Pixel 8, Pixel Watch 2, and a lot of AI

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Stock up on Hines. Available at retailers nationwide. They managed to surprise us with a lot of things. I had no idea what they were going to announce.

They turned out to have been working on a phone, a watch. I'm surprised they made a phone. A bunch of software. Just a crazy amount of surprises.

So we get into all of that. That was also laced with sarcasm. I hope you can hear that. I can't even have the podcast there.

It makes sarcastically potentially surprising. I was trying. I was trying. But we did get some stuff.

What should we start with? Because we got Pixel 8, Pixel 8 Pro. We got Pixel Watch 2. We got some Google and Bard stuff.

And then we got a... There's also a bunch of software here. There's a Pixel Buds update. Oh, yeah.

Software update. Yeah. Let's do retention farming and just go worst events. Let's go from the most boring stuff at the beginning.

How dare you? Pixel Buds update. What was this? Okay.

They have two new colors. It comes in porcelain and bay now. Nice. Bay meaning blue.

Blue. Yeah. That's what it's for. Blue sky.

Yeah. Pacific Ocean. Water. Yeah.

Wet. Nice. Anyway. So the software update is that they now have a context-aware ambient mode.

Basically, if you start talking, it will turn on transparency mode. And then another person can talk to you and it will keep on transparency mode. But then as soon as they stop talking or after you stop responding, it goes back to playing your music and having it in noise cancellation. It's exactly what Apple added in the AirPods a couple of months ago.

Yeah. I used it at the event. The Pixel one? Yeah.

Okay. How was it? Good. I'm excited to try.

My biggest issue with it is that it takes a good second and a half, two seconds to actually kick in. Okay. So you start talking and then it goes, you wait like a beat or two and it goes, and then it's an ambient mode. People start talking and then you wait a little bit after they stop talking and it goes, I don't know.

And it's just kind of, I don't like, I don't really love this feature for the same reason I don't like it on the AirPods Pro. The exact same reason I don't like it on the AirPods Pro. It's like, the consistency is good, right? Like they wanted to, the whole AI aspect of it is that they want to know it is always you talking if you want to go and transparency mode.

If you start talking, then you probably want to hear things around you responding. So let me turn on transparency mode. But I just, it's no. Okay.

I'll say two things. One, I tried the AirPods version. I thought it was really, really good. But then two, also I've tried, there are other headphones that just like, I think they have a conversation mode where the second you start talking, it just pauses your music and that's good enough for me.

I'm not like singing along or like accidentally triggering it usually ever. So I'm like on a flight. Like my habit is just like, as soon as the flight is on, I'll have to take the headphones off. But now, I guess I kind of, you can do the cup feature.

Remember the Sony cup feature? It makes it seem like you're trying harder not to listen to somebody. Yeah. Kind of does.

But you know, this is a clever way of doing it and right, it is exactly the way Apple's done it with adaptive audio is what they're calling it. I think it's cool. I think it'll be turned on by some people. I think it'll be ignored by other people.

But it's a feature to offer. One of those things where in the case of AirPods ends in the Pixel Buds Pro, it's like, really good isn't good enough. This needs to be like perfect because it's already kind of awkward to not pull your headphone out when talking to someone. To me, it just seems rude.

But I don't use any of these. Yeah. I will always pull a headphone out if I'm trying to talk to somebody. I agree.

Yeah. So there's actually a bit of conversation around that with like, is it rude to talk to people with earbuds? Yeah. This is a thing.

There is a small, I don't know how small it is, but there is a subculture in certain cities where everyone walks around with their headphones and all day and never takes them out. Yeah. And it's totally normal for them to talk to someone who has their headphones and they also have their headphones and that's normal. A lot of times it's AirPods.

A lot of times it's whatever else. I feel so rude doing that. I don't know why. This feature is designed for those people who think it's totally normal.

Yeah. I think there's also it'll eventually be normal to everyone. I think I totally agree with that. It will be normal to everyone.

But I think there's a small difference between what both of you said where if you are the one with headphones starting the conversation, then it's like, is this rude? There are people who like to have headphones on as a way of saying like, I do not want to be talked to right now. Yeah. And that's why you buy over your headphones at this point.

If you're talking about someone. If you're talking about someone. Yeah. That's the difference between earbuds and headphones.

That's the main difference. Yeah. It's true. Yeah.

I guess I see it. There's like two versions. One is you start the conversation, the other is the other person starting. So if I'm going to go order food somewhere, I walk up to the counter and start talking.

