00:00 – Mishaal Rahman: Is the OnePlus 15 a worthwhile upgrade or should you just hold on to your money?
00:04 – C. Scott Brown: And will Android 17 finally keep your contacts safe?
00:08 – Mishaal Rahman: I’m Mishaal Rahman.
00:10 – C. Scott Brown: And I’m C. Scott Brown and this is the Authority Insights Podcast where we break down the latest leaks and news surrounding the Android operating system.
00:19 – Mishaal Rahman: So, our OnePlus 15 review is finally out and pretty much everyone on our team, Scott included, pretty much came to the same conclusion. It has absolutely incredible battery life, probably the best of any smartphone out there right now, but it’s unfortunately held back by downgraded hardware compared to its predecessor, as well as an exceptionally spicy processor.
00:39 – C. Scott Brown: Meanwhile, we’ve spotted clues that Google is finally working to fix a major privacy issue in Android. They’re developing a new tool that’ll let you selectively give access to contacts instead of your entire address book. And lastly, Samsung may be cooking up some unique new gesture controls for its upcoming Android XR glasses, but to use them, you may need to shell out for some cash to get a Galaxy Ring to combine the two together.
01:10 – Mishaal Rahman: But before we get into the XR stuff, let’s circle back to the OnePlus 15 reviews because they’re a bit of a doozy. You know, this is the second OnePlus flagship phone we’ve gotten this year. You know, at the very beginning of the year, we had OnePlus announce the OnePlus 13, although technically that phone came out last year, but that was a China launch, but in the US, it came out the very beginning of this year. And now, just like 11 months later, we have its successor, the OnePlus 15. And no, you didn’t miss a thing. They did indeed skip the 14 because, you know, the association with the word four in China, the death connotations, but whatever. We’re now on the OnePlus 15. And you expect there, you know, you go from 13 to 15, it’s a generational jump. You expect there to be generational improvements across the board, but that’s not the case. In our own testing, our own reviews, we found that yeah, there are quite a bit of downgrades in the hardware department. We have a downgraded camera system, downgraded haptics, a couple of other downgrades in the area, downgraded display, lower resolution display, upgraded refresh rate, but you know, there’s not many applications that actually take advantage of that increased refresh rate, and some unfortunate issues with thermals in our testing.
02:31 – Mishaal Rahman: So Scott, you did a review yourself of the OnePlus 15. You published a video on YouTube actually earlier today. Sorry, I’m speaking from the future two days ago about the OnePlus 15. So why don’t you tell me what are your overall thoughts of the device?
02:48 – C. Scott Brown: So, the thing is that it would be a great device if the OnePlus 13 didn’t exist. The OnePlus 13 as an entire package is far superior to the OnePlus 15 by nearly every metric. So, what we have here is a situation where OnePlus might have made a mistake with the OnePlus 13. It may have made the OnePlus 13 too good.
03:21 – Mishaal Rahman: Oh, yeah.
03:22 – C. Scott Brown: And for whatever reason, instead of iteratively upgrading the OnePlus 13, it decided to drastically change the formula of what it did with that phone and give us the OnePlus 15 instead, which has a few upgrades, but then a bunch of downgrades as well. And I don’t know, I can see in a board room, you know, with a bunch of OnePlus executives, I could see them saying, okay, if we just release the OnePlus 13 but with a better processor and maybe a slightly better battery, we’re going to get lambasted for it. People are going to say that we’re not innovating, we’re just doing, you know, we’re just rehashing the same phone, whatever. So instead, let’s redo everything and really make all these upgrades, but in order to do that and keep the price at a reasonable level, they had to make some sacrifices. So that’s what I’m sort of imagining happened here is that OnePlus made the decision, we’re going to reduce some of the specs to then up some of the other specs. And I think that was a mistake.
I think it was a big mistake and I think that the OnePlus 13 is now by far the superior all-rounder phone for pretty much anyone, which is bizarre because you know, how often does this happen in the world of smartphones in general, not just in Android phones, but in all smartphones. iOS included. Like how often do you get a phone that is the so-called sequel to the previous phone, but you can literally point to multiple downgrades compared to the previous year. It just doesn’t happen that often. So it’s very notable, a very notable release and a release that I find it very hard to recommend anyone buy.
