Tech News Weekly 371 Transcript

Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.

0:00:00 - Mikah Sargent
Coming up on Tech News Weekly. Emily Forlini is here. We start the episode by talking about a PowerSchool breach, Then we talk about a Subaru hack. After that, Patrick Holland of CNET joins us to give us the lowdown on the Galaxy S25 lineup after Samsung's unpacked event. All of that coming up on Tech News Weekly.

This is Tech News Weekly, with Emily Forlini and me, Mikah Sargent, episode 371, recorded Thursday, January 23rd 2025. A Look Into the Galaxy S25 Ultra. Hello and welcome to Tech News Weekly, the show where every week we talk to and about the people making and breaking the tech news. I am one of your hosts this week. My name is Mikah Sargent and, as is the way of this show, we are joined by an awesome guest host. This week, we've got Emily Forlini back with us. Hello again, Emily.

0:01:11 - Emily Forlini
Hello, hello, hello.

0:01:14 - Mikah Sargent
Good to see you. How are you?

0:01:16 - Emily Forlini
I'm good. I'm in the office in New York today, hence my blander than bland background. But you're making up the slack because yours is cool.

0:01:24 - Mikah Sargent
Thank you. Thank you, I've been working on it, so I'm glad you think so.

0:01:27 - Emily Forlini
What is the texture actually so?

0:01:30 - Mikah Sargent
it's actually a custom texture I created myself, you don't say. I do say, actually With the help of the wonderful Burke McQuinn. You start with a semi-gloss base and then you take flat paint of a slightly lighter color and sort of dry brush stroke over it and that helps to pull the light. So before I had the, the texture on there, those lights really just stayed like right at the top of the frame, but with that you can see it kind of coming down almost to this level because of that flat paint that's there.

0:02:04 - Emily Forlini
So so yeah, that is super cool. Did you do a Crafting Corner special on that? I should have you should.

0:02:11 - Mikah Sargent
I need to consult you about everything before we do it, because you've inspired me to create some new devices. I should have thought about that for the show.

0:02:22 - Emily Forlini
You need to keep me in your back pocket, that's for sure. Exactly, I should have thought about that for the show.

0:02:24 - Mikah Sargent
You need to keep me in your back pocket that's for sure, exactly Well, I am excited, though, to talk to you this week about something that I think we always kind of chat before the show to figure out what we're going to be talking about, and we both kind of came to a conclusion that more people need to know about this, because it's a big deal and it has to do with PowerSchool, which many of us many of us have at least heard of, if not been a part of in some way. So what's the story?

0:02:57 - Emily Forlini
Yeah. So is this a really good example of a data breach If you're kind of looking to learn about data breaches and you're like what the heck is going on and how does this affect me? So power school is a like a record-keeping system that over 60 million kids, parents, teachers in the US use. It's something that sometimes you have to have an account to enroll in the school. It will have your name, your date of birth, your grades, your siblings names, your parents names, your address, in some cases your social security number or relevant medical records. So it's just this kind of mega tech education platform that everyone's using and it started a while ago but up until today it's still in use and basically a hacker has accessed their entire record system. So it's, you know, millions and millions of kids, parents, teachers who someone infiltrated this data and, we think, got almost all of it.

So what Mike is showing here is a new report from a publication called Bleeping Computer, which does really excellent cybersecurity reporting. They seem to somehow have access to this information, which is the actual number of people affected. They're saying it's 62.4 million students and 9.5 million teachers. So I had reported on this before this came out, but it was all it was very murky. It was like all these local news reports were saying oh you know, 10 districts in our state were affected. In Canada there was a province it was like 80% of districts in the province and so finally Leaping Computers seems to have confirmed, you know, some of the top districts affected, the total number which lines up with the number of students that PowerSchool says it keeps record on. So it's really crazy and it really should have a lot more outrage.

I think, people maybe see this and they're like that's so horrific I can't even engage with it. Because you know, oh wow, kids are potentially getting their identity stolen just from enrolling in school.

0:05:03 - Mikah Sargent
So that's what this is, and that's you look, I understand, like parents and teachers and to some extent, especially high school students, see the benefit of platforms like this. You know, growing up I can remember the system that the teacher used that had the grade books and the attendance and all of that built into one and it gave parents the ability to communicate with the teachers and teachers to communicate with the parents, and so everybody hops on board with these platforms and it's not like if you were a company that works in one version of cybersecurity and you hire a company that, or you hire, like, the software from a company that works in another form of cybersecurity. In that case, the need to figure out whether this is a good system and a safe system for them and their students, parents shouldn't, that's not something that they should have to worry about.

