00:00 – Mishaal Rahman: We may have finally figured out why the Pixel 10 has bad battery life, at least for some users.
00:04 – C. Scott Brown: And we finally have an Android alternative to the Apple Vision Pro.
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 news and leaks surrounding the Android operating system.
00:18 – Mishaal Rahman: Google announced Android XR, its XR focused operating system way back in December of last year and they promised at the time that we would get some real hardware from Samsung by the end of this year.
And finally, after many months of waiting, we finally have the official launch of the Project Moohan headset now known as Galaxy XR from Samsung. And you can now finally buy it. You can literally walk into a Samsung store or order it online from Samsung. But should you buy it?
00:46 – C. Scott Brown: And should you buy the Pixel 10 given the battery problems that some people are having?
We have seen some erratic reports of battery life as far as the Pixel 10 goes, but we finally got some data from testing that we did here at Android Authority and found out that the battery issues that people are facing might be hardware related, which of course is not great because that means you’re not going to see it get better and better as software goes or software updates come in.
01:13 – C. Scott Brown: But to Google’s credit, their hardware decisions have proven advantageous in other areas. Besides all the unique AI features that you only find on Pixel phones, it turns out that Pixels are actually the best phones for running desktop Linux apps.
01:29 – Mishaal Rahman: That’s pretty exciting, but we’re still years away from actually realizing those efforts of running desktop Linux apps on Android phones in an actually performant way and actually turning our Android phones into proper PCs.
But today right now, we are also seeing the promise of XR coming to Android devices become a reality.
Google finally and Samsung and Qualcomm, they all came together, made this big splash last year, but now they have finally unveiled the feature, the hardware they’ve been teasing for many months now, the Project Moohan, Samsung Galaxy XR device.
02:05 – Mishaal Rahman: And Scott, you got to use it for a more than extended period of time two weeks ago at the time of this recording, but it was a week before the launch. I only briefly got it for about five minutes at Google IO, so I did not get the full experience of what you can do with the Samsung Galaxy XR.
I want to ask you, what are your initial thoughts on it? Starting with the comfort aspect. How did it feel to actually wear the Moohan?
02:31 – C. Scott Brown: It was very comfortable, much more comfortable than other XR headsets that I’ve worn in the past. A big part of that is because of probably one of the more controversial aspects of it, which is that the battery pack is attached to a cable, which is then you can just hold the battery pack.
Like the Vision Pro from Apple, you can put the battery pack in your pocket, you can rest it on the chair next to you while you’re using the headset, but the battery pack being separate from the headset reduces the weight considerably.
02:59 – C. Scott Brown: The weight on my head was much more comfortable than other headsets that I’ve used including the Meta Quest, which the battery pack is built into the headset itself.
03:10 – Mishaal Rahman: Do you think that’s still the right trade-off? Cause it is 150 grams lighter than the Apple Vision Pro. Do you think they could have gotten away with stuffing a battery onto the headset itself or do you think this is an acceptable trade-off?
03:23 – C. Scott Brown: I think it’s an acceptable trade-off. The one thing that’s weird to me is that since the battery pack is separate from the headset, the battery pack could be literally any capacity that they want. Within limits, you wouldn’t want it to be this massive boulder in your house, but the battery pack is basically the size of a smartphone. It’s about that big and maybe that thick, but they could have made it that thick and that big, and then made it so the battery lasted longer.
As of right now, according to what Samsung is telling us, you can get about two hours of use out of one single charge. And they’re positioning this as being a device that you can use to consume immersive content which would include feature length films. I don’t know if you’ve been to the movies recently, but there are lots of movies out there that are much longer than two hours.
It being separate from the headset doesn’t weird me out at all. The fact that the battery pack is as small as it is, that’s what weirds me out because you could have made this any size you wanted. And there’s no ability to buy extra battery packs, at least nothing that we’ve seen yet. That might be something that comes down the road, but you get the one battery pack in the headset box and then that’s it. So you’re in the middle of your movie, getting towards the end of the third act, battery runs out, you got to pause and charge it up and then finish your movie and that just makes no sense to me. Even three hours, very few movies break the three-hour mark by this point. If they pushed it just a little bit to get you those three hours, I feel it would have been much better, but I don’t know.
