Galaxy Fold set for September relaunch (The Daily Charge, 7/25/2019)

Today on the daily charge, AT&T have another streaming service. Nintendo fixes the joy cons. The death of robocalls and the finally fixed Galaxy Fold. Good morning and welcome to CNet's daily charge. It's Thursday July 25th. I'm [UNKNOWN]. And I'm Roger Chang. Let's take a look at today's headlines. Companies love introducing streaming services. ATNT loves it so much it will introduce a new service called ATNT TV in the third quarter of the year. ATNT already has three other services, Direct TV now, Watch TV and the upcoming HBO max Roger what's up with all these services?>> This is simply a case of HT trying to throw everything against the wall and seeing what sticks. As you noted already, that's three streaming services already. That's on top of DirecTV, the traditional satellite service, universe TV, the traditional home cable service that they offer. So you're looking at six different options. In a fairly short amount of time, does it have anything to do with the fact that their the pipes? You have to stream on the network anyway. Let's have as many streaming services from AT&T as possible. I think I think it's less about you know having different options and more about figuring out what works. What configuration services will really get people to actually sign up for these services? Because right now it's been a struggle. AT&T just reported earnings yesterday. They lost 770,000 premium video subscribers and cable TV subscribers. And what's worse is they lost 168,000 DirectTV Now subscribers. DirectTV Now is supposed to be their big growth engine, right? Their kind of streaming service, their kind of future service, and they had a huge amount of growth thanks to promotion and lost a whole of ton of them now. Maybe one day they'll just come up and combine all of these streaming services to one and maybe Pipe it in through a cable, like cable TV. With a bundle? I don't know. Maybe. Next up, an internal Nintendo memo obtained by Vice says that Nintendo will fix joy cons with the drifting problem for free. Joy cons have apparently suffered from what has been called joy con drift. This is when the controller will not recenter itself, it's as if you're pushing a stick in the direction. Nintendo would not require proof of purchase or warranty status. By the way, this is after a lawsuit was filed against Nintendo of America over the drifting. Roger, have you experienced any drifting in your Switch? So I just got my Switch back in May, so I think it's a little too soon if there are any issue. I haven't had any problems. I think this is the right thing to do if Nintendo does this, keep in mind this is still sort of based off of an internal memo. We don't know. Nintendo has not said anything publicly about this yet, but I do hope they do talk about this and address this issue. And what do you think it would take for Nintendo to actually make an official statement about this? Because we've seen. The dozens of reports online, but that's only a small sample size, maybe, of what's actually going on in a larger user base. I mean, I think the litigation is definitely a good start. Especially if that can get legs, and the case becomes credible, that could move Nintendo to get going on this a lot quicker. These are divided times in America, like dividing Joy-Cons. But if there's one thing that unites, it's robocalls. The US House of Representatives passed a bill called stopping bad robo calls act by a vote of get this 420 923. The bill requires every call to be verified should the bill pass and become a law carriers would have to verify the number shown on caller ID Plus, the FCC would be able to take action against Robo callers. Roger, what do you think about this bill? I love the name. It's like... super creative. Super creative. You know, it's very straightforward. I like it. They're not mincing words here. It's a good step. It's a nice step in the right direction. But, keep in mind, this robocall problem is epic. And, it's not something that's just here in the US, right? These robocalls are coming from all over the world. Places where it's a lot harder for these folks to clamp down on so I like what everyone's doing. They're there. They're saying all the right things are they're giving the FCC more power to enforce the laws against Robo callers. I imagine that it's not gonna kill the robocall problem. Listen to stop the bad robo calls. So the good ones are still gonna come through whether you've signed up for something, you should still be able to get those. So that's kind of the issue right now is like how do we craft laws that allow for those actual legit robo calls to go through without, letting the bad ones go but Just a reminder, 47.8 billion robocalls went to Americans last year, and half of them are scammers. We have to find out who these three that voted against the Act. Yeah, yeah, they're terrible people. There must be something in there. Maybe there's a kittens and puppies line. They're like, I don't like this line. Can't go ahead with that. And lastly, our main story today is that Samsug announced That the Galaxy Fold is coming in September to select markets, it was originally coming in April. The company has made some hardware changes to make sure the new version of the Fold can withstand those pesky things called human beings. Long story short, review units of the Galaxy Fold were breaking for a number of reasons. People were peeling off what they thought was screen protectors. But they weren't screen protectors. They were a key part of the display, leading to the big screen breaking. Others had to brief fall into display because of gaps in the build. Now Samsung redesigned the fold in a number of ways here to a protective top layer that extends beyond the bezel which is supposed to make it apparent that is the technical part of the display and you're not supposed to feel it off And reinforcements to keep the brief from working its way underneath the screen. Roger, do you think this is gonna get people excited about the fold? Or have they already forgotten about it?>> It's really interesting question because it did emerge with a huge amount of hype. People were really excited about this thing. It was sort of a breakthrough product. Then all the problems came it's hard to see It's hard to tell whether or not folks, can go back to trusting Samsung again with this. I mean, this isn't a huge problem. It's not like there was a whole it's not the note seven. There was no product recall. But I think there was already kind of some question about how durable these portable phones were gonna be. And Samsung having these earlier problems, didn't help the broader industry. I think, folks, the industry still wants to push portable phones as this next revolution in your smart phone. But I imagine there are a lot of consumers, even folks with a lot of money, who are going to be second guessing whether or not this is something that they really need. And we've got this huge, we got a new cycle. This happened in February when they introduced the phone. It got, not recalled, it got Delayed in late April. It's now July. Yep. I don't know if people are even aware of this device anymore. Because it's not like they're advertising it, it's not like there's a lot of things, other than our little tech bubble. Right. It's not something that I don't think the mainstream are paying attention to. The Galaxy Note's coming up. And if the Fold's coming out in September, It's gonna be going up against the iPhone and the pixel and maybe even the the mate x worldwide around the same time. You think they're trying to Samsung trying to bury the fold? I don't know if it's burying the phone to keep in mind that the folks who are gonna buy this phone are probably the ones who are like watching this show or really in attack and understand and keep track of what's going on with the fold. whether or not they're actually gonna want to buy one is another question, but I think In terms of awareness, the folks who would buy this phone are extremely tech savvy would know the difference between a folder in Mate X, and will probably try to make a decision there. You bring up a good point with the Mate X, the Huawei phone being that other foldable device, probably coming around the same time and so yeah, for folks who have a lot of disposable income, who want the latest and greatest. All of a sudden it's an interesting choice. Yeah, so even with all these redesigned elements for the Fold, Samsung said the price doesn't change at $1,980. What a bargain. I know, it's what a deal. Yeah. Do you think they're gonna add any Extra freebies to get people to go, yeah, I will get this phone even though there was some issues with the build quality. I mean, I suspect they'll have some sort of bundle, whether it's free headphones or free memory card. They've done that in the past with other, [CROSSTALK] Memory cards, there's no micro SD card slot in this- You're right, sorry. They can give you one, this could Traffic- Bluetooth headphones, maybe. Maybe. But they have bundled extras before, so I wouldn't be surprised if they tried to do this as sort of a make-good for all the folks who got burned the first time around, with preorders. They didn't get burned, that was the Note 7. All right. That joke was too easy. Poor, poor choice of words. I apologize to everyone for that. Thank you again for joining us. Tag us online and let us know what you want to see on the show. For the Daily Charge, I'm [UNKNOWN]. << I'm [UNKNOWN]. << Thanks for listening. << [MUSIC]