gigabyte base storage now watching i if you told me in the pixel seven days that the iphone base would be the better deal and have more features and stuff i would never believe you but we're in a place right now where even though it has one more camera the base iphone has more base storage for the same price and like and has 120 hertz it has all the other things now i feel like i got scammed i still love the phone don't get me wrong like it's a fine phone i am enjoying it but i can't believe they're up at 800 and we're finding an iphone has a better deal that just feels so unpixel they just dropped the price i mean it's on sale but it's 599 it's been on sale for like a month now which should be proof that it's not started which yeah which is proof that that's what it should have been at which is what they used to be at which is what the 16e is did you guys all just agree with me well i'm saying like yeah that phone for 799 is a bad deal yeah but you could see it being a pretty good deal at 599 yeah the 1699 would be the 16e is 599 and is a horrible right so that's why it got the award but i agree that it was a bit of a disappointing year for pixel um i i've used pixel 10 pro for a lot of this year as well yeah it's not great the cameras has been fine the battery is not that great we were kind of hoping like a lot would come from this tensor refresh and it didn't so it didn't yeah yeah i have a question that you guys probably don't know the answer to in japan no idea do are they also on like a carrier system where people just pay monthly for their phones and then they get into carrier contracts i assume that was just here because i have a big question that's going to lead into the phone of the year that we're about to talk about okay and that is that my friend from college just bought a regular iphone 17 and we you know we named it phone of the well i guess i'm jumping the gun we named it and we talk about how like they made all these upgrades and blah blah blah blah blah blah blah i have literally never seen one in the wild um so my question they're all in cases probably So my question becomes, like, in America, or in the West, where everything's a carrier contract, and I see so many pros. And I'm first on my list. I think it's just in America. In Europe, I don't think you're locked into carrier contracts like that. Yeah. It's very American. But the reason I say Japan is because the iPhone is also incredibly popular in Japan. It is, yeah. Where in Europe, like, it's a mix. It's a grab bag. So that's kind of my question. But it's crazy that the iPhone 17 both is the best value phone this year. And also, I haven't really seen that many because everyone keeps using the carriers. This could be the same exact reason why you see so many errors and folds. It's because the masses that are using the 17s are slowly trickling out and getting them in a way that people who just snap up the error probably aren't. So I think it's kind of like the Camry where you don't realize how many you see. right everywhere that's true um and the fact that it looks like the last iphone it looks just like the last so it's hard you got the silver one or whatever you never know i think also part of it is like phone of the year doesn't necessarily mean most popular yeah mostly because consumerism and so many people are okay with spending way more than they really need to but like sure i see this is like the people watching our videos who are going to try and find like enthusiasts yeah like It's not just bang for your buck, but there's so many things about this phone that just nailed it this year that I think our audience would be more inclined to be impressed by it. Well, I guess we'll just get right into it. The phone of the year is the iPhone 17. It is? Yeah. And it also won Most Improved, which we skipped over, but that's basically hand in hand here. So iPhone 17, they finally did the thing. 120 hertz, much brighter, better display. Thank God it's way overdue. The other thing is the much improved selfie camera, which is across the entire lineup, which is a sneaky great upgrade. I'm expecting to see a lot of people copy that. The big square sensor where you can do horizontal or vertical portrait selfies. That's awesome. And then doubling the base storage to 256 gigs. Also, I didn't have to do that, but kept the price the same. So now it's a better deal at 256 gigs than Pixel's base, than S25's base, than a lot of other phones. And it's just become the easiest phone to recommend. And I had a couple people ask me like this year, oh, I'm due for an upgrade. Like, which one should I recommend? And you'd look at the lineup and you'd go, oh, you're staying with the iPhone? Okay, I think, yeah, you could probably go with like an old 15 Pro or 16 Pro. Or maybe you should get like a, I don't want to recommend the base though. You'll have a 60 hertz phone for five more years. Now it's just like, oh, yeah, get the 17. Yeah. That's the one. That's way easier. Yeah. So, yeah, iPhone 17 won it. And my runner up was the Xiaomi 17 Pro. I've talked a lot about it in this podcast already in the review. I loved it. The screen on the back is awesome. It's a super complete phone. It's never going to be on sale here in the U.S., but the fact that I got to test it, it impressed me a lot, and it was definitely deserving. And I always mention the phones that have spent the most time in my pocket in between reviews, so I'll at least do that again, which is it started off S25 Ultra for, like, the first half of the year. Then it went to a