 Hello, welcome to Circle Breaker, the Virgins Gadget Show. It's a show about gadgets on YouTube, which is where you are. I'm Neelai. That's Paul. Hello. This is Ashley. Hey. My name is Ashley in second. We're here in the chat with you if you're watching this live. Love your questions, comments, concerns. We basically react to this the whole time, so that's cool. We have a huge show for you today. Our friend Sam Sheffers here is back. We're going to make him talk about not new technology, but kick-ass old technology. We're going to talk about some sidekicks with him. We have some great questions for Ask Circle Breaker. And then Dan Sheffert is going to join us and we're going to talk about Android Wear. Wear OS. Which has been rebranded to Wear OS. What does it like to say? Wear-Os. Wear-Os. A friendly breakfast wearable. But first, let's start with Ashley. You're going to talk to us about avatars? Yeah, like digital emoji avatars. It's a thing. It's a thing. Paul, you know, video game avatars have been a thing forever. Yeah, I could never get my me to look like myself. I feel like I probably just have a very unique world structure aesthetic. But yeah, you make a character to play around and to represent you in the world. Right, it's important because you're in a digital world. That's you. Visualization. It's also like a huge business in games. Like the game company saw like clothes and like accessories for your digital avatars. Hats. Hats are big. And they changed Val as a company. Do you know today was hat day at the verge? And if you wore a hat, you got cake and no one told me about this? Are you kidding me? It was in Slack, Neelay. Oh, I missed it. Anyway. So, okay. So, video game avatars are one thing, but now we're seeing kind of these emoji avatars, digital representation coming to more messaging apps. Like personal exchanges you have with friends. So, like there's Animoji with the iPhone. Samsung just recently debuted their AR emoji. And then Bitmoji, which is now owned by Snap, is kind of like the originals that we're trying to do this. So, I'm going to just kind of walk you guys through a little bit of the market basically of what we're seeing now. And I feel like an important point to make here. I bet our audience knows this, but like Bitmoji was first. But Apple put out Animoji and there was like a wave of hype. But there's been a lot of these for a while, right? Yeah. Like multiple companies have tried to do this. So, Bitmoji does stickers and they actually relaunched this new Bitmoji Deluxe in January. And this is mine. It's kind of hard to see here, but these are mine. And they're very accurate. You've only made one face for this and then they adapt. And they put it in different situations. And then a company called Gabsi came around. And I think we actually have video footage because right now their app is not on the App Store currently. But just to show you guys, this came out over the summer and it was kind of like the video version of Bitmoji. So, it came out, the Internet kind of freaked out about it. Casey Newton wrote a piece about this. And then Snapchat was like, okay. There we go. So, you can see this is sort of like your Bitmoji, but doing stuff in a real world environment like AR. And so that came out at the time Bitmoji wasn't doing this. And now... It's a real classic one right there. The fart. Yeah. Snapchat has introduced a way to do it with your Bitmoji in Snapchat. I can't say what I want it to do. It's not masking my face or anything like that. So, did Gabsi just get killed by this? They're still a company. They're still a company. They're still a company. But why did they get pulled then? They pulled it themselves. Because they got eaten. I can't say too much. Okay. All I can say is they're still around. Okay. Yeah. So, you didn't have to make a new Bitmoji for this. This is just mine. Bitmoji is on my Snap. It's pulling from my Bitmoji app. Snapchat bought Bitmoji. Correct. And so, that's me in doing the AR. And I think this is... I'm in this environment. You've come on and done a ton of AR demos with us, but this is the AR most people know about. Yeah. Snap life. And that's like a more theoretical question I have is like this. It's my face. It's masked, but it's not masked. Like if I had a full mask on, it would be masked my face. Is this considered a digital AR emoji? I would say no. Yeah. Like I'm curious where the distinction is because... So, if we look at Animoji... Get this to go. You're punching that button. There's masks that cover your face entirely. On Snapchat, your name? Or Instagram? There's filters that kind of change your face. And then there's avatars that are not your face. They're a representation of your face. Right. That are masked to your facial features. So, like here with Animoji, the fox is my face. Like it's talking to me if I go like this. As Neelay points out, loves to point out, you can't really... Well, I can wink with this eye. I cannot wink. So, this is a true story. We did the iPhone X review. No time. I was playing with this, and I was on the phone with Apple. Before we published the review, I asked all my follow-up questions. And I was like, you can't blink. And they're like, we are aware that blinking is not yet supported by Animoji. And it will be rolled out in the future. I mean, that's important. It's a huge thing you do with your face. Like, arguably the biggest thing you do with your face. I'm good at it. I'm good. What's the main thing you do with your face? I got a 50%. I would say blinking. It's a big thing. It's tough. So, what's interesting about this, and we were talking about Bitmoji earlier. And, you know, when the iPhone X came out, everyone was doing Animoji karaoke. And you don't see them anymore. Like, that wave came and went. And my theory is like twofold. One, the iPhone X is really expensive. So, like, they sell a lot of them. But they're selling them to people who are maybe not incentivized to like make goofy internet memes. Right? The meme creators can't afford it. Because the dollars, the meme sales are poor. And then it's actually really hard to get them out of here. Like, you can text one to yourself. A lot of people, and that