05:01 – Mishaal Rahman: If they could push it to three hours, that would be nice. But what will you actually be doing for those three hours, besides watching movies? Watching movies is a great use case, but I don’t think anyone wants to spend $1800 for the Galaxy XR or $3500 for an Apple Vision Pro just to watch movies on it. I think they want to do a lot more than that.
So what are some of the killer features that you’ve seen personally while you were using the headset?
05:21 – C. Scott Brown: The coolest feature, the feature that made me be, whoa, is Google Maps. Most people listening to this know about Street View. You can navigate through a city or pretty much any location from a street level view. And you can walk around, quote-unquote, walk around with the headset on in Street View. It’s like using Street View on your phone except that it’s immersive. It’s all around you.
So you really feel you are in whatever location that you’ve gone to.
At the same time, you can pull back and you can see the city or the town or wherever you are from a bird’s eye view and soar over it like a superhero, getting a real lay of the land. It would be really beneficial, I think for people who are traveling to a place and want to see what does this city layout look like and they can just see it. All around you, you just turn your head and you’re just, oh yeah, there’s this and there’s that. But then you can get even further in and you can actually explore the interiors of locations.
And the way Google does this is it uses AI to stitch together various bits of media that’s created by the public and then uploaded to Google Maps. For example, you can take a picture in a restaurant and then they’ll take that photo and then hundreds or possibly even thousands of other photos for those locations and stitch together a 3D model of what it would look like to actually be in that restaurant. So there are thousands of places around the world that support this already and a thousand of them are already in New York. You could just go and check out a restaurant. It could be beneficial in a lot of ways. You could go inside a restaurant, quote-unquote and see that there’s only 10 tables in this restaurant. I better make a reservation here because those 10 tables are probably going to fill up fast. Or they have this really beautiful outdoor patio space. When I make my reservation, I want to make sure I get one of those seats.
I’m going to ask for those specifically. Lots of cool things that you could do that would be you could do in Google Maps on the web or on your phone or whatever, but it’s just going to be so much easier and more immersive to do it on the headset.
That was the one feature that I walked away from being, this is really cool. This is something that’s very different, something that I’ve never seen before on a headset. Everything else though was pretty much stuff that I had already done on a headset.
07:50 – Mishaal Rahman: One thing that Google says differentiates Galaxy XR and the underlying XR platform from other platforms we’ve seen before is that they say that Android XR is the first version of Android that was built from the ground up with generative AI in the fold. They included Gemini throughout the operating system.
So did you actually get that feeling when you were using it? Did you feel this is really they’re actually making full use of Gemini. It’s not just a tacked on chatbot, but it’s actually integrated throughout and there’s actually some unique things you can do with it. What are some of the things you can do that you can’t do without XR plus Gemini?
08:26 – C. Scott Brown: The one thing that they showed us that showed that Gemini was actually integrated into the operating system was organizing your windows. If you have your Chrome browser and your Instagram feed or whatever, a bunch of windows open in your virtual environment and it’s all messy, you can just ask Gemini to organize them for you and all of a sudden it’ll just flip all the, it’ll grid it all and make it all look all organized. This is something that’s operating system level. This is not something that you can do in Android. You couldn’t ask Gemini to rearrange the icons on your home screen. It won’t do that.
Everything else I saw though were things that you can pretty much do with your phone or tablet such as tell me about what I’m looking at using what would be Gemini Live. You’d be sharing your screen with Gemini and you’d be looking at a YouTube video or whatever and Gemini would be able to tell you, you’re looking at such and such a thing. Those were all things that I’ve done before. But it did prove, Google did prove that it is baked into the operating system itself.