And so there's, and administrators too, like this is supposed to be in the hands of the company to make sure it's good. And, as you point out, the fact that these students who are at young ages already potentially dealing with identity theft and everything that's involved there, is just awful. It is, and it's cumbersome and it is you never know when it's going to pop up again, like it can come at any time and you are just going oh, I suddenly am trying to buy a car and I can't because somebody stole my identity seven years ago. That's awful.

0:06:58 - Emily Forlini
Right and it's just it feels like a big failure, like, oh wow, we failed to protect these kids who are in public schools and private schools. This is not just a public school system. You know, we kind of failed to protect teachers and meanwhile teachers are getting flack all the time for, like, oh, your job's so manual, or you know, the school is not tech forward and you know schools are so inefficient and why does it take teachers eight hours to grade all night? And then they demand more pay and there's like this, all this controversy and it's like, well, they tried to make it more technical and then this happened. It's just a sad situation.

0:07:34 - Mikah Sargent
Now do we know the and you may have mentioned it and I missed it Do we know what type of information it actually was? Have they broken it down into? We're looking at, you know, full. I mean because I think about too. In elementary school in particular, the teacher would put little notes in the grade cards, right, and that stuff. I mean I'm thinking about what if a kid wants to become a politician someday and they, you know, this data is out there and it shows that in middle school they got into arguments with people or something because that information was made available by way of these data breaches.

0:08:16 - Emily Forlini
Yeah, so I've been combing through. There's a lot of Reddits about this, about three different Reddits. There's like the K through 12 Reddit. There's IT school administrators Reddit, because all the IT people are trying to figure out you know what their school asks people to enter in the system and therefore what was stolen. And there's like Google Docs that IT administrators are looking at on how to figure out what's going on. But, like I said, there's I mean I found over 50 districts that were affected just in the work I did combing through local news reports to figure out the scale of it. This was before that reporting today, but there's one school in California that publicly disclosed what was stolen. So I will read off everything that was stolen from them and it varies by school, but so they had student name, student ID, date of birth, date of enrollment, ethnicity, home address, home phone, grade level, gender, enrollment status, name of mother and father, registration PIN, guardian email address, emergency contact, graduation year, gpa phone, doctor phone.

0:09:35 - Mikah Sargent
And then for staff it was name, email, home address, home phone, ethnicity and their power school login. So that was this one school of social engineering where someone claims to be the child or the grandchild of this person they're talking to and oh, I'm in jail and I need to be bailed out and you just need to send the money here or some semblance of that, and these things can wait in the pocket for a long, long time. And then, on the other hand, on the staff side, it seems like there's less information there. Right, but when we're talking about power school login, does that mean username and password? Because I know that not all of my teachers were using password managers with pseudo random passwords and probably their login at school is very similar, if not the same as their logins to all their other accounts. This is very bad.

0:10:26 - Emily Forlini
Right, and I also saw on some Reddits that it's not just current students, it's just all students who the school has ever logged.

So it might be you, it might be me. I don't know when my high school started using PowerSchool, or, yeah, I don't know when it was founded, but it's that makes it personal, so you don't have to just be a parent of a kid to wonder if this affects you. It's kind of crazy, just like how they figured this out. So this came up in December and PowerSchool, as a company I guess, got notified by the hacker. Then the hacker asked them to pay a ransom. So they paid who knows how much money. I don't think that's been disclosed and then all they know is that in exchange for that money, the hacker showed them a video of them deleting the information. So the New Jersey cybersecurity state of New Jersey cybersecurity portal was like well, there's not actually really a way to confirm that they actually deleted it.

So New Jersey is conducting their own investigation. I'm sure many states around the Jersey is conducting their own investigation. I'm sure many states around the country are conducting their own investigation. I reached out to the federal education department and they said oh well, please direct your questions to PowerSchool. It's just very kind of piss poor that we don't even have a full list of administrations and districts affected. We don't even know the data, and PowerSchool says that they're contacting each school directly, but it seems to me like there's just a lack of awareness about this, especially because what TechCrunch calculated was that 75% of students in the US are in this system.