has a 10-second limit. And a lot of people, we actually have a how-to on our site. It's like just hit the screen recorder and then like crop and export that file. So, I think this is actually a killer creativity tool that is just in sort of classic Apple fashion. Just like harder to use and harder to share than it should be. Well, and you can't even get creative with lenses. Like Snapchat, Paul could tomorrow make a lens and submit it. Here in Apple, you're playing just with their specific version of emoji. And there's no Bitmoji equivalent. So, it's just their character. Exactly. By the way, this bunny looks angry and stoned. Every time I look at it, I find myself wondering like what? It looks tough. It's a really angry rabbit. Yeah, it's true. So, then this is a little bit similar to Bitmoji. But this is going off, we'll see with Samsung, you take a selfie. Google actually created a feature for Aloe, everyone's favorite messaging app. Everybody's favorite. Everybody's talking about Aloe right now. You can take a selfie. Google will feel good about itself. And it will turn your, it will use your face as inspiration to create art. So, this is based off of a selfie that I took. I'll send this to Paul. Like that's supposed to be me. And it's not too far off. You can actually also customize it. I think I can do it from here. Ashley, I want you to know that Chad is thinking about setting up a GoFundMe to get you a new phone. Because your phone is so broken. God. I mean, thanks guys. Yeah, so you can actually edit these. You can customize it if you feel like it wasn't an accurate representation of you. So, this is another way that Google is trying to take inspiration. It's looking through the camera at you, taking your photo, and trying to create you as an animation or as a character. But you can also use your own liberty to. So, that's kind of cool. Yeah, I think it's neat. They partner with artists to do it. And I think their styles are all different. And they're nice. One of the good service that we've done here today on the Circuit Breaker Show is we've shown anyone what Alo looks like. Yeah. Probably never opened it before. Yeah, this is what it is. Before you think that's the only background for Alo, you can customize your conversation background. Yeah, I was like, when did that change? Thanks, Paul. So, it seems like it's breaking down on like three lines, right? Like, how do you make them? Are they totally fake? Are they like representative of you in some way? Or are they just like a cartoon? And then how do you like share them? Right. The idea that these are tied to a messaging app seems interesting to me because that's obviously one audience that you have. The nice thing about this is. But this is machinima. Yeah. Like, you're using computer animation to like do stuff. The nice thing about Snapchat is that it has a messaging component and like a broadcasting component. Well, and Bitmoji is a keyboard too, the stickers, not the AR part of it. But the keyboard is like meant to be in any messaging app that you use. I went through a wild Bitmoji keyboard phase. Oh, really? Like, my family was like, you have to stop. Like, my cousin sat me down and was like, I am very annoyed with you. I just can't keep behind the Bitmoji aesthetic. It's just really not for me. Yeah. It is very extra, like in general. And it's weird to me because Bitmoji is so tied with Snap. Like, there's certain Snap features like with the maps, right? It's all Bitmoji. It's like, I don't want to be represented like that in the world. Fair. So. Well, Samsung has a horrifying feature. I think it's horrifying for you, my friend. All right. So these are the Samsung AR emoji. And someone in the chat actually asked us to predict if Samsung will ever talk about these again after the S9 launch. And my answer. That's a good time. Everybody's having fun. Well, so yeah. So Samsung has found another way to do this, which is by you taking a selfie and then it producing an animated version of you. But I think they just didn't get it right. Why? My character looks like it's had a stroke. Why are you gruffing so much? Is that my face? I don't know. What are you wearing? The clothing options are terrible, which you'll see when we do. You're going to create one. I'm wearing a workout suit. Okay. I took this one with my glasses on. And what is interesting is it did pick up on my birthmark. So it's really doing photo. See, that's like too uncanny. Yeah, I was like, whoa, okay. This is without. Oh, this is your other outfit choice. Okay. You look like a mean librarian. Yeah, that's totally my aesthetic. Come on. There it goes. All right. Okay. There you go. Just in case you missed it the first time. Great outfit. It's me. Amazing. I mean, it's like very photorealistic. I don't know if that's what you want. And the mapping's really bad, too. I just want to say. Yeah, because it doesn't have any of the depth stuff, right? It's just using camera. Yeah, but still, like Snapchat on my 6S does a better job. Well, what if this worked really well? Wouldn't it be cool? No. If it works really well, then just like take a video of yourself. Okay. So, Neil, I can't be in it. Okay. Take your selfie. I just push a button? Yeah. Okay. All right. Let's see what kind of old man this thing makes me. That's blurry. Let's see. It's creating his emoji. I don't think it's simple. What's it going to be? I'm so nervous. You're going to look so... Oh! I don't like you at all. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. I don't like you at all. Oh, man. That is the worst. That's my nightmare. I like this Neil, I don't like the old Neil. What? None of these are my skin tones. Oh, my God. I hate this. Wow. All right. Let's just... Can we all take a look at this horrifying situation? All of this is bad. What does that say? That says figure. No. Oh, a turtleneck. What are... A blazer? This is all bad. This is all bad. This is bad. Terrible color. Samsung has read my coverage of Samsung. This is as close as it gets. Everyone picks that. That's a dude. That's like the one outfit that's acceptable. What is this tie? It's a fake tie. That's horrible. Is that a t-shirt tie? And that is just like another... It's like ankle-length pants. This is a professor who doesn't know what he's doing. He's hip. He's like, uh... It doesn't look like you at all. I will say this looks like Sam. All right. And then... All right. Oh, so then it creates gifs for you that you can use in any messaging service. This does not look like me. So now you could film a video if you wanted and send it wherever you want. Oh, my God. Why? Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Why? It's horrible. This is the worst thing ever. It's horrible. Ew. What? I hate this so, so, so much. I love it. All right. I think we've... Sam's done. You've created art. Good job. I hate it so much. This is why I'm animoji only. Okay. Okay, fair. After that, fair. Seriously. This is why I just draw pictures for people and send them letters in the mail. I'm just saying. That is horrible. I'm supposed to be a fox. Okay. That's what I know. All right. We've got a great Ask Surger Breaker for you. These are questions that come from you in our chat, in our comments. We try to answer them as deeply as we can. Jake and Chaim have a couple for you. Take it away. Today, we have a bunch of questions about Fortnite. I have never actually played Fortnite, so we have Chaim here to answer them. I've played Fortnite, so I'm way ahead of you, Jake. That is all of the qualification you need. We have a whole bunch of questions from YouTube. But first, I just want to get us started. I hadn't heard that much about Fortnite until like two weeks ago. Now it seems to be everywhere. Just quickly, what is Fortnite and why is it blowing up right now? So, Fortnite is a game that launched last year. It's actually very similar to PUBG, Player Unknown's Battlegrounds. But the big thing with Fortnite is that Fortnite is free. Sounds great. Yeah. Cool. All right. So, what is our first question? We've got one from Lex. How do you think this changes the landscape of mobile gaming? Which franchise should follow suit? So, I don't think Fortnite is actually changing the landscape of mobile gaming that much. Just to backtrack a bit, Fortnite is in the news not only because it's one of the most popular games in the world right now, but because they just launched a mobile version on iOS that's in beta at the beginning of this week. PUBG actually then followed that up by launching its mobile version, which had been out in China and other regions in the US and Canada just after Fortnite. So, now you have these big games on mobile for the first time, which is really interesting. I don't think it's going to change the landscape that much. These are very specific, very popular games, like riding this edge of popularity. And at the end of the day, there's still console and PC games that are really meant to be played with a controller and a mouse and keyboard. And just porting them one-to-one from console just doesn't seem like a viable strategy that we're going to see other studios necessarily doing. Yeah. So, what's the thinking behind bringing these to console or to mobile? Because it doesn't seem like that's the normal place for them. So, part of the experience of Fortnite and PUBG are you have these big hundred-person matches. And the goal there then is just get the biggest possible player base as possible so you can have these games. And when you bring mobile into the mix with all the iOS and Android phones out there, that's a huge player base. And one of the cool things is that they are working on cross-play. So, right now you can't, but in the future, at least for Fortnite, you'll be able to take Fortnite and play it on your phone against someone on Xbox and someone on a PC all in one match. You'll immediately get destroyed because you're using a touch screen and everyone else has a mouse and keyboard. But it'll be possible, which is kind of cool. Yeah, that is a very good segue because our next question, which is a two-parter that is partially about cross-play. The first is, do you think Fortnite will ever be cross-platform across all consoles? And the second question is coming up. Well, for now… We can address this one. Yeah. So, the answer in a word is probably not. That's two words, but… Here's the thing. Cross-play is in theory possible. We know it's possible with Fortnite. Fortnite accidentally turned it on last year and you could play against PS4 and Xbox for like a weekend. It happened. And then they sent out an apology saying that they'd made a mistake. So, it's technically possible. It's possible with other games. You have Rocket League enables cross-play between Switch, Xbox, Switch, Xbox, PC. Minecraft is on a whole bunch of things. The odd man out in all these situations is Sony, who doesn't want to enable cross-play. The reason for this is very simple. Sony sells more consoles than anyone else and is leading the industry. So, it's not in their best interest to make it more convenient for you to not own a PlayStation. It makes sense. It sucks. It's probably not changing anytime soon. So, that brings us to the second part of this question is, do you think having cross-platform gaming is a gimmick? And you kind of got into whether it's difficult because it seems to just be Sony doesn't want to. So, from a technical perspective, I don't think it's that difficult for them to implement. As to whether or not it's a gimmick, I don't really think we're going to see a lot of cross-platform people doing this. What I would ask is, I mean, is that even an enjoyable experience? Because you're playing a shooter which is very fast-paced, needs a lot of precision on mobile, and you're playing it potentially against people who are much better suited to play those games because they're on PC. Yeah. So, part of it is also that like switch mentality that you can play anywhere in the world, and that's kind of cool. But in terms of like practical play, I don't think you're going to really see too much of it being done just because you're going to get destroyed once that's turned on. It is optional. Like you don't need to play cross-play. You can just play against people on phones, and that's like a much more viable experience. Okay, our next question is from somebody who is hoping to play Fortnite. It's from