whole lot of Pixel 10 Pro and then OnePlus 15. So that's me. I was going to say how Samsung has fallen. next year like no we've we've had the s ultra phones in in the like lineup of this for like ever since the s21 ultra basically yeah they're really good ones because s20 ultra was horrible and that was bust of the year that year yep but like yeah the fact that they're not in the lineup at all is kind of crazy it kind of just shows how they just totally went super boring until we get the trifold in the beginning of next year that's crazy the same company is doing like incremental baby steps on their biggest best phone and is also like by the way here's one that folds twice and like what do we that's that's the same company next year's gonna be crazy because we're gonna have that trifold and we're gonna also have the iphone foldable allegedly seems like it's gonna be next year yeah yeah yeah we'll see would you go from a mini to a fold that's why i'm not buying a pro really i'm waiting for the fold wow two areas glued together yeah to the fold could be awesome rumor has it it's 2026 so yeah we shall see wait didn't adam have a hot take that's around the pixel category it was pixel related my hot take was that pixel 10 was phone of the year can you press that button for me i have the pro yeah and i feel like i spent too much like i should have just gotten the 10 because the 10 does everything the Pro does. It's super on sale almost immediately if you don't get it at launch. Like if you just wait a couple weeks, it's on sale. And besides that, the AI, I hate to say it, but the AI stuff that the Pixel has been doing compared to something like the iPhone, which is just another iPhone, it's actually been very useful. And like thinking about switching phones, even Android to Android, I'm like, I'm going to miss some of those AI features, though. Like I really enjoy them. I mean, I could go to Samsung because Samsung just has all the Gemini features anyway. That's exactly how I would pick it apart is like if I were giving an AI of the year award, it would go straight to Google and then my proxy also Samsung because they use all the same stuff. And then I would also say to your point of the Pixel 10 Pro feeling like a ripoff, I think it's because it was a worse deal than ever this year. And it doesn't mean that 10 is phone of the year good. It just means it's a way better deal and feature set because it has all the same software features and it has the same Tensor chip and triple cameras. I just feel like if you're going to – I mean, I know this is a hard ask, but if you take someone out of the Apple versus Android world, like a fresh person coming into the world who's just looking for their first smartphone and they have no horse in any race and they're like, give me a phone, I'd probably give them a Pixel because it's doing more interesting things than the iPhone. Where in the world do they live? It doesn't matter. You're giving them the phone or they don't have to pay for the phone? Yeah, yeah, no. I'm giving them the phone. You're giving them a Pixel 10. Like the best phone. I'm giving you a phone. Here's a Pixel 10. That's interesting. That's an interesting question. I would probably give that person an S20. No, I would give them an S25 Ultra probably. Just like the most beefiest, crazy phone. Just the most stable. It's the most boring, the most stable. It doesn't improve that much year to year, but it always has good battery, good cameras, good software updates, good screen every time. You want to give someone fresh to the universe a boring phone? Yeah. Well, I don't want to give them a phone that, like, if I give them a Xiaomi 17 Pro, next year there's going to be, like, a totally different design and no screen on the back, but this other crazy feature, and they're going to have gotten used to one thing and have to switch around. People just want stability. That's exactly what we went through in the early 2010s, okay? That's fair. Every single year was fresh as hell. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. Consumency was not a thing. I don't know her. As the only Pixel 10 owner here, Andrew, what do you think of my take? I think you're wrong. well it's funny because you you keep thinking i feel like i should go down i keep feeling i feel like i should spend another hundred dollars and went up because then i would have gotten 256 base storage and better cameras and a better i mostly wanted the yellow which was my ultimate downfall the only reason i got the pro who thought the piss color would be so bad yeah uh i think one thing you did mention though which is kind of a comment i wanted to address is there's so many people we judge everything on msrp at launch um which is like a lot of people keep saying well this was actually a great phone once it went on sale blah blah it's like that can be true but it's so hard for us to ever base that off of i know we've said this a thousand times but like i can't we can't base things off of carrier deals and two-for-one deals and like on sale the pixel will go it's great to know it's great to say like hey this kind of sucks at 800 but if you're willing to wait three months or black friday the pixel will be way cheaper msrp stands for manufacturers suggested retail price and that means that that's what they think that that device is worth so if that's their judgment of it then that's probably what we should be basing it on yeah and i could also you could probably make the argument that things that constantly go on sale means that a