0:12:01 - Mikah Sargent
Great, yeah, see, and that's we talked before about how, when a company is so big that it becomes the default, which is what it sounds like for most systems, then you run into issues like this, like if every school is using PowerSchool and PowerSchool gets breached, issues like this If every school is using PowerSchool and PowerSchool gets breached, and it's from both sides too, because you think about who are the hackers going to go after, but the big fish, and so PowerSchool sets itself up as a target, which means that it should be doing an incredibly fastidious job of making sure that it is protecting itself and therefore it's uh its clients from this and what. What has power school said in terms of how they're planning on helping? Have they said anything on on other than reaching out to the.

0:13:00 - Emily Forlini
yeah, the huge identity theft, credit monitoring, blah, blah, they're, they're big point. Their big saving grace or saving face is that oh, not every school collected social security numbers, because that's the big piece of information. So they're reiterating that in their communications. They are saying they're investigating. They did not confirm or deny the numbers to me in that leaping computer report. They have a website set up. They are contacting schools. It should be treated as a total disaster for them because it completely undermines the integrity of their product. So I really hope they're working on it. It seems like they are, but there's not a lot of specifics and I do feel like there should be a little more heat on them just to figure this out, and everyone should be talking about it.

0:13:55 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, I absolutely agree. It is kind of weird that you know it was a bleeping computer article and then you know you also wrote about it and that it's not coming across every single news desk, or, if it is, that it's being ignored. I guess because this is, yeah, as you said, the big number there 75% estimate of students in the US and then that means that probably 75% of teachers then too in the US would be impacted. So this is a lot of people in the United States who have been impacted by this.

0:14:33 - Emily Forlini
And it's a successful platform. It's a public company. It was purchased by Bain Capital last year. You know the money wheels are turning for this platform and when something like this happens, I mean you can't blame business for everything, but this really calls into question like you're making money off of this. You know just this data and it's these kids that are kind of in your hands and you did not. You didn't protect them, you failed to.

0:15:00 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, this is terrible. So all of you listening out there share this with I mean frankly, everyone, but in particular, any of the people you know who have students in school right now. But again, this could also include students who have been enrolled at some point, required to provide an education to those 18 years of age and younger. That accounts for a lot of people, frankly.

0:15:31 - Emily Forlini
Yeah, just try to learn about it. I know it's scary and alarmist, but it's like it's just such a tangible example, Like, okay, kids put their records in this system, they have to do that to be at the school. A hacker hacked into that system. It's like very straightforward.

0:15:49 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, absolutely All right, we're going to take a quick little break and, believe it or not, we're talking about some cyber security, and then we will be back with my story of the week.

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All right, we are back from the break and continuing on with talk of cybersecurity. This story ended up kind of making me drop my jaw a little bit because humans are a problem, like Look, I know computers are also a mistake at times, but humans are just the weakest link in so many cases. So all right, let's start this from the beginning. Are solely focused on not solely focused, but very focused, rather on cars and kind of automotive industry exploits and looking at and exposing the different systems that these cars use and the exploits that are possible with them. And one of these individuals is Sam Curry, who is a security researcher. And Curry said Mom, I'm going to buy you a car, but here's the deal If I buy you a car, then you need to let me try to hack it. So Sam Curry bought his mom a Subaru and just was able to get around to attempting to hack it.

In November, while visiting for Thanksgiving this is in the Wired piece poked around looking at different systems within the vehicle and used Subaru's sort of emergency access technology, but also just sort of the car's inbuilt system called Starlink not to be confused with the other Starlink, but Starlink which is part of Subaru and discovered that when using Starlink, the system reached out to a website, subarucs.com. So they went to subarucs.com and started looking at how the site worked and what it was, and it turned out to be kind of an admin database. And when they went there they figured out that all they needed to do to reset an employee password was to type in an employee email. And let me be clear with what I'm about to, with what I'm saying here. It wasn't the standard thing. Where I go to a site, I type, I click the forgot my password. I type in my email and they send me an email to reset my password. No, you just needed to have the employee pass or the employee's email.

Okay, and then there's a little bit more that's involved and I'll explain that in just a moment. But all they needed to do was go to LinkedIn and find one of these Subaru employees who had listed their Subaru email and then they typed that in and then you go. Okay, Mikah, but here's the thing they're not going to be able to gain access because Subaru CS, don't you worry, the site makes you type in the answers to security questions. So well, they're stuck there, right? They type in goof troop 97 at Subarucom and hit enter and then there are two security questions what's my favorite flower and how do I like my eggs? Oh, can't get in. No, they can get in because the website, literally they just use practically right click and choose show page source. The website checked the answer of the security question with plain text responses that were stored in the code, so Tulip and Scrambled were. Remember that was. What's my Favorite Flower?

