0:00 Hey, every Friday. This week, Huawei showed off two new major innovations for smartphone cameras. Apple showed off liquid glass and I have a hot take. And Microsoft showed off a brand new operating system for gaming handhelds. Welcome to the final checkout. This video is sponsored by Insta 360. Okay, for my first story of the week, let's talk about Huawei and their camera innovations. They launched the new Pura 80 series phones in China, which will come to Europe and a bunch of other markets later. And these have some of the most insane camera bumps. Meanwhile, in the most expensive model, you get what they call a switchable telephoto lens. Basically, a single sensor with a periscope system that can switch between two different fixed lenses. One offers a 3.7x crop or 83 mm, while the other comes in at 9.4x zoom or 212 mm. This
0:49 allowed Huawei to use a single huge sensor instead of two small ones. And at 1 over 1.28 28 in and 50 megapixels. This really is much bigger than any other smartphone telephoto sensor that I know of. Now, of course, Sony has a periscope system that can do fully continuous zoom instead of just two fixed focal lengths. But sadly, the image quality of that is really quite poor. And the zoom range is also much more limited. Lenses with fixed focal length typically look significantly sharper. And so, I guess Huawei decided to make a combination, a kind of hybrid between those and a variable zoom lens that ideally should give us most of the benefits of both. Now, the first hands-on videos that I've seen from China claimed that the image quality is really good. So, that's cool, and I really hope to try one soon. Meanwhile, the other big news was that Huawei teased their main 1-in camera sensor being made in China, which presumably means it's not made by Sony like before.
1:36 Huawei didn't give many details, but various outlets like Digit Times are saying that it's from Smart Sense, who's one of China's low-key camera sensor champions. In fact, Digit Times quotes counterpoint data, which claims that China now has three image sensor champions, of which two have already surpassed Samsung in volumes. And now Smart Sense is in line to do that too, putting Samsung potentially to the fifth place for image sensors. So Huawei and China in general seem to be making major progress with camera sensors, but not everything is good news for the company. Huawei, wildly enough, doesn't actually say which chips their phones use, but we're thinking it's a Kirina 9020 again, which is basically the same chip as in the predecessor, which itself is something like 5 years behind the bleeding edge, making it look more and more like Huawei really might have hit at least a temporary wall with these. Okay. And for our second story of the week, Apple had their WWDC conference. They showed off a bunch of things, but I
2:22 want to talk about liquid glass, their new design system, and I have a historical parallel that I think not many people have talked about, but I think is very relevant. So, liquid glass is the new design language that should become the unified direction across iOS, Mac OS, and all of Apple's other operating systems. I tried it and I really had a sense of deja vu. So, the design itself turns all the surfaces into little glassy 3D objects that get layered on top of each other and these then cast shadows and in a way reflect their surroundings. Now, visually, I personally mostly like how this looks overall, but the effects are also clearly way too aggressive in many places to the point where I find that they're really quite distracting in day-to-day use. Also, they'll clearly need to add way more blur or adjust the transparency because a lot of UI elements become basically impossible to read. And some screens, like this one, to me looks straight up like a design
3:07 accident. Anyway, this is a huge design overhaul that is all about digital UI elements feeling like physical objects in real 3D space. And it's pretty clear to me that Apple chose this system specifically because it makes sense on the Vision Pro. There the UI elements literally have to float in space and cast shadows and react to lights and stuff. So, the physicality and the transparency makes a lot of sense. I think the forced physicality makes a lot less sense on devices like the iPhone and the Mac where you don't have 3D objects flying around you. And I think it's also a little bit insane that Apple's least used device is the one that is informing the design of their mostused devices, not the other way around. But anyway, guess what? We've seen this before. When Microsoft introduced Windows Mixed Reality with the Holo Lens and their set of VR headsets as well, they also switched to
3:53 a new design system called Fluent. And guess what? That too was all about frosted glass surfaces, light spilling off of the edges of objects, physical depth to the UI elements, etc., because those things made sense in mixed reality. Microsoft brought that design to the desktop as well, but you probably didn't notice because almost no app makers adopted this outside of Microsoft itself in some cases. And I wonder if that will happen to Apple too. Developers love to build cross-platform apps. So something that can span, for example, Android and iOS or for example a web app or an Electron app that can work on Windows, Mac and Linux as well. These kinds of apps, I think by definition will not be able to support things like liquid glass. And then you'll have a combination of things, some of which will support it, some of which will not, and everything will look like a mess. I don't think it will be good. Anyway, moving on to my third
4:38 story of the week. Microsoft and Asus have announced two new ROG Alli handhelds, which are the first to feature Microsoft's new Xbox handheld UI. Now, the hardware itself is pretty standard. There's a cheaper version with an unknown AMD Ryzen Z2A chip and the more high-end ROG Liix, which packs AMD's new Ryzen AI Z2 Extreme processor along with maxed out storage. Both have Xbox style controllers and Xbox buttons, and they also both run basically an Xboxified version of Windows. These are supposedly both booting straight into a brand new full screen Xbox experience which hides Windows completely. One lady even said the following. Let's take them to games. Let's take them straight to Xbox. Also, Microsoft claims that there'll be much better performance and better sleep and wake functionality just like you would expect from a console.
