Solid State Podcast

The age-old saying “The more things change the more they stay the same” couldn’t be… more accurate for this week’s show.  It’s no secret that we do this show because we love it… we’re not here to be on billboards, top any charts, or quote-unquote “move the needle”… We do the thing out of a genuine passion for the thing we’re doing.  126 times later… well, it had to happen… we… ended up in the same room.  Talking over each other? Turns out that’s not because of the call lag. Running way over on time? That definitely didn’t get any better. Having the opportunity to do something so “routine” shoulder-to-shoulder with two of the best in the biz? As they say… priceless.  The only sadness to be found in the room was the realization after the red light turned off was that this really was a “once in a blue moon” opportunity… next go around we’ll be back in front of our cameras, poorly lit by monitors and effects lights, wondering why we can’t pick a better time of day to do this.  Or… who knows… maybe we’ve got even more in store just around the corner. Guess you’ll have to wait and see…

This show has a whole lot of… “whys” behind it… Education(ish) for sure, its just fun is a definite top three, but right atop the mountain for me, at least, is and continues to be our shared, mutual, and genuine love of these silly hunks of plastic, bundles of wires, and ever-charging batteries we simply call “gadgets”.  And there’s no better time of year to be a tried-and-true Gadget Head than Gadget Season, of course! After an entire year-to-date of announcements, developer conferences, thinly veiled teases, and giant quote-unquote “leaks”… this is the time when the devices get packed, the tracking numbers are issued, and the highly rendered version in the advertisement of whatever we spent our money on runs face-first into this harsh thing called reality.  Do we watch said tracking from shipment-to-delivery with the excitement of a child staring at the chimney on Christmas Eve? More than I’d like to admit. Will any of this year’s lineup of next-big-things change any our lives? Most certainly not. Are any of them even any good? Guess that’s why you’re here, now isn’t it?  With no further ado, we’re going to chat through some glasses that are here, some slightly more interesting glasses that… aren’t… as well as newly arrived earbuds, smartphones, and even watches from both this century and last… I promise, that one will make more sense in the wrap.  Oh, and as if that wasn’t enough, we even have a tease of our own at the end of the show… what can I say, we couldn’t help ourselves? Guess you’ll have to listen and find out… and hey, no skipping!  Spoilers…

Listen… some weeks I more-or-less bore you with pieces of my own tech history that, honestly, you only just barely signed up for… Other weeks though, well let’s face it there’s just no room for preamble!  Generally speaking, mid-ish September is often one of those weeks because, there’s no other way to say it, it’s iPhone announcement week! In a now-tradition going back to October 2011 and the fall launch of the iPhone 4S (and yes, “S” was for Siri, come at me I’ll die on that hill), the long days of summer begin slipping into recent memory and a fall of holiday shopping, (hopefully) cooling temperatures, and shiny new iPhones have been cornerstones over since. Is this the end of Apple’s “year”? Almost certainly not. But even with iPads, processors, and other accessories still to come in the weeks and months ahead, it’s still impossible to ignore that this remains “The Big One”… And, to be fair, it’s (as usual) not just phones on tap here… we’ve got AirPods and an assortment of watches to get through as well…  In the end, the final question is really the only one that matters… are any of these gadgets your next one? Let’s find out…