0:22:34 - Emily Forlini
Oh, I'm following.

0:22:35 - Mikah Sargent
I'm following Were in the website's code right there available to them, at which point they pop into the admin site where they are able to get a bunch of information about the individual who purchased the vehicle. You know the standard kind of information get access to the I believe even the license plate, get access to the state that they live in, get access to their home address if they put that information in and loads more. But, most importantly and most disturbingly, they were able to gain access to every location that the car pinged while it was in transit, or I guess not even while it was in transit, but while it was registered with that account. So they were able to look at the mom's Subaru account and see where she went to the doctor, guess who her friends probably were, see where she went to church and even where she parked, if she parked in the same location. Every time they were able to with this access, unlock the car, make the car horn honk, start the car, make the car horn honk, start the car. And this database or this not database, but this site was not just because I have my mom's information that I'm able to access this. If they had enough information about any other person, they could also access that person's vehicle, person's vehicle. So they reached out to Subaru and told Subaru this was up. And Subaru said, right, right, right, right, that's bad, that's real bad. And they fixed it. But here's what Shaw and Curry, the researchers, have said, which is that sure they fixed it so that now it's not as easy to hack it. But let's be clear that Subaru employees still have this carte blanche access to all of this data and that Subaru is storing this data at least up to a year, which was how long the mom had the vehicle.

But they tried to claim, or they did claim. The company claimed that the reason for this is so that an employee is able to call emergency services to your location. Sure, give them live access to my location. If I hit the button and say I need emergency access, don't give them a year's worth of information about where I've been. And the company, of course, said well, they sign NDAs, they pass the security checks, they do this, they do that. That only matters as long as it matters because, again, humans. So I wanted to hear your take on this, Emily, as someone who is, you know, who knows a lot about cars, and especially as we look at electric cars and the ongoing computerification of these electric cars. Does this surprise you at all? And kind of yeah. What's your thought? What are your thoughts?

0:25:47 - Emily Forlini
Yeah. So when you sent me this I was like, oh, this sounds like something I wrote about with Kia and actually it's the same group that did this with Kia, these two researchers the Curry guy was on both studies and yeah, just being able to remotely access the car and uh data about it and then also make it do things like honk um, unlock, lock, and it's scary I think he just used the vin number and in that case it was a dealer credentials, something like that. So again, similar approach, like employee credentials plus some information about the person's car like an identifier. It's a minefield out there. You can't go to school, can't drive a car.

0:26:29 - Mikah Sargent
Exactly yeah, or at least here's the thing. The one good thing about this is that I look back on the cars, that my family and thereby me, because I grew up with them are not really car people in the sense that, a, we couldn't really afford new cars growing up, but also we always just kind of saw them as tools to get from point A to point B. So I've never been super into cars, but even when my family would get cars, they couldn't afford these extra little features and stuff. And so I do think about people who get an aftermarket vehicle and there's that button on their you know rear view mirror that they never press and they never use and they never, you know, call in to get this service. But there are a lot of people who do have it because of the and it's something that I was thinking for myself.

That would be something that would draw me in for sure.

I would absolutely have something like this because I want to know that if I was ever in an accident or that I couldn't gain access to my car for whatever reason, someone somewhere could pop it open for me.

But this is what you expose yourself to, and I think the big thing here is that these companies have been doing this for some time and, while it may have started out as a means of helping the consumer, suddenly you realize you've got this delicious database of very expensive or valuable, I should say data that maybe you know.

Those services that want to grab that, who are willing to pay quite a bit for it, start to sound pretty good, and then you start to look at them and go, well, maybe we do hand over this data. And you know, the thing that really stuck out for me and stuck out for these researchers is what they talked about in this, where what happens if this data is suddenly made available in instances of someone needing to have an abortion or trying to find out if they are participating in protests or if they go to church. You know, any of these things could be something that is looked at because that data is being stored right, and I think that's the big problem here is how much of this fine-grained historical data is available. That's the problem that at least I have with it. They're looking at a lot of car manufacturers, which I'm happy that they're doing, and now it makes me really want you to interview this, this group, because I know, I know I hope you can get in touch with them.