How much more you can do besides just organizing windows, I don’t know. I only had 20 to 30 minutes with the device. I wasn’t able to do all the testing that I’d want to do, but it is baked into the operating system deeper than it is on a phone, but how far that goes, I won’t know until we actually get a review unit and I get to spend multiple hours with it.
09:55 – Mishaal Rahman: Hopefully Android Authority will be getting a review unit. I don’t know if that’s been confirmed yet, but at the moment, would you consider paying $1800 for this headset? Has it been something that has crossed your mind at the moment?
10:12 – C. Scott Brown: I don’t think so. And the core reason why is because the controllers don’t come with it. It’s $250 more to get the controllers. So you break the $2,000 mark by including the controllers with it. And that’s just a lot of money for that particular device. And the reason why I would want the controllers is because I would want a do-it-all headset. I would want the headset that I use to play my VR games that I already own through Steam or wherever. And I want to use it for the games that would be better suited to having controllers within the VR world, such as if I decide I want to play a 2D game, a game that was designed for the 2D world, but in my VR headset blown up to epic proportions, that 2D game is going to rely on a controller.
Yes, I could connect my existing controllers. I could grab an Xbox controller or a DualSense controller and hook it up that way, but the VR experience, you want the VR controllers. The fact that it doesn’t come with those means that this is not out of the box a do-it-all device. You have to buy those controllers if you want to play all the games that already exist. And there wasn’t enough shown to me that made me think that $1800 for not playing all the VR games would be enough.
Now, granted, once again, I had let’s say 30 minutes with this device. Maybe there’s killer features in there. Maybe there’s really cool things coming down the pipeline that are going to make it so that $1800 would be worth it. But right now, having used it as much as I have, having seen it and worn it, no, I would not spend $1800 on it.
11:55 – Mishaal Rahman: Me personally, there was a brief moment the night it came out where I was tempted to actually pull the plug and buy it because one of my friends, he’s a big VR guy. He immediately bought it. He buys all the VR stuff. He still has the Apple Vision Pro. I don’t think he uses it that often, but he has it. He has the Meta Quest. He has the Ray-Bans, he has everything. But I was considering buying it, but then I stopped to think, what made me pull the plug on that idea was initially when I went to go buy prescription inserts, I kept getting an error with the checkout.
First of all, I couldn’t even find the link to buy the prescription inserts from Samsung’s website. They just told you to go to this third-party website and then buy from there, but it was nowhere on the website.
But eventually someone found a direct link to the product listing. I tried to check it out, but it kept telling me my prescription was invalid. To keep re-entering it. So then I just gave up from there.
And then, I later spent some time thinking about it some more and then I thought, what is the thing I would use this the most for? And I would say probably working in a virtual space, productivity purposes, working with an infinite canvas. But the thing is, I do most of my work on a Windows PC. Android is still not where I think it should be when it comes to actually doing proper desktop-like computing.
You do have a bigger canvas, of course with this XR device. You can run Chrome in a desktop-like interface, but it’s not the desktop version of Chrome with extensions and all the desktop kind of behaviors that you come to expect. I would bet our CMS, our content management system at Android Authority just would not work very well just it didn’t really work very well the last time I tried it on Android tablet, so I wouldn’t expect it to work well on this blown up version of Chrome on an XR device. When I was looking at the list of apps that are available for Android XR, the one I was most excited by was Virtual Desktop.
And the reason being because I can use my Windows PC. I can extend my Windows computer to my XR headset. And that made me stop to think why am I getting this thing? If I’m just going to use it as an extension for my Windows PC, what is the point of that?
14:03 – C. Scott Brown: And remember, you only have two hours because you got one battery pack, you have two hours. That’s not a full work day. That’s a quarter of a work day. Or for you, that’s probably an eighth of a work day. For everyone listening, Mishaal is a very hard worker. He works a lot.
