The thing that jumps out to me about this is like the launch stuff doesn't totally surprise me because A, it's really hard to launch a phone globally, which we've seen from many, many, many startups over the years. And what too many of them do in the U.S. is sign the one exclusive carrier deal, which is just the instant kiss of death to all smartphone startups everywhere. So kudos to Carl and nothing for not doing that. But then the invite thing seems to also be, I would guess, purely like supply driven. Yeah.

I mean, they're a small company. They're not going to be able to compete for the already limited parts.

You don't think it's just like to build hype?

It does build hype too. Yes. It helps, but I don't, I just don't think the world is the same as it was in 2014. Like the, that was a time when people were like amped about their phones and wanted that. And I just don't think that's the world we live in anymore. Like there's Samsung and there's the iPhone and there's just, I think the audience for people who are like deliberately looking for something else is just shrinking really, really, really fast. But

I think like, I think that's the point though, is I think they're trying to find that shrinking audience who's currently buying the OnePlus or whatever and saying, no, come buy our thing. We can be exclusive and weird with our rollout, too. We've got this. And we've got lights on the back.

Well, and they've done some of that, right? They did a StockX drop with, I think, 100 phones that, by all accounts does not seem to have gone as well as they might've hoped. But that kind of stuff totally makes sense to me as a, as a pure hype driven thing. But for what nothing is trying to do here, like artificially restricting the number of people who can buy your phone just seems backwards to me. So it's possible that they're going to do like the pre-order thing and have invites. And then everyone who wanted one will get one very quickly. But my guess would be that this is just the fact that it's very hard to make phones right now. And unless you're a company as big as like Apple or Samsung or Huawei, it is hard to stay on top of your supply chain. And like, I have no inside knowledge of this but i i would be very surprised if that's not the limiting factor here yeah

i mean that's that's kind of what what they are alluding to that it is it is you know a supply chain driven thing it does conveniently build help i think uh i think that is definitely part of it if there's one thing carl pay is very good at it's marketing uh and it is driving interest and hype. It

looks cool, though. I know we're going to knock on – we have knocked on the nothing. We will probably continue to knock on some of the elements of the nothing, but it looks cool, right? I

guess. Would you buy it? Is it cool enough to buy it? That's a thing.

It's not cool enough to buy, but it's just neat looking. The lights and stuff I thought were just a hokey like i honestly the first time i saw the the screenshot of it from mkbhd's piece i thought it was like a mock-up or a case and i was like okay cool that's a dumb case but you do you and then i was like oh wait no those are real lights okay that's cool i don't want to buy it but i'm really excited about what you're doing here even though like if saw this in a movie theater, somebody's phone started ringing and just the entire row is glowing, I would lose my mind.

Yeah, I've gone back and forth on this like a hundred times. There are just a bunch of little things that you see in Marquez's video that you plug the phone in and it gives you the charging indicator of where it fills the space as the battery charges. Super neat, cool idea, fun to watch into that. The lights will sync with notifications or ringtones. They have a bunch of custom ringtones, like all that stuff. I'm like, okay, it's neat. It's cool to see companies like actually do something with the back of their phone, which it's been a long time since anyone really tried anything. Bring back e-ink screens on the back of phones is my personal opinion. The best. I think I'm going to lose that fight permanently. But Dan, your question is exactly right. I get to the end of that and I'm like, okay, this is neat. Okay. 90% of people put cases on their phone. And the people who don't care way more about like the camera and the battery life and like the basic functionality of the software have

they said anything about any of that like have they talked about how durable it is or whether the camera will be good because most startups you know i keep thinking of essential and it's garbage garbage camera that did not improve with time unlike some other products in the world it just got worse it

did it just went from literally unusable to like pretty bad in terms of

like details on the phone mostly what we have is like the design uh and then these lights so like we don't exactly know i mean it could have a snapdragon 8 gen 1 whatever the latest version of that is, and like 12 gigs of RAM and like a decent panel or whatever. It all comes down to the software optimization for things like the camera performance. And that's where the startups generally struggle because they just don't have the experience or the resources to make that work well.

But he should, right? Like didn't nothing like they bought Essential, didn't they? And they like.

So they bought like the essential branding oh

like

we're gonna talk about what happened to the other half of essential in a second but like there's not like a ton of essential i think staff at nothing i think it's a lot of the branding uh and like the the that they bought. The engineers from Essential started a new company called OSOM, and they announced that they were working on a phone last December. Wait,

can I just pause you real quick? Is it not called Awesome? I thought it was called Awesome. I never made that connection, so maybe it just went right over my head. It's also very possible that I'm wrong. I just assumed it was called awesome.

How is awesome spelled? I think for

listeners... O-S If it's not awesome, it should be. I'm just saying that. So in

December, they announced that they were working on this phone called the OV-1. It looked like an essential phone, just modernized, and it was going to have modern specs and everything like that. Turns out today, here we are in June, six or seven months later, and Solana, the crypto Web3 company, which I know very little about, so quickly getting out of my depth here, has an announcement that they are announcing a phone. And it's made by Awesome. This phone that Solana is announced and releasing, they say early next year, is the OV1 phone that Awesome announced back in December. They've rebranded it to the Saga, and it is the Solana phone. So there's no more OV1. Awesome is not releasing that phone under its own branding. It's only going to be the Solana Saga, which is a crypto Web3 blockchain type of phone. Where's the Web3? What does any of it mean, Alex? Isn't that the eternal question?