05:07 – Mishaal Rahman: Yeah. I mean, I’ll share my overall thoughts too just for a little bit of contrast. Like, I think if you consider the OnePlus 15 in a vacuum, it’s a very good device, right? Like sure, on paper, if you compare it with the OnePlus 13, they’ve downgraded the cameras, the display, the haptic feedback and the design is more iOS, same with the software, but like in a vacuum, it’s still a very good phone, right? You can’t get away with calling it a bad phone. It’s very difficult these days to make an actual bad phone, right? I don’t think I remember the last time I’ve actually tested an objectively bad phone. And the OnePlus 15 is certainly not a bad phone. But when you consider the OnePlus 13 when it released earlier this year, it was basically flawless for its price, right? There were a couple of things missing, of course, it doesn’t have Qi2 built-in magnets.
I don’t know what, does it like, what else was it missing? Pretty much everyone was like, this is like the best phone of the year, and it came out in January.
06:10 – C. Scott Brown: Yeah, no, I mentioned it in the video, but it’s the first and so far only OnePlus phone to ever get a perfect five-star review from Android Authority.
Every other OnePlus phone has always had something that we’ve pointed to and been like, this is where OnePlus saved the money. This is where OnePlus cut the corners. And the OnePlus 13 was the first phone ever where we were like, we can’t spot a flaw. Like there is nothing wrong with this phone. So, yeah, I would argue that the OnePlus 13 was literally perfect. The only, I mean, for me, it was only held back by its size. It’s just too big for me. I don’t like big phones. I’ll never use it as my daily driver because of its size.
But if OnePlus were to take that phone and just shrink it down a bit, I don’t know. I don’t know if I’d be a Pixel guy anymore. Yeah.
07:01 – Mishaal Rahman: Yeah, I mean, it’s just baffling to me. Like, everyone has said all these incredible things about the OnePlus 13, and they know they had a hit on their hands. But then they come out of the gates with this device where they take away a lot of what made the OnePlus 13 special. And I think they gambled way too much with – they were hoping that the battery life would be enough to overcome everything else. And the improved refresh rate on the display, you know, would be awesome enough to pull in more gamers and overcome all the other aspects, but like the main the core target audience of OnePlus phones has never really been just gamers, right? It’s always been just an average enthusiast or just the average person more recently. But nowadays it seems like they’re specifically targeting gamers with this improved refresh rate by always boasting the latest and greatest Snapdragon 8 chipset.
But even then, like with these capabilities, we’re seeing that, you know, it’s not really working out for OnePlus because when we benchmark the device and we tried to actually put the 8 Elite Gen 5 to the test in the device, we found that the device really struggled to actually run the processor to its maximum potential. It wasn’t even able to complete a couple of benchmarks. Like when I ran it, I was not able to complete the 3DMark Solar Bay Extreme, the Solar Bay what’s it called? the ray tracing test that’s in the 3DMark app. It just refused to complete and it would just like error out and then I would see nothing on my home screen. I was like wondering what the heck happened and it’s just because it canceled because the device overheated.
So, I’m wondering why didn’t they just stuck to what worked, made incremental improvements, increase the battery size, and then they would have had the second phone of the year. Like if we just had the OnePlus 13 with the battery capacity of the OnePlus 15, that would be without a doubt the best phone of 2025.
08:57 – C. Scott Brown: Yeah. I totally agree. I don’t know what the thought process was. It could be that there’s an Asian bias for people who are listening to this who maybe don’t know this, but mobile gaming in Asian countries is everything. Like it is one of the most significant aspects of smartphone usage by far.
And in Western countries, we don’t really think about that. You know, mobile gaming’s, you know, people are mobile gamers here, but not like they are in Asia. And obviously OnePlus is a Chinese company with a larger parent company above it that is also Chinese. And yeah, they may just be like, this is what people want. People want these gaming features. They want phones that are super, super powerful gaming machines. Therefore, let’s make all these sacrifices and only focus on gaming.
Not really understanding that outside of their home country, people don’t really care about the gaming aspect. At least, you know, most people don’t care. Obviously, no matter where you go throughout the world, there’s always going to be those hardcore gamers that are like, I want the phone that can play all the games at the highest frame rates, etc, etc. But it’s just not as prevalent here.
So, I don’t know, it could have just been that they looked at some numbers on, you know, on a marketing sheet and some survey results or whatever and we’re like, this is the direction we should go. And I would argue that it was the wrong direction. At least for this market and for markets in Europe. But I don’t know. It’s very confusing to me. I am very disappointed. I love Ryan Haines’s headline for the Android Authority written article, which is I think “I’m not mad about the OnePlus 15, I’m just disappointed.” Yeah no, yeah, “I’m not angry at the OnePlus 15, I’m just disappointed.”