14:24 – Mishaal Rahman: I don’t game. I haven’t really played games as often as I used to. I mostly play on the Switch. So I don’t really have any VR I don’t have a catalog of VR games to try. I would love to try some VR games. I know there’s I’ve seen a lot of good demos of Horizon for the PS5. Resident Evil 7 and 8. Those looked amazing. I tried them at my friend’s place. I would love to play Half-Life: Alyx, but how many of these games there’s already so few VR games that are available. There’s not that many VR games that you can actually play. How many of them are even available of that limited set would work on the Android XR headset and that is another concern that I had.
15:05 – C. Scott Brown: You can connect your Steam, you can connect Steam to the headset.
So anything that’s on Steam will work. But you’re going to face other things. You mentioned the Horizon game. I’m a huge Horizon fan. Horizon’s probably my favorite video game franchise. You cannot play that without the PS headset. That’s an exclusive to the PlayStation headset. And then, you mentioned Resident Evil. There’s a Resident Evil 4 remake, the original Resident Evil 4 that was remade for VR environments and that’s exclusive to Meta Quest. There’s a lot of exclusives out there that you’re still not going to be able to play without owning the specific headsets.
It’s just like the console wars. If you decide you want to go with a PlayStation instead of a PC, you’re going to miss out on a lot of stuff. And if you decide to go to a PC without a PlayStation, you’re going to miss out on a lot of stuff there. The idea of having to own two headsets or technically three headsets to play all the games that you just talked about is nuts.
I think that the headset has a promising future. The real question is, and this is something that we’ve talked about quite a few times already, is will Google stick with this? The Apple Vision Pro without a doubt is a sales dud. Apple couldn’t sell a million of them. And this is Apple we’re talking about. Apple’s bread and butter is coming into existing markets, disrupting it, and claiming that they invented it. It’s a meme at this point that’s what Apple does. Apple’s claiming, we invented VR.
That’s a joke that we’ve said a million times over the past 20 years. And even Apple couldn’t do that with the VR or XR, let’s call it XR space. Google and Samsung are now trying coming in second fiddle to Apple. Is it going to work? And if it doesn’t work, what’s Google going to do? Is it going to pull a Stadia and just say, see you guys, we’re done or is it going to stick with it? I don’t know.
17:15 – Mishaal Rahman: I think there’s a lot of disadvantages that Google is playing on the back foot as you mentioned, Meta and Apple especially have had a head start compared to Google. But I think one key difference between Meta Horizon and Apple Vision Pro and Android XR is that Android is starting out as a platform, not an ecosystem. Sure, it’s a platform and an ecosystem, but Meta’s Quest was just an ecosystem, not a platform. It later evolved to become a platform with Meta opening up Horizon the Horizon operating system to other manufacturers, but it didn’t start out that way.
And the same thing with Apple Vision Pro. Apple is not giving away Vision OS to other manufacturers, right? It’s just the Apple ecosystem. But Google is coming out the gate offering Android XR as a platform that other companies can build off of, right? It’s not just Samsung that is making XR products. We’ve already heard Xreal, for example, is one big name that’s said that they confirmed they’re working on devices. Albeit they’re working on glasses, not actual full on VR headsets.
But it’s a platform, which means potentially imagine in the future if Nintendo decided to make a dedicated VR, just imagine. It’s not going to happen, but just imagine if they did. And imagine if they put the amount of production value that the folks at the people that the team behind that new Digimon game put into their new Pokemon game. And imagine if they released that new VR Pokemon game for a Nintendo Android XR powered headset. Just imagine. That thing will fly off the shelves. I would buy one in a heartbeat. What about you?
18:49 – C. Scott Brown: So the headline of my hands-on is just the opening act, a Galaxy XR just the opening act. And the reason that I said that is that they Samsung and Google and Qualcomm partnered together on this, but they didn’t want to talk about this. The keynote made it clear that they are not as excited about the Galaxy XR as they are about what comes after the Galaxy XR. They were already hyping that they have partnerships with Warby Parker and Gentle Monster to make smart glasses. They were already hyping the demos that they’ve done for smart glasses in general based on the Android XR operating system. They know that the Apple Vision Pro was a sales failure. They know that the Meta Ray-Bans are getting more successful every year. Google can see the writing on the wall and know that the success of the Android XR platform is not going to be based around headsets, but it’s going to be based around smart glasses.