So it’s not going to exactly be a big secret, you’ll undoubtedly hear it in today’s recording (sorry about that…) but I… have a cold. It’s nothing so terrible that I’m “bed ridden”, but at the same time I absolutely feel like a walking zombie who’s taking 3-4x longer to perform even the most basic task. At thirty seven years old, this is mildly inconvenient at best and day-altering at worst. Twenty five or thirty years ago though… school-aged John would have had one agenda… a day off in pajamas filled with Mario, Pokemon, and Mega Man on nothing other than my trusty Gameboy… So it’s no wonder, these literal decades later, that on stuffy-headed days like today I have a nearly innate yearning to pickup my Gameboy’s spiritual successor the Switch an proceed “recovering” on the couch to the subtle tones of Zelda’s background music… In that moment, though, it hits me… yes the Switch is “portable”, I guess you can even call it “hand held” (with two hands, looking at you, dbrand)... but the equation has changed SO much since the still very pocket-able Gameboy days (and the DS, 3DS, even 3DS XL that followed).  So the question is, have we lost something in translation? Was the true best, final form of the portable gaming device a foot-wide slab that mostly fits in a backpack? Or are we missing out on the best 10-15 minutes of gaming we could find here and there when still truly amazing titles were along for the ride in our pocket.  Battery just finished charging, so lets find out…

I’ve talked, quite recently actually, about my “island of misfit toys”… my shelves upon shelves of yesterday’s tech, lost to time maybe but not to memory. While this week’s entries are very unlikely to earn a spot on said shelf, it doesn’t stop me considering the generations of devices to come first every time a new contender enters the market.  Earlier this week I was doing exactly that exercise, taking in a time when phones had home buttons, scroll balls… heck, even a headphone jack… and what occurred to me the further I went “back in time” was how much more diverse and, well, obvious the design choices were. One manufacturer might try a “chin” at the bottom of their phone, thinking the would be the thing to make them stand out, while at basically the same time others would try not-so-subtle curves to their glass.  These choices, some paradigm shifting and some… not… did at the very least lead to generation after generation of devices that you could actually tell apart from across a crowded room. Today, for the most part though, you nearly have to hold the phone just right in the light to make out the logo on the back or risk uttering the wrong brand in conversation… The one place this “unified theory of phone design” doesn’t seem to have set in, yet at least, is over in foldables. Yes, they obviously have certain qualities in common like, you know, a hinge… but past that we see companies trying different paths still in aspect ratio, material design, even dare-I-say form factor… So, when given the chance to look at the paths chosen by Samsung and Google in nearly-consecutive weeks, it’s honestly so much more entertaining to take in the technical advances, sure, but really spend our time interrogating the choices then went into making these things. Why go wider instead of taller? Should it open to be more square, or rectangle? Need we continue to fear dust or 50 grams of added weight in our pockets more?  The answer to all the above came from a meeting, a design group, a decision… and now we have these devices in our lives to ask the only obvious question in reply… who made the right call? 

Origin stories are a funny thing… they’re one part history lesson, two parts Science Fiction often times, and just a dash of self-indulgent FanFic about ourselves for added flavor… So when we took a proper look at our own origin stories, how we got to this very place in our careers as technology professionals and card-carrying-nerds… we pushed past all the gadgets, all the experimental builds-gone-wrong, and all the countless nights on the couch, controller in hand, with just one more boss to beat… and realized before all those pixels, frames, and gigahertz was a dark room, a table, and friends with character sheets in one hand and dice in the other…  Table top Roleplaying Games such as Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, and the myriad of others like them have gone through something of a cultural resurgence in the last decade for sure. From Stranger Things to Baldur’s Gate to… well… a literal movie called “Dungeon’s & Dragons” starring none other than a Potato Dragon… But even before they found their way into the hearts and minds of a seemingly whole new generation of fans, characters, and future DMs… there was still a quiet army of devoted fans rolling out a map, putting on background music, and hosting their regular game night.  And that’s the part we couldn’t ignore any longer… sure there is literally no tech to be found here… except that every single ounce of our love of all-things-technology, gadgets, and “the future” has direct connective tissue to the creativity, imagination, and… fun that starts sitting around that table. So screens off, ringers to silent, and grab your dice (you know you’ve got ‘em)… let’s play. 

