Android Q gets a name (and the sugar high is over) (The Daily Charge, 8/22/2019)

Today on The Daily charge, YouTube stops targeted ads towards kids cutting the cord for good with 5g and the name of the next Android operating system is [MUSIC] Good morning and welcome to cnet's daily charge. It's Thursday, August 22. I'm Claire Riley And I'm Eli Blumenthal. Let's get to today's main story. It's official, Android Q has a name, but forget your sweet tooth. After Marshmallow, Nougat, Oreo, and Pie, the next generation of Android will simply be called Android Ten. Google's head of Android Samir Simat said it's important for the names to be quote clear and relatable for everyone in the world. Now the operating system is set to launch in the coming weeks. There's no firm date yet, and it'll bring support for things like foldable screens, gesture navigation, and new privacy features like more granular location controls. Now what do you reckon Eli. Do you think it's quote simpler and more intuitive as Google says, or has the company lost it's sense of fun. It's definitely simpler from finding a With a cute name. << Yeah, I can't really think of one. I don't know if you can I put the challenge out to our audience. If you can think of a queue desert or suede I was deep in the bowels of the internet today trying to find something. Yeah. So from that it doesn't really make sense for them to go with the desert name again. I guess they could do. Quesadilla? Which I guess could technically. You could get a chocolate quesadilla, I'd be down for that. So I guess that would have worked? Maybe Nestle Quik I was talking to some colleagues, if they wanted to go with another partnershiop Yeah they did the Kit Kat and the Oreo cross branding stuff. And when they get to S they can do Snickers. Yeah I'm not a fan of peanuts. Well apparently there were some issues with languages l&r severe civil rights in his blog post were indistinguishable in certain languages. So that was some confusion for people. Obviously, the Q desert name probably played a role. I would imagine. As for the sense of fun, yeah, it seems like there's a little bit of the whimsy is gone from [CROSSTALK]. Yeah, I think it's sort of one of those logical progressions that you kind of we've seen all of the the brands go towards just numbered operating systems. Google was always that kinda "we're fun, we've got our little android robot and we're really cool!" Also, the logo is changing a bit but I guess it does make sense. I'm a bit sad. Part of me has died today. I just wanted, I was living in hope. I think it's also interesting now that We have iPhone had the iPhone 10, which was an ex and now Android Q is pronounced Android 10. So I feel like words don't mean anything and language is dead. [LAUGH] That's definitely Ferran. Yeah. To your point in the number ten. I mean, you now have Windows 10, Android 10, MacOS 10, lots of 10's when it comes to software and technology. We've also got a couple of devices out there that are 10's. Right, the [UNKNOWN] 10, the foldable phone. Also, with an X. Galaxy Note 10. S 10. I feel like maybe we're just gonna reach a stage where what happens when we get into the 11 z's. That would be a great question, possibly for Apple in a few weeks. Yeah. We'll see. We'll see. September is- If they ever do anything then. September is gonna change all of our worlds. All right. Also in the news today, if you're tired of dealing with your cable company, 5G could let you cut ties with them for good. The next generation of wireless technology is Coming out and it's rolling out across the world. But it's already been touted as a possible replacement for traditional home broadband. The real question is Will 5G hold up to household use and how are you going to pay for it through the noise? That's the most important question. Now Eli, you've been playing around with 5G at home is a kind of replacement for Johan broadband. What's your verdict? it well i've been using an early version of sprint's 5g network which isn't officially live in new york but you can find it in certain spots right guys if well they sell the devices all across the country but in certain areas as they get ready to turn it on they already are testing it so you can hop on to that network in advance and where i live there happens to be 5g. And it works really well as home broadband. There's still a lot of kinks that need to be worked out, and some issues with XBox and Netflix on certain devices. But speeds were generally between 100 to 200 megabits per second, which is on par with what a lot of people get at home. It's actually a little bit faster than the national average last year from, I believe, it was Ookla, the guys who do speed tests. So as far as playing games on Xbox, or streaming 4K Netflix, browsing the web, all the things you use the Internet for, it was perfectly fine. The real question, I think, is gonna be, what would your data allowance be, and how quickly are you gonna burn through that data allowance? Cuz I was reading a story this morning, we had a great feature up on CNET about it. And talking about streaming a show in 4k, for example to your TV. Suddenly you're burning through that data reasonably quickly. And if you don't have the data cap to match, it doesn't matter what your speeds are. If you are burning through and then you get kind of, if you get type it on your spades, that's going to be where people get annoyed. That's a great point because, I was watching a 60 minute episode of comedians in cars getting coffee on Netflix and Jerry Seinfeld show In 4K streaming over 5G, 16 minutes 2.2 gigabytes, which for your home broadband where you generally don't have data caps, that's not a big deal. It doesn't really matter. But Verizon and sprint who are the two carriers who are publicly selling hotspots that work with 5G networks, at&t has one too but at&t isn't letting any consumers on their network yet. If you're gonna do that, having a data cap, for Verizon's case, at 50 gigs, or in Sprint's case, 100 gigs, you're gonna hit that pretty quickly if you're watching a lot of Netflix in 4K. Yeah, changes a lot. All right, we'll have to talk to the audience. I'm keen to hear what you think about whether you'd cut ties with your cable company, whether that would be a good thing. But finally I wanna get to our last story, won't somebody think of the children? YouTube is reportedly going to stop quote targeted ads on videos aimed at kids. That's according to Bloomberg. This follows an investigation by the Federal Trade Commission in the US into whether YouTube's ads violated the privacy of children on the platform. Now YouTube has come under fire in the past for the way some content. Content is served to kids on its platform. Do you think this change to ads was inevitable? Definitely YouTube has. I mean, the troubles that YouTube has had, especially of late are very well known and well documented. We've been covering it intensely. It's it's a rabbit hole for conspiracy theories. All kinds of doctored videos and a whole host of messes, really. For them to finally take a stand is actually kind of encouraging. Yeah. I mean, they have a lot of work to do. But I give him kudos for at least doing maybe one thing right now. Getting the ball rolling and probably trying to get out in front of the regulators who were potentially going to clamp down with some tough rules. Maybe they wanted to get in front and be showing to be doing something. I think the thing with YouTube is it's all about that recommendation algorithm and so therefore also how ads are targeted through essentially just A lot of pulling of data and automatically selecting ads to serve to you. I think the issue around this was that ads that are served based on how you browse the Internet, what you're doing elsewhere online? They were considered, if you were tracking that information about kids, and they're under the age of 13, that's against the COPA act, the Children's Online Privacy Act. So That's the problem. It's not that okay, this ad is for kids so therefore we'll just match it with and an ad for, sorry, this is a YouTube video for toys so we'll match it with an ad for toys. It was much more kind of granular and detailed. So, I think it's a good move I think their recommendations and how all that stuff is happening automatically on YouTube. That's where their problems. Right, the algorithm is definitely seems to be the issue. And people who have figured out ways to game that system and get millions of views and influence millions of people because of it. Yeah, we saw it. That's still the root issue and that's something that they still need to address. A big one pretty. Pretty quickly. Yeah. I think especially when you're talking about kids on YouTube, obviously you've got the Youtube Kids app which ideally Google wants everyone to put their content on there but they had that whole scandal with Elsagate. The weird Disney character videos. It was a little offbrand and quite terrifying. I think they really wanted a need to watch it. Also maybe parents need to stop using YouTube as a babysitter. That's a That is definitely another alternative here and one that should also be considered. Definitely, for the Daily Charge I am Claire Reilly. I'm Eli Blumenthal. Thank you so much for watching.