AI Broke Containment, Galaxy Z Fold 8 Lineup, Best Fitness Trackers with Lexy Savvides

0:00You know the quarantine procedures. 24 hours for decontamination. Welcome to Primary Technology, the show about the tech news that matters. Special show this week, we're going to talk about Samsung Galaxy unpacks all the new folds and flips. OpenAI actually had a breaking containment situation with one of their models. We'll get into that. Chinese models are getting really good. Apple might come out with a leasing type deal for their devices and a ton more. This episode is brought to you by Claude, Nordlayer, and you, members who support us directly. I'm one of your hosts, Stephen Robles, and joining us for the first time in a very special episode,

0:30special guest, Lexi Savides. How's it going, Lexi? Hi, Stephen. I'm doing great. What an honor. Thank you for inviting me on the show. And I know we've been trying to do this for many, many moons, as they say, and I am so excited. I'm so excited to finally be here and make this happen. So I'm stoked. Awesome. Well, thanks so much for being here. I'm excited because you have the Galaxy Watch Ultra 2. That's the name, right? Yes. That is the name. I do have it right here. On the wrist. And you really do some great work with fitness trackers and watches.

1:01And so we'll get into that in a bit. And you have last year's Fold. Is that right? You have that as well. Z Fold 7. Yes, I've got that as well. Unfortunately, not the new one. But I don't know if even on camera, definitely not on audio podcast, you wouldn't be able to tell the difference. That's the thing. But I do want to get your take on just Folds in general, because it seems like this is going to pave the way for maybe the iPhone Fold this September and how useful Folds are. I want to get your take on that. So we'll do it. Quick five-star review shoutouts. Thank you for all those who did that.

1:33Dane Zero from the USA says we're the new fave podcast. Doesn't know anyone in Antarctica. And that's fine. Lexi, do you know or have you ever been to Antarctica by chance? No, but I did have the opportunity once to do a fly over flight of Antarctica. I wasn't able to actually go on it, but I was invited on it. Does that count? I could have seen it from the air. That counts very much so. The air? Okay. That's all. I mean, that's way closer than I've been. We're on a quest to get our pin for primary technology, which is a medieval knight riding a polar bear. We're on a quest to get it on every continent.

2:04And Antarctica is the last one to conquer. And so I'll send you some pins just for fun. But if you ever go again, I might know someone going on a research trip there. So maybe I could send it to Australia and then they could potentially take it. I'm not sure if it's happening, but maybe we can try. We'll see how we go. Listen, I literally have bags of pins. I will send as many as it takes. So we'll send them a bunch. That would be awesome. Okay, a couple others. Amtheon from the USA loves the show. It says, Stephen is the optimist. Jason is the realist. That's our typical chemistry on this show.

2:38Orion, the Crewson from the USA. Thank you for that. And Josh sent me an email and I'm on the iOS 27 beta. Are you on the betas, by the way? Do you have iOS devices you're running the beta on? I do. I do. And I'm running it on the primary iPhone that I have. And I'm just, you know, normally I don't do that and I wouldn't recommend that for most people. But this year I just thought, hey, I'm just going to fly by the seat of my pants and do it and see what happens. And it's actually been fine, like really fine compared to iOS 26.

3:09It was really fine. I was getting a ton of springboard crashes over the weekend after, for some reason, like beta 3 was fine. And then all of a sudden it would just, I would swipe a couple of times. I had to reset my iPhone or restart it multiple times a day. But beta 4 came out this past Monday. It is great. And Josh pointed out, if you use Apple Mail, which I do, the remind me feature, which came out one or two years ago, you can set an email and say, remind me later, but it would not leave your inbox. It wasn't really an official snooze feature, but now it does.

3:43There is a setting, if you go to settings, apps, mail, and you can say, move remind me messages to the remind me inbox, and it will leave your inbox until the time that you set to be reminded. So it's an official, legitimate snooze feature in Apple Mail. It does sync across your Apple devices if you enable that remind me box on your Mac and your iPad. And so I'm excited because it's an official snooze feature. Do you use snoozing on your emails? I don't, and I don't use, on my iOS devices, I don't use Apple Mail, but I feel like iOS 27 could be the catalyst that gets me to try it.

4:19I mean, I am just, you know, so accustomed to using Gmail across everything just because I'm constantly going between iOS and Android. So I need to have like that flexibility, even though, yes, I know I can get Gmail through Apple Mail. I just, it's never been appealing, but I, the more I hear people talk about it, and the more I see the implementation, and obviously it's indexed the whole device, and now I'm like, oh, maybe I should, because then I get that flexibility. We'll see. I don't know. Do you think I should do it? I'm just, I'm so on the fence.

4:50I posted about that remind me feature, and all the Gmail users were like, you still can't get push mail from Google on iPhone, like if you connect to your account. So I totally get, you know, if you use the Gmail account, but for someone like me, I have FastMail as my primary. I have a couple other accounts that I sync, but I actually like the Apple Mail interface. So I think if you're in the dual lifestyle like you are, and you really are testing a bunch of devices, totally makes sense to be in the Gmail world, but I like Apple Mail. Okay, and last thing, Ruan sent me an email.

5:22I want to hear your podcast app of choice because Pocket Cast actually has a few updates coming out. And I didn't realize they have this whole GitHub page where they're talking about features that are coming. Not only do they have automated chapters coming in Pocket Cast soon, but they've implemented HLS video in Pocket Cast. And this is the open standard for video. And so very soon, it's in a test flight now, and Ruan sent me the screenshot. But you can, if you're on a test flight for Pocket Cast, you can watch this podcast in Pocket Cast with HLS video, and it's there.

5:55It's good. And so Pocket Cast is always my, it was my main podcast app for a long time. I think if you're cross-platform, it's probably the best option. But yeah, it's adding some really cool features. What is your podcast app of choice? You're going to really laugh at me. It is a streaming service. It's generally Spotify, and that's how I just am doing a lot of the consumption of this. I mean, again, being cross-platform a lot of the time, it is just easier to kind of have it consolidated rather than just in and out. But maybe with this new feature, I should give Pocket Cast a try.