suggested price probably wasn't the best idea in the first place. Right. And it's correcting pretty quickly. Well, Google should figure that out because they do the same thing every single year. Just make it cheaper to begin with and you'll sell way more. They had that. They had it for a while. I know they did. They almost did it. Remember when, like, we were saying that, like, Pixel 7 was too good of a deal to not even look at the Pro and people on the Google team were like, I guess we should just make it more expensive. Ha, ha, ha. You should have done it. You really screwed the pooch on that one, man. Well, they shouldn't have made it $300 more for the Pro before. Like, that was insane. Overall, though, I'm pretty happy with the awards. I think that people picked up on some trends of, like, this, I don't know, when was the last time Samsung, or when was the last time Google won zero awards and Samsung S Series won zero awards. Yeah. Probably never. First time in a while. iPhone winning bust and winner in the same year is hilarious. i think that's also happened before didn't hcc pull that off no they did most improved and bust oof and we they asked for the most improved trophy so we sent them the toilet bowl trophy also hilarious yeah anyway so let us know in the comments if you agree disagree we enjoy reading all the let me speed run a couple of the comments all right yes the most comment was wearing a blazer and a hoodie is diabolical hey last year i thought it looked sweet but i have no fashion sense at all so maybe i loved it all right next comment good lord this one recently has been nagging at me a little bit but i there's so many people who love to say you're in a bubble you don't get to experience all the other phones but like we're all in our own bubbles yeah i said at the beginning this is my award we're in an i thought you were super clear about it this year yeah phones i test yeah phones you test and ones like it's within the u.s bubble because we live in the u.s unfortunately we try like we probably get more phones than the average u.s reviewer gets and you definitely try them but i thought you were very clear this year like these are my awards the things that i like it's i also said that specifically because other youtubers also do their own awards if you have your people were uh quote tweeting my list and giving their own set of awards which is maybe they have used some of those phones maybe they haven't but like anyone can make their own set of what they think is the blank of the year um i give mine because i think i have a unique perspective of i've been able to test all these devices so here's my perspective from what i've tested and then other people will give theirs so yeah i'm i'm sticking with mine yeah obviously um okay i went through a couple of these just in our normal thing okay here's one that made me mad no and it has nothing to do with our audience it has to do with youtube where's the time stamps okay i added them at at launch did you they were there yeah so they were there for a couple hours And then I saw that comment and I went back up and I was like, they're gone. So I went back to the description. They're all still sitting there. So I simply deleted a letter and added a letter and hit save again. And all the timestamps came back. So we do this with the pod. We've had this struggle before. Obviously, this is a video that we should be timestamping. So I'm sorry, but also like not because it's not my fault. But yeah, the timestamps should be back. And if they disappear again, just ping me on Twitter again and I'll put them back. There was a comment that did the timestamps. and everyone's like you're a savior it's like they were in the description the whole time but just like yeah yeah youtube what the man please let that i want a public apology also this also this isn't like ui like this isn't like a youtube feature where you click the timestamp button and add them this is if you decide in your description to type out timestamps with titles it auto detects it in the description of the video and adds timestamps everyone has sort of figured out that that's how you do that at this point, but there's never been official UI from YouTube to add timestamps to a video. Why? It's unofficial UI. It's a super useful feature. It's like a hashtag. It should be the easiest. They're only like a trillion dollars in data center investment away from pulling this up. They're going to get it soon. It seems very doable. They basically have it already, right? You can pick where ads go in the middle of your video through a UI system, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But Andrew, Andrew, Andrew. Ads make the money, okay? It can insert dynamic ads into timestamps, but I can't just pick that timestamp and write, put this text in. Do timestamps make them money? They got rid of annotations. They got rid of all the clutter. I think it would be super easy to add a timestamp feature. Please. I want a screen. It makes me so mad. It seems so obvious. By the way, the video we did, the Sniper Front Awards, is a 2.4 by 1 aspect ratio, which meant it's not supported for end cards. so i couldn't add end cards oh really it's an unsupported aspect ratio which i thought was a bummer uh but yeah that's another weird quirk about this video i saw a lot of comments about that too why didn't this auto play i think the last thing i have here is there's a lot of love for the red magic 11 pro yeah they wanted some love found yeah uh i have flirted with the idea of adding a gaming