Then it'll work because I'm going to get a response a few seconds later. The other version is someone taps down the shoulder and starts talking and you're listening to music and you don't hear them until you somehow manage to activate the mode by talking. That's a good question. If you are, because it's trying to pick up your voice first, right?

So if you type me on the shoulder, say a whole sentence and then I have to go like hold on my adaptive headphones. I haven't started coming out yet. Let me say another whole sentence and then can you repeat yourself and then it comes in that. Yeah.

I will say it's really, really good at knowing that someone is continuing to talk to you versus just ambient background noise. It's really good at distinguishing that. So it keeps it in transparency mode until you fully stop talking for like a second and a half or so. But the biggest issue right now is how long it takes to trigger an untrigger.

But of course they need that because they don't want to accidentally going off all the time. It's annoying that it mutes your music or your podcast or whatever you're listening to. So I don't know. It's really more of a fan of manual pause, take your butt out, talk for a while, put back in.

That's what I'm going to keep doing. But I think that, like you said, Andrew, a generation of people are going to eventually grow up just where it's naturally. And Google, even in their marketing, they're like, now you never need to take your earbuds out. That's literally what's in their room.

Glue them in, baby. Yeah. Never charge them. I didn't get to try them, but I have to say, if you think they're even slightly impressive in a demo unit where there's probably 50 other people talking and trying them as well.

It wasn't an isolated sound chamber. Never mind. Yeah. I was going to say that was like a show floor.

Show floor would be really impressive. The demo that I got from Apple was also in like a small room with like seven people in a so you have to use the new phones for that. And then clear calling. Yeah, really dope.

Obviously, we showed that in the video that we made and it sounds really good, removes background noise extremely well. So this is another thing that like has existed in the iPhone for a one year of software now where there's a toggle to switch microphone modes and it removes background noise and it works really well. Yeah. And now Google's like, yeah, okay.

We can do that too. I'll just build in noise cancellation and all phone calls. Yes. That's been that long because they just showed that in the event this year.

Yes. I thought it was just this year. I was 17. Okay.

Yeah. Okay. This was just for phone calls and it's on by default for all of us. Yes.

Yeah. I think they're using some of my technology because in the video features of the Pixel 8 they also have an audio manager. Oh, yeah, yeah. It's called audio magic eraser.

Which I think they'll probably eventually rebrand. That's a bad name. I think it's just kind of what they it's very cool that they showed me a demo of it and you take a video and it has a bunch of different sounds you hit edit audio and then it separates all the sounds and it's like talking wind nature this and you can adjust each of those individual frequencies to go away. So you can just take the wind away or you can just take the talking or you can just take the like I am getting away.

This is going to if this works the way it's supposed to in the demo work really revolutionizes and issuing autofocus videos. That's true. Every time I shoot autofocus videos it is me it is a lot of wind and there's a lot of beeping and train noises from that whatever's going on back there every single time. Ellis or she's a part two.

It's just how much can I get rid of it. I still is a question. Yeah. I'm feeling like a horse and a room full of heavy boards right now.

It's just that is the perfect use case is I shoot those videos on a phone. So I am looking to the built-in features. I shot one on a pixel last year and I was using the wind removal feature and it was okay. But this works is going to be cool.

Yeah. And then there's also a new low latency mode that gets automatically activated whenever a compatible game gets launched. Oh, it's only for. That's what it says here.

I don't know. I guess like that he did say like into for the gamers out there for the gamers and I was hoping that meant like you could use it while you're playing on your computer like you use on the computer because the Mac now has that gaming mode that if you're wearing air pods doubles the sample rate. I was really hoping that that would work on Pixel Bets as well. I don't know.

Maybe I'll come later. Yeah. So they basically saved all of these updates for to introduce the new colors today. The drop does all went out.

Yeah. The drop does all went out today. Okay. At least everyone that already had Pixel Bets prior is getting all the updates.

Although some of them only work on pixel eight. So there's that. Okay. Should we move to the watch?

Yes. Okay. Okay. So if you haven't already seen our first impressions video, these are getting the things I did cover now, which was I covered both the phones in the watch.

So the new Pixel watch two is the same prices last year, 350 bucks. And it looks visually basically the same. It's the same small puck, the same ultra modern minimal design with like the one button on the side, the curved screens are on the outside, same bezel size and everything. But the major things they've changed are one, it's got a new chip, new quad core chip they're very proud of.