6:27I did a comparison recently, and Spotify surprisingly has a lot of features that other platforms don't. They did video first, and they have chapters and follow-along transcripts for video. Apple's adding that in iOS 27, but Spotify had it right now. Plus, you can do things like upload a vertical clip for your podcast episode, and that could be featured in Discovery. So no shame. Spotify actually has some great features for podcasts. I just like the separation of having my podcast over here, my music over here.

7:00But Spotify is actually a good podcast app. So yeah, good call. Yeah, I mean, except I generally, and this is going to be hilarious because I do a lot of video podcasts. I generally turn off video podcasts when I am using Spotify. I'm like, how do I get, I don't, because I'm, when I am using, like, when I am listening to podcasts and other content, it's generally, I'm on the move. I'm walking, I'm testing devices. I'm out and about rather than sitting stationary and able to, like, consume a piece of video content.

7:31Yeah. So I am listening audio only generally and then turning off the video feature. But please, if you are watching this, turn it on because, you know, we have this beautiful matching background right now. We do. We did not plan this. We didn't plan it. Not at all. No, no, it's good. And I still primarily listen to podcasts because I'm either driving or doing chores. And so I'm a primarily audio listener, but, you know, we do visuals. We try to share screen and stuff. And so, anyway, Spotify is good at that. All right. Samsung Unpacked.

8:03Samsung had their big event for their folds. This is not like the next flagship phone, like the 26 Ultra and 27 Ultra, but this is all the flips. And so they announced, I'm going to try to get these names right. The Samsung Z Flip 8, which is their kind of smaller, it folds vertically, you know, top down. So there's the Z Flip 8. There's also the Z Fold 8 Ultra, which is the newer version of which you have, the taller one, kind of the folding one that you probably see most often.

8:33Then there's the newest one, which is the Z Fold 8 Not Ultra. And this is the squat, passport-style foldable. And this is if you've seen the iPhone models circulating around of what the iPhone Ultra fold might be. It's this form factor. And I think it's actually the most interesting. But let's hit the other two real quick. The Z Flip 8. I've never used one of these, so I really can't speak. Have you ever used one of these Z Flips? You've never used a flip, like a clamshell start? Really?

9:03I mean, I had a Motorola Razr back in the day, but that's not this. I mean, that does count, because that's really just kind of like the genus of all of it, right? It's like that's the real feel of what all of them are trying to achieve. But obviously, in 2026, it does feel a lot different. But there's, I mean, we have to get you a flip. I have to get you a flip phone. I'm going to have to send you one. I have to overnight something to you, Stephen. I'm not mad about it. I'll try it. I'll try it. I mean, the small, you know, it gets real small, which I understand is, you know, an attractive feature.

9:34And the best camera can face you and you see the screen. And the technology looks cool. Like the camera punch outs that actually go through the screen. Samsung did a bunch of updates to the Flip 8, where you can see your notifications. You can scroll social media. You can basically use that outer screen, which they call some funny name. I forget what it's called. It's not a cover screen. Do you know the official name they call it? Oh, don't. Yes, I mean, look, when it comes to Samsung marketing terms, I do not memorize them deliberately because nitography, I, look, it's not a word.

10:07I will go on until the end of time about how these marketing terms just don't make any sense. Regardless, I've forgotten the name of the cover screen. It's the one on the outside. Yes, yes, yes, yes. But no, but I mean, you're right. Like this, it's just been a slow evolution of just trying to like add all of these features. I mean, the way that Samsung has engineered the Z Flip 8's cover screen is so it's basically bringing in a lot of the features and functionalities that we've seen from like the Razer series, for example.

10:40And so it's sort of about time in that respect. But, you know, Samsung has had like so many different ways in which it's kind of been, you know, pushing the development of these, this entire category. So they've got to kind of save something for each specific generation. But I feel this year, though, I mean, we'll talk about the regular Z Fold 8. I know. And the Ultra. No, no, because they've changed the naming convention, right? So the Z Fold 7 and Z Fold 8 is this like, sorry, I'm even getting confused now.

11:14The Z Fold 7 is the traditional long kind of configuration that, you know, we've used to on all of Samsung's previous fold lines. But now they've kind of flipped the naming convention because the Z Fold 8 is that passport one that you were mentioning. And the Z Fold 8 Ultra is the long one, like the successor to the Z Fold 7. So it is a little bit confusing in how that naming convention has been done. Anyway, we'll talk about kind of that in a minute. But just going back to the flip for one quick second, the pocketability of this is why people are so interested.

11:48The nostalgia is also another huge element to it. And it does feel, when you use a flip phone, it just feels incredibly good to use. It's one of the things I can't really describe until you actually have it in your hand, which is why I do want to send you something. So you can have an experience of it. I was going to send you pins. If you want to send me a phone, that's fine. Well, it's not to keep, it's to borrow. But we'll see what I have. I might only have a really old, I might only have like a Z Fold 3, maybe somewhere in my tech drawer somewhere.

12:19We'll see what I've got. But you do need to experience it. At least get a Razr as well. We've got to get you a Razr too. Okay. All right. I'll try it. I will say, I've not seen any flips in the wild. I have seen Folds in the wild. And I have like a friend who has one as well. I mean, you're in San Francisco. So do you see these out and about? I was about to say, you've got to come here. You'll see them. You'll go to cafes. I mean, potentially, like not as prolific as you might think.

12:50But I've definitely seen a lot more Folds here than, you know, anywhere else. But really, it's the productivity play that for me, not the flip, but the Folds specifically, it's all about like kind of that working on the go, that kind of content consumption. That is where its kind of biggest strength is. And so it's interesting because I've seen a lot of the coverage around the Z Fold 8, the passport style form factor being all about, it's great for consuming content, like the four by three aspect ratios on the internal screen is just much more optimized for video.