The whole launch was just so weird feeling because it was the only launch I think I’ve ever been to where the companies on stage were, this is just the beginning. This is only going to get better with the next products that we’re coming down with. It’s just so weird. It’s even they didn’t want to say, you should buy this. They were basically, you should wait until the next cool thing comes along. It was a very strange, very strange experience, but I think that we’re just going to have to wait and see how this all plays out. I hope you’re right and I hope that Google sticks with this because this could be the next future. Everybody’s saying that wearables are going to be the next big smartphone, the best next big smartphone replacement. Maybe not replacement, but augmentation.
And if Google can make it so that it’s at the forefront of that, that would be awesome, but Google also has a really short attention span, if things don’t immediately work, it just moves on to the next thing. So, let’s see how this goes.
21:03 – Mishaal Rahman: One thing I would like to point out is you actually wrote an article titled “Samsung’s new XR headset is secretly a Pixel” because as you pointed out, it doesn’t even say Samsung anywhere on the headset itself. When I read this I thought –
21:18 – C. Scott Brown: It says it on the battery pack. That’s the only place you can see Samsung.
21:21 – Mishaal Rahman: It says it on the battery pack. So there is Samsung somewhere on it. But when I was reading this article that you wrote, I was thinking the Galaxy XR sounds like it’s a Nexus device. It has Google everything, Google software, Google applications, basically the stock version of Android XR, but it’s made by Samsung, manufactured by Samsung, designed by them.
That was exactly basically what the Nexus program was. You had a whole bunch of Nexus devices. None of them were designed or manufactured by Google, but Google made the software for them. And it sounds like what this device is to me. If this particular device doesn’t succeed, maybe some other manufacturer down the line will release a $500 Meta Quest killer that runs Android XR, maybe that one will succeed.
Hopefully Google hasn’t invested too much on the success of this particular device and if a future Android XR device happens to kick off, then that’ll actually kick start the excitement around Android XR.
22:16 – C. Scott Brown: That would be exciting to me. I would be very into that, but I don’t even know… but Google, but history. I just don’t know what’s going to happen. I don’t see this being a success. I do not see the Galaxy XR as being successful. I see it as being something like the Vision Pro. People are going to buy it, they’re going to be super excited about it for a week or two, and then they’re going to return it in droves or it’s going to go into a drawer and collect dust. That’s what I see happening here. And I just hope that that sudden drop in excitement and interest doesn’t kill Google’s momentum. Hopefully the smart glasses are going to be enough to keep Google riding that wave, but I just don’t know. I don’t know.
23:12 – Mishaal Rahman: Hopefully they stick to it long enough to see the long-term benefits of it because the same thing, a lot was said, a lot of similar things to when Google switched to its own custom designed Tensor chipsets in its Pixel phone. For a long time they were using Qualcomm Snapdragon chips and then with the Pixel 6, they switched to its own custom silicon, the Tensor G1 chipset. And at the time, there was a lot said about it, long-term, this is going to be good for Google. It’s going to be good for Google Pixel smartphones.
But in the short term, people were complaining about the modem not being very good, performance not being very good. And we still have those complaints, but I think have died down recently. They’re not as bad, things are not as bad as they used to be in terms of performance and connectivity.
23:52 – C. Scott Brown: Not on my channel.
23:56 – Mishaal Rahman: There are still people complaining about these issues on Pixel smartphones and with the Pixel 10 in particular, we’ve heard a lot of complaints about battery life on the Pixel 10 series.
24:06 – Mishaal Rahman: Our Rob Triggs, he’s one of our smartest analysts. He did a deep dive into trying to understand why the Pixel 10 seems to have bad battery life in particular. And you actually recently published a video that basically recapped it. So why don’t I just ask you what exactly did Rob find in his research?