Yeah. Two Snapdragon, a new Snapdragon chip. Yeah. So performance and battery life should potentially be improved from that.

We'll see. They did have a bunch of new sensors on the back of your wrist to potentially have more accurate and more reliable heart rate sensor information. They're basically multiple heart rate sensors now and because they can average all the sensors from different parts of your wrist, they can get more accurate information. Great.

And then there's just a couple new software features. There's a temperature sensor. Yes. Skin temperature sensor temperature.

Yeah. Which you're definitely going to use all the time. Apparently it helps with sleep tracking is what they said. Yeah.

It helps with sleep tracking. Are eight sleeps. Are eight sleep temperature, right? I think so.

I guess it knows its own temperature because it's changing. They have a heart rate sensor. Yeah. Nothing about how you track sleep anyways.

So like I could see how temperature could potentially be something. Yeah. But I don't know. I think most of it is heart rate.

Like heart rate is very important to the pixel watch. And when you listen to them talk about the new sensors, they make a big deal about heart rate. They're like heart rate, sampling. We want it to be much more accurate.

Especially during or often. Yes. And so during this activity. Well, the thing is the regular everyday sampling during the course of your day will probably look the same, but it's during a vigorous activity running around high heart rate variants type stuff, then it should be more accurate than it was in the past.

So we'll have to test that. I'll take it to a practice. Yeah. I think safety check.

Safety check. Nice. So if you walk home, you also want to be able to check in on you. You don't check in and contacts them.

I think safety check and all these different devices we're seeing is might be like one of the most important features we're seeing in like the last year. That is just such a good idea that could make so many people so much safer. And it's feels like they could have done this five years ago, but just like a really simple like, Hey, I'm walking home. Check on me.

If I don't make it an extra amount of time, maybe call one someone I know when I reach a certain destination. It's just such a good idea. You can already see everything having it. You can see the commercials writing themselves.

Yeah, basically. Yes. As this happens. It's like an auto workout start and stop.

Yeah. Detection. Yeah. That was actually a pretty major thing.

Pretty happy. Yeah. I think the auto stop is actually more useful to me than auto start. 100%.

I always remember to start it, but sometimes I get off the bike and just walk away. I just forget. I think I listed that today at lunch. He was like my watch.

Thanks. I've been playing for three hours. Yeah. Auto stop.

That's useful. Yeah. What else? It's improved battery life 24 hours of use with the always on display now previously used to be without the always on display.

Is that what the metric was? Okay. Yeah. Because I forgot what the old metric was.

I just remember it was not good. Yeah. It's just a little bit different because it's so easy for all these different things to be like, this is your battery life when you turn basically nothing on. I'm trying to remember.

Did the pixel watch have always on display disabled out the box? Yeah, it did. Are they going to enable it out the box? It is enabled out the box.

That's a meaningful difference. The pixel watch is a good looking watch when always on display is on. It looks great. Like when you actually have things or else it just looks like a weird dome.

So I appreciate that. I mean, they needed to improve the battery life on that picture. Yeah. So one thing that I think they need to get better at is they have six months of fit that frame for free quote, quote because the quotes are because you still have to sign up to pay monthly or yearly.

So you still have to like put in your credit card information and then do the first six months or whatever. And that gets you like a lot of the fit bit premium features. But like the one thing that the Apple watch really has over it is it just has all the exercise stuff just for free. You know, there's like fitness plus.

Yeah. But fitness plus is everything outside of the watch and the watch just kind of like tracks. Yeah. It's like all these exercises and stuff.

I don't subscribe to fitness plus Apple fitness plus because it's just classes that I take. But you're right. Like tons of fitness tracking from how many steps you take to how long you walk to analyzing your trends and all these other things all built into Apple health. That's all free.

It comes with having an iPhone and Apple watch. Yeah. Just cut your ties with it. I just wanted to go straight to my phone.

Like I'm in the Google ecosystem for a reason. Stop pulling me out of it. It's just a weird. Like I think that they bought Fitbit in order to like get a head start on all the fitness stuff.

But the problem is both the brands are too strong. Yeah. And it's now Fitbit with Google. I can kind of understand the first time they did it because Fitbit did have a good name and people were buying Fitbit.

But I don't think people were buying Fitbit as smart watches. It's like its own category. No. No.

They just want the Fitbit charge six like two or three days ago as a recording. And it has like a very basic screen that has like the time. Maybe it'll send you like icons of notifications. But it's not smart watch.