Tommy. I'm 11, and my dad disagrees with all the shooting games. How's the point? However, I would love to be able to play Fortnite on my phone or PS4. Does anyone have any tips that I can use to persuade my dad to allow me to play? I feel for you. My heart goes out to Tommy. The biggest problem with Tommy is that his dad is technically in the right. Fortnite and PUBG are both rated T for teen by the SRB, which in theory means that they recommend that they're for people aged 13 and up, and Tommy is 11. A lot of better luck in Europe. They're both rated PEGI 12 there. I mean, these are just recommendations. It's really what parents and children on their own decide to work out together. So maybe offer to do more chores or see if your dad will try the game and see. PUBG is not the Fortnite especially is cartoony. It's not that violent. There's no blood. I'm not a parent, so I'm not qualified to give advice on this, but I'm on Tommy's team. Tommy's dad, if you're watching, give him a chance. This was very good, like indie game scene, too, doesn't it? Is that that is where I would be if I was looking for some games to play. All right. That's yeah. And our final question, we actually got a tweet from Dan Seifer is gonna show later. Is Fortnite anything like dots? Dan, Fortnite is exactly like dots there. It's basically just a dots clone. You should dive right in. Sounds great. Next up, we have Sam Sheffer with some retro phones. Is it is it live? Are we live? I just totally ruin that segue. I think we can unplug these now. Hi, I'm here. I'm doing well, man. You're the big star now. Thanks, man. I'm trying coming up. Yeah. We've known each other. Do you know how long it's been? We hired Sam when he was 17. 19. I believe it was illegal for you to hire you at the time. It's been so long. Sam used to work at The Verge, and then he worked a bunch of other places. And now he's an independent. Jake said it best. He was like he's a pioneer of a multitude of social platforms. Sam is living something like that. He's here to talk about sidekicks. So we want to bring on our friends to talk about their favorite old tech, because we love old tech on the show. I think it's so cool. We did a whole bunch of iPods a few weeks ago. But you, we asked you, what's your favorite old tech? And you told us sidekicks. The Sidekick LX specifically. Why the LX? So tell us what this is, first of all. This was one of the, oh yeah, nice. We've got the overhead camera over here. This was, I would argue, the best Sidekick that ever came out. This is the Sidekick LX. It came in two or three colors. It was released at the end of 2007, and I got it then. The original iPhone had come out in June of 2007, and I saw it and thought it was really stupid, frankly, because I didn't understand what you could do with a touch screen phone. You certainly couldn't do this. And you had the flip out screen, the physical keyboard. There's the LED indicator also. And this to me was just spoke very highly of, you know, kind of mobile development. Nothing like this existed, this kind of like bubbly, scrolly UI. And we were on Singular as a family back then. I jumped to T-Mobile. You left your family plans? Yeah, to get this, yeah. Were all your friends getting this phone, so you were like, okay, I've got to go get this? I remember in high school, a couple of girls actually, my friend Ashley had like the Sidekick 2 or Sidekick 3 in high school. I was like, that is just the dopest phone. And I was the only one in my high school that had the Sidekick LX. There was one person who had an iPhone original, and I was rocking this. And I just remember just like, yeah, I'm the coolest dude in school. No question about it. And yeah, nothing like this existed back then. You've got to remember, 2008 was so different. Like the phone came with AIM back then. No one was really on Facebook back then. And the mobile landscape was vastly different. Yeah, I mean, the thing to know about these, Sidekick was an Andy Rubin project. This is what that dude did before he started Android, and then was fired from Android. And now he's started Essential. But this model – Wasn't it like a robot at some point for a small amount of time? Yeah, he's been using Essential for a few minutes. But Andy Rubin is like one of the godfathers of mobile. So many of his ideas still to this day are like embodied in this device. So can you walk me through how you actually use this? Yeah, totally. So just for the viewer's information, someone sent me these. I would always talk about on Twitter and other socials about how much I miss this phone with the physical keyboard. So thanks to whoever sent me these. I have the blue version. This is the mocha version. So there's buttons on the face here. There's buttons on the edges here. But the most important thing is the flip-out screen. And if you watch it really slowly, you don't even notice the animation of when the screen actually goes upside down. Very good tech for back then. Physical keyboard, full QWERTY keyboard. I don't understand you a lot for these physical keyboards. I just – I was so – Wait, let's see a little type thing. Let's see a little type thing. It's far up in the air. I can't. The controller is broken. I don't – I can't – How do you even start? Maybe new message here? I have honey for lunch. Let's see. I don't know what messages are about to be in here right now. Text message. Oh my God. Inbox empty. How do you – draft? Decade old text messages. I don't even know how to do this. New message. Here we go. All right. Windows 95. Yeah. All right. So if we're going to type in here, hey, what's going on? I'm on the show. I don't see any text. There's no text showing up. Well, that's a problem. It was a lot of work to do that. Yeah. Well, this is a great text. Here we go. Here we go. I'm on the show. We are live. I mean, it takes some getting used to, right? Like I've been smashed away on glass for 10 years, but I remember having this thing back in high school and I got so fast. I'm so not used to this. And then, yeah, this is the operating system. There were no apps. There was a couple of games on here. Menu Shift L I think brings up a – there's like a secret game or something built into here. But yeah, just – I just want to contextualize again. 