13:25But I think for me, not having had hands on with it yet, but just looking at the specifications, seeing all the videos come out, the passport style foldable is so much better for multitasking, for productivity. At least I feel like that's what it's going to be like for using and working across multiple different apps in those internal screens than the current configuration of the 7 and the 8 Ultra, for me at least. I think it's going to be more of a productivity play.

13:56But again, I'll have to wait and see what it actually feels like when I use it, because the aspect ratio of, you know, content consumption on the longer Z Fold 7 and Z Fold 8 Ultra, you know, we'll see what the new one is like. But I think the productivity play for me is going to be the biggest part of the 8, the regular 8, the Z Fold 8. The regular 8, yeah, yeah. It's confusing. I just, I wish they called it like Z Fold 8 Pocket or something. Tall. You know? Tall. Tall. And they should have done, they should have done Z Fold 8 Legolas and then Z Fold 8 Gimli.

14:33And I feel like that would have been very clear. Yes. Okay. Yes. Let's, let's go with that. I was going to say like Pocket and, well, I actually think it was interesting because I saw Michael Fisher and he, you know, his like video was great. Like if you haven't watched his debrief on the Folds and the Flip, definitely go see that. But his thumbnail on YouTube was amazing because it was like, it's kind of like the small, medium, large versions of all of them. And that's exactly what I feel Samsung has done is like the small one is the Flip, the medium one is the 8, and the large one is the 8 Ultra.

15:09So I thought that was like a great way. It's like, you know, small, medium, large. I like that. That's it. I will link his video. I'll also link MKBHDs because he has compared them all. And the Z8 Ultra. So this is the big one. And there have been some improvements. I'm linking all of the Verge articles as well because David Immel from like Waveform, he works with MKBHD. He actually did all, a lot of the photography for these devices this week. And the photography is amazing. So you should go to the articles and look at the photos because they're awesome. But the Z Fold 8 Ultra, the big one, Samsung made a big deal about this new Flex Titanium technology, which is going to lessen the crease of the foldable.

15:48The battery is bigger, 5,000 milliamp hours. There's 45 watt charging now. Samsung developed this like dual charging system where both batteries, because there's a battery on both sides of the Z Fold 8 Ultra, it'll charge faster. And there was one feature, I watched the keynote breakdown, and I really liked the fan cam feature, which is basically a live subject tracking. So if you record a landscape video and you want it to be focused on one person because you're going to make it a reel or a TikTok, Samsung will just do that for you when you edit the app or when you tell it to do the fan cam.

16:21Like all of that is very cool. I have just two questions for you, Lexi, because you have last year's model. You've used it a bunch. The crease. Is it actually an issue or not? And how useful is the folding anyway? Well, we have to always have something to complain about, right? And for many people, the crease is kind of the one thing that really will get their goat, right? As they say, right? And for me, you know, I don't notice it that much when I'm immersed in the device.

16:53And, you know, for example, using content, watching things. When I was, you know, using this as kind of my daily, I would watch a lot of content like at night, in the middle of the night, you know, with a young newborn baby. I would basically be using like the fold as kind of my daily just to consume content, you know, at three in the morning. And I didn't notice the crease at all. And I'd be using it for hours at a time, watching things just like going, I wish I could sleep. I wish I could sleep. But thank goodness YouTube exists, right?

17:25So, you know, for me, it didn't really, it doesn't really bother me that much. But over time, you know, if you think about, you know, a regular consumer, I was very fortunate that this is a review unit that I was sent from Samsung. So I didn't have to pay the $2,000 for it. It does go back though, obviously, with all review units that I get, they do eventually go back to the manufacturer. But, you know, if you're thinking about it, like you've spent $2,000 on this phone, sometimes a bit less with trade-ins. But now this year, the prices have gone up, right?

17:56So you're spending a significant chunk of change. You do want the ultra experience. And I said this about the S26 Ultra when I reviewed it earlier in the year. You want like a true premium ultra experience that is deserving of that name. And for a lot of people, the crease in the display is still something that is an annoyance. Like we're eight generations in now, and we do want to have like that experience that does feel like a true tablet when you unfold it. But we've seen like other manufacturers like the N, the OPPO, OPPO, I sound like the Australian, OPPO, N6 Find.

18:32I'm sorry, I always get those names. I'm terrible when it comes to just like the actual names of model names. Yeah. But it's my job, right? Like I need to memorize the names better. The crease, you know, that the way reduced, the reduction of that crease, like it was incredible on that device. And so we've seen like other people have been able to do it. So, you know, I'm really looking forward to seeing how, thank you, Find N6. Thank you for pulling that up because, yeah, getting the names back to front is just something that I do all the time, all the time.

19:04But, yes, wanting to have like the features on the device that are deserving of the ultra name. And so having like the reduction in the crease, this new titanium technology that is, you know, bonded differently, different levels of strength to help the screen be a little bit more durable as well. You know, again, it's about time. It's about time that we're doing something about this crease. And if the rumors about, like you mentioned the iPhone fold, the rumored iPhone fold at the top of the show, and if that comes to fruition and if that's real, as we're going to hopefully see in September, you know, if that does have a creaseless or like a minuscule crease in the display, which incidentally also might be made by Samsung display, which I find quite hilarious, you know, then obviously we do want to have like the best, you know, preview of that right now.

19:55So we'll see. But, yeah, very long-winded way of saying who wants a crease, especially on a $2,000 device. That and if and when Apple does the folding iPhone, you know, the Apple pun, like everyone who follows Apple, they will freak out about corner radii and just the slightest design issue, whether it's hardware or software. And so I feel like when Apple does it, everyone's going to be looking for that crease, whether it actually bothers you or not in use. And like you're saying, probably in most use cases, like I have a friend with the Z Fold 7 and he'll open it up and do something and like, yeah, you don't really see the crease when you're just looking at the content on the screen.

