The Gemini theory of everything

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⭐️ Starred

Like it has for the past couple of years, this week Google unveiled a teaser site for its upcoming Pixel devices, offering an enticing glimpse at the Pixel 11 lineup. Specifically, it shows what appears to be the Pixel Glow feature that has leaked a few times over the past few months, most recently when we showed you all the colors these phones will reportedly come in.

The leak all but confirms that Pixel Glow is essentially a fancy flash, able to showcase a variety of colors to act less as a second screen than an over-engineered indicator light. While devices like the Clicks Communicator (and, oddly, the Trump Phone) are heralding the return of the blinking LED, Google likely wants to take the idea a bit further.

So what will Pixel Glow be used for? The obvious answer is for Gemini: place your Pixel face-down on a table, say “Hey Google” and watch Gemini Live answer your beck and call, glowing and pulsing colors in time to the model’s increasingly realistic-sounding voice.

That’s all well and good, but what happens when you don’t feel like being the creep on the subway asking your phone to explain chlorophyll? It’ll also likely do regular phone things like glowing a particular color for incoming messages and phone calls from your favorite contacts. And maybe, if we’re lucky, it’ll sync to your favorite music and provide a little light show.

Does that count as a marquee feature? I don’t really know, but Google is no stranger to short-lived hardware gimmicks. Remember Soli, the tiny radar integrated into the Pixel 4 that enabled Face ID-like biometrics but little else of value? How about the Pixel 8 Pro’s thermometer that’s somehow survived three generations of hardware releases? (According to many of you, however, it’s become an essential tool that people are going to miss.)

Pixel Glow may be more than just a gimmick, though; Google has integrated a similar lighting into its recently released Home Speaker, and the upcoming lineup of Googlebooks appears to boast a similar lighting bar across its portfolio of laptop lids. If anything, it’s less of a feature than a branding exercise, an attempt by Google to turn a pulsing color array into a visual representative of Gemini itself. As companies continue to release models with full duplex audio capabilities, voice input may be the primary way we end up interacting with AI, and having a hardware suite of products that jump, dance, and pulse while listening or talking back is precisely the kind of organic marketing win Google is hoping to achieve.

✉️ Inbox

• Yo dawg, I heard you like app stores, so I put an app store in your app store. Google and Epic are ending their long-standing beef (can you believe it’s been six years since the Fortnite saga?), clearing the path for third-party app stores inside the Play Store. Starting July 22nd, we’ll start seeing names like the Epic Games Store and maybe even the Aurora Store alongside Instagram and Twitch.
• The reports of OnePlus’s death are not greatly exaggerated. Our reporting from earlier in the week was confirmed by Bloomberg, citing internal sources within OPPO. OnePlus will indeed “cease operations in the US and Europe…this week,” while budget brand Realme will exit China. OnePlus will also bow out of India sometime in 2027.
• Gemma 4 E2B 4 TPU 4U. You’ll be forgiven for not keeping up with Google’s seemingly endless train of AI announcements, but at I/O India this week the company made a big one about a very small model. Gemma 4, its suite of open-weight models announced back in April, has been adapted to run on the Pixel 10’s TPU, freeing up the CPU and GPU for other tasks. Why is this important? Because the future of AI is local, and the more one can do on a phone with no internet connection, the less tied we are to the endless hyperscaler quest for AGI.
• Holy crap, someone else finally made an Android phone with Qi2 magnets built-in. That’s Ben’s actual headline. *click*
• Samsung is putting titanium under the displays of its upcoming foldables to minimize the crease. Now you’ll have one fewer reason to complain when they raise prices.
• Of course Suno scraped YouTube, Deezer, and Genius to train its models. Noted hater of creativity and copyright law, Suno, obtained terabytes of music data to train its models by sidestepping firewalls, paywalls, and legal walls in the name of AI music slop. Last year the company’s CEO said, “the majority of people don’t enjoy the majority of the time they spend making music.” (404 Media)
• Babe, are you OK? You’ve barely touched your very real apple. A school board in Western New York spent nearly $60,000 on a humanoid robot classroom assistant named Sally. Students will reportedly be able to speak with Sally about class assignments, homework, or life skills both in person and via her avatar inside an app. No word on how well Sally will get along with Harry, the curmudgeonly but lovable bot from down the hall. (New York Focus)

🤑 Action items

With wildfire-related air quality warnings back in the news, I’m especially appreciative of this Dreo air purifier/tower fan combo that I picked up a few years ago during a similarly apocalyptic fire season. It’s basically a smart oscillating tower fan that’s both very powerful and extremely quiet, but also comes with a replaceable HEPA filter that runs off a separate motor.

I’m usually not effusive in my praise for smart home gadgets, but I appreciate Dreo’s attention to detail — its capacitive buttons are responsive and reliable — and its excellent app, which is something I can rarely say about this category (I’m looking at you, Kasa). At just under $300, it’s definitely not cheap, but if you need neither Wi-Fi nor HEPA, you can get a very similarly powered option for just $65.

If you’re less worried about the apocalypse and more about Tetris, I’m pretty psyched about this new GameSir Pocket Taco mobile gamepad. First announced at CES, this incredibly named micro controller hugs the bottom of your phone like a comfy sweater and overlays physical controls on top of your touchscreen. Perfect for whiling away the hours playing Game Boy and GBA titles. At $30 right now, this is an instant buy for me.

🙃 FWD:

This section has some of our favorite stuff from around the internet. Great videos, weird memes, fun reads, recommended apps, whatever. Send us your recommendations!

To know me is to know I love a Spider-Man movie — good, bad, or really bad. I’m a sucker for the drama, the romance, and the web-slinging-around-New-York of it all.

I also love how the movies are made, particularly the balance of practical and computer-generated effects. In the run-up to Spider-Man: Brand New Day, the guys at Corridor Crew have put together a tier list of the Spider-Man movies’ special effects. And while I’m always going to prefer the first two Sam Raimi flicks to anything made in the 2010s and beyond, I have to agree with the guys’ picks here.

🗑️ Trash

There’s a lot to love about a command line, but do we have to redesign every app around it? Spotify sure thinks so. This week, the company augmented its AI-powered DJ with a new chatbot. This new text input area lives right below Spotify’s famous carousel on the homepage and, it appears, at the bottom of the Now Playing bar where it plans to taunt you with prompts like “Play more from this creator,” and “Let’s talk about this audiobook.”

Can’t wait to get so distracted by chatting with my Spotibot that I stop paying attention to what I’m listening to and be forced to rewind it over and over again. That’s one way to juice usage numbers!

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Thanks for reading, and have a great weekend. See you on Tuesday.