2008 was so much different than 2018 for the cell phone landscape. But then I tried an iPhone for the first time and this was such a – this device acted in two orientations. But the iPhone was like a true portrait, three and a half inch device. And I tried – it was Google Maps. I remember looking at the blip. I thought it was crazy how you can be tracked in real time. Like we were on a bus together, me and my friend Rami who had the phone. And then like a month or two later, I got to play with it again and I saw the threaded text or – yeah, the text messages were threaded in iOS. And if you remember back in the day when you had a flip phone, it was just message, message, message. There was no threading. So those two things kind of sold me. And then like saw the iPhone 3G redesign faster, all that stuff. So I ditched this. I sold the Sidekick to pay for the iPhone 3G. So was there like Sidekick culture in your world? Because I mean it was a phone but it didn't have any like integrated services. There's no like – like BlackBerry had BBM. Yeah, there was AIM. The iPhone has iMessage. There was AIM. The reason why people – a big reason of why people got this phone is because it had AIM built in. It's got all the messengers. Well, yeah, it had Yahoo messenger, MSN messenger built in, phone, address book. It had a browser too, like really crappy browser for back then. It's a WAP browser. And then I guess we could just do one more demo here. Let's show off the camera how great it is. What were you upgrading from when you got this? I was on a – if anyone remembers, this is a real throwback here. This is – it was a T-Mobile MDA. So it was a touch screen HTC device with a pen. It was running Windows Mobile 6.5 or something with – it was a capacitive touch screen. So you're giving up a lot of functionality there. Yeah, but for this OS. Yeah, so that's the camera here. The frame rate is awfully slow. No, you're good. So saving the device to – this got two, three photos remaining here. But I just want to show like how slow – Shoot a picture of Neelai. Let's take a picture of Neelai here. I keep wanting to touch the screen. Oh my God. Oh, wow, a flash. Oh, look at that. Look at that. Not bad. My favorite things about this device though, the flip out screen for sure, physical keyboard, and then I missed the LED indicator. Yeah, a lot of people – Remember how great that was. You could just glance over at your phone and within a second you knew what kind of message you had. Do any flagship – does the S9 have an LED indicator? It's all gone. It does? It does. It does. In the top, right? Yeah. Can you change it? People use it? Dan, see where he's like in the corner. He's giving us technical expertise. Dan, can you set it to like new text messages, blue or – There are some limited controls and I think there's maybe some like third party apps that you can – Okay. It's definitely not as – Okay. And then also the only text message tone for this was new message. So when you got a new message, it said new message and then – yeah. What's interesting to me is like the – like this thing was in like a bunch of Jay-Z videos. Dude, there was a Dwayne Wade sidekick. There was a Tony Hawk sidekick. They got big celebrity endorsements and I remember the commercials were always so cool. Like I need that phone. Yeah, this was like – there was definitely culture behind this. Like this is going to sound really ridiculous, but like if you had a sidekick, you were cool. Like it was definitely associated – like the same way Beats by Drexel. The same way Beats by Drexel when they came out were like the cool thing to have, I feel like this was very cool to have. How much was this? How hard was it to get? I don't think it was too hard to get. On contract, I paid like $200 or $250 or something like that. I remember breaking even on the sale. But my dad had a friend at a cell phone store, so I definitely got hooked up. Chad is telling me that Eric and Jared are saying the Pixel 2 has an LED indicator. Brandon is saying you should use Lightflow for LED control. Ooh, that's good. And then Eric is also saying he misses his LG NV touch. So like there was a moment, I think this is the moment of like the last of the feature phones. And they got really crazy for a while. Like remember the LG Chocolate? It was like the hottest phone on Verizon for a minute. The slidey-uppy that always broke. It was garbage. Yeah, but this I think you're absolutely right. This was kind of the turning point for all cell phones are going to be glass with touchscreens. And this was it. But I dearly miss it. I want to pour one out for Sonny Erickson. I know we're not talking about that right now. We always do. My Sonny Erickson Walkman WA-10i. We're going to bring that on the show one of these days. And let's pour one out for Dieter in his palms with the physical keyboards. Yeah, rest in peace. I don't buy this physically. I've never understood it. Every time one of those new BlackBerries comes out, I pick it up and I'm like, yeah, I'm a businessman now. And then it's just slow. I'm curious if the chat. Oh, OnePlus has an LED indicator too. Okay, so it's an Android. It's weird. We have these phones on the show all the time, and I never see their LED. I think they're like disabled. I feel like they're not like the companies aren't pushing that as a feature, but they're so underratedly good just for the kind of glancing capabilities, I feel like. Because if you look at your iPhone, it's just a black slate with the screen off. Right. People are just naming phones that were supposed to be iPhone killers. The LG Voyager was going to be an iPhone killer. There are so many feature phones like this. Oh, the other thing people are pointing out, Rev Atlas is pointing this out in the chat. These were manufactured by Andy Rubin, HTC. He goes. He does Android. Who does he partner with to build the first Android phone? HTC, Big Chin. But this is built by HTC? No, this is Sharp. That's Sharp? This is a Sharp phone, yeah. But the first HTC. It was a G1. The first T-Mobile G1 was HTC, right, Dan? Yeah, it was. But no, this was Sharp. I