20:34But I think it'll just, it'll be the story if Apple has not figured out how to minimize the crease as much as possible. And so we'll see. And we'll see with this new titanium technology that Samsung has. They showed like the cross section of the hinge during the keynote too of like how, you know, the screen isn't like creased at the bottom. Like it does this little loop at the bottom of the mechanism to try and prevent that crease over time. So we will see, you know, we will see how good it is. But the one that I found most interesting and that's most hopefully like the iPhone fold is this passport style, just the Z Fold 8 squat, we'll say.

21:10And this is MKBHD's video. I'll link his and Fisher's video. But this one, you know, MKBHD shows a couple of things where, you know, if you're looking at a photo, it will actually fill the entire internal display because the aspect ratio is ideal for that. If you watch a video, of course, you're going to have black bars on the top and bottom. But it seems like it rides the line really nicely from nice outer screen to use that's still usable and then the internal screen that is a good aspect ratio for both watching videos, looking at photos, or like you're saying, productivity, having an app on each side.

21:47I would be really inclined to try the iPhone version of this. I would try the Samsung version of it too. But the one thing that Samsung differentiated here is that it's not an Ultra, meaning it doesn't have the three cameras. It doesn't have maybe like the larger battery that the Ultra does. And so like the iPhone Air last year, I do wonder if people are going to have to choose between the pros that have the three cameras, the best cameras, you know, the best display technology, whatever other improvements Apple makes versus let's try the Fold, but it only has two cameras, so on and so forth.

22:20We'll see how Apple threads that needle. But how do you feel, and I mean, you haven't used it yet, but that passport style size, what was your feelings about that? I think I'm pretty bullish on it. I think it's going to be pretty good. I am excited about it because, you know, things like pocketability, portability is big. I've seen a lot of people who have particularly small hands get very excited about the prospect of having a device that is a little bit more, you know, the hand feel of that is going to be a bit better for them. So those elements are something that I'm looking forward to.

22:52There is also, you know, the things that we didn't talk about that the Folds don't have, you know, like the S Pen support. Can I just go on a little bit about S Pen support and why these devices don't have it? Because I'm a little bit frustrated. And also the, I mean, I know we were going to talk about how excited I am about it, but I'm also like a little bit, why haven't we got the S Pen support on these devices? Were you a Note 7 apologist? Like, did you enjoy that phone? The Note 7? Oh, the one with the S Pen.

23:22Oh, no. Maybe that's why it's in my mind. But did you like the versions of the Samsung phones with the S Pen? Like, you found that useful? Oh, my goodness. I am a Note OG fan from way back. Like, I don't want to talk too long about how much I love the Note series and how the S series, the Ultra series specifically, is not the spiritual successor that I hoped it was going to be. I can talk about that. I have spoken about that in length in previous videos. So I won't bore you with that. No, no. And I will say there have been times when I'm working on my iPad with the Apple Pencil and I edit podcasts on my iPad with Apple Pencil.

23:58So I'm doing that every day. And there's been many times where I'll have my iPhone and I want to do something on it real quick. And I will take the Apple Pencil about to do something on the phone thinking I can. And I'm like, oh, it would be great if I could do that. And so I feel I totally get, you know, yes, it's a smaller screen. But for note taking, like you're saying, you know, just actual notes, if you're in a talk or whatever, or being able like Ferrite, the app I used to edit podcasts, it's on the iPhone, too. And you can use Ferrite to edit. And I would love to be able to use my pencil on the iPhone.

24:29There have been times when I'm traveling and just using the iPad will be cumbersome. So I will edit on my phone and I'm over here, like, thumbing these audio waveforms. And it would be great if I could just do it with the pencil. So I've never used the Note one, but I get it. I totally get it. Well, you know, people would say, yes, well, you can use the S26 Ultra, which has the S Pen in it. And I would say, yes, I can. But I don't get MagSafe charging or magnets in that phone. And I don't get magnets in the Fold series either.

25:01And there's no S Pen support on that. Because long story short, the working theory, even though I don't think it's come out officially from Samsung, that the reason why there are no magnets in the S Ultra series is because of the stylus and the interference that it could cause with the magnets, you know, basically the way that the stylus works. You know, the magnets in the phone, if they were there, would cause, you know, interference. And we saw that with kind of like some magnetic cases providing some odd interference with the S Pen.

25:34But if there's no S Pen support, why can't we have magnets in the Fold, you know? Like there's sort of this trade-off that I am, I just, it's the hill that I'm willing to die on. It's the, I want magnets in everything. I want MagSafe in everything. And people often like wonder why I get so annoyed by this. And for me, it's an accessibility thing because, you know, if you have limited dexterity,

26:04if you're constantly doing things with a lot of things in one hand and you've got a phone in the other and you need to be charging it, you don't have the ability to just like whip out a cable necessarily and plug it in. Putting it on a MagSafe charger, putting it on a stand is so much more convenient. It's easier. The other thing with the Fold series specifically, and this is one of the issues that I had with the Z Fold 8, is that a lot of cable, like USB, this is, I'm so sorry, I'm getting into the weeds here. But that's it, that's what we do. Okay, good. Okay, good. Because I can talk about this for such a long time. The way the configuration of the Z Fold 7 is in the charging port, a lot of USB-C cables, not all of them,

26:42but some of them that are slightly thicker, the way the plug is configured, you kind of have to open the device ever so slightly, plug it in, kind of gently shut the screen again. But then it sort of still kind of can remain slightly open. Depends on the cable. Not all cables can do this, but like a lot of the ones that I do seem to have this odd charging configuration, especially a lot of the cables that I have that come with faster chargers on the end. I don't know. It's just a very odd way that because it's such a thin design,

27:12the charging situation on the 7 for me has always been a little bit of an annoyance. And not having MagSafe is just a big pain point for me in general. Again, a lot of people do, you know, get mad about this on both sides of the equation. So you can, please don't fight me in the comments, but I would love to hear like the other side of why MagSafe is not the thing, like why people don't want that in a phone.