And that’s a perfect summation of it. It’s like you said, it’s a great phone. Like there is nothing about it that I would say, you know, oh my god, this phone is awful. No one should ever own it. It’s just that the second that you compare it to the OnePlus 13, it immediately becomes irrelevant. It’s just like why even bother? Especially because now that the OnePlus 15 is available, the OnePlus 13 is going to come down in price and then it’s going to make it even more of the better decision for anyone, whether you’re a gamer or just a regular smartphone user, if you want a great camera, if you want great software, if you want a terrific build quality, lots of durability, I mean whatever it is that you’re looking for, the OnePlus 13 has it and it’s better than the OnePlus 15. So, yeah, there’s just no reason.
11:37 – Mishaal Rahman: Yeah. I think it’s unfortunate that a lot of these problems has to do with benchmark chasing and audience capture.
Like, they’re targeting hardcore gamers and a lot of Chinese power users who are especially interested in the raw performance numbers, you know, if you’re not improving your performance, then it’s a downgrade objectively. But like we’re seeing there’s barely any applications, barely any games that can even push these chipsets to their absolute limits. So for the vast majority of like 99% of your use cases of these phones, you’re going to be spending time with like the clocks at their lowest or like really low clock speeds and kind of sipping not really as much power as they could be if they were running like desktop-class applications. So a lot of this processing power is kind of wasted on these flagship phones and you would be perfectly fine with just a mid-range Snapdragon 7 series device, which is, you know, basically why Google hasn’t really been pursuing the same kind of performance claims as Qualcomm as MediaTek.
Like they don’t really care about that because all they care about is delivering a good user experience overall. Now, of course, that angers a lot of enthusiasts because they want those high benchmark numbers. They want the best performance in games, but you know, most people don’t really care about that. Most people are just using the phone day-to-day and as long as it’s fast, smooth and fluid and scrolling and swiping and opening apps, that’s all they really care about. And I wish more companies like OnePlus and Samsung, etc, would prioritize that use case and maybe potentially give us the best of both worlds, include like a more conservative performance mode that allows us to basically intentionally throttle the processor just to maximize battery life and reduce throttling and reduce how much heat is generated by the device. I would love to see that kind of performance mode be more widely available in devices.
13:26 – C. Scott Brown: Yeah, I mean, it’s kind of I mean, I know we talked about this a little bit in the last episode, but they’ve kind of dug their own grave here.
You know, like they’re constantly trying to prove that and I’m not just talking about OnePlus here. I’m talking about a lot of brands, a lot of brands that make phones that specifically focus on making it the most powerful, fast phone, whatever, you know, the highest benchmark scores, the highest numbers, whatever. Like if you’re constantly chasing those numbers, then you’re always going to lose. Like you’re just always going to lose.
Even the OnePlus 13, even if you ignored all the problems, even if we ignored the overheating and the camera downgrades and all these other things that are problematic about this phone, even if we ignored all that, two months from now, there’s going to be a phone that’s better than this. There’s going to be a phone that’s going to have better performance, it’s going to have a higher benchmarking score, it’s going to have better battery life, a better camera, whatever it might be. And then immediately your phone is irrelevant, you know? And that doesn’t happen with phones and other products that don’t rely on the cell of that product being the numbers. I mean just off the top of my head, you know, like a you know, like a gaming PC, you know?
Like yeah, you want a gaming PC that can do everything that you possibly can do, but you also can get a Steam Deck, you know, the new Steam Machine. Yeah, the Steam Machine, the little tiny box. You know, it’s a sensation. It only got announced 24 hours ago. Well, by the time people are listening to this, it’ll be many hours ago, but when we’re recording this, it only got you know, it only got announced a day ago and it’s all over social media. Everyone’s raving about it. And we know just from the design of it and the specs included that it’s not going to be the same power as a custom built gaming PC with a 5090 in it or something like that.
But it’s still it’s going to do what it does better than a lot of other things because it’s got the right software, because it’s got the right design, because it’s got these things built into it that you don’t fit onto a sheet that you can’t just tell by looking down a list of numbers. And so, yeah, I think that is what these companies are missing out on. They’re missing out on the idea that a great smartphone is a package, you know?