The saying “time flies” has always troubled me… time feels like one of those constants we should be able to rely on yet, as it indeed goes by, I will at least agree our perception of it, at minimum… evolves. Take “the long days of summer” for instance… I can remember as a school-aged kid thinking summers would never end, I’d get to play with my friends from sun-up-to-sun-down forever, and fifth grade was a distant future that, as far as I was concerned, would never arrive.  Now today, many, many… many… summers later… another one is almost over?  Yep, as impossible as it is to believe, “Back to school” is in the air as parents begin gathering supplies, teachers begin dressing up rooms, and retailers across the land are… well… putting up “Sale” signs.  Whether you’re needing to pick up a bluetooth mouse for your Middle Schooler’s Chromebook because it turns out Sunny D and trackpads don’t mix, or you’re on your twelfth laptop review (that all somehow say the same yet polar opposite things) scouring the internet for the gear of the Class of 2029 (yikes) this is not-so-sneakily one of the prime times of year to upgrade and expand your tech while stretching every dollar nearly to its limit.  Is every laptop the cheapest it will ever be? Nope.  Is this deal, that conveniently “ends” in 59 minutes, ever going to come around again? Without a doubt.  Does the MacBook Air still reign supreme as the “laptop for everyone”, students, professionals, and grandparents alike?  Guess you’ll just have to listen and find out…

On a shelf in my office is a line of phones… No they’re not spares, or “extras”, heck the vast majority of them probably don’t even turn on any more. Instead they represent signpost moments in my own technology journey. Far in the back is the same candy-bar shaped Nokia “brick” that pretty much every phone-using person had at one point in the early 2000’s… it was my first cell phone. A little further over is a lightly cracked but still intact Google Nexus One… not the first Android phone, but it was my first Android phone… You get it, and trust me the list goes on… these devices aren’t valuable or even particularly special… but each one anchors to a point in time of my journey to this very moment in the tech world, and hopefully the collection will keep growing.  So what then, does that have to do with Samsung’s Summer 2025 “Unpacked” foldable event? See, one thing I find interesting about my own shelves of IT History is that no where on them… from a TRS-80 to the original Chromebook Pixel… is a true foldable (No, I don’t count you, Surface Duo. ).  I’ve owned quite a few, going back years at this point. We’ve talked about most of them on this very show! So why then, has each one disappeared into obscurity as the next is announced unlike the dozens of personal artifacts on those shelves?  To be quite honest… a lot of it has to do with these things are freakin expensive, trade-ins have been a big part of getting “the next one”… and that… hasn’t changed this time around.  So this week we’ve got phones, watches, software, the full gamut to talk about… and we will. But somehow, as I anticipate receiving this years entries and seeing where they fit in my own day-to-day technology life… I can’t help but wonder… will any of them end up on the shelf?  Guess we’ll have to wait and see…

This week on the Solid State Podcast, we talk about… Nothing… No, really… Nothing actually has new headphones, and we talk about them! In case you can’t tell, a slough of major events from I/O to WWDC are behind us and while we wait for Samsung and others to fill our lives with more gadgets in the coming weeks, we chose to take a beat and meander (as we’re want to do) through everything from the iOS 26 Beta to Switch cases and car sized, galaxy filming cameras… So, in the market for a new pair of smart glasses? This week (shocker to no one), we’ve got you covered. Ever laid awake at night wishing your digital photos had the look-and-feel of classic, 1980’s Fuji film cameras (because who hasn’t…)? Yep, that’s on tap too.  And if all that wasn’t enough, I still find time to take a (somewhat) abridged tirade through Microsoft’s seemingly willful inability to just listen to good advice and treat Xbox like the software platform that it rightfully is rather than a (now) overpriced, nearly long-in-the-tooth black cube in your entertainment center… Well, considering it’s a show about Nothing, somehow we found an awful lot to say… too much even. But let’s not forget, you chose to be here, so with that let’s dive in and see what this week really has in store…