0:29:08 - Emily Forlini
What I would, I'll try. What I would be curious about, just with how much I report on this type of thing, like if someone did launch a new car that had a cool modern design and a cool interior but 1995 technology, like would it sell.

I mean because as long as you can fill it up or you can plug a charging cord into it, like you can do those things in a rudimentary way, like I wonder if people would buy it. Or we're all just going to keep buying these super techie cars and being so proud of them and then complaining about data collection in society Like is there about data collection.

Yeah, you're right. Like, is there any way to you know, put our feet to the fire here? Or like, launch a compelling product and see if it would actually take off, or do we just love? The tech, the dumb car, but like cool.

0:29:54 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, the cool dumb car, exactly Because people want to buy cool stuff, let's be honest and people yeah, we get a lot of requests for us to give people suggestions for what they call dumb TVs. They don't want the TV that connects to the internet, because that is another data collection place, and those people are very techie people. They're aware of what that tech is doing and so they want a good dumb TV. So give me the great panel, take out the Wi-Fi chip and we're good to go Right. And so, yeah, I actually I think you might be onto something when I think about all of the people I know who complain about. Well, I used to be able to take out the carburetor and switch out. Now everything's in a computer. So maybe that's me when I'm like 20 years old.

0:30:40 - Emily Forlini
Are those your friends? Those are my friends.

0:30:42 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, my poor friends.

0:30:45 - Emily Forlini
Do a health check.

0:30:47 - Mikah Sargent
You're right, I should check on them. I'll give them a call after this. I know where they all are because I've looked at their location data. They all drive Subarus, no.

0:30:54 - Emily Forlini
They're at the mechanic right now.

0:30:57 - Mikah Sargent
Exactly that fixed this for me. Anyway, I look forward to maybe reading a piece for you with these folks. But, more importantly, if folks would like to stay up with what you are writing about, where do they go to do that?

0:31:17 - Emily Forlini
So you can definitely find all of my pieces at PCMag. I just have a bio page. It's Emily Forlini. I'm also at Emily Forlini on all social everything. I am leaning more into blue sky these days, so that's where you're going to get most of my personality and my honest thoughts. But sometimes I do dabble in the other platforms. It's just speaking of mine feels a little crazy right now in social media, so I'm on it. You can find me everywhere. It's evolving.

0:31:45 - Mikah Sargent
Yes, indeed. Well, thank you so much for being here with me today. Always a pleasure to get to chat with you and we'll see you again next month.

0:31:54 - Emily Forlini
Yeah, it was fun See you in a month. Bye, all right, take care.

0:32:07 - Mikah Sargent
All righty, we're going to take another quick break before we come back with this latter half of the show. I am excited to bring on an individual to talk to us about what Samsung announced and maybe, maybe, just maybe you'll get a first look at one of the devices that was announced.

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Already, we are back from the break and I am very excited to be joined today by Patrick Holland of CNET, who joins us to talk about Samsung's Galaxy Unpacked event. Hello Patrick.

0:35:07 - Patrick Holland
Mikah, it's been a long time. Hey, how are you doing? I'm so excited to talk with you.

0:35:11 - Mikah Sargent
It is so good to see you back on the show. Thank you so much for being here. There's a lot to get through, so we'll just get started. You know it starts with the S25 and the S25 Plus. You see kind of these major smartphone manufacturers sort of launching some base models and then some fancier models, making sure they kind of cover the full gamut. I'm kind of curious, though how do they compare to the models of yesteryear? What can people look forward to in this next set, and how does Samsung kind of sell it as? Here's why you should upgrade to this phone.

0:35:47 - Patrick Holland
Yeah, I mean, these are the important questions we ask every year with new phones or really new electronics at this point. And phones have kind of hit a point not just with Samsung but most manufacturers where they are just part of our everyday life. So a lot of those wild like swing back and forth years of design changes that we would see maybe five, even 10 years ago, we don't see that as much. We see a lot more refinements, a lot more subtle things. So the S25 and S25 Plus, unsurprisingly, look almost identical to last year's phones, which look almost identical to the ones before that. But get this. Last year's phones were really good, Like the S24 got a CNET Editor's Choice Award because it had outstanding battery life, it had great processing power, great software support. So in one thing it's like that old ad, like if it's not broke, don't fix it, but in another one it's like we want something kind of exciting. So that's where we have something like the Ultra, right. So the S25 is their base model. For $200 more you can get the S25 Plus, which is the base model that says bigger, and then for $1,300, you can get the S25 Ultra, which is kind of like their premium flagship phone.