think all the sidekicks were Sharp. Wasn't there a nasty LG Sidekick too for a minute? Because this was just a brand that T-Mobile had. T-Mobile bought the brand and put it on Samsung. Yeah. That was like the latch ditch effort for that, right? There was like the Sidekick slide, and then they just got really bad, really. Once they took away this, it's like, come on, what are you even doing? Yeah. I think I want to put one of these on the shelf. Donate one of these to the archives. Is that appropriate? I love it, man. Are you going to keep the other one? Leave one here, yeah. I'm just going to put it just like right here. The archives need your love, man. Just going to put it right here, and then I'm going to come back to the table, and then you can transition. I'm going to just leave that on there and let that die. The battery will just die. That's good. That's the only thing that shows up. That's it. All right, Sam, thank you so much for being here. Thank you. Appreciate it. Paul. Yeah. You just keep doing this to me. Paul's made another video that I was not shown beforehand. I don't know why. I'm not trying to keep any secrets from you, Neil. Sam, the worst. I was not trained for this. Just wait here. There is a transition out here. It's a little transition. It's a little transition. It's called Hot Tips. It's another show within a show. It's called Hot Tips. Just watch it. Paul's segment begins as a two-minute. Hello. It's your friend, Paul Miller. I'm great at a lot of things. I can program in multiple languages. I can throw and catch a Frisbee. I can draw really good logos. But the thing I can't do is tell you how to live your life. And that's why I've asked my kind and supportive colleagues here at The Verge to help me out with something I'm calling Hot Tips. Deaver Bone. Yes. Hey, I'm doing Hot Tips this week. Yeah. I wanted to know if you had any Hot Tips. My first Hot Tip is if you have a weird name when you go to Starbucks, pick a different name. Peter with a D? I tell people my name is Peter at Starbucks because it's just way easier. Oh, that's a good Hot Tip. Yeah. Okay, so. Fake name at Starbucks. But you have to use the same fake name every time because if you don't, you're going to forget what your fake name is and then you won't get your coffee. So when Deaver gets his coffee, he wears a disguise. He says, Peter. All right. We're about to get a Hot Tip from Thomas Rooker, my favorite Dutchman. I was wondering where you were going to go with that. Okay, so one of the things that I use in iOS that I don't think a lot of people know about is shared shopping list. And what you can do is you can create shared lists by going in, setting up sharing, add a person, and I can use Paul. So I can add that and then you will receive a notification on your iPhone or maybe your iPad. I don't know. Oh, I got it. Invitation to share a reminders list with Thomas Rooker. Okay, right now the list is empty. It also shows up empty for me. So there's nothing in it. I get a confirmation that you accepted the invitation. Hey Siri, add bread to the shopping list. Okay, I added bread to your shopping list. So added bread to the shopping list. And now what you're going to see. I see it. Bread right there. Yeah. So that's great because my wife and I, I mean, we're separate during the day and we usually shop every day because we live in a big city. And this way, whoever goes to the store will see the updated list and they can buy things. And then if you tap the little checkbox, then it'll disappear. In Europe, we just buy one slice of bread at a time. It's very frugal. We don't have this waste in America. It's ridiculous. Well, thank you, Thomas. I really appreciate it. Got any hot tips? Do you want a real tech tip? Yeah. Okay. So I've been saying lately people should pay for Tinder. Why do you pay for Tinder? I don't pay for Tinder right now. But why should someone? But I suggest paying for Tinder because I've spent many hours of my life swiping on Tinder and it is a profound waste of time. Honestly, it is. Right. And if you pay for Tinder, you basically get a page of just people who have already swiped right on you. Right. So it's kind of like a catalog. Like you're shopping for people and you can just say yes or no and you know they'll like you back regardless. You can't pay for Tinder no matter what Ashley says because then you just get thousands and thousands of choices and you have to scroll through them like a DVD catalog. It's terrible. It's so depressing. It's the bleakest thing that's ever happened to me. Probably a good idea, good advice also to not take dating advice from someone in a relationship. Yeah, exactly. I'm going to patch up this. You should take dating advice from me, the person who's in a terrible relationship because of a dating app. I'm really confused now. Okay, so I've got Ashley says money for relationships. Caitlin, no money. Lizzie, what were you saying? Someone's in a relationship and they have a cool idea. Don't listen to it. So hot tips, I guess you could say this one was. Learning a lot. We're back. Paul, always a delight, my friend. Thank you. Appreciate it. Always confusing. I did those for free. The thing is they literally never show me the videos before we go in here. I don't know why. I think that's the best part. I have no secrets. I enjoy a good time. All right, Dan. Hey, I'm here. There was news this week. Yeah, so believe it or not, there was Android smartwatch news. There's a big watch conference going on. Right, okay. So the news is that Android Wear is dead. Long live Android Wear. It's dead. It is now Wear OS or Wearos as I like to say. Google renamed it Wearos. Google renamed it and I think the primary reason that Google renamed it is because the company claims that one out of three of these Wear smartwatches is used with an iPhone. And so to clear up confusion that you don't need Android to use this, we're taking Android out of the name, which seems to be a running theme at Google. They're taking Android out of the name of things. And the reason that the announcement was made this week or last week was because this week is Baselworld or Baselworld out in Switzerland, which is the big watch conference of the year. But that's the only news that Google had. It seems really weak to show up at a conference and say, big news, everybody. We changed the name. Is it still garbage? Yeah. But the name is different. Yeah, fundamentally nothing else has changed. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm not really in-depth use Android Wear. I'll just say this. The garbage is an appropriate description. I'm really walking that one back. I would say the garbage is an appropriate description of Android Wear. It's more like somebody at Google's 20% project. Kinda. Yeah, it kinda feels like that. Like, I mean, so Android Wear has been around for a number of years. It actually launched before the Apple Watch. And it's kind of just faltered and tripped and stumbled. And now we're at a point where Wear 2.0 came out a little over a year ago now. This is the Google's LG Watch Sport, which was like one of the flagship watches with the Wear 2.0 launch. And nothing has really happened since then. Basically, fashion brands have taken it over. And so right now, this is the Movado Connect, which... How much is this watch? That's $600. Wow. And that's a Movado. And so Fossil and Movado and Louis Vuitton and a bunch of other fashion brands have released smart watches using Google's smart watch platform. But the tech companies really haven't done anything in quite a while. They've kind of backed up all out of it and just left it to the fashion companies. And the issue that that presents is you get some nice-looking watches. I'm wearing... Let me see if I can line up here. Here I'm wearing one of the more recent ones. This is the Skagen Foster, which was announced at CES. That's nice. It's a nice-looking watch. It is the right size. It is sharp-looking. It doesn't really scream I'm wearing a smart watch. It's got good design. It's comfortable to wear. But it has fewer features than this one does. And you might not care about all those features. Like this one has LTE and GPS and NFC for mobile payments and things like that. But maybe you care about one of them. And this doesn't really have any of them. How much does that cost? This all starts at $275. Well, especially your problem is this is the Apple Watch. If you have an iPhone, this can do everything. It can also send messages. None of these can do with an iPhone. Yep. That's right. It has whatever nonsense iPhone watch apps exist, which is not a big deal. But if you're in Apple's ecosystem and you have an iPhone, this is just such a better option. It really is. I mean, I've been using this paired with my iPhone to see what that experience is like. And it's pretty miserable. You can't do anything with the notifications. You can't archive your emails easily. You can't reply to messages. You can't easily control what notifications you get sent to the watch and not sent to the watch and things like that. So it's definitely a subpar experience in Apple Watch. Frank in the chat says, I have a Moto 362 and it was a waste of money. I mean, that's like to me, Apple spent – so I don't know if you guys remember. The first Apple Watch came out and the first line of my review, which was like a huge, big, anticipated, all the attention, Tim Cook's first new product line. The first line of our review of the first Apple Watch was, it's kind of slow. And the last line was, you shouldn't spend money on what it looks like until they figure out what it's for. It was a very medium review. Since then, they have made it substantially faster. They have completely redone the interface twice basically. To pair away a bunch of unnecessary functions. They've really backed away from apps as far as I can tell. And they've really focused it on fitness. And then depending on – Notifications. Like Apple is so bad at notifications and being like they focus on notifications. They fell into quicksand and just died. But that's a form of focus. I reviewed the Apple Watch 3 last fall and it's like you said, much faster. The software is easier to use and more intuitive. It's much more useful than before. It's still very much an Apple Watch and very much not for everybody. But it is making forward steps at least. And that's where Google is not. If someone is not familiar with Wear OS, could you run me through what is the basic UI? How do you actually use it? One of the things that is different about Wear OS versus say the Apple Watch is you can customize the watch face extensively. You can download third party watch faces. You can customize – Look, this one has this watch face here that you can customize all these different cells to do different things which is pretty extensive. But you can also download third party ones and you can swipe through them very easily. It also does have apps. You push the button on the side. This one has a little spinny dial like a digital crown and you can access your apps. The digital crown. It is also a touch screen. But it's your basic set of apps. There's not really anything different here from the Apple Watch. The difference being that there isn't a ton of third party apps that you actually care to use on this that you might find on the Apple Watch. You're not likely to find them here. With Android Wear 2.0 which is now Wear OS 2.0, Google actually put the app store directly on the watch. So you can download apps directly to the watch without using your phone. And that kind of is the clunkiest thing in the world. It is rather slow. It's hard to – this one is not connected to the internet. But it's hard to find apps. It's slow to download them. It's not a pleasant experience. But that work around exists simply because of how impossible it would be for Google to get apps on these when it's connected to an iPhone. If it was relying on the app. One of the original promises of Android Wear way back when was it's kind of like Google Now on your wrist. Is that still a thing at all? So it has the Google Assistant. You can say, okay, Google and it will wake up and you can use your voice command. The Google Now that existed in 2014 when Android Wear first launched basically doesn't exist today. Google has kind of iterated on it, changed it so many times. It became Now on Tap on the phone and