category every year but i never really test that many gaming phones and i also not even that into gaming a lot of the gaming phones i end up testing i end up looking at them through the lens of are they a good phone the rest of the time that you're not gaming right so like the two or three gaming phones we got this year were good phones but this phone had like a liquid like cooling loop that was like visible through the glass back it was super interesting i'm pretty sure zach tore it down it was a really interesting interior uh like a phone on the side of the phone blowing hot air out of it like it was a cool phone yeah um but i it didn't really it wouldn't have won like my design award it wouldn't have won my best big phone so it just kind of didn't get mentioned so that's valid i just haven't like there is no gaming category so yeah did you see what it looked like in your story about the uh i saw someone screenshot it looked kind of like a story that we were shooting smartphone awards and because it's like a it's like a clear back but it has this like faded black border and for some reason the way the light was hitting the phone and you took it it just looked like this almost see-through phone with black bezels and no one could figure out what it was oh wow that's funny it was yeah it was kind of does have 80 watt wired and wireless charging yeah they got wireless charging in there which is cool 80 watt wireless Is that just like a space heater? Yeah. I mean, it's probably losing to 90%. No, it's gotten cooler. It's kind of crazy how many phones charge at 80, 200 watts. Don't use that in your apartment. Especially when they don't have Qi2, and so they can't perfectly align. They're probably losing so much heat. Wait, 80-watt wireless? It has both. 80-watt wired and 80-watt wireless. Oh, my God. Losing a lot of heat. You need, like, the perfect charger. Okay, I have one more thing I noticed. Quite a few people mentioned. Ellis, did you use the PS3 startup sound? Dude. Let me, let me, I, this was a, this was, this was a healthy learning experience for me. You know what I mean? Because I went into this, I was like, I want to use music to explain what makes this smartphone awards different from all the other smartphone awards we've done in the past, because that's something that we can't exactly express visually. I do think this was the most beautiful set and the most beautiful lighting we've ever had for smartphone awards. But also we're, we're, we're at the top of our game right now. We are chugging out these excellent videos, and I wanted the theme of this smartphone awards orally to be prestige. And I thought very hard about that, and I said, how can we, in about eight seconds, communicate prestige and tradition and the fact that we've been doing this longer than anyone else has been doing this? And I thought, you know what would be great? PlayStation. No. PlayStation. For 300 years, for 300 years, orchestras have been tuning the exact same way, with an oboe starting, then the concertmaster, and the rest of the orchestra. I thought that because that had been happening for 300 years, everyone would know that's the case. But apparently, this little company that makes a little box called the Xperia rewrote what that sound was for everyone in the world. And I probably should have known that. But yes, apparently you cannot use the sound of an orchestra tuning without people being like, oh, that's the Uncharted machine. You think too highly of it. It's an expensive box. So, yes. Almost $2,000. My goal was not to use the PlayStation. Actually, fun fact, that is the second original piece of music that has ever been written in a video here. Rufus and I wrote that from scratch and produced it ourselves. So, no, I didn't use the PlayStation 3 startup sound in our video. It's just a great minds thinking alike situation. I guess so. And also, how dare everyone pay so much attention to that? And I didn't see one comment about the toilet flush I used in the bus of the years car. I was shocked that nobody mentioned that. I will say, we put so many Easter eggs in videos that it's sort of trained people to look for Easter eggs, even some of which don't exist. So I am both shocked that they didn't notice the toilet flush, but also not shocked that they assigned PS3 sound to the others. It's a trivia thing that you do. We'll win some, lose some. To the oboe. Anyway, but thank you for listening. It's trivia time. Yeah. Trivia, dude. Someone yelled at me last week for not doing that. So, real quick. Ellis, what's your battery percentage right now? Oh, jeez. Okay, so... Uh-oh. May have forgotten to charge my phone last night, so we got a little juice in David's car this morning. How was it even... Dude, you could have plugged... Oh, no, you couldn't have because you have lightning. Yeah. So I wireless charged in David's car. Also, it's a 12 mini, which doesn't really line up with the Tesla. It really does not. So it mostly just gets hot. Anyway, anyone want to guess what my battery percentage is at? 27. 27, 26. Marquez? 34. 