Samsung does do foldables, but that's a whole other thing, right, and what the Ultra does is it has the same processor, has the same RAM and a little bit more storage than the regular model, but the big thing is going to be the cameras. The cameras are just a big step up in terms of quality. But then get this All the software on all these is all the same. So that's where you get this weird thing where, like that S25 model on paper seems like an incredible value. Now the S25 Ultra I have right here does have some physical changes. It might be hard to see on camera. The corners that used to be right angles that used to go back to like the Note series, are curved and the edges are more flat, a bit like the s25 and s25 plus. So but the big thing that separates all these models is this thing on the bottom, which is a stylus. Yes, because who doesn't love a stylus in your phone? And I'm going to have a hard time putting them back yeah, that could be kind of difficult.

0:37:57 - Mikah Sargent
So, yeah, I, yeah, I mean, this is as you kind of mentioned. That is the big struggle that I think these companies have when it comes to announcing the next iteration. Right of solidified around a sort of physical concept, it becomes more difficult to really set something apart, and so you just get these little bumps to everything.

0:38:44 - Patrick Holland
When it comes to, though, the Ultra, is the pen the main draw, or is there more to why you would go Ultra versus those standard models? I do a little promotion for Samsung. All the phones did get some refinements. They're a little bit lighter. The glass on the Ultra is more durable, and last year's glass was more durable before that. So if you're dropping it, that should be helpful. We haven't tested that yet. Obviously we just got it. The other thing is it carries over some of the neat features we had in last year.

The Ultra has an anti-reflective display, so even as I'm doing it here, it would probably look a lot less like a mirror than if I do that, and as someone who does a tech podcast, I'm sure you'd appreciate if you had to film an actual device. It would be a lot easier to film because you don't have the lights bouncing off it or like, hey, you could see the cameraman. But in everyday use that anti-reflection stuff I think is such a big, big feature and that's not new, that came from last year but that's something that the other phones don't have. And then they're saying that the battery life even though the batteries are the same size as last year, the Ultra does have a slightly bigger battery than the S25+, but that all the batteries get more battery life. So that will be curious, because last year's Ultra did well for us, but it was really the smaller phones that did great on our battery test. So I'm excited to do that.

But the thing that we have not mentioned the elephant in the room is AI, right, and that's kind of where Samsung is hoping to kind of make things seem exciting and new. And there is some really interesting AI they talked about, but that's kind of what the upgrades were looking at in terms of that. Now it does have a new Snapdragon processor, as will all major flagship phones from Android, and the Ultra also has a new ultra-wide camera, so that is new.

We have new hardware Yay, first time in a while.

0:40:30 - Mikah Sargent
Nice, a new ultra-wide camera. So, yeah, let's talk about We'll get to even more after we take a little break. But when it comes to these phones in particular, how much of the announcements for these devices were focused on the software side and, in particular, ai? Versus being about that hardware, it was another AI event right, it really was.

0:40:53 - Patrick Holland
I mean, if you tuned in for the first like 30, 40 minutes, you'd be wondering am I watching a developers conference and what's going on here? Are they launching phones? It was a lot about. Let's celebrate our partnership with Google. Let's celebrate our partnership with Qualcomm and these other companies. Let's also show off AI and list all the reasons people like the AI that we have and offer some new features.

Now, the new AI, if you get past just how much of it is, the takeaway is there's some really interesting ways. Some of this is getting better. So, as opposed to being something, I use AI for one particular task, one particular setting, I'm now able to use things where I can do kind of multi-step things for the device. Like an example that you could try is like hey, I'd like to go see a Warriors game, find the next Warrior game for me and add the date and time to my calendar, and it will do all that in one prompt versus having to do it in steps. Now, how well that will work across the system is interesting, because a lot of the stuff they're showing are just Samsung-based apps and really not everyone's tied to Samsung that strongly. A lot of people use Google apps and other third-party apps. So it's this interesting thing. There's some potential here, we're seeing some movement.

But is it worth 45 minutes of talking about? I'm not sure. Technically it probably really is, and for scientists and engineers working on it it's probably like, yes, please, three hours of that, right. But for consumers you're like is it a good phone? Should I get a new one? Should I wait next year? That's kind of the questions I think they ask.