then something else and now it's a Google Assistant. And that like useful information cards don't really show up in many places anymore. And they don't really show up on your wrist. But the transition has been to things like watch faces that you can put your upcoming appointments or calendar entries in. You can put your step count. You can put weather and things like that. You can customize those complications so you don't have these like interstitial interruptions. I just feel like the New York watches have LTE and a bunch of Wear OS watches have LTE. A couple of them. Not many actually. This is one. Maybe one or two others have it. But it hasn't really caught on. But the idea of the watch as existing separate from your phone, I just don't think anybody has really figured out how to make an interface that works great with this. I don't think anybody has really figured out what they're for beyond, hey, I have a job that makes me walk around a lot. Right? I'm a nurse or a doctor or something. I'm a server. Like those people all love them. I have a friend who worked as a worker in like a high-end art gallery and she wasn't allowed to use her phone when she was at work. So she loved her Apple Watch because she would be able to at least see and respond to text. I've heard that before as well. Great. That's all great. It's a little remote control for your phone. But at the end of the day, I think people just want to look at their phones. And I think that's Android Wear's big struggle and I think why the fashion brands have adopted it because you're just buying this fashionable thing. And they make it look really nice. They can make it look nice and then in six months they can put out a new color or they can like scrap it a year later and come out with a new design because their cycles are different than the tech cycles. The other thing that seems to be with Google's watches that has stalled is the actual technology development. So you can see these are all pretty sizable watches, especially these two. Even the Skagen, it's comfortable on my wrist, but if you have a smaller wrist, you're probably going to find it large. And this is the big Apple Watch. And you know, it's considerably smaller. Apple's on its third generation of processor in there. This is a brand new watch. It was just announced to CES this year and it has a two-year-old Qualcomm processor in it. So the processors are not getting smaller or more efficient or more powerful that would let you do slimmer things and longer battery life and all the stuff that Apple's been able to make. All right, we're going to wrap up the show with a few questions here. People ask about the Fitbit Verso which just came out. What do you think? I'm highly skeptical based on the last Fitbit smartwatch. Yeah. Sean is saying when is Google Pay coming to Wear OS? It's like sort of there on some of these. Yeah, so if your watch has an NFC chip like this one here, you can make mobile payments using Android Pay which is slowly getting rebranded to Google Pay. Google Pay is just a rebranding of Android Pay to remove Android from everything. See, it's a trend. Andy asked what's the update situation like for Wear OS? Can you reasonably expect two plus years of support? I don't know if you can say two plus years but the one thing about Wear OS is that all of the current watches basically get updated at the same time. It's not the same as the phone situation where if you have a Samsung you might wait a year for the software that came to a Pixel. They all basically do get updated at the same time. The current list of watches that are getting the Wear OS update which is basically just a new logo are basically watches that have been released within the last two years. If you've got a Moto 360 which was last released in 2015, you're out of luck or a first generation Huawei watch, you're out of luck from three years ago. But most of the ones within the past 18 to 24 months are on that update list. All right, last one. Samuel says what does Google have to do to make Wear OS not a joke? I mean, we're here for 20 more minutes everybody. Buckle up. I think a lot of people would say that Google has to make its own watch which it hasn't done yet. There's no Pixel watch. So there's no, like I was saying, there's no advancement on the hardware or the silicon or the chips inside of it. I think Google has not focused Wear OS in the way that Apple has focused watch OS on fitness. And so there's really no focus there. I think it still is trying to get too much of the people who are interested in it on a nerd level involved. And it's kind of dropped the ball there because things that look nice and what you want to wear don't have all the features that me a nerd would want. I just hate the idea of another computer I have to care for. Like I have a lot of computers. They all need a lot of upkeep. The Russians are apparently trying to hack everything all the time. I just had to delete like 9,000 Facebook apps today. Like I got enough going on. Another full-on computer in my life that needs software updates and app management and battery charging. It's got to do more for me than just show me motion notifications. What if I had a calculator? I like that it shows me the weather. That's the one thing that I enjoy is that it gives me weather at a glance because I'm like an obsessive weather nerd. Is Google going to bring anything to Google I.O. you think? My knowledge is that there will be talk about Wear OS at Google I.O. I have no idea what they're going to say or if there's going to be new news there. But I would expect it if we're going to have any news about Wear OS in the future, we're going to see it at Google I.O. All right. So that is it to look forward to if you're a watch nerd. Okay, that is it for this week on Sugar Break It Live. Thank you, Dan. Thank you, Jake. Thank you, Haim. Thank you, Ashley. Thanks to Sam for showing up and letting us harass him for ten minutes at a time. He'll be back. We love having Sam on the show. And thanks to all of you for watching. Thanks to everybody in the chat. We love talking to you. We will see you next week, 4 o'clock Eastern, for Sugar Break It Live. We'll see you next week.