This week on the Solid State Podcast, well… there’s just no other way to say it… it’s WWDC!  That’s right, it’s summertime in 2025 and that means nothing other than Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference just took place and with it a slough of announcements, Beta releases to play with, and an ever-sharpening picture of where Apple at least thinks it wants to go with its broader product line in the coming months, years, and frankly beyond… We know full well our episodes are never exactly… umm… short… But this one was a challenge even for us to fit it all into a single run. We’re not saying it was an action packed event… far from it in fact… but what Apple did bring to the table could have far reaching implications for almost every corner of their product and service offerings.  User interface and design, power user workflows, a new naming convention across the board of their OS’s, and… dare we say it… an actual mouse pointer in iPad OS? Yeah, this isn’t exactly “put it up on a billboard” kind of stuff, but in possibly a much more meaningful way it could represent one of the most end-to-end changes in both the look-and-feel as well as the overall usability of Apple’s core products for many of its users.  And, at the end of the day, if you’re really just here to have an iPhone, use it every day, and be annoyed once every Fall when all of your buttons move around for seemingly no reason after a reboot one night… then, well, this Fall is likely to be no different for you… This year had all the hallmarks… an internet full of “Apple is doomed” predictions, further confirmation of Apple “falling behind” in a race that may or may not even actually be happening, and once again adding Wallpaper to one of its product was an on-stage, announcement worthy moment for team-fruit…  Like I said, it’s WWDC, would we have it any other way? 

Technology, in a weird way, is at its best when it makes us feel like a kid again… It’s hard to ignore the swell of emotion and nostalgia… as gamers, nerds, or whatever you want to call us… when you fire up a classic that takes you right back to sitting precious too-few inches in front of a TV playing countless hours until being told for the twelfth time that it was absolutely time to go to bed… So it comes as no shock, based on nothing else than how many times we’ve talked about it in the years that we’ve been waiting for this very day, that it was suddenly 1991 again the moment a relatively little, red blue and black box with “Nintendo Switch 2” emblazoned on the side was (honestly unexpectedly) in our very presence… Were the preorders nothing short of a debacle? I refer you to a previous episode… Was a single retailer effective in communicating how one was supposed to even try to exchange currency for one of these seemingly-gold-plated marvels? It was so bad it was almost by design… Did all of that disappear into a puff of digital smoke the moment I hit a two-second-launch perfectly on my first outing in Mario Kart World? Let’s just say my eyes hurt a little as I write this, and it’s not hard to figure out why… Technology is special in so many ways, but one of its most foundational is its ability to entertain, inspire, and frankly distract us at moments we maybe need it most.  Now, do excuse me for a moment, I think I just figured out a shortcut on this circuit I’ve been stuck on and I’ve got characters to unlock…

About twelve years ago I got onto a coast-to-coast flight in the cheapest seat of the worst airline I’ve ever been on to attend a a tech event. It was equal parts Star Trek and Willy Wonka with promises of futuristic, ambient computers ready to sort your ever whim at the speak of a simple wake word coupled with literal 10-foot tall robot-arm bartenders making drinks on command… all while none other than Billy Idol performed “White Wedding” live just 15 feet from me. Yep, it was an event-slash-party done the way only Google could do, especially at a time when their geekish-whimsy was still in full bloom.  Fast forward more than a decade and things are somehow still very much the same and also wildly different.  Google I/O is still very much a thing… the goal of everyone in the room in one-way-or-another is still to build the computer from the Starship Enterprise… and, okay, admittedly Billy Idol probably didn’t make this one. Substitute A/I or Gemini for Google Assistant, Flow for Google Play Music, and Project Aura for Google Glass and we’re suddenly partying like it’s 2013!  But remember that part about it also being wildly different?  Google isn’t the teenager-of-a-company that it was in 2013. It’s many times larger, sure, but also has many times the pressure, responsibility (to shareholders), and existential threats that seem to mount more and more every day.  Gemini is coming to Chrome… but what if Google suddenly doesn’t own Chrome? Google Beam lets you hold a meeting with someone virtually as if they’re really there… but what if more and more people are just down the hall again to have a meeting with? Google AI Search will do all the Google’ing for you… until there’s no more web pages left to search because no one visits them anymore.  It’s far from a death knell, but it’s impossible to say that the air at altitudes that Google breaths isn’t getting a bit thin as time goes on. But, at the end of the day, Google took the stage, announcements were made, and we’re left (as always) to answer one question… what’s next?