0:42:25 - Mikah Sargent
Absolutely. Yeah, I was intrigued hearing about the aspect where it could do these multiple prompts all at once. But, as you say, aspect where it could do these multiple prompts all at once, but, as you say, we've got to see how that plays out, because if it does do what it says on the tin, that will be, I think, a really standout feature. That can be very helpful. But, again, there's a difference between showing demonstrations on stage versus actually seeing them in real life and testing them in that way. We do need to take just a little break here for a moment before we come back to talk about Samsung's one more thing moment and a little bit more about AI combined with AR, combined with VR, which was another part of the Samsung experience, if you will.

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Alrighty, back from the break we're joined by Patrick Holland of CNET, who is here to talk to us about the Unpacked event, and we saw a nice little hey, we've got something else. Moment with a little bit of detail. What is the S25 Edge? Is it vapor hardware or is it a real thing that's coming out?

0:44:27 - Patrick Holland
Okay, well, let's talk about the one more thing moment is what people are calling it, alluding to Apple. But normally when you have a one more thing moment, you don't have like a fake ending, right. So it's normally like, hey, and, by the way, we actually do have one more thing to show you today, and then you keep it going. What Samsung did was kind of like a DJ at a nightclub. Everything just kind of stopped. They even had fake credits rolling, at least inside the auditorium. They did Wow.

And then I'm looking at CNET's Abrarah Headey and we're like what is going on? As a theater director, I'm like you've not built the tension to have this release. And the next thing you know, they're showing off this new product called the Galaxy S25 Edge. So we have the S25, which is the regular model, the slightly larger version, which is the S25 Plus, and then we have the s25 ultra, which is is this one? Right? It's the big dog, it's the expensive one, the premium. And now they're saying, hey, we're going to make a thinner version phone, but it's premium. So if the s25 plus cost a thousand dollars and the s25 ultra costs thirteen hundred dollars, my guess is somewhere in there. Probably twelve hundred dollars would be the price of this new phone.

Now, this new phone, is it real? It is. And then in the demo area they had it hanging dramatically off one of those stands you might use to hang your microphones on, or like a banana right To show off how thin it was, and everyone's tripping over themselves to get a photo of it. But in terms thin it's like, yeah, it looks thin, but you know what? We saw, uh images, oppo's new phone, which looks even thinner.

Um, in terms of when does this release? We don't know. It's going to be later, later this year, probably in the first half of the year, but beyond that, that's really the detail we have about this phone. So it was exciting. It kind of made up a little bit for that first half, which, which was very technical, very in the weeds about AR, excuse me about. Well, it was AR actually, we're going to talk about that in a moment but also AI, excuse me. But then yay, we have some hardware to talk about. And then, hey, this thing that we're really excited about, we show you. We're not going to talk more about it.

0:46:29 - Mikah Sargent
You're like why are we here? Yeah, that's interesting. It makes me wonder, too, what's the reason for it not being released with everything else, If they really were just trying to build that suspense, or if it's a matter of manufacturing delays. What's going to make this phone stand out, as you said, you start asking about well, what's the battery life? On something like this, Are we still counting on good battery life? So that will be interesting, and this is one thing that I didn't mention ahead of time. But I saw something about the Qi charging in these devices. Can you tell me a little bit about that?

0:47:10 - Patrick Holland
I would love to tell you about it because you're talking my game, Mikah. So, basically, there's these different standards, one called g, which is qi uh, and one is called g2, and g2 is the latest standard. It came out a year, maybe even a year and a half ago, um, and all this means is that phones that have this standard can support 15 watt wireless charging. Great, these phones do that. However, another aspect of the g2 2 standard is this magnetic profile. So if you're familiar with any of the iPhones in the last few years, they have a thing called MagSafe charging and essentially, the Qi 2 magnetic profile is the exact same magnetic placement on the phones.

Up to now, I believe the only phone that has been released with this is the HMD Skyline phone. Which. What is that exactly? Um, so for samsung to have the at least the charging capacity on here is great, but what they do now is they actually sell a case that has that magnetic profile in it, so you could put the case on the back of the ultra and then I could put this in theory on a magsafe charger. They had a very looking, a very similar looking magsafe charging stand with the phone on it, a watch and, I believe the Galaxy Ring, so that looks really cool. They had a little wallet accessory you could attach to it. But does the phone, naked, have magnets that I could do that with? No.