24:26 – C. Scott Brown: Rob found that he compared the Pixel 9 Pro XL, the Pixel 10 Pro XL, and the Galaxy S25 Ultra and he did it across a variety of testing, including low performance tasks, mid-performance tasks, and heavy tasks.
And for the low tasks, he noticed that the three phones were pretty much the same. If you just have your phone idling with the screen on or screen off and you have it connected to Wi-Fi or connected to cellular, they all pretty much performed the same as far as the power consumption of the phones in that state.
When he upped it to mid-level tasks such as web browsing or being on a zoom call, he did notice that the Pixels both consumed more power than the Galaxy, but the difference between how much they consumed on Wi-Fi and how much they consumed on cellular were pretty comparable. Even though the Pixels were higher, the difference between those two scenarios was the same across all three phones.
But when he did high level tasks such as downloading a huge file or buffering a 1080p YouTube video, that’s when he noticed that Tensor did really poorly. Not only did Tensor do really poorly, but there were huge differences when on Wi-Fi and when on cellular.
The most confusing thing was that the Pixel 10 did worse than the Pixel 9 in those scenarios. It’s a multi-front problem. You have a huge disparity between the amount of power draw a Pixel uses when it’s on Wi-Fi compared to when it’s on cellular. The heavier the task, the worse it gets and the Pixel 10 is actually worse than the Pixel 9. Google has a real problem here as far as making sure battery life really doesn’t become a huge problem on the Pixel 10 series.
26:32 – Mishaal Rahman: It feels like we’ve been hearing again and again about a variety of battery problems on Pixel phones. We’ve had the unfortunate battery swelling issues on the 6A, the 7A and I think the 4A also it seems an A series specific problem where you have these batteries having issues keeping their health long-term. They start to swell up and become spicy pillows.
And now we have these battery draining problems on Tensor Pixels. And mostly not due to the batteries themselves, but just because of the inefficiency of the chipset itself. I’m surprised to see that the Pixel 10 is performing worse than the Pixel 9 from what I can tell, the modem didn’t really change, right? Doesn’t it have the same modem?
27:14 – C. Scott Brown: It has the exact same modem. So, it comes down to the efficiency of the chipset or possibly software, but the software should be pretty much the same across the devices, so I really don’t understand why the Pixel 10 would be worse than the Pixel 9 when it comes to the battery life efficiency of the modem.
27:33 – C. Scott Brown: And to be clear, we reached out to Google with this data. Rob reached out and said, here’s all this data. He emailed them, he showed them the data and said, what do you have to say about this? And we waited a few days, we got zero response. So we don’t really know. We have no real idea why this is happening. We know what is happening and we know directly when it happens poorly and when it doesn’t.
The low-level tasks are pretty much fine, but it’s only when you start doing that high-level stuff that things start being problematic. But it is good to know because if you do own a Pixel device, whether that’s a Pixel 9 or a Pixel 10, if you’re concerned about conserving your battery life, try to prevent doing high-level tasks on a cellular connection while you’re on battery. If you have a big file to download, try and wait until you get to Wi-Fi to do it and you’re going to make your battery last longer than it would if you download that over cellular.
28:42 – C. Scott Brown: I know that’s not ideal. Most people would just ask, why do I have to do that?
And also to be clear, this problem happens on the Galaxy S25 Ultra as well. It’s just not as bad. So if you have a Galaxy S25 Ultra and you start watching YouTube or start downloading a big file, you’re going to see a much bigger battery drain than you would if you did it on Wi-Fi. This is not something that’s just a Pixel problem. It’s just that it’s worse on Pixels and it’s worse on the Pixel 10 than it was on the Pixel 9. So I just want to make sure that’s clear for anybody listening.