The pain on your face right now. Just trying to think. I believe

their pitch is that it will have a crypto wallet on it and you can trade crypto with it and store crypto with it and access digital NFTs and things like that with it. Beyond that, it's just a smart, it's just an Android phone. I'm

just, I'm reading our post. Chris Welch wrote it for support for decentralized apps that rely on the Solana blockchain. That's the blockchain element of it yes

it's a workaround i guess for the play store but you don't want to buy a phone that doesn't have the play store yeah

i mean i think a

it's very interesting to me that our friends at osom awesome decided to go this way because clearly what this looks like is the company thought they were going to be able to build a competitive, like security privacy based Android phone and kind of ride that wave. And what they've decided is that actually the wave is web three. And if you want to like halfway gimmick your way into a successful phone, that's a better track. I'm not sure if that's true. I just think it's really interesting. It's worked well

for HTC so far. But

the only thing about this that I think is interesting is like there's been this big debate over the years about whether your phone should be your hardware wallet for crypto. Because in theory, right, the idea is like it's a device you have with you. Like your phone is very handy for that. It's a computer that you hold that can do all of the identifying for you. But then because it's connected to other things, because things get software updates, because phones die much quicker than thumb drives do, lots of people have always said, don't use your phone as your hardware wallet. But in the sense that if you imagine a world in which blockchain and cryptocurrency is the future, which I strongly believe is not the world we actually live in. But if you imagine that world. Jack

Dorsey wants that world.

Right. In Jack Dorsey's Web 5 world, there's some interesting problems to be solved here about like, how do you do on-device payments? How do you let it be your hardware wallet? How do you do that kind of cryptography and encryption on your device? It's all very interesting. I think it's like incredibly trying to catch a wave that crested a year ago it's

just so late to the party it's just kool-aid manning in at the weirdest moment pretty

much yeah yeah

i like it's gonna be a thousand dollars the specs are nice you know 6.67 inch screen, 120 hertz OLED display, like the Snapdragon 8 plus Gen 1. Like it seems nice specs. It looks cool. It just, why would you do Web3 in 2022? I

mean, I get like, you know, kind of David alluded to this awesome company probably realized or they couldn't line up the money needed to actually bring a phone to market at this point. And so, you know, you catch the wave of, you know, Solana is an exchange. They've got money. They've got resources. There's a lot of buzz and interest still in web 3 world even though like markets have been crashing and things like that so like i get the the pivot here yeah do i think it's going to be a successful device do i think anyone's going to ever buy it probably not even like crypto hype enthusiasts probably won't buy it if

you want to buy this phone if you're like yes this makes sense please, please DM Dan, not me.

I'm just going to go on record and say I don't think this phone ever launches. I look forward to this being thrown in my face in, what is it, Q1 2023? This is supposed to launch. When that happens, please take this clip from the Vergecast and send it back to me and ruthlessly make fun of me. I do not believe this phone is ever going to launch.

I mean, this is one of those areas where we love to be wrong on. Yeah. So like, please make fun of us if we are wrong on this. If Web3 is like real

and cool, that gives us so much interesting stuff to cover. That'd be great. I don't, I don't, I don't see this being the thing that makes it work. Hey

Siri, set a reminder for April 1st, 2023. Awesome phone. You didn't pay attention at all. I

mean, it's incredible that you thought Siri would be capable of this. Yes,

it set the reminder. All right.

I'm

very excited, David. It's going to pop up in a Verge cast in 2023. We're remembering it. We're setting the calendar. I

bet you it'll play its reminder at 12 a.m.

I'm going to be asleep. Just be an awesome phone. Go away. Okay, we're going to move on to the lightning round. David, what you got?

So there's this new Twitter feature called Notes that Twitter is testing. Twitter has been saying for, like, years that it is interested in the idea of longer tweets. And Twitter just rolled out blog posts. Like, that's just what it is. Twitter is testing blog posts on Twitter.

But, like, image blog posts, right? Like their images, they're not even like text.

Oh God. The thing that drives me the craziest right now is you you're in the Twitter app and you're like, Oh look a note. And they're just like, this is just a test. So only a few people have access to it. There's only a few notes out there. You hit one. It takes you to the in-app browser, makes you log in again, separately, in twitter and then finally lets you read the note but basically like the idea seems to be twitter's done all this stuff on like longer form things like they they bought review the newsletter company they're very interested in the idea of like letting people make stuff natively on the platform and now it's blog posts will this go the way of all of the other things twitter has tried in that vein, which have not worked at all ever? Probably. But I still think it's kind of interesting. So I'm very curious

to see how that pans out. I can't imagine why I would ever use it, but here we are. Yeah, I don't understand the use case. Like if you're writing a blog post, you're putting it on a website, preferably your own website, but maybe you're putting it on Medium or, you know, another place. It's like indexable and searchable and findable. Like, otherwise, how

does anyone see these?

I think this is just for celebrities who want to like clarify. It's

to replace the notes app apology. Yeah,

exactly. There you go. They designed the thing to

replace the notes app apology. All

right. I'm in. I changed my mind. This is the best idea Twitter's ever had. I love it. It's perfect.

They're like, we don't want this indexed. We just, no, you want notes. That's the note. You need notes. We gotta have it. Also, this week, the FDA said, Jewel, you cannot sell e-cigarettes in the United States. Kind of not good, seeing as that's like Juul's whole thing nowadays.

There was a, I think it was Dan Primack at Axios who, like back in 2019, when all this started, predicted that Altria's investment in Juul might go down as the worst corporate investment of all time. And because I think I'm going to butcher the numbers here, but it was something like they invested $13 billion at a $43 billion valuation. I'm like, I'm wrong, but I'm in range. And the thesis was basically like, if things go as badly for Juul as it looks like they're about to, that's going to essentially go down to zero. And he just wrote a thing today that just said, update, worst corporate investment ever. It's like, yep.