27:41So, yeah, the charging situation. And Google put it like PixelSnap, you know, it's all over. I actually, I'm going to not spoil, but I'm going to do a video this weekend, and I just re-bought a Pixel 10. It just came this morning, actually, because I'm going to do some Gemini testing. We'll just say that versus Siri AI. So, anyway, speaking of which, yeah, yeah, yeah. Let me talk about Gemini real quick, because Gemini Task Automation, Samsung announced, is coming to 40 more, or 40 apps. And if you're not familiar, this was only the Pixel 10 and Samsung Galaxy S26 series

28:15that had Task Automation. But I actually found it to be really useful. A lot of people kind of poo-pooed this feature because it's like, oh, your phone can use the Starbucks app, great. But I actually thought, yeah, it actually was great. And I had an S26 Ultra to test it with. And you could just give it a complex Starbucks order, and it could use the app for you in the background, do it all, and then you can just press order. And so now it's going across more apps, mostly travel booking, restaurant recommendations, shopping, like Etsy and Expedia, things like that.

28:48But I think that's, like, the next step. You know, that's something Siri AI cannot do. It's not going to be able to use third-party apps for you. The most third-party apps can do is, like, give app intents, and hopefully you'll get some actions, get some data from third-party apps. But I've found Task Automation to be really interesting. Have you played around with that at all? I mean, what's your feeling on that than Gemini? And because you use more Android phones than I do, like, thoughts on Gemini in general? Well, I've used it on the S26 Ultra when it first launched. So for the first few weeks, I was kind of really bullish on it,

29:20and I was just trying to see all of the ways in which I could kind of get it to work and be useful for me. And the real restriction that I came up against was just the time that it took to complete a very simple task was extensive. Like, it was very, very long. And obviously, being a very early iteration of this, you know, people would say, well, of course it's going to take a while. It's also, you know, cloud-based in the way that it's, you know, basically piecing all of this together, even though it's doing it on device, it still needs the cloud, right?

29:54Like Gemini still, it needs a connection to do everything. And that's sort of the things that I've encountered testing the watches as well, is that Gemini is great, but you need to be connected for the majority of the things that you want to do on it. So the speed was always an issue for me. I also, I mean, again, though, a lot of, I think the things with task automation is that it is, maybe I'm expecting a little bit too much from it in the terms of like wanting it to be more real-time as fast as I can do it myself.

30:25Because I would find that, you know, I was out one day, I think I was doing the S26 Ultra review and I was like, oh, I'm just going to test it out on one of the apps that I know it works with, which is the McDonald's app. And, you know, I was like, okay, let's see how fast I can do it. So I timed it, doing the same command on Gemini versus me actually physically going into the app and trying to place an order. And I think Gemini took something like it was like over a minute and I did it in maybe 10 seconds to kind of do the same task.

30:58And again, you know, it's fine because, you know, I think the main reason to use automation is because you just sort of want to set and forget, right? You just want to get it done and go on with your day. But I'm impatient and I want things done immediately. So I will, old school, just go and do it myself. So that was the source of frustration for me. But I am happy to see that it is available on more apps. And I am hoping that when I get to test it again now, hopefully on the new Z Fold 8 series, and obviously when the Pixel 11, yeah, we're up to 11 now,

31:31when that comes out as well, to sort of see the progress that's been made there and see if it is a little bit better at the complexities of tasks because it did stumble. I don't know why I'm talking about the McDonald's one specifically, but I just was trying to make it order, like a very specific combination of things. Like it was not a, I think it was like a Big Mac meal, but I wanted to remove one of the elements in the burger. And I think it sort of struggled when it got to that stage or something. There was some reason why it wasn't able to do what I wanted it to do. So those sort of complexities within additional apps

32:03will be interesting to see if it has improved on that front. But as an assistant in general, you're running the beta, you said, so you play with Siri AI maybe a little bit. How does that compare with Gemini just as an overall assistant? Well, I'm going to be really intrigued to see what conclusions you come to when you do your testing as well. I mean, Gemini, the speed of Gemini is superior to Siri AI at the moment. I don't think there's any kind of question about that. Gemini does have a bit of a hallucinations problem.

32:36Though that I've found, not necessarily like in kind of like task automation and things like that, but just in general. Like I've just found that Gemini does tend to hallucinate a little bit more than any of the other AI tools that I have used. Maybe that's because when I'm using my voice specifically to talk to it, it's interpreting things wrong because of my accent. It could be partly to do with that. It also could be because the model just does, you know,

33:08hallucinate a little bit more in certain respects. But when I am using Gemini, you know, it works for the main things that I need it to do, right? And it is fast. Yeah, across everything. But I try not to use it, you know, as my kind of like go-to because the way that I've sort of set up my Samsung phones, for example, when I'm using it is now I've got Gemini is kind of like the main. I'm also using Bixby, would you believe it? It's like my on-device, like as the agent that I'm kind of doing all of the on-device stuff with on the phone,

33:46like all of the volume adjustments and all of the settings and things like that. So just trying to kind of spread across the load in different ways because it does have strengths in some ways and Bixby and Perplexity have strengths in others. Okay, interesting. All right, well, I want to get to the watch because you had a great video. You just published it this morning as we record on the Galaxy Watch Ultra 2. I'll link it in the show notes. I've not used any watches, so you'll have to tell me. But the brightness increased, there's better performance. And the one feature I thought was wild, it will tell you when to drink stuff.

34:20What is that? What is the hydration warning? It will tell you when to drink, not any, just water or electrolytes, nothing else. Just to make that clear. It's not just saying, hey, it's five o'clock, crack open. Time to hit it, yeah. Time.

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36:41That's claude.ai slash primary. And check out Claude Pro, which includes access to all of the features mentioned in today's episode. That's claude.ai slash primary. And the link is down in the show notes. Now, thanks to Claude for sponsoring this episode. And to help you keep your business and team secure is our next sponsor, which is NordLayer. NordLayer is a network security platform for modern teams across different work environments. And it enables secure access to company systems with centralized control over users, devices, and network activity without additional hardware or complex infrastructure.