And I think that that's what they're doing on purpose. They're trying to differentiate like if you want a smart band. But I'm wondering how many people still use smart bands instead of. I think a lot of people do actually.

There's like a lot of people, especially I've learned this from Claire's insurance has you got like 20 bucks off a month if you hit X amount of steps in a month. And I think people will buy cheaper activity trackers like that for stuff like that because if you're saving 20 bucks a month and a Fitbit's under $200. Like you wear that for a few years and you're making money. Fitbit used to offer one that was just a pedometer that you put in the back of your shoe.

And I wish they would make like an ankle bracelet. You go to jail. It's not going to be easy. You can get one.

Yeah, it's just like I would I don't really like using smart watches that much anymore. And I wish I could still get a lot of that information like on a place on my body that isn't really obvious that I have like a smart device. Last thing about the phone stuff Google fit on your phone tracks just being your pocket and just count your steps and do all that stuff. And the same thing now on the Apple watch this or the iPhone this year the health app the fitness app is on the phone just count your steps and counting that.

Yeah, it's like pedometer and stuff. But you don't get any of that additional information. You still get trends whether it's like trends of activity up and down over time. How many steps?

You know, it's not going to have like heart rate and all that stuff. But it's like basic information. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, we'll try the watch. I'm definitely curious if the battery life is meaningfully different because I was on my big complaints with the last one. I was on display on. Do we want to talk about the party and the stuff right now?

Or do we want to do a trivia? I think we just I think we do part now because then we're going to talk about the phones. Okay. There's a lot of stuff here.

And I didn't watch the entire keynote, but this is basically the way I understand it. Google Assistant combining with Bard. Sorry. That's the main thing that's happening.

It features inside of Google Assistant. So you can ask Google Assistant to summarize a web page that you're on and it will look at your screen in Chrome and read the whole web page and give you a generative IEI summary, things like that. So the idea is more of the features from this Bard experiment are going to be surfaced to people who use Google Assistant regularly. Lots of interesting stuff that could open up the possibilities of.

I'm curious if you guys have favorite stuff that you saw, but I kind of like the summary web page thing seems like very reliable to me. If I just go real quick because I know David will go on for the next 45 minutes on this. I mean, this is exactly what we just talked about with Copilot last week with like Amazon Alexa and chat GPT stuff a few weeks ago. Just like, yeah, all this generative AI inside of the assistance will make these assistants so much better because it's just like conversation based in a understand context and this can use your text voice images.

It can take actions on your phone. All of this is going again. Right. The third we can write.

It's going to be the new tech support that we never have to deal with again. It's going to make using technology for people who don't know technology so much easier. And that's a huge one. Yeah.

Yeah. I don't know if she's going to do it, but like asking the assistant to do something that you would think is like an insane request. Like, can you order the flowers from the site from the thing? And then it just does it.

Oh, my God, it actually worked. That's how all of us feel though when somebody asked us something and we're like, well, I can just Google it. Like, Google is very good. Just literally type what you told me on the phone and Google probably figures it out.

That's what this is now. And like, assistant is just already the best out of all of them. Yeah. So now we're getting barred on top of that.

Yeah. It's just going to be awesome. It's kind of super charging like a lot of the things that the assistant already was able to do. And I think when barred first launched, we were kind of like, why isn't this just Google assistant better?

And I am predicting that within the next two years, the barred branding goes away and it just gets rebundled into assistant. You think so? This is going to be like better Google assistant. Hear me out.

What if assistant gets bundled into barred? I feel like assistant is such a better name than barred. I would so much rather say, Hey, barred than a Google is the strongest brand name in the world. I just want to stop saying.

Also, like the amount of devices that are already on the wild that use the HG keyword is insane. And so it'd be a lot easier to software update those on the back end. It'd just be a lot better on your queries than it is to totally change. I don't care about what I want.

Google, Deeter. I mean, if they allowed you to just change the keyword. Amazon, you can say, Hey, Alexa, you can also say, Hey, computer. You know, they let you say like three or four different things.

I mean, it's dual keywords. Google is such a pain in the neck to say every time. That's the slippery slope though, is you want it to be slightly irregular of a word? Because if it's too easy, it's going to accidentally get a serious issue.

Yeah. So you just say, Hey, mom. And I say, Oh, did you say, Hey, barred? And you're like, Yeah, that wasn't that close.