Like you could have a phone that has all the greatest specs in the world, but if the software is trash, it’s a trash phone. It could have all the greatest specs in the world, but if it doesn’t have the right cellular band connectivity, then no one’s going to want to use it because it’s not going to work in their country. Like there’s so many other things that go into making a great phone and so many companies just focus on the numbers and so many buyers only focus on the numbers, you know? So many smartphone buyers, they’re just like, well, this doesn’t have, just look at Nothing. You know, Nothing launched the Nothing Phone (3) and it came with a processor that was not the flagship processor that everyone thought it was going to be and they went nuclear on Nothing about it. And it’s like, why?
The processor that’s in that phone is really, really good. It will do everything you need it to do, but they were just like, no, I expected the flagship processor and I didn’t get it, so therefore, the phone sucks. And it’s like there’s so much more to a phone, but I don’t know. I feel like a lot of the time I’m just screaming in the wind about this kind of stuff because you know, I make a video like the OnePlus 15 review and there’s tons of comments from people being like this guy doesn’t understand what he’s talking about.
He doesn’t understand that these specs are better than these specs. And I’m just like, no, I do understand. I just don’t think that’s everything. There’s so much more. But no.
17:22 – Mishaal Rahman: It’s that argument we talked about a couple of weeks ago where like people want what they perceive to be the best value for money, even if it’s not even if it comes in the way of the actual product experience, right? If OnePlus had the choice between shipping the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 versus, I don’t know, the Snapdragon 7 Gen 4, for example, people would feel miffed that they didn’t ship the 8 Elite Gen 5 because they were feeling like they’re getting scammed.
They feel like they’re not getting their true money’s worth. But you know, it might provide a better experience because it would run cooler, it might even let the battery last even longer than it currently does, which is already really impressive. And we wouldn’t really have any issues with throttling, with overheating, probably not nearly as much as we do now. So yeah, I mean I totally agree. And actually you brought up an interesting point that I wanted to to hark back on, the desktop PC, the gaming PC comparison. On gaming PCs, we see so much more variety in CPU and GPU combinations, no matter the price range, whereas on Android phones, like once you hit a certain price point, everything is the 8 Elite Gen 5 or everything is the MediaTek Dimensity 9400 plus, 9500, right?
There’s like no variety once you reach a certain price point. Like sure, and like the budget and the lower mid-range, you have a lot more variety with the 7 series, the lower end MediaTek Dimensity chips, but everything in the flagship range, the same chip and that’s it. Everyone uses the same processor and I feel like that’s probably holding back these a lot of these devices because I would be okay if we only have the 8 Elite Gen 5 in the you know, the highest end gaming phone with like the Red Magic with its the liquid cooling, but even that phone supposedly struggles even with the liquid cooling attachment.
So it’s kind of crazy to see the difference we have in variety between desktop PCs and gaming phones and I think that Android would do a lot better if we had more variety in processors.
19:17 – C. Scott Brown: Yeah. I think I wholeheartedly agree with that.
And I also think that Android would do a lot better if the people, the Android fans were a little bit more open to accepting that not everything has to be to the hilt the entire time, you know? Like the example you just gave, like it is very possible that Qualcomm went to OnePlus and said, here’s the price for the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 and it was much more expensive than last year’s model. And OnePlus said, okay, well, if we want to keep the phone at $899, then something’s going to have to give.
And so we’re going to cut down on the cameras. We’re going to bring the camera hardware down and that was a choice that OnePlus had to make because Qualcomm came to them and said, here’s the price, take it or leave it. And OnePlus is like, we have to have this chip in this phone. So therefore, something’s got to give. And I don’t know, you know, like I don’t think that’s the right position for a company to be in. I think that the company should have the leeway to say, we’re not going to go with this Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, we’re going to go with something a little bit less robust because we think that our cameras need to be at this level.
But no, Android fans won’t have it and OnePlus sees that because they saw the vitriol against Nothing. They see the vitriol against Pixel phones with Tensor, you know, G5 and all these other things. They see that and they’re like, we don’t want that. So we’re going to avoid that as best we can. And that sucks. That sucks for everyone.
It sucks for OnePlus, it sucks for buyers, it sucks for me. I am a OnePlus fanboy, ex- OnePlus fanboy. Like, I mean, the OnePlus 7 Pro is my favorite phone of all time. and before the OnePlus 7 Pro, all I bought was OnePlus phones. So it’s like it hurts my soul to have this phone in my hand, the OnePlus 15 and say, don’t buy this. Like, it sucks. I don’t want to say it.
