On this week’s episode of The Voicemail, James and Stefan discuss:
- Will the next iPhone have speakers on top and bottom?
- Google launched their keyboard for iOS, Gboard
- New Moto G phones; plus rumors say the new Moto X phones are Z phones
- The OnePlus 3 leaked
- Sony’s Xperia XA Ultra (6-inch phone with 16 megapixel OIS SELFIE CAMERA?!)
- Microsoft sells Nokia’s feature phone business to Foxconn
- Spotify for Android TV is out
- Nokia gives Finnish company right to make Nokia branded phones and tablets
- Google I/O 2016: Everything announced there
The Voicemail 
Glad to have y’all back in my ears.
Had a thought during the Daydream VR stuff – what if that’s Nokia’s “angle”? Nokia has this fancy new OZO VR camera that Disney (!!) has signed on to use, and now they’re going to be [sort of] designing/building phones. Looking around the current Android ecosystem, there’s not really a “place” for them – except for that no one is building devices specifically for VR. Probably cause it’s not really “a thing” yet, but it *could* be. And soon.
Google Home looks fantastic – I’ve basically already bought one. Really interested to see how it handles the multiple people thing. Anyone with kids can tell you that voice control is a nightmare with kids around. I really liked the demo, though.
Watch 2.0 – it’s got stuff, but not exactly all the stuff that I want. Also, make fun of the keyboard, but you realize that was basically needed to support the standalone apps, right?
Instant Apps – REALLY interesting, esp since I work at an app. Doesn’t work for all apps, though – for instance, TripCase (the one I work at) is pretty useless if you haven’t logged in, so Google would have to have a way to authenticate that for our app (and I’m sure countless others). Also, there’s a big debate about packaging your app up in a way that Google can take in bits and pieces – it wouldn’t take much for Google to apply that knowledge to basically make your app redundant. We’ve already seen Apple do that basically every time they add a feature to iOS, and Google has also started encroaching on others’ territory with things like secure messaging, night mode, camera features, travel, etc. As James said, there’s not really a super clear benefit for apps to enable this (depending on the purpose of your app).
James – join the Nexus lifestyle. It’s fantastic. Also, it’s generally well accepted that the Nexus One (HTC-built) was the best Nexus device yet (maybe the Nexus 5?), so if they built the next Nexii, they’ll likely be amazeballs. Huge, ginormous, amazeballs.
Cadden out.