Yeah. So you got to be sorry. Yeah. I feel like a system with barred is just kind of like the natural progression of what they want assistant to be, right?

Because now I can, I mean, Google says it's always been able to like look at your display and like see what's on your display and stuff, but now it can do things contextually with that. So it understands a lot more and it can bundle into your other Google apps that you have too. Like a couple of weeks ago, they announced barred extensions, which allowed you to like access things in your email and do this and that. And, you know, we've talked about last week, like, I think Casey knew he was new and tried it and it was not great for him.

Like it was making up emails that he never sent me to the site of sources. Exactly. Which by the way, the source is citing on the new Arc version. Yes.

Amazing. That's a great shout out. Yeah. So speaking of this is a total tangent, but speaking of AI features, this browser that David put us on, this was called Arc browser has this big new update with a bunch of AI features.

Yeah. And they're actually genuinely very useful. And one of them is just take, summarize this web page for me. So from on a web page, I asked you for a summary and then it cites the, it cites the part of the website that it's drawing that fact from.

So if I highlight a sentence and it goes, I want to like, where did you read that? It scrolls down and highlights the sentence that says what it was. And it doesn't pull the exact sentence. It generates a new sentence that make it simpler.

But when you like, you can find on page, it brings you exactly to where it brought it. Yeah. So you know when it's making something up or if it is actually drawing from the actual page. Yeah.

That's, that's good AI. Yeah. That's good. Do a little more of that, please.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

So now I can look at things on your screen. It can access things in your email. It is a lot more of like a generalized assistant, at least as far as plugging into Google services. Yeah.

Because I wanted it to be. Yeah. Yeah. And I thought, I think we all assumed this is what happens.

I just wasn't expecting it to be five months later. Yeah. Like already. I mean, Chaji BT basically added multi-modal support like two weeks ago and then like flies dropping.

It was just like Amazon and Microsoft Google like we're kind of moving towards that omniscient kind of AI at this point. Yeah. So unfortunately, Assistant with Bart is not out yet. It's coming later.

Which is so many. Which is so many of these things. Yeah. Yeah.

I was curious. Apple did a couple of these. Now Google's going to couple of these. It's a trend that I don't like.

I'm with you. Yeah. It's weird that we don't know when exactly. Some of them would say like next month.

Some of them are saying December this year. Yeah. Early next year. I don't like that.

That's weird that they don't just like wait to really say or finish the feature first. I'm sure it wasn't the one of the first ones I remember was that iPhone. What was it called? It's a picture feature.

It was a picture feature where it was like increasing the resolution or something. Oh, it was like middle light detail. It wasn't. Yeah.

Why can I remember what it was called? What was it? It would like make your fine detail and pictures. It had a Vveter.

Very distinct name. I want to say it was probably like iPhone 11 or 12. Not Photonic Engine. Right.

It had a different name. I just remember it being like diffusion. Diffusion. Yeah.

Thanks for the deep. Diffusion felt like the first one. And that was like this very small thing and a huge list of stuff they announced. It took forever to launch.

Now it feels like 50% of the features they mentioned on a phone between the iPhone event and the Google event. Yeah. Aren't coming out until months. At least a month.

There are a couple of years in a row. We're right. That started with diffusion. One camera feature that would be coming later and every time I reviewed the phone out, I would have to be like, I guess we'll see because it's not out at the time of this review.

And then the next year, there was another camera feature and the next year, there's another single camera feature. But you're right now. I feel like there's a couple of things, both with cameras and other stuff on the phone that are coming later or that are either about to come out or not. Yeah.

Even on even double tap on that, but I'll just tell that out yet. Not out on the watch until sometime soon. I feel like every product in the last Apple event had like two things that weren't coming out when it was launched. It's weird.

And it just makes me think a lot about you've always said like don't buy things based on future promises. We're getting to the point where half of the features are future promises and it's yeah, I don't think it's a good look in general. If you are trying to buy any of these things, I would buy it assuming that that feature is never going to come. Yeah.

For real. That's true. Because half of these, we're going to talk about this offer features on a little bit and a lot of them are not going to launch at the phone. I would buy the phone assuming you never get that feature and maybe someday in the future they'll put it on the phone and it'll be a bonus for you, but that's still true about every gadget.

Or that's going to be way worse than they put it. Like deep fusion. Remember it barely did anything? Yeah.

Like we waited months for it and then it came and everyone was excited and it was like that maybe looks like 1% better if I squint. Yeah. It's just the perfect dim lighting. Yeah.