I don’t like it, you know, but it’s like I don’t know what else to say. Like I have to be honest and I have to be forthright with the consumer and tell them what’s good and what’s not good and it sucks. So I really wish there was more leeway and I really wish people were a little bit more open-minded about what makes a good phone. But until that day happens, unfortunately, this is the world we’re stuck in.
21:33 – Mishaal Rahman: Well, you know what else sucks? The way that Android currently handles your contacts. So a lot of applications whether they’re social media applications or messaging applications or some other applications, whenever they need access to your contacts, they generally request broad access and you have no choice but to either grant them access or deny them access. And that’s a problem because your contacts is a treasure trove of personal information.
It not only has, you know, your own name, email address, home address, phone number, but also everyone else you know and everyone else you’ve ever interacted with if you’ve chosen to add them to your contacts list. So that is a lot of valuable information that advertisers or other companies may want to get their hands on. But unfortunately, Android doesn’t really provide a way for applications to only get one or two or like a handful of contacts. It’s either all or it’s either none. But fortunately, Google is working on a solution. They’re working on a new application, a new tool for applications to use called the Contacts Picker.
And this is basically a new privacy-preserving way for apps to select contacts. The way it’ll basically work is apps will call this Contacts Picker application and then it’ll open up a UI for users to select one or more contacts to grant applications access to the contact and then applications can choose which information they want to retrieve whether it’s not just the name, the address, the email or something else. So they can selectively choose basically, I only want X, they only want this data field or that data field. They don’t want everything and then you can also choose how many contacts to give to that specific application.
So this feature is something that I spotted in development in the latest Android Canary release. I’m expecting it to go live in next year’s Android 17 update. But one big caveat with this feature is that it’s seemingly optional right now, like there’s nothing preventing developers from ignoring this and just requesting access to your entire contacts database anyways. But hopefully Google does something in the future to entice developers to use the Contacts Picker tool or maybe force applications on Google Play to use this new tool if they want to, say, continue to be distributed in the future, similar to what they’ve done with the Photo Picker tool for media selection. So Scott, I want to hear about your experience with application and contact access.
Have you ever like, will you ever admit to installing an application and just blindly granting it access to your contacts? Or are you always very skeptical before you hit grant?
24:14 – C. Scott Brown: No, I never, I always deny that permission. There’s no reason for apps to have access to my contacts, even social media apps, you know, like Instagram.
24:22 – Mishaal Rahman: Not even Facebook?
24:24 – C. Scott Brown: Not even Facebook. I don’t even have a Facebook account. No, yeah, no, I don’t allow that access. For me, there’s no reason, you know, like the algorithms that are in these social media networks, all of them, whether it’s Instagram or TikTok or YouTube or whatever, like they’re so good. They don’t need access to my contacts to figure out who I’m friends with, who I’m connected to. You know, all you got to do is just watch me on one of those apps for, you know, a few days, a few weeks or whatever, and you’re going to know my entire social circle.
Like that’s how the algorithms work. You know, there’s this thing that goes around all the time that people talk about, oh, my phone is listening to me. You know, my friends and I, we went out to lunch the other day and we talked about going to Hawaii and now I’m getting all these ads for Hawaii. Like clearly my phone was listening. And the reality is much scarier than that. The reality is that you are so predictable that your behavior is so linear that these algorithms are able to determine what you are probably going to want before you even know that you’re going to want it. That’s the reality. That’s what’s actually happening and that’s much more scary.
And so yeah, feeding that by giving them more access to my contacts, it’s just not necessary. So anytime that pop up comes up, I just say no. So, this update that you found this potential thing that’s coming in Android 17, it kind of just makes me scratch my chin because I’m just like, I’m still just going to say no.
Like I’m still just going to be like, no, you’re not going to have access to any of my contacts. I really can’t think of a situation and maybe you can correct me here. I can’t think of a situation in which I would be like, oh yes, you can have some of my contacts. Like, I don’t even know why I would ever do that. But I don’t know, maybe there’s a situation that you can think of that you would do that.
26:15 – Mishaal Rahman: I mean, I guess one scenario where, I mean, obviously social media applications, one reason why they might request access to your contacts is to locate other people who have signed up for the platform.