34. You guys give me too much credit. I am at the solid 18% right now. Honestly, you know how phones sometimes will just die even though they have like 18%? I'm sure Surprise Sears didn't. Like that's just not misreading the battery. Alright, next trivia question. So earlier we were talking about Android XR. They introduced a new UI toolkit called Jetpack Compose What? And it looks kind of like if Material You Expressive had a baby with glass, liquid glass. And I think it looks kind of dope. I hope they don't bring it to phones, but it's cool on. I skipped this part of the keynote, and I remember, dude, I swear to God, as I was skipping this part of the keynote, I was like, Adam actually watched this one. Not because of trivia, just because I knew that you would be interested in the developer stuff. That's the part I was the most interested in. That's when he slowed down to 1X and was like, I'm not even joking, that's the first thought I had. I knew it would come to bite me in the ass. All right. Well, those of you who 1X that part will know the answer, but we'll think about it. We'll be right back. All right. We're back. Wrapping it up with a couple last thoughts and things that we wanted to at least chat about. One is the Xiaomi SU7 review is finally up. and also chats just in general about the state of Chinese electric cars and what would happen if they came here and how good they are through the lens of checking out this one EV. It's a really good car. It's nice. The conversation is basically it retails for the equivalent of $42,000 in China. And so if we were to get a car like that for $42,000 here, it would be just completely ridiculously out of this league good it feels like a 75 85 000 car and i said that in the video lots of cool features really good drive uh self-driving great build quality all this great software and you should check out the video if you haven't seen it already any other thoughts on it i just thought it was a one of the most interesting products of the year that we reviewed it has multiple reverb engines in the system which like most karaoke systems only have one reverb so to have multiple for those confused on what the karaoke system is this car had software that was really good it also had uh karaoke modules that you could buy that would attach to the car things like an extra speedometer at the top or ambient light bars on the sides to move up and down with your music or usb type c cables at the bottom and one of them is a pair of high-quality karaoke microphones that will plug in and charge based on the car's battery and will work with the car's built-in karaoke mode in the software. Said software had multiple reverbs and lots of other features. We actually demoed it briefly. It was hilarious. That is a feature that exists in this car, just one of many. I'm just so disappointed you didn't mention the mini-fridge. Ours didn't have that option, I don't think. Oh, okay, okay. Yeah, but yeah, there is a mini-fridge. Yours did have Duyin built into the back screen, which is Chinese TikTok for anyone curious, which provided me with ample time to scroll Chinese thirst traps and League of Legends live streams. It was quite fun. I drove it for like 20 minutes to go get charged. And as I'm like sitting there while it's charging, I'm just like, oh, this thing's got a lot of stuff. And then I was like looking under the center console, thought, oh, Miles and them left some walkie talkies here from when they were doing rollers. And then I clicked them and they like popped in perfectly. I was like, this car has walkie-talkies on the bottom of it. Two of them. Built in. They were better than our walkie-talkies. We were using them to do our shoots because they had a longer range and were incredibly good and had a long battery life. I have a super small gripe or something that they should add. Okay, so on the left side of the steering wheel, there was a little raised MagSafe puck for you to put your phone on that needs wireless charging on it. The YU7? It does. It does? Yeah. they thought of everything yeah i thought the same thing i was like this is like a little mounting point but you know it would take it to the next level if they could charge my phone the yu7 it does get power yeah so when we get the yu7 yeah i kind of want to get the hands on the yu7 the yu7 is like a the model y to this model three although that's not a good analogy these are super premium this is like the hmm this is like the purosangue these cars are essentially stealing design from the other most popular luxury cars that you see everywhere that are successful so the the su7 just looks like a porsche yeah in a lot of ways it has lines from like lotus and mclaren headlights and like the embezzled mirrors like a pole star but essentially they just said let's make a porsche tycan but better yeah and they made a livable incredibly cheap version of a Porsche Taycan, and it's amazing. The YU7 is more of an SUV. It's a little taller. And if you look up the Ferrari Purosangue and put it next to a YU7, you're like, oh, they just made the Ferrari. The Ferrari is $400,000. Andrew, the Purosangue is the car that almost burnt my eyebrows off. Yeah. We were recording exhaust sounds, and I was like, oh, I'll just sit behind the car while it's red lines. And a hot exhaust. literally blew his hair back like yeah yeah or maybe just whatever um yeah one thing i found funny i couldn't get over that there was a me logo on the front there's just like something about a phone a phone logo being on a car which now makes me wonder if there was an apple car like how long would it take me to get used to seeing an apple logo like hood ornament or logo yeah car yeah yeah that was kind of silly it almost made it look less expensive if that makes sense yeah i was just like an apple gadget i don't know if i would think of that as premium yeah that was one of the things i said at the beginning uh a lot of these older car companies that you do think of as premium have this like history of premium so you assign