You can maybe see more detail. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, with this, with this Bart assistant thing, one of the examples that they gave is like you've got a picture of your puppy on your phone and then you pull it up and you say write me a cute social media post about my puppy and it just doesn't and it just like contextually writes on.

But it's like, I remember talking, you just make it all the computers, talk to the computers. We talked about this and I remember like how it's like drafting social media posts. You guys were mad at the face swap making my own social media posts feel so much like lying across so much. Yeah.

That's the social media posts thing. That was weird. Especially for having our computers like scrape to gain like the general consensus of other people's posts. Yeah.

And then all those other posts are made by Hey, I also feel like they probably use the example of a dog because a dog's not going to care that I didn't write a social media post for it. But you sure as hell know that I can be like, right? My mom a really nice birthday message that I post publicly and it's like the greatest mom in the world. And then like she finds out that I didn't I asked Bart to write that.

That's the most. Oh, I hate just thinking about it. So I love you. I will write real messages to you.

I will still put photo editing features on the other side of the line. We'll get to that later. We'll get to that later. Yeah.

I think that the overall with the bar and assistant stuff, it's like they're going to introduce all of these flashy things that you can do with it. But the most important thing, which is going to be just the way we interact with computers in the future is that you can just interact with them more naturally. And that's like a low key, like not super exciting, not flashy thing. But the fact that like you can talk to your computer and it knows what you're talking about, even if you don't use the very specific keywords you're supposed to use with a smart device is a big deal.

I mean, think of what every quality of life small like update is on anything is to make usability better. It's a big deal. It's a big deal for tech. Yeah.

If my grandma can interact with it, then that's important. Lower is the barrier of entry of every advanced feature, which is pretty safe. Yeah. So that's coming later.

They're testing it with a limited number of testers right now, whatever that means. Yeah. I want to just review otherwise. Yeah.

We got new call screening with a more human voice, which was cool. Did you see that demo? Yeah. I'll do that in the pixel features because I'll kind of as a pixel feature.

So I'll get to them. Cool. So I'll say a quick break. Yeah.

We'll do a preview question and then we'll do pixel phones. Yeah. The lights are back. The lights are back.

Yeah. I got it. This thing is fussy, man. It kicks in at screams and then you get it under control and it's happy.

Anyway, question number one. I'm doing both questions this week. Oh boy. Oh boy.

Question number one. What was the first pixel to have a sip made by Google? Wait, but Google doesn't call it a sip. They call this piece a sip.

Did they really? Yes, they do. Apple was the only one who did that. Let me rephrase this.

The Wikipedia page for this piece of silica refers to it as a sip exclusively. Wait, so I'd say that again. To the question again. There is a piece of silicon made by Google, which Wikipedia refers to as a sip.

Okay. In package. Right? It's not package.

Sure. What was the first pixel? Okay. Now I've gone too far.

So you've gone full person. What was the first pixel to have a sip made by Google to have silicon in it that Google designed and had many. Oh, this is such a trick question. It's not.

You silly, silly man. It's not a trick question. It's a straightforward question. Sure it is.

Okay. I'm writing down my answer in advance. Yeah. I think you know how it goes.

I do not know. But we'll see. All right. We'll be right back.

It's all about you. Okay. Don't forget the next one. Hi.

I'm Maria Sharapova, and I'm hosting a new podcast called Pretty Tough. I'm sitting down with trailblazing women at the top of their game to discuss ambition, work ethic, and the ups and downs that come in the path to achieving greatness. We'll dive into their stories and get valuable insights from top executives, actors, entrepreneurs, and other individuals who have inspired me so much in my own journey. Follow pretty tough wherever you get your podcasts.

Alright, welcome back. Let's talk Pixel smartphones. New generation Pixel phones, Pixel 8 and 8 Pro. Right off the top.

More expensive than last year. We've got plus $100 for each of them, $9.99 and $6.99. So $6.99 for the Pixel 8, $9.99 for the Pixel 8 Pro. And so with these higher prices, we go, well, what's new about them?

What's more expensive? What's better about them? And there's quite a few interesting things. I'll start with the tensor sensor.

It's on the list, but I can't say I think it made it more expensive. No, I'll start Tensor G3. That's going to be in both. I think I have a lot of hopes just about efficiency and battery life, and Tensor G2 was okay, but it wasn't good.