So, for example, if you’re setting up for a new social media platform, you have a bunch of contacts and you’ve added their email addresses to that contact list. The social media application requests access to your contacts so it can go through it and then see and then like correlate those email addresses in your contact book with people who have signed up for the platform already and then say, okay, here are recommended people to add to your friends list because they’re on your contacts list. So why not add them to your friends list as well on this platform. So that’s one reason why a lot of social media apps I think request access to your contacts, but of course when you do so, they get access to all the other information you’ve added about them to your contacts.
So that’s a potentially scary thing. But you know, there are other social adjacent applications that might request access to your contacts for similar reasons. But yeah, I think it’s very rare for applications currently to request selective access to your contacts. And currently there actually is a way for apps to do that on Android. I wrote about it in this article how applications can currently do it, but you’ve probably never ever seen this UI because there’s very little reason for applications to use this UI to choose a contact. Like this is actually a screen within the Google Contacts app that I bet 99% of you have never seen before to choose a contact to grant to an application.
But that method has some flaws because this chooser UI is not universal across devices and it only grants an application access to a single contact at a time. So if they want to access more than one contact, they’d have to repeatedly ask you to go through this screen and then grant it access to your second or your third contact. And then it also gives them full access to all the information about that contact. So if you want to selectively grant it only their email address for example, then you wouldn’t be able to do that. So those are several of the reasons why Google seems to be working on this new Contacts Picker tool, but yeah, I’m hoping that this will solve a lot of the privacy issues surrounding contact access in Android.
But I’m skeptical because there’s a lot of reasons for applications to continue to use the existing approach of just requesting access to your full contacts database, ignoring this tool. So hopefully Google makes it mandatory and actually enforces it on developers so they have to go through this Contacts Picker.
28:40 – C. Scott Brown: There’s one thing that you mentioned here, about shadow profiles, shady apps building shadow profiles. And that’s something that I’m curious about. What’s going on there?
28:52 – Mishaal Rahman: So, the thing is like there’s I don’t know if you’ve heard about this controversy, but there was an application, I think called Truecaller that a while back was basically, you know, you sign up for it, it’s basically acting like I mean it’s – to preface this, it’s a legitimate application has legitimate uses. It’s basically an alternative dialer application where you can set it as your default dialer app on your phone and then it’ll basically provide call screen features. Like it’ll show you who’s calling.
And there’s a lot of places where, you know, the carrier doesn’t really provide those services. so you can use this dialer app as an advanced scam protection or caller ID feature. And I think the application was caught at one point basically scraping the contacts from people who have signed in and then using that to I guess advertise to other people. So basically even if you hadn’t even if you’re not part of Truecaller, you’ve never used Truecaller before. Because someone else had signed up and you’re on their contacts list, now they have information and data about you. So they’re able to collect a profile and build a profile about you even though you’ve never interacted with the service directly, just because you were on someone else’s contact list who did sign up for the service.
So that’s kind of the the concern and one of the reasons why people want more privacy related to the contact access because even if you are closely guarding your contacts database, if your information is in someone else’s database and they’re not closely guarding theirs, then your information is still going to find its way to some potentially shady third-party service.
30:24 – C. Scott Brown: Yeah, and I don’t like that. That’s bad. We should stop that from happening.
30:29 – Mishaal Rahman: Yeah. I mean, it’ll take a while for that kind of thing to be done away with, but hopefully this is the start of a movement towards that future. And finally, speaking of the future, we are finally soon going to be getting Android XR wearable glasses from companies like Samsung, Warby Parker and Gentle Monster, I think who announced it, and we recently learned that there might be a new way to control these glasses once they’re out. So, our Authority Insights team, we’ve done an APK teardown, APK analysis of the latest Galaxy Ring application, the Galaxy Ring Manager application. And we’ve discovered that Samsung is working on a ring gesture for glasses, which hints at possible smart glasses integration. We don’t really have any details about exactly how this gesture will be performed or what exactly it will do on your glasses, but the fact that there’s some kind of integration being developed in the first place, I think is just interesting because obviously most smart glasses won’t have a built-in display and I think Google even said that their the initial crop of glasses that they’re working on with their partners won’t have a display.
So, your primary mode of interaction will be probably like a touch sensor, a touchpad or something on your glasses kind of like the Meta Ray-Bans have or like gesture swipe controls on the button or even a button on itself. So, the fact that Samsung is testing integration with the Ring is quite interesting and it leads us to ask what exactly will you be able to do with this ring and smart glass interaction.