that shape with prestige and xiaomi doesn't have any of that history so they kind of just yeah they just borrow prestige shapes they just borrow the porsche silhouette obviously their logos like we don't associate that with prestige but they just borrowed that a lot um and the more i think of this car the more crazy features that are just coming to my back to my mind from testing them so i'll just blurt some of them out one of them was the 50 watt wireless chargers in the center that charged the xiaomi 17 pro i was using extremely fast yeah another one is the speakers in the headrests behind me which no matter what phone and navigation i was using would separate out the navigation voice from the music that was playing from the same phone and would play it just in the speaker while the rest of the music played in the rest of the car so much better i don't i can't underestimate how awesome that was yeah like i would be using ways and spotify on the same phone at the same time and it would separate just the waze voice and play it on the speaker and keep the music the same that was awesome too yeah um the ambient lighting in the car at night it was brighter and more visible it would pulse with the bass of the sound i was listening to in the color of the album art of the song that i was listening to ridiculous did govi work with them it was great i don't know but it was like it was built into the software just new um what else there was this full-on like rad tuner equivalent from rivian where essentially the xiaomi you could change all the driving dynamics with a custom mode you could flip it to be fully rear wheel drive if you want fully front wheel drive if you want change the brake calibration change the acceleration rate and how much it slowed down and regen all this stuff was in the software easy you noticed that because i was flipping through the drive modes and one was called miles yeah but it was lowercase i was like huh they didn't capitalize this i was like wait these kilometers oh this is miles our employee who made one yeah um there was also stop me if i'm getting boring there's another one where you could mirror the screen of your phone in real time for some reason for some reason because it's a xiaomi phone in a xiaomi car yeah uh carplay full screen the whole thing 16 inch carplay wireless carplay why do they even have carplay i guess because people will buy it and not have iphones or and will have iphones yeah so yeah if a yeah hold on i didn't know how to add carplay If a main competitor smartphone company can put the competitor's CarPlay inside, suck it, Tesla and Rivian, and everyone not giving me CarPlay and Android Auto. Get over yourselves. Didn't they say Tesla's finally going to add CarPlay? Are they? Allegedly. I'll give them a ton of credit for doing that. They should do it. Yeah. They said that, well, everyone assumes that they need that to, like, pump their sales up again. Yeah. But they haven't done it yet. But they might do it. Because that's what they need. Well, remember, according to Apple, like 95% of people wouldn't buy a car without CarPlay in it. Yeah. That was the best CarPlay experience I've had in a car. Yeah. Anyway, the list goes on. Shout out to Hugo Barra, who, ex-Google guy, friend of the show, had him on a show one time. He was able to source this for us because he was also a big guy at Xiaomi, and that's how he was able to get us the car. What would it take for you to want this car? Assuming it was sold here. To want it? Like, you would actually... like i already want it like okay it's available for sale uh-huh price aside uh-huh like what would you just buy it like no matter what i mean i already have a daily that i love but if i didn't yeah i would i would get this even if it was like the price of the daily that you love oh because what we don't know what would it would realistically cost if you brought it here you know yeah like i mean if i didn't have a car and i was like trying to pick a car i would pick the su7 up until about 75 80 000 okay it's really good do you like it more than the lucid air sapphire no but that car is 250 000 and i would pick that car pretty much anything over 250 but like yeah the the xiaomi is i would pick it over any tesla yeah i think i would pick it over any like the lucids that i tested with the air suspension that are not the sapphire i would probably pick this Xiaomi over those. I just wish I had a little more range because the Lucids have like 400, 500 miles of range. But everything else about the Xiaomi was awesome. So, yeah. Really good. Very nice. Can I – there's a lot of chatter on Twitter, which mostly was like, wow, these cars are amazing. I'm sad we don't have them in America. There's a lot of Tesla fanboys absolutely freaking out about this and being pretty mad, which kind of makes it seem like it's doing really good. Well, it's really funny. I reviewed this car. people on YouTube went oh cool car and commented about the car people on threads went oh cool feature and commented about the feature people on threads saw it and went oh let's talk about how this compares to Tesla or Twitter that's how Twitter is so I saw that too I thought it was very funny it's so weird that like the website where people get paid to say nice things about Tesla people say nice things about Tesla like who would ever expect that it was very obvious when all the mean comments you'd click on their profile and dollar sign and TSLA was in it every single time. A lot of them were like, well, this car doesn't have self-driving, so