29:12 – Mishaal Rahman: If it’s true that it is worse on Tensor-powered Pixel phones, why should Pixel fans put up with it? Why should Pixel fans continue to use Pixel devices when they have worse processors? And this is the frustration we’re seeing from Pixel fans who are asking, is it worth getting Google’s software and in exchange having to deal with the inefficiencies and the poor performance and poor emulation performance, poor Windows gaming performance, just poor gaming performance in general compared to Snapdragon-powered devices, is it worth having those trade-offs?
And we see a lot of people very vocal about it saying, no, it’s not worth a tradeoff. I think Google should switch back to Snapdragon products for the future devices. But you argue that actually Google shouldn’t, they should continue to use their own custom Tensor chipsets and want to ask you, you wrote this article last month and it got a lot of engagement, a lot of people were upset with your take on this. So I want you to defend why you think Google should continue going the path they’re going right now with the Tensor chipset?
30:20 – C. Scott Brown: I’ll address that question, but I want to point something out, which is that the article on Android Authority got 130 comments or something like that. And almost all of them were profoundly negative. Some of them were actually attacks. They were, you’re an idiot.
On my channel, on my YouTube channel, I published the video which makes the same argument and in the same way and gives the same defenses, and I got a lot of positive comments. A lot of people saying benchmarks don’t matter. I have no need for a Snapdragon processor in my Pixel. I’m totally happy with my Pixel as it is, etc. So always remember that the Android Authority audience is very, very passionate about these specific things. And the general user isn’t.
And that’s the core idea of why I think Tensor should stick around. Why I think Google should stick with Tensor is because it presents a different choice that most people will be fine with. Even going back to the data we were just talking about with the Pixel 10 series, most people are not downloading a gigabyte file on cellular. My dad has never done that before in his life because there’s no reason for him to do that. That’s just not something he does.
You mentioned emulation. 90% of people who own smartphones have never emulated a game ever. We tend to think that the Android Authority audience is the world, but it’s not, it’s the niche. And I think that’s the core argument that I tried to make in the video and in the article is that for most people and when I say most, I mean 90% of smartphone users, Tensor is great. It does everything they need it to do. The battery life is good, the amount of cool features that you can do on Tensor that you can’t do on other phones makes it a worthwhile expenditure for most people.
It’s the Android Authority audience that forgets that they are the niche. And I think that that’s number one, the ability to do these things and that makes it good for just your regular average smartphone user. And the second thing that I really think is important for Google to stick with Tensor is because it presents a choice, it presents competition. Think about it right now, of all the phones that come out in the United States, how many of them are running a Qualcomm Snapdragon processor of some kind. I have no idea what the number is, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it’s 95% of Android smartphones. That’s not good.
That gives Qualcomm tons of power over the market. The Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, I have no idea how much it costs for a company to use it, but I do know for a fact that it is the most expensive mobile processor that you can buy to put into your phone.
That’s a ton of power in Qualcomm’s hands over the smartphone prices that you are going to pay for your phone. Not having competition, not having Tensor, not having MediaTek, not having phones that don’t use the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, makes that worse.
I think Tensor should stick around. Yes, it’s not as good as the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5. You will hear no argument from me saying that it is better. By all metrics, it is worse, by all, battery life, power, everything.
33:59 – Mishaal Rahman: Not all metrics because this is a perfect segue to our next story because there is one particular area right now where Qualcomm Snapdragon chipsets completely fail at and that’s Linux emulation because as I’ve talked about before on the show, Google’s been working on this new Linux Terminal feature that allows you to basically run full desktop Linux apps on your Android phone.
And we’ve shown you can run apps GIMP, LibreOffice and other and even the desktop version of Chromium in a virtual machine on your Android phone.
But I say Android phone, but in reality, I mean specifically Android phones that support the Android Virtualization Framework for one and support unprotected virtual machines, which is a requirement to use the Linux Terminal feature.
And unfortunately, there’s not a single Qualcomm Snapdragon chip that supports this feature. Every Snapdragon chip including the new 8 Elite Gen 5 does not support the Linux Terminal because they do not support the unprotected or the non-protected virtual machine feature, which is a requirement.