It’s kind of funny, in the office lately we’ve been half-joking about being careful how you manifest things… it’s great when you “put out there” that a new project kicks off well… and it does… or you hope against all hope that a concerning trend isn’t here to stay… and it isn’t. So, should we be surprised that after weeks of lamenting the desert of gadget news we’ve been traversing… we are suddenly greeted by the relatively unexpected arrival of not one but two new Surface devices from Microsoft?  It’s no secret that we review, use, and maintain a relatively vast fleet of devices made up of every brand and logo you’ve ever heard of… and several you haven’t. Dell, HP, Acer, Asus… yep they’re all there and many times they’re really good and even great at what they do.  But some lineups… just hold a special spot in our hearts and for whatever reason Surface has just always been one of those! From the arrival of the first Surface RT almost thirteen years ago to the latest Snapdragon-powered behemoth that arrived on our doorstep just last summer… we’ve been there for it all. A few have been great, several have been… not… and a rare couple have even been game changing (at least for the industry that was left to chase them). Like the best concept car, sometimes Surface hasn’t been about selling a certain number of units or directly moving the needle of one of the world’s largest companies… but instead about putting the channel on notice for what they could (and should) be making out of their own products.  I’m here to tell you, the laptop you have today, regardless of what it is, is better because Surface exists. Believe me.  So, when Microsoft suddenly shakes things up not with a “next generation” but instead with what appears to be novel entries in-and-around their existing lineup… well let’s just say we’ve found an oasis in the desert, and it’s about to get exciting around here!

This week on the Solid State Podcast, we realized something… odd.  We’ve mentioned it off-hand on several recent episodes, but it has come more and more into focus as the weeks have gone on. It’s quiet out there… too quiet.  Sure, we’re in the post CES, MWC, etc lull that exists every year as we wade towards Summer’s more splashy, developer-focused events like Google I/O and Apple’s WWDC… but even that expected downtime is so quiet right now, the silence is honestly deafening.  Don’t get us wrong… there’s plenty of people talking, but what’s actually being said? Switch 2 pre-orders took place… which mostly left a lot of people tired after a night of no sleep and sadly almost as many with no actual Switch 2 order with their name on it… Companies seem to be coming out of the woodwork left and right making noise about buying a pretty ubiquitous web browser that… isn’t actually for sale yet.  And on top of all that, prices have begun to not-so-subtly fluctuate across consumer tech… from video cards to cameras… something is afoot and we’re just not so sure it’s 100% correlated to the things dominating the daily news cycle.  Are you confused yet? That’s okay, because we are to! So, for a stroll through what we’ve unceremoniously deemed the “un-News”… let’s take a crack and figuring out what the heck is going on out there…

This week on the Solid State Podcast… well there’s just no way of sugar coating it… Jet Lag reigns supreme… See, it turns out that when you get hundreds of technology professionals together in a room on the other side of the globe for a week and tell them to turn their brains into hyper-idea-craziness mode… well the impact doesn’t fade quickly… Events like these are special because, on paper, you have a bunch of people who are objectively "competitors" all being asked to talk freely and openly about the “secret sauce” of how we do what we do… and to be honest you’d think that would lead to a very quiet room… right?  Ohhhhh is it ever the opposite… and it is safely what I find most magical about what we get to do and call “work” every day. Nope, instead it’s opening a pandora’s box of collaboration, idea sharing, and community that I’ve only ever experienced in these multi-day caffeine-driven pressure cookers.  So when we had the opportunity to not only attend but participate and engage in just such an experience… well what do you think our answer was? Fuel up the plane, pack the bags, and figure out what the German equivalent of Monster is… (it’s Monster, by the way…) And what, you might ask, was the actual moral here? Well, keep listening for the full story, but suffice to say the status-quo was challenged (as it should), ideals were re-affirmed (not that they needed it), and a reminder was starkly delivered that not only is there no competition in this room but instead we’re all connected by an imperative to, at the end of the day, be better…