Will you be able to like, I don’t know, flick with your ring, do like a flicking gesture to scroll through notifications from your phone or maybe swipe right on your fingers with your ring attached to your finger and then it’ll change songs. Like, what do you think’s going to happen, Scott?
32:21 – C. Scott Brown: So, there’s a company called Halliday that has smart glasses and they have a smart ring controller. The difference is that their ring actually has a touch sensitive pad to it and it’s also a button. So, you can swipe like you would swipe on a trackpad on a laptop or click like you would click with a mouse.
And that does enable you to sort of hold your thumb here and move on the ring and then swipe around the UI that you see. So it prevents you from having to reach up and touch your glasses to control where, you know, whatever feature it is you’re trying to use. The difference there is that I don’t think the Galaxy Ring has that capability built in. So if this gesture is going to control your glasses in some way, then you would probably have to it would probably be a gesture that would be more like your whole hand, like your hand goes like this or you shake or something along those lines, something that the ring would have because I as far as I know, there’s no touch sensitivity to the ring itself.
I think it’s just an inert ring with the sensors in the inside. Now it’s possible that a future Galaxy Ring could have this stuff and maybe this string is referencing this, you know, second generation Galaxy Ring that will integrate with the glasses. But yeah, anyway, so there is a company that’s already doing this kind of control for the glasses. So maybe Samsung saw that and said, hey, that’s a really good idea. Let’s try and do that for our glasses as well. So yeah, I think that it makes sense.
You know, like having to hold your hand up to your glasses and hit a button or swipe on your stems or whatever. Like that’s just going to be weird. And being able to do that discreetly with your ring, I think is a better, more elegant solution. But as you mentioned, that is going to require you to own this ring. And all of a sudden it’s not just you’re buying glasses. Now, your glasses need to connect to your Samsung smartphone and your Samsung smartphone needs to be connected to your ring and all three of them got to work together.
And now you’re buying three devices instead of one. So I don’t know about that. That’s going to be something that we’re going to have to see. Are consumers ready to buy all these different things to have them work together? Or do they just want glasses? Like that’s going to be the question that I think we’re going to only know the answer to once these products actually start coming out.
34:58 – Mishaal Rahman: Yeah, hopefully the integration is more optional and just provides an added benefit to using your smart glasses and your smart ring together rather than like a requirement. And I mean, I know there’s a lot of integrations like that already between Samsung devices where you get like some added benefit by having two devices from Samsung, but there are also a lot of really cool and necessary features that you only get if you have multiple Samsung devices. so hopefully it’s more of the former and not the latter. But I’m also curious to see exactly what they’re implementing, like how exactly it’s going to be measuring. You mentioned it’s probably not going to be touch sensitive areas on the ring because it’s just too small, but maybe they might be doing like a miniature version of what Meta’s doing with the Ray-Ban Display where like you have that strap and it measures like an electrical impulse that’s like literally sent from your brain down your arm.
It’s measuring, it’s like intercepting that electrical impulse and determining, oh, this person is trying to move their hand this way. They probably meant to scroll up, to scroll down, or they’re doing a handwriting gesture like that. Like, what if they’re able to do something like that, but with your ring. Although, obviously, since your ring is on your finger, it wouldn’t be able to intercept your whole arm electrical impulses. So I’m kind of curious to see what they’re doing there. But, you know, it’s probably something somewhat similar because the ring I think is already able to detect some it’s already able to detect some gestures. Yeah, I don’t remember exactly what it can do, but it can detect some gestures. so it obviously has some sensors to do that.
36:20 – C. Scott Brown: Yeah, I think that if anything, this string, the thing that I’m most interested about with this string that we found in this APK teardown is this to me suggests that a second Galaxy Ring is on the way. And we’re at the I think we’re at the past the two-year mark for the Galaxy Ring, the original Galaxy Ring, I think came out two years ago.
36:46 – Mishaal Rahman: Really? No way. No way.
36:50 – C. Scott Brown: Yeah. I’m pretty sure it’s two years old. When did it come out?
36:57 – C. Scott Brown: Because yeah, I’m pretty sure it came out alongside the previous Samsung watches.
37:06 – Mishaal Rahman: I got to look this up now. I think it’s 2024 actually. I think it came out with I do remember it was shown off alongside the Z Fold 6 and the Z Flip 7, but it wasn’t actually released until then.