it's not as good. Self-driving saves lives. Yeah. That was an actual comment. I guess you could just reduce every car to does it have Tesla self-driving or not, and if that's your version of an advanced take on cars, then keep shipping that. But I think there's a lot of interesting things about this product. Most Teslas don't have Teslas. Ignore that. Ignore that. Ignore that. Yeah, this is a really good, complete product in a lot of ways. and that was worth talking about well speaking of tesla really quick sort of where are we in the segment this link is still here wait this are we talking about have you seen this i watched this clip you watched this clip it's i can't tell do we know anything else about this clip we know what happens yes okay so where is this from i'm gonna explain something to you yeah okay so we all know that tesla optimus robot right we all know that they're remote controlled we do not everybody says it's not not everybody thinks like that well you have to phrase it like this one is remote control it's pretty clear if you leave the cookies out on christmas eve so there's this incredible clip of a tesla optimist robot who had been serving people water bottles um and you know i've been serving them you know autonomous autonomously not and then at one point uh the robot just picks its hands up takes off an invisible headset and just falls and like just minorly bumps the table gets frustrated and then beautiful like at first i'm like oh that's so funny it takes his headset off but then it just like freezes and just like comedically falls backwards through a like curtain guys guys guys but have you tried version 14 yet oh yeah true have you tried this clip is outdated as long as version 14 exists the best part about this is that this event was called the tesla autonomy visualized event oh that's where came from this was not autonomous it's not autonomous what do you think it was that got the person who was wearing the headset so somebody picked up a water bottle for themselves they're like i'm out i'm out what yeah one of the water bottles like explodes watch right here when it falls down this is brutal he hits it so hard this is a tough clip yeah it's beautiful you know this will make the headlines but none of the successful autonomy of the robot will make headlines guys all right So last thing before we go to trivia. A few weeks ago, I had mentioned that Fairphone was going to finally start selling stuff in the U.S. They were going to sell the Fairphone 6 in the U.S. And they were going to sell the new, the all-new Fairbuds XL, which are headphones that, you know, they're, it's confusing. When the Fairbuds, they're XL, but they're not buds. They're actually. There's also no regular Fairbuds. Yeah. So there's just the XL. Yeah. So anyway, I talked about that. and the funny thing about that is that there are there's this thing called an embargo wait there are fairbugs oh i was like i'm pretty sure there's fairbugs okay good good a week or so ago um fairphone posted a teaser on their instagram so do me a favor click on the link that i put in the show notes uh the instagram link got it okay so describe what this video is that they posted Someone pulling up a box, and then it says stay tuned. So what is on the box? Braille. A QR code. And a QR code. Can you scan that QR code? Can I? Let's try. Marques, can you describe where it brought you? It takes me to a YouTube video that just says, Introducing the Improved Fairbuzz XL. And it's a 45-second video of... Wait, what? The headphones. No, they changed it! Oh. Mine takes me there, too. Okay, so up until they had literally announced this today, it took you to the YouTube the waveform episode where I accidentally broke embargo wow that's hilarious they emailed me about it they emailed me and they're like hey David and then wink and then they showed the frame and then I went to it and I was like oh my god and in the comments of that post people say where does the QRCA go and then someone says a YouTube podcast anyway these are officially was that Megan Fox? no Megan Fox was Bieber shout out to Megan anyway their new headphones they sent them to me they're much better than the first Fairbuzz XL they have this plush material on them I forgot to bring them today I really wish I had brought them you have them? I have them it's too late describe them All right. They have this sort of a knit, like 3D knit kind of material, which is like much higher quality. You can replace pretty much every aspect of them. The cool thing is that if you had the Fairbuzz XL from the last generation, you can actually just buy the new drivers from the Fairbuzz XL thing. And put them in the old Fairbuzz XL. So I think that's awesome. One thing is they sent me both colors. There's a really nice green one, and then there's a black one. And the joystick on the green one was broken when I got it, which sucks. Can you replace it? I don't know. Oh, good question. In theory, you should be able to, right? Maybe. I would think we have the whole thing. Or maybe the whole can. It's like a lot of it. Yeah. It's a lot of it. Anyway, yeah, they're going to be sold in the U.S. just like the phones. So Fairphone is like really making a U.S. play now, finally. $229 for these headphones? $229. U.S. through Amazon? U.S. I think they sounded pretty good. um i think you're you're mostly buying the sustainable like better you know better diamond blood diamond mine stuff i think this is a good category for them like the phone obviously is hard because you try to miniaturize