Image with me for a moment, if you would, the start of a perfectly normal day in the “modern smart home”… Your alarm goes off right on time, and your start-of-day automation scene kicks in. Lights begin to subtly come up, adapting to eyes still very much wanting to be closed for at least 10 more minutes. The Air Conditioning goes to your preferred morning setting, while the living room TV kicks on with the morning news. After the tea kettle reaches the precise temperature for ideal steeping, reminders start arriving on your Home Screen summarizing the day ahead. Left over dishes go into the washer, and that last pesky load of laundry kicks off. Everything works, everything communicates, this is… “good”… right?  That’s the thing about smart home tech or, honestly anything in the gadget-filled world we know and often times love… when it works… it’s freakin magical!  The cost of that little slice of magic, though, is the other side of the coin… imagine once more that same scene with one vital change… last night a storm blew through and this morning the unthinkable… the internet is out… Don’t mis hear me, we’re not talking a life-and-death “rise of the Cylons” situation here… but it’s shocking to take mental stock of everything in our homes that grind to a halt when suddenly “offline”. Will your alarm still go off on time? Automation scenes, smart lighting, and adaptable thermostats? Better be running something like Home Assistant. And more and more, even something as table steaks as that load of dirty dishes comes into question without a lifeline to the cloud.  The cost of convenience so often is security… but more and more it also seems to be one of resilience. Maybe there’s a better way? 

This week on the Solid State Podcast… Spring in the air! Okay, it’s actually 80 degrees outside already, but hey that’s life in the swamp that I call home…  But historically, the Spring season also conjures memories of the time-honored tradition of, yep, you guessed it… Spring Cleaning…  For some, it’s clearing out a closet of clothes you’ll never wear again, and others its about finally clearing a path wide enough in the garage for a full-sized human to actually navigate end-to-end… but for the Solid State crew, well, let’s just say things are a little more, uhh, “gadget-y”… Yep, for every un-used sweater my wife needs to get rid of there are easily three phones, tablets, laptops, or frankly TVs I would be better served sending off to, shall we say, “future endeavors” in someone else’s service… You know, all so I can then use the money (and reclaimed space) to buy yet more phones, tablets, laptops, and frankly… TVs…… And this got us thinking, in 2025 a TV isn’t just a TV anymore, a toaster many times isn’t just a toaster and heck… a car isn’t even just a car… Every single one of these “smart” gadgets, devices, and appliances has, by nature, our digital fingerprint inextricably linked to them… and without a healthy dose of intentionality, that fingerprint goes right out the door with it once we sell, trade-in, or dispose of it.  As with so many things, there has to be a “right” way to go about it then, so let’s fire up those eBay accounts, clear space in the junk drawer of charging cables you know you have, and let’s see what it takes to actually sell your tech in 2025…

This week on the Solid State Podcast we’ve got a little bit of everything on tap… honestly just the way we like it! Framework made a splash on several fronts this week with updates to its already-beloved 13” modular do-it-all and also expanded this year’s lineup to include a smaller, more accessible 12” model that… dare we say… they position as a “laptop for everyone?” And not to stop there, they rounded out the string of announcements with a… Desktop. Yep, you heard me… a modular, upgrade-focused… desktop. Now if that has you scratching your head for any number of reasons, A: you’re not alone… and B: just trust us, there’s more here than meets the eye… Newer, faster SSDs are no tap from Samsung this week as well and, lets face it… faster is just faster… and that’s a good thing… And last but certainly not least… the end of yet another era has arrived as we bid adieu to a product that in many ways kicked off a chain of events that led to how meetings are literally done today… this particular product just… wasn’t the one we use to do them… All that leads to our feature though… and please do yourself a favor and preemptively unplug any and all smart speakers in earshot because, you guessed it (or maybe didn’t)… Amazon is finally ready(ish) to launch their AI/LLM/GenAI/Martian pixy-dust-infused Alexa upgrade known, yes you again guessed it… as Alexa Plus… We probably spend too much time on this show talking about naming conventions, and I’m here to warn you today is no different, but I solemnly swear there’s more here than that even if Amazon didn’t exactly go out of their way to give us much to work with. All that AND several tortured D&D references abound… what more can you ask for? Let’s dive in and find out…