5:24 That said, in the video you can briefly see actual Windows apps like Discord and also multiple times Battle.net, Steam, etc. So, these will clearly still somehow run as well, meaning that this is still Windows underneath. I wonder how well Microsoft will be able to pull off the balance of kind of getting Windows out of the way but still somehow having it in the background. But either way, Steam OS has done us all a service because hopefully Microsoft will make some improvements. Okay, and onto our release monitor which starts with new earbuds from Ael and Kern. They're called Luna and they have handcrafted titanium housings made in Japan and also uniolar microplaner magnetic drivers. The product page weirdly doesn't show the pricing in any normal way, but you have to scroll down all the way to the bottom and then it's under a drop down. I wonder why. Oh, that's right. It's because these cost $2,700.
6:10 Okay. And also insane is the brand new $25,000 HP Dimension, which is the first ever Google Beam device. This is the Google tech that uses light field displays with six cameras, and it also renders a pseudo holographic version of the collar at 60 frames per second. funnily enough, HP said that the Google Beam license will be sold separately at an undisclosed price. It's good to know that somebody paying $25,000 for the device would not cover the cost of the service itself. Nice. Okay, and moving on to the brief, we start with a leak from Android Authority saying that the Google Pixel 10 series will come with CH2 support and magnetic Pixel Snap accessories. These would include a magnetic charger, a charger with a stand, and also a ring stand. Next, Nvidia's new ARM chip called the N1X has leaked with a healthy 3000 plus single
6:55 core score on Geekbench. That's pretty good, and it means that Nvidia will likely be able to challenge Intel, AMD, and others on laptops. Moving on to political stories, Denmark is the newest country who've made it their national policy to dump Microsoft software for Linux and Libra Office with the digital ministry and multiple city governments announcing their intent to switch. Then in yucky news, Wikipedia has paused an AI generated summaries pilot test after editors protested with a bunch of editors responding to the idea as basically saying no thanks. And also yucky is that Amazon Prime Video now reportedly shows almost twice as many ads as it used to. No thanks. Then moving on to AI news, French company Mistral has announced Magestral, its first reasoning model with two sizes which seem to roughly be in line with the competition on benchmarks with a few potential benefits. They claim Majestra
7:42 can do reasoning with 10 times the speeds compared to most competitors. And meanwhile, their other strong focus is on multi- language support and also the small model having open weights too. And then in some pretty cool news, Qualcomm has released a new chip called the AR Plus Gen 1 which will power future smart glasses like maybe the next Meta Raybands or the Google XR devices. And Qualcomm says that they can handle a bunch of AI tasks directly on the device itself. The chip is also 28% smaller than the last generation while also drawing less power in certain applications. That's pretty cool. And you want to see something that I also find kind of mind-blowing? This is what a webcam of a modern and pretty high-end laptop looks like. Not exactly great, but then this is what your webcam could look like if you chose the Insta 360 Link 2C. Not bad. Not only does this webcam have a massive halfin 4K image sensor for that awesome image quality,
8:28 it also has many impressive features. That circle, for example, is a touchpad. Just double tap and it can zoom in. Double tap again and it zooms out. That slider is a physical privacy shutter. the camera can physically no longer see you. You can just tilt the camera to whatever angle you want. Or hey, you can even remove it from the stand because it's magnetically attached. Oh, and what's that mesh on top? A microphone, of course. Well, guess what? Not only does this sound pretty decent for a built-in webcam microphone, it can also do voice isolation. So, you shouldn't really be able to very loudly hear me clapping right next to my face on the Insta 360, but you should be with another microphone that is recording on the sides. You shouldn't really be able to very loudly hear me clapping right next to my face on the Insta 360, but you should be with another microphone that is recording on the side. I find that especially when I turn my studio lighting off, so I'm not well a lit like
9:15 many people's home environments would be. The comparison to a laptop webcam becomes especially brutal. Oh, and fun fact, you can just plug the camera in with USBC and use it right away. But if you want to use an app, you can also get a lot more out of your camera, including various image quality settings and advanced features like the voice focus modes. It's a really nice app and it works both on Mac and Windows, including even on Windows and ARM laptops such as my ThinkPad here. Nice. Oh, and if just having great image quality isn't enough for you, there's also the link to which has basically the same features, but also a motorized gimbal so it can follow you around and stuff. Nice. The first five people who order with my links in the description will also get a very nice 15% discount. Note that for US users, we have Amazon links where you can use a discount code Insta 360 for the 15% off. While for everyone else, we have a separate link that goes to the official website where the discount
10:00 should automatically be applied if you're quick enough. So, check out these cameras. I hope you look great in your next video call and I'll see you next Friday.