everything and then the fair phone is like a little thicker and that's fine but like i imagine they can match all the specs of normal headphones there aren't like super cramped for space like they can have a 40 hour battery life and anc and microphones everywhere and all the stuff that you expect that headphones and make them comfortable and make them repairable yeah and not really sacrifice so i think that's a good that's a successful new category i think that they sounded way better than the other ones they they fold really well the other ones were just too stiff and like they had like this leather i don't know it's it's a lot better now so it's good anyway those are officially out um i apologize to absolutely no it's funny that they lean into it it's like kind of when i've told the samsung story before on this ssds yeah oh yeah it kind of reminds me of that i did a what's in my bag video like many years ago back when i was about to go to ces and i had a samsung x5 ssd in my and i've been using it for like weeks and i was like this thing is awesome i definitely need to shout it out and i shouted it out and then i was as i was adding links to the description for all the stuff in my bag i couldn't find a link for it but i just went oh well and then i got a email from them after the video published saying um we're really glad you like the drive uh embargo tomorrow so just i'll have a link for you when you want to add that the funny thing too is that that ssd was like went on to become like one of the best ssds for the next like five years and they discontinued it and there wasn't anything better than it for another like few years yeah it was awesome yeah they were selling like secondhand which is crazy for a samsung ssd i know but anyway but anyway You know what I'd never be discontinued? Trivia! Good answer. Until this podcast crumbles. You haven't seen my 2026 plans yet? Oh my gosh. Yeah. No more trivia. What was the name of the cancelled Google ARXR project? F***. Damn it. I don't have the right answer, but I do have a good answer. I'll give you a hint. No, I won't. Wait. Sounds like we all need the hint. Yeah, this one's a little difficult. How much time do we have? That's the hint. I wanted to ask a different question, but I realized I spoiled it by putting the answer in memes because I got an email from some PR agent this week about asking me to come check out a product that they claimed was the world's smartest toilet. We made a joke about that. Let's go to Japan. This one was genius, bro. I want the wrapped from that toilet. Yeah. No, but that was what made it so smart, is it would, like, analyze your pee and make health recommendations. And then also, if you bought it for old people and no one used it for 12 hours, it would notify your loved ones, which actually is kind of cool. I mean, I don't use my bathroom for 12 hours. Okay, we're not going to get into that. We're not going to. All right. Do you want the hint? Yeah, no. Well, we can't change it. We can't change it. I really bungled this one, guys. All right, flip them. Oh, boy. Okay, all right. Who wants to go first? I'm wrong. I'll just say I wrote Google Beam because it can beam you to a new location. I think that is a thing, but it's not this thing. No, it was not this. It's in Android 4. I wrote Goat. Project Boo-Hun. It's not Halloween anymore. I said Project Glass. What an idiot. Wait. Oh, I should have said Air. It was Air? The answer was Project Iris. Project Iris. That makes way too much sense for a Google Project. I know, right? That's why I got canceled. Yeah. Score time. Marquez has 10. Still. Andrew with 13. I feel like I've had 10 for like a month. I know. It's been a minute. David with 9. All right. Here's your chance. This is it. You guys can all get a point. Why don't you meet me in the middle? With the new Android XR stuff, they introduced the new toolkits. Called Jetpack Compose What? And because we didn't have enough time for Alice to give you a hint, I will give you guys a hint. It rhymes with Shimmer. Jetpack Joyride. That doesn't ride with Shimmer. Jetpack Joyrider. Jetpack Maritaph. It would be really funny if it was just Shimmer. That would actually be hilarious. I would feel really dumb. Flip him and read. Flip him and read. What do we got? Marquez, what did you write? Jetpack composed dimmer. Dinner. Andrew, what did you write? I wrote glimmer. David, I wrote glimmer. Correct. We're finally tied, Marquez Don't you like being tied with me? I've had 10 points since 2022 It's been so long since I got a point We're in the same club now 10 point club, carry the one We're all carrying the one, that's good 10 point club Remember that? We learned something new, that's the point of trivia We either get it right or we learn something new And today I learned two new facts I thought the point of trivia was to win It's about the friends you make along here thanks for watching thanks for listening I assume you've already subscribed so thanks to getting us to 500,000 subscribers this is a huge year for Waveform we still got more coming up we got regular scheduled episodes we got bonus episodes December don't stop so I guess we call it Tech-cember no catch you in the next one we don't say that see you later bye bye some people say Waveform is produced by Adam Molina and Ellis Riven we're partnered with the Vox Media Podcast Network and our intro to our music was created by Vane Still bingo bingo bingo bingo bingo bingo bingo bingo bingo bingo bingo they spent hundreds of hours in sleepless nights promptings