So I think we're hoping is that Tensor G3 gives us maybe not a huge improvement on raw power because that wasn't necessarily what was bad about it, but it was just inefficient and it was not great with battery. So we're hoping for that to be better. But naturally, the focus of Tensor G3 is the TPU. A lot of AI related features and we'll get to those.

But Tensor G3. But then there's the other two new things, which is new cameras and new screens. So there's two different sizes. Pixel 8 and 8 Pro are different sizes.

Also, the 8 Pro is a high resolution, as always. But also now the Pixel 8 is 120 Hertz. So it's no longer, it was 90 Hertz previously. So it's up to 120 Hertz.

It's not LTPO. I think it's 16120. Yeah, 16120. The Pro is still LTPO.

It'll go all the way down to 1 Hertz. They're also both flat. I'll just say that. So they're not curving over the edge on the Pro, which I think is nice.

The bezels look pretty much the same all the way around. There's no more chin. We had like a chin on the previous pixels that's slowly been shrinking over the years. It feels like it's pretty much even all the way around.

And then they felt the need to name this new brightness. But they are legitimately some of the brightest screens I've ever seen in smartphones. And this is just from the hour that I spent with it. But they're calling it an actual display on the Pixel 8 and it's super actual display on the 8 Pro.

2,000 nits on the Pixel 8 and 2,400 nits on the Pixel 8 Pro. I will be fact-checked on this, but I'm fairly sure that's the brightest smartphone screen I've ever seen in my life. It was the same as the Oppo Find X6 Pro, right? Okay.

It might be. I don't know. But I looked at it and I said, oh my god, this is the brightest screen I've ever seen. There's probably like a Lumio from like seven years ago where one feature was like 3,000 nits.

But it is genuinely very impressive. And I know that when I take these things outside, they're going to look great outside. Oppo claims it can reach 2,500. Oppo is technically still slightly brighter.

My bad. My bad. But still, on a Pixel, usually you don't get crazy big hardware numbers on Pixel. It's all about the software.

But that was cool to see. 8 gigs of RAM with TensorG3. Battery sizes are both like a tiny bit bigger than last year. Not like a meaningful amount.

I think we'll still look for Tensor to give us that difference in efficiency. And then new cameras. Same primary camera on both. It's a Bluetooth 50 megapixel sensor.

Then you get either the 12 megapixel ultrawide on the Pixel 8, or you get a 48 megapixel ultrawide with macro on the 8 Pro, alongside a 48 megapixel 5x telephoto on the 8 Pro. So I got a new camera suite. I didn't notice that. Wait, so they left the worst ultrawide in the regular one and gave you a better ultrawide with macro in the Pro?

I think this year they definitely are trying to justify the price gap. Because it's still a $300 difference between the phones. And if I'm looking at it, those two phones, $300 apart, have the same TensorG3, have the same primary camera, and both have incredibly bright 120 hours displays. You got to really start to swing again to find the differences between them, and it's going to be an extra telephoto camera, extra resolution if you want it, which is not even on by default, like stuff like that.

But that's the main hardware differences. And then once you get into using the phones, it is all software, baby. It is the classic Pixel story of, and I think this is probably going to be the theme of the review. Oh, 8 and 12 gigs of RAM, did you say that?

Oh, 12 on the Pro? 12 on the Pro. Okay, so let's get more RAM. Will anybody pay $300?

Yeah, I don't know. Maybe. But it's there. But I think the story with the Pixel is definitely that you kind of just accept that the hardware is just going to be fine.

And they've had this design for a couple of years now with the visor. And I was actually just thinking about this, the visor, which is so iconic to the Pixel. It still collects dust in the corners right above and below. You had this with your Pixel, right?

It seems to be something that a lot of these newer... It specifically happens with the Pixel because of the big visor, but just filming a lot of macros with iPhones. The new lenses on the new iPhones do it all around the circles as well. It's bad.

It's so annoying to do robots. Especially if you have a case, but cleaning that out is so annoying. And I use a case or use the case on my Pixel. And when I go climbing, I take the case off and there's a chalk caked on both of them.

Yeah. Yeah. I'm like the top and bottom of the visor. So you're not buying a Pixel for the hardware quality.

It's still going to look like a Pixel. So I think there's new colors and there's a satin back on the Pro, which is not like a satin back. Or sorry, yeah, on both. Is it both?

Yeah, okay. Which is sweet. They're matte textured. Yeah, they're like a satin slash velvety satin.