We’ve talked many (many) times on this show about the cycle of things… and what I find very interesting at this particular moment is the relatively subtle but sudden departure from those cycles… Take the iPhone for example… like the Tim Cook branded clockwork that it is every Fall we have an event, a new lineup of phones are announced as the next biggest thing ever to happen in tech in perpetuity throughout the universe… a week later we can pre-order them… and a week after that they’re living in our pocket for 2-3 years (or… you know, 11.5 months for some of us……) This week however, the cycle broke. Yes, I know, we’ve had offshoot iPhone announcements in the past in the form of the “SE” line of phones. But, as I was aluding to earlier… this is different. The naming convention is ever so slightly but ever so importantly different… the parts bin this mid-cycle monster was crafted from was full of THIS years parts… and while the price has definitely gone up compared to 2022’s most recent entry, this one is actually spec’ed at a level a normal human being can use it successfully for more then 2-3 months rather than years…  So, zooming out, where is all this going and more importantly… what does it mean? This isn’t just a microcosm of Apple wanting to “change things up”, the industry as a whole see’s something at play and is racing to meet it head-on rather than be washed beneath its waves. The Smartphone-driven growth of the last decade-plus is rapidly subsiding, we’ve talked time and time again about the advanced maturity of that market, and as quote-unquote “upgrades” are getting more and more iterative the fight for every purchase is becoming almost cut throat.  Was simply slapping AI on the box going to ignite a fresh decade of consumer frenzy? Well, ask Humane… Was making a phone magically fold in half going to convince droves of users to part with $2,000 for an impossibly fragile device? Samsung remains unsure… All we can say is something is afoot, and when a player at the scale of Apple starts adjusting its stance to brace for impact, its past time to pay attention…

Do you remember the mid-90’s cartoon Pinky and the Brain? Stick with me here, but it was one of my favorites. Few things can illicit instant laughter from me like the ever quotable “Gee Brain, what are we gonna do tonight?” Followed by the infamous “The same thing we do every night Pinky, try to take over the world!” Much like that quote found its way into just about every episode of the show, Samsung’s flagship Galaxy Unpacked event finds its way into just about every January, and with it a certain theme takes shape… what is Samsung planning for their phones this year? Why the same thing they do every year, dear listener… try to take over the world… I don’t mean in a literal sense (mostly), but in battle for space in the average person’s pocket, Samsung can make a certain case that’s exactly what it’s done! In the United States, at least, it has de facto become the default option if you’re not carrying an iPhone, period.  And Samsung’s strategy here has been pretty straightforward… make a phone in just about every shape, size, bend, and price point you can imagine, and someone will buy it… So when its time for them to take the stage each January and show us the “next big thing” from one of the world’s preeminent technology brands, you kind of expect it to be a “big thing”, right?  Enter the reality of the situation… the smartphone market is well past maturity, and sure things like foldable screens seem like the “wave of the future”… in the end Samsung (and many others like them) have gotten very good at making a glass and metal rectangle to live in our pockets and dominate our lives.  So then, what did they have to stand up and talk about? Honestly that’s a very good question, but one thing hasn’t changed… its another year, another Unpacked, and Samsung still wants to take over the (smartphone) world…