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38:20Try it risk-free, 14-day money-back guarantee. And when you're ready to sign up, go to nordlayer.com slash PRIMARYTECHNOLOGY, 22% off yearly plans, plus 10% on top with promo code PRIMARYTECHNOLOGY10. That link and the promo code is down in the show notes. Our thanks to NordLayer for sponsoring this episode. Yeah, not that, not that. Not, not that. So it has a trail run workout type and that it's exclusive to this watch. And for trail, I'm not a strong trail runner.

38:50I do run on trails, but I wouldn't say I am a trail runner by, by choice. So when you do. It's an occupational hazard. I mean, it kind of is. I'm so clumsy. I trip over things all the time. It's the worst place for me to run, to be honest. But when you are on a trail run, like, you know, generally you're out in the wilderness, in, you know, environments that are probably a little bit more harsh than if you're just running on the street or a track or something. And so, you know, you lose a lot of sweat, essentially. And so this is using basically like an AI calculation to determine when you've lost a certain percentage

39:26of water or sweat. And it tells you, hey, you should drink water and it will give you the specific amount that you should rehydrate with in order to avoid dehydrating. It's pretty interesting. It does, it does work as advertised, but again, it is not using necessarily like, it's not a mechanical way or like the scent, there's no sensor on board that is specifically like for sweat loss. It's using a calculator, an AI calculation, a methodology to kind of pull together data from

39:56like your actual run, the environment and the, the bioactive sensor, whatever it's reading from that as well to come up with this measurement. And so it took me, I did 37 minutes of running before it told me I needed to drink a little bit more, but I was so thirsty before that. I would have loved to have had a drink earlier. So again, with all of these tools, you, you need to listen to your body first and foremost, rather than rely on something on your wrist or a phone or whatever to give you that piece

40:29of advice. And it's something I always try to bring up every time I do something that has an AI where like anything that has AI in it, that's to do with your health and fitness. Like, please listen to your body. These are not medical tools. These are not designed to like really, you know, give you that kind of complete picture. If you feel like you need to drink, please drink some water. Don't listen to your watch. If you, you know, it doesn't tell you yet. And it can't take into account, like if you've drank something. So like if I drank a gallon of water, I might still get that notification.

41:03Hey, you should drink water now. Like it doesn't know that. That's a good question. I actually don't. I should do that test. I don't want to drink a gallon of water and then go on a 30 minute run. No, no, no. Drink like, you know, drink like a 16 ounce bottle of water in 30 minutes and see like, do I still get a notification? Because my question was going to be, is there a sensor specifically for this? And you said there's not. Because I was like, if it's not sweat perspiration measurements, then it has to just be like active calories and movement. And that could mean a lot of different things. I mean, I was a very intense Wii tennis player, but I was also not sweating.

41:37So I feel like, you know, there's, there's something there. But, and like you said with AI, there was a very funny part in your video. I'll link the video in the show notes. Also go subscribe to Lexi's YouTube channel. Everybody do it. Let's get her to like 30,000 today as you listen to this. But it says funny things like your first workout is tops, which you were just saying. It just kind of says funny things sometimes. I mean, who, does anyone say that? It sounds like ye oldie, like from the 1930s, like good work, old chap. Your workout was tops. Quite the run. Yeah. Quite the effort there.

42:09Yeah. Well played. I don't know why that's the only old timey thing I can think of. So you've tried a bunch of fitness things. And when we get to personal tech, I want to ask, you know, what is your actual daily driver fitness tracker? But the Galaxy Ultra Watch 2 and your testing, do you find that accuracy, it is on point better than something like an Apple Watch or a Whoop? Or is it all just estimation, like take it all with a grain of salt? Like what's that part like accuracy wise? Wow. What a big area of discussion, because this is something that is like a real passion area

42:45for me. So first and foremost, I do want to say that like I haven't got enough data yet from the watch in order to provide like an actual judgment on whether or not it is accurate. From my understanding, the sensor on board is the same as the first ultra in terms of things like its heart rate measurements and so on. But I will be doing like, again, another validation of what I try to do with every single wearable that I test is I want to try to test like the main metrics in terms of how accurate they are. So like step counting, heart rate accuracy tracking.

43:17And I do that against a chest strap, which is kind of like the gold standard when you are like an athlete or just in consumer heart rate tracking to see if that actually matches up. And so like a good threshold for like a wrist based wearable is generally anything from like if it's like within one to two beats per minute of the chest strap and like, you know, of the average heart rate, things like that. I mean, that's generally a good sign. And that's generally where we are kind of on wrist based wearables. I would say from like my, my previous testing of other wearables that, you know, overall

43:52the Apple watch is one of, if not the most accurate in my, my specific testing of various metrics, such as heart rate tracking, things like that. Sleep tracking is another really interesting one that again, I don't want to go into the rabbit hole about this, but sleep tracking is something that really like, if you want to get really clinical about measuring this, the only way to do that with accuracy is through a lab grade sleep study. And so the, the ultimate test, I think, um, a journalist from the wall street journal

44:26did this and I was annoyed cause I'd kind of done this before, but, um, but props to her cause she did an amazing, amazing debrief of comparing like the whoop, the Apple watch, uh, the aura ring. And I think there was one more and she did a lab grade sleep study to kind of compare the accuracy of the sleep tracking and a number of other metrics. So it's definitely, it's a great piece. You should go check it out if you haven't seen it already. Oh, there you go. Um, it was aura ring, Fitbit air, whoop and Apple watch. And the aura ring five, which just came out.