0:48:29 - Mikah Sargent
Got it Okay, that makes sense. Thank you for clarifying that it's all about magnets. It's all about the magnets. How do they work? All right, let's round things out here with the conversation around. Is it Project Muhan and the technology that, of course, had been seen before, but there were some demos, yeah.

0:48:54 - Patrick Holland
Kind of. So there's a lot of how do I say this? So VR for years. We think of the headset, we think of playing games on it, and there's always been pass-through cameras, right. I think Apple kind of really made that pass-through camera kind of to the forefront with the Vision Pro last year.

But what this is doing is taking a look at a lot of other technology too. It's incorporating things like AI, Gemini specifically, and what it really is it's a combination of a partnership between Qualcomm, Google and Samsung and the platform's called Android XR. Now, Android XR could be made by a variety of companies, so people would adopt this like they would an Android phone and make their own version of that headset or glasses. So people would adopt this like they would an Android phone and make their own version of that headset or glasses. Now, what Project Muhan is is Samsung's version of a headset on that platform, and this was, I think, revealed like in December. But what's notable about yesterday was, until then, no one had been able to take photos of the Project Muhan headset or video of it. So they actually did have it in the demo area and there's a lot of, I'm sure, very similar-looking photos of people taking it of it on a stand, but essentially that's kind of what the breaking news side of it is.

I expect we'll probably hear a lot more about it at Mobile World Congress. But what's really fascinating about it is some of the features on these phones are kind of tied to that, because it's not all about VR and AR, it's about Gemini, it's about Project Astra. There's gonna be an app on these S25 phones. You'll be able to like see some of those features and it's basically bringing all that stuff and putting it near your eyes and your head so you have cameras and be able to react to your environment that way. So it's a lot of different things, but the notable takeaway yesterday is we've got to see a physical device. It's in person. No one got to touch it or put it on. I know some reporters did earlier, including CNET's Scott Stein, but hopefully we'll see more of that. I think they're kind of like dribbling it out a bit.

0:50:50 - Mikah Sargent
Understood. Well. That, I think, covers the event. Was there anything else that you wanted to mention Anything? Maybe in your early look at that device you've got in your hands, that bears a little mention, or have we covered it all?

0:51:07 - Patrick Holland
I know, as we maybe sounded a little skeptical about how many updates there are and how big these are, but I have to say these refinements it does feel really nice in hand. It's still a very much a brick of a phone. I could probably really hurt somebody if I really wanted to with this, but it feels a little bit better in my hand. It feels a little bit lighter. Is it dramatically different? No, and to be honest, it was a really good phone last year, so I wouldn't expect a lot of changes. I'm still a big fan of the screen, the anti-glare thing I can't go on enough about it and I'm really excited to play with Gemini. So we're going to be working on, or I'll be working on, a review over the next few days and have a lot more answers to a lot of these questions probably within the next week.

0:51:45 - Mikah Sargent
So stay tuned for CNET, for that All right, that's exciting be staying tuned? Um, in fact, this is a great time to ask. Of course folks can head to cnet.com to check out your work. Is there anywhere else they should go to keep up with what you're doing?

0:52:04 - Patrick Holland
Man, they really are, but there's so many different networks you say so you can find me on like Instagram, um, @directedbypatrick. I used to be a theater director. Look out, uh. And you can find me on a lot of other websites. It's my name without the first two letters, so Trick Holland. So I know I'm on Twitter, I'm on Blue Sky now and I think I'm on Threads and I think that's about it.

0:52:22 - Mikah Sargent
All right Sounds good. Thank you so much for your time today. We appreciate it.

0:52:26 - Patrick Holland
You bet Take care Thanks.

0:52:29 - Mikah Sargent
All righty folks, we've reached the end. Tech News Weekly, our show publishes every Thursday at twit.tv/tnw. So you head there to subscribe to the audio and video formats of the show. I mentioned Club Twit during the show twit.tv/clubtwit. This is a reminder for the URL. Be sure to check it out, especially right now, while we have the ability to get you two weeks free, so you can, you know, join the discord, join the fun, see everything that you like. And I, of course, want to remind you twittv slash survey 25. It's about to close, so we would love, love, love it If you hopped in there, filled out the survey before we shutter it for the year Again, twit.tv/survey25.

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