37:18 – C. Scott Brown: So yeah, so then it would be a year and a half I guess or close to a year and a half. Either way, I think the window has passed for when a yearly, you know, a yearly refresh of the Galaxy Ring should have happened. We should already have a Galaxy Ring 2 by now.
37:42 – Mishaal Rahman: Yeah. Yeah, I get your point there. You’re right.
37:44 – C. Scott Brown: If Samsung is going to release, you know, a yearly upgrade cycle just like it does with its smartphones. So we’re already passed that. So that either means that Samsung isn’t planning on doing that or the Galaxy Ring isn’t getting a sequel. You know, who knows? I don’t even know how well did the Galaxy Ring do. I’m not even sure. Samsung hasn’t really talked about it. I haven’t heard about any new crazy awesome features for it. Like as far as I know, Samsung launched the device, there was some initial excitement about it and then it kind of just petered off. So, so yeah, I’m not really sure what’s going on with the ring.
So the the idea that a ring could potentially be coming down the line that integrates with the glasses, that might revitalize the concept of a Galaxy Ring in general because it might be like, oh, not only is this something that can track my sleep and track my steps and do all these health things, but it’s also something that’ll make controlling my future glasses easier and better. So that could open up a new avenue for Samsung that something like its competitors can’t match. You know, like the Oura ring wouldn’t be able to integrate with Android XR, so therefore the Oura ring would now be something that would not be as appealing to a person who’s trying to buy a smart ring.
So I think that that could add some excitement into the smart ring thing. because yeah, like I said, I haven’t heard anything, no one is talking about the Galaxy Ring as far as I remember. I mean I feel like I haven’t heard anything about it in months.
39:07 – Mishaal Rahman: I mean, hopefully they’re just staying quiet because they’re trying to fix the battery swelling issue that happened with that one YouTuber.
39:12 – C. Scott Brown: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That was scary. Yeah, that was the most recent thing that I remember about it is the poor guy not being able to get it off his finger.
39:21 – Mishaal Rahman: Or they’re still working to refine these gestures because like imagine if it’s not just doing it with with these glasses, but like you can pair it with your TV for example and then you can just like with your hand, just swipe and use your hand as a remote. That would be dope.
39:35 – C. Scott Brown: Yeah. That’d be that’d be sweet. Yeah, so a lot of potential there for that. And I feel like the smart ring, I see a lot of smart rings just around, like not even like within the tech sphere, not even just like with people at events who are YouTubers and tech writers and stuff like that, but just like general people around, you know, it seems like they’re it’s a popular category. And so yeah, I would hope that Samsung is really working to make sure that it stays a big player there. Because I feel like that if they are going to be integrating these things together, I feel like Samsung’s in a prime position to really, you know, innovate in that space.
So, yeah, I wish nothing but success for Samsung with these glasses and with the ring and the cohesion between them. Because yeah, I feel like the Galaxy XR is struggling and I’m hoping that doesn’t forebode future struggles with the glasses because yeah, I feel like the Galaxy XR was like the hot topic for maybe a few days and then nobody cares, you know, nobody.
40:40 – Mishaal Rahman: Yeah, I only know one person who bought one. But yeah. I mean, we’ll have to wait and see. It’s still a little too early. I think the Galaxy XR has only been out for a couple of weeks now and we still
40:50 – C. Scott Brown: Yeah, we have holiday sales and stuff and yeah.
40:53 -Mishaal Rahman: And we still don’t have any solid rumors at all about the Galaxy Ring 2. Like I don’t think we’ve heard anything from anywhere, even out of like Korea about potential a launch date for the Galaxy Ring 2. So hopefully we’re just, you know, they’re working on refining it, making it better and preparing it to launch alongside these Android XR glasses. That would be a delight.
But for now, that’s all we’ve got for you this week on the Authority Insights Podcast. You can find links to all the stories mentioned in this episode down in the show notes and you can find more amazing stories to read over on androidauthority.com.
41:24 – C. Scott Brown: Thanks for listening to the Authority Insights Podcast. We publish every week on YouTube, Spotify and other podcast platforms. You can follow us everywhere on social media at Android Authority and you can follow me personally on Instagram, Bluesky and my own YouTube channel @CScottBrown.
41:40 – Mishaal Rahman: As for me, I’m on most social media platforms posting day in and day out about Android. If you want to keep up with the latest in Android, follow me on X, threads, Mastodon or Telegram @MishaalRahman. Thanks for listening.