44:57Yeah. Yes. I'm wearing it right now, actually. Oh, look at that. Okay. Decked out in it. Yeah. So, so you found the Apple watch is still of all like the wrist ring wearable types. You find it to be the most accurate. I wouldn't say, I'm not going to say like have the blanket statement of it's the most accurate for absolutely everything. I think for wrist based specifically for many of the metrics that I'm kind of looking at, it is very accurate. It is kind of the one thing that I am like kind of looking at as almost like the North

45:31star, but not, there's always, there's so many different variables here. Like again, for example, like the pixel watch four is fantastic for certain elements. Like it's heart rate tracking is fantastic. It's really, really good at that, but it falls down when it comes to things like distance and route calculations in like GPS based workouts, when you are doing very niche things, like doing a dog walk, like, or, or pushing a stroller and the, you know, it gets like things like distance and step count wrong, for example, even though it has like amazing ways of calculating

46:03heart rate in, you know, other respects. Again, I don't want to go down the rabbit hole here. If you do want to talk about this, like in more depth, we could do another like breakout. I should do a breakout video. I should do a breakout video on this. I should. We'll do a breakout video and then come back. We could do a special episode because I don't know, again, I won't go too deep, but all the health tracking features as a casual user, they're interesting. It's whatever. But when someone is actually going to depend on the numbers, it becomes very important. How much do I trust these numbers? And like my mom in recent months, she's been having some heart things and she's on now different

46:38medications and she has an Apple watch. She's had it for a few years, but now she's like very attuned to what those numbers are doing. And if she sees the notification of like your trending heart rate, resting heart rate has changed, that could induce some anxiety of like, wait, is that good? Is that bad? Is the medication doing something? And she was even really looking at like the blood oxygen measurements on the Apple watch. And I had to tell her like, mom, do not stress about the blood oxygen because if there's any sensor on the watch, that doesn't matter as much. Like, don't worry about the blood oxygen.

47:09Like it's, it might tell you you're at 95% and it might not be right. So, so when you're really depending on this stuff, and I also had someone, I've talked about it before, someone I knew personally who got the Apple watch notification that their heart rate was too high and found out she was in kidney failure. And so there are times when these are very important and the accuracy is important. So I, I think it's valuable information. Maybe we should come back and talk about it again, but you do have to know like, all right, the sleep score, my Apple watch tells me I'm going to feel terrible today.

47:40Take that with a grain of salt. Like maybe I went to bed a little late. The sleep score is kind of ambiguous, but like you say, the heart rate tracking. Yeah. If it says my resting heart rate is 20 beats higher than it was a few months ago, that's something to maybe take into consideration kind of thing. Is that how you approach some of these numbers? Yeah. Well, really like the, the key thing to remember, you kind of hit the nail on the head. These are not medical devices. There are some sensors and some features that are FDA cleared, which basically means that like they, they have been validated in that respect. And so that maybe you could use those a little bit more as kind of like a, a truth that you

48:15can take to your medical provider and be like, Hey, like my watch has told me that like, I've, uh, you know, I'm showing signs of AFib. Let's do a test to see if that is actually the case. Like those are the sort of signals that you should be paying more attention to. Like you found with, you know, your mom and your friends, like those definitely like do, do take those into, into consideration. Things like sleep scores. Oh, I could, I can talk about sleep scores. So just really quickly, sleep scores are a proprietary measurement that each device

48:46calculates differently. It is a calculation. It is not based on a standard. Every single wearable does sleep scores differently. That's why if you wear an aura ring, you wear an Apple watch, you wear a galaxy watch, they're all going to calculate that sleep score differently. Cause they take into account different way, like different weightings of things, like how long it took you to fall asleep, how long you've stayed in certain sleep stages. And also the way in which they measure like sleep stages is not the same. There's no consistency across devices. So sleep scores, you know, if they help you great, they can be a great way to gamify getting

49:19better sleep for a lot of people. But if they make you stressed and more anxious, don't look at it and don't worry because sometimes like they don't tell you how you feel at all. And they can't diagnose anything like a sleep disorder. You can't do that with, with a watch unless it's potentially a sign of sleep apnea, which is again, like going back to that medical FDA cleared validation that I was talking about earlier. Those are the things that you can be paying attention to. Sleep scores can be, I just treat them as a bit of fun, to be honest. I'll just do a, for everybody, if you're concerned about your sleep score, I'll tell you what

49:52it says. Go to bed earlier and get seven plus hours of sleep at night. That's like the only thing like it's going to tell you, you know, and if you stayed up late, you know, you might not feel great. And to your point about like the sleep score is basically like arbitrary calculated differently. I recommended this app recently. It's a free iPhone app made by former Apple employees. It's called trackables again, totally free, doesn't know weird tracking stuff, but you give it access to your health data and it will give you a different sleep score than you got in the stock health app because it's just calculating the numbers differently.

50:25Maybe not over indexing on your bedtime and wake time, but just on overall time of sleep. So you can get a different score if you just want a different score. You know what I mean? Like it's, it's not, don't, don't put too much weight on it. Basically, that's it. Um, the last thing Samsung wise, and then we've got to talk about open AI, they got smart glasses coming out. Uh, I just recently did a whole video on the metaglasses. I since returned them and now Samsung's like, no, well, we're going to do it too. And it looks very similar. This is gentle monster and Warby Parker designs.

50:56It's going to have the camera. It's going to have Gemini built in. And it's still a camera on your face. And so I'm not sure how they're going to solve that cultural, uh, issue, but have you tried smart glasses ever? Do you have any interest in this? Yeah, I actually tried the Google prototype of these at Google IO back in, in May. It's the second time that I've tried them actually. So last year they showed off kind of like the working prototype of the Android XR in that little sandbox demo that they had at Google IO.

51:27And it was, you could, um, get turn by turn navigation on a little display in, you know, your vision. That was particularly cool. And they obviously had a camera. They had the ability to kind of use Gemini. Like you would look at something and ask, what am I looking at? Like, what is this picture? And it would, Gemini would tell you about it in your ear. However, you know, that demo was like particularly cool for me to see, uh, the, the version that I saw this year was audio only though, because the ones that are going to ship are not going to have the, the binocular displays.

51:58They're not going to have anything in your field of vision. It's just going to be audio only, and it's going to require the phone to be with you. They had a camera in these ones. And it was interesting that the demo that they asked me to try, because it was not, it was really just about kind of like having a little bit of fun with the Gemini capabilities in photo editing specifically. Like you could say, you know, take a photo of what is in front of me and then change the back. I did something, I did this most ridiculous prompt when I did it.

52:29And I think they were looking at me like, why did you ask this weird, this weird thing? Judging your prompt. Pretty much. But it was long and complex. And I was like, take the photo of the, of the person in front of me, change the background to make it look like I'm staring outside an airplane window and he is standing on the wing of the airplane. Like it was a very long, odd prompt because I really wanted to sort of like push the, you know, A, being absurd about it and, and B, or seeing how complex I could make this single, single prompt with just speaking to Gemini in my ear.

53:02And it, and it did it like it did it reasonably well. But the, the reason why I think it was interesting was because they weren't kind of talking about it in a way that was, it was trying to make it a little bit more fun. And I think that the, it's a sort of like, I guess, dissuade people from thinking about the privacy concerns about always having like a Gemini enabled camera on your face. So, you know, yes, you can have a little bit of fun with it, but I think the bigger question is I'm sure you encountered with, with the glasses as well is the, the privacy question.

53:35And is it any, you know, I noticed that you think, is it any better that, that Google and Samsung are doing it versus, versus meta doing it? And that is like the big, the big picture question. I would say I need to try the, the final shipping version first. And I think that the manufacturers are really acutely aware of the privacy issues, but just hoping that people kind of sideline that because it's got a cool thing. You can change the background of your photo and make it look really cool that you, you give it into Gemini and it sounds really fun, right?

54:05You can have this a lot of fun with it, huh? Don't worry about taking pictures and video of people without their notice. Like, that's the thing. And maybe it hurt all of the brands that meta got there first because of all the brands, they probably put the worst taste in people's mouths of privacy and security. And, you know, whether people see a camera on your face, they're not going to think, oh, is that Google's or meta's camera? Like, I don't think that, it's not even going to get that far. They're going to see glasses with a camera and they're going to feel a certain way about it. Either they don't care or they feel very strongly about it.

54:38There's usually not an in-between. So we'll see. That's, this is not coming out till the fall, I believe, the Samsung glasses. So we have some time, but we'll see. We'll see if glasses on faces are ever a thing, for real. We got to talk about AI for a little bit. And we talked in the pre-show, which Lexi did do a little pre-show for us. And so thank you for that. Open AI had a little breach of containment. And I forgot to ask you about the movie quote. I know you said you wouldn't know the movie, but the quote typically relates to something we're going to talk about in the show. And I said, you know, the quarantine procedure is 24 hours for decontamination.

55:11No idea what that's from. It's okay if not. No idea. I'm really sorry. I am the world's worst person to talk to when it comes to popular culture quotes and movie quotes specifically. Love consuming it. It just doesn't stick in my brain. So I can't sit here and quote movies at you all day. I'd love to. It's just, that's not my strength. That's totally fine. I chose an older one. And you're probably too young to even know I've watched this, but it is from Alien, the first Alien movie. And so that's, that's what that's from. But breaking containment was the theme because that's exactly what happened with Open AI this

55:44week. And they actually have this press release that I'll link in the show notes. And they explained what happened. But the short story is Open AI was testing their models for cybersecurity. Specifically, they were testing Sol 5.6 and an unreleased unnamed model. And they were supposedly sandboxed it, limited it to not have internet access, except for this one very specific internal use case. And the prompt that they gave it, the models basically broke containment.

56:17They got to full internet access and breached the hugging face company. And so I'm going to read something real quick from the press release. This is from Open AI. They said, quote, while operating in our sandboxed testing environment, our model spends a substantial amount of inference compute finding a way to obtain open internet access in pursuit of solving the evaluation problem. To gain access, the models identified and exploited a zero-day vulnerability in the package registry

56:49cache proxy. With this access, our models performed a series of privileged escalation and lateral movement actions in our research testing environment until the models reached a node with internet access. So basically, it broke out. The model broke out of its testing sandbox and was able to reach Hugging Face, which is an AI marketplace company. But this feels like the first time, where until now, every AI company has been very clear, like, no, no, no, you know, it's sandboxed.

57:20It can't do X, Y, and Z, because these are the parameters we have given it, and security, yada, yada. Anthropics over here, like, we're only going to give a model to the public when it's safe to use and such. And here's an instance where one of the models that is publicly available, 5.6 from OpenAI, broke containment. And actually, because of the instructions it was given, which was to find vulnerabilities, it did exactly that. It found vulnerability and made it out. And I don't know about the people in your life, but I have people on both sides who are

57:52like, AI is going to destroy us all, and, like, full-on Terminator future is what's happening. And then I have other people who are like, Chachapi T's an idiot. I don't think it's going to do anything. And I always try to, like, center the conversation because it's like, I don't think Terminator just yet. But also, you know, there are some things that we should keep an eye on and realize that there needs to be some guardrails for how this is used and developed. And this feels like one notch in the belt for the Terminator side of, like, this model made it out of OpenAI's own sandbox.

58:23And it seems like any vulnerability, no matter how small, no matter how small that, like, mouse hole is, it's going, like, if you give the AI an instruction, it will do it. And this was not an instruction that OpenAI gave. OpenAI didn't say find a vulnerability to open internet access and try to access it. That wasn't an instruction OpenAI gave it. It was having it test vulnerabilities elsewhere. So I don't know. This one, I'm not scared, but I do think this is a red flag to say, hey, maybe we should

58:54be a little more careful. What do you think? It's a red flag. There's sort of two things that I'm thinking of here. Number one, it's sort of done, like, it's a test that was set for it. And so it's kind of gone about it in a way that almost like someone would cheat on a test at, like, school potentially would think about, like, in sort of, but in, like, a very movie-esque extreme way, like, oh, I'm going to go break into the teacher's office where they have all of the tests and all of the results. And that's where I'm going to go be able to find it.

59:24And then, yeah, I can pass it off as my own. It kind of feels like the model was trained on, like, a very devious, like, student in that respect, potentially. The other thing is that, yeah, I am more scared about this than I think many people might