And when I verified this and I reached out to Qualcomm, they said their “priority is to deliver technology that meets the evolving needs of our OEM partners and their end consumers, and as the Android ecosystem continues to expand its virtualization use cases we remain poised to support emerging requirements including non-secure use cases like the Linux Terminal, should market demand arise.”
35:18 – Mishaal Rahman: Basically they’re saying that they think this feature is not important enough right now to support when every other chipset manufacturer supports it. You have Tensor supports it, MediaTek supports it, Samsung Exynos supports it. It’s only Qualcomm that doesn’t support it. And it is a niche feature right now. It’s true that there’s really not much you can do with the Linux Terminal right now. But will that be the case five, six years from now when Android on PCs has hopefully long been launched by then and you have powerful Android PCs with next-generation chipsets capable of running full-fledged Linux apps in a virtual machine.
I’m guessing the Linux virtualization will be significantly more advanced by then and you’ll be able to run apps with near native if not entirely native levels of performance. And at that point, there’ll be a lot of things you can do with a non-Snapdragon chipset that you can’t do with a Snapdragon chipset and it’s because of this decision not to support the Linux terminal feature.
And I see this is disappointing because sure, something is niche right now. It’s not very good right now, but many manufacturers are selling phones with promises of supporting devices for seven years now, right?
If you don’t support display output, for example, on a smartphone, it’s not a big deal right now because Android desktop mode sucks right now. It’s still a work in progress. But six years from now, will it still be as bad as it is right now? I don’t think so, especially because Google’s putting so much effort into building up its desktop experience.
I think this is a disappointment and I think this is one of the rare cases where the Tensor chipset actually has a dub over Snapdragon chipsets and take that in stride Pixel fans. You’ve got a W right there.
37:01 – C. Scott Brown: I have a question for you. Is this something that could be fixed? Is this something that Qualcomm could just give a software patch to OEMs and those OEMs can push out that software patch that would enable this feature or is this hardware locked?
37:15 – Mishaal Rahman: They could fix it because Qualcomm chips do support the Android Virtualization Framework and they do support protected virtual machines.
They just don’t support the non-protected version of it, which if you support virtualization in general, you support all the requirements to support AVF and you support protected VMs, I don’t see any reason why Qualcomm couldn’t push out a firmware update to add support for the non-protected version of it.
It would just be something that they would have to work with OEMs to actually get the update out to users.
I don’t know how long it would take for them to push out an update and how long it would take for that update to actually arrive on consumer devices, but it should be possible for them to do.
37:56 – C. Scott Brown: I agree that it’s weird that they didn’t just include this because you said, all their competitors do. I’m assuming it’s a security thing. Qualcomm probably is, well, there’s no need for this to be available and it could potentially present a security risk at some point. So we’re just going to shut it down.
And then, you said, if a need arises and they decide there is a very good reason now and there’s a public demand for this feature, we’ll figure out a way to issue it later on. I could see where Qualcomm’s coming from there, but I also see that it seems like an excessive amount of restrictiveness for no real reason.
38:42 – Mishaal Rahman: I think it is a little short sighted considering Google is placing such importance on this feature. They think this is one of the features, this is one of the most important features for the Android on PC transition because right now, if you have a Chromebook, if you want to, for example, run Android Studio on it, you want to develop Android apps on it as a developer, you want to access a lot of development tools.
They’re not natively available for Chrome OS, but they are available for a variety of Linux distributions.
So on Chrome OS, you can just boot up a Linux virtual machine and then install whatever application you want from there, including Android Studio, which is how Google officially offers its development environment to Chromebook users.
And Steam, for example, that’s also another big feature that’s enabled through the Linux virtualization environment on Chromebooks. If you want to play Steam games, you have to install Linux and that’s only made possible because Chrome OS has this Linux environment. But right now there’s no such capability on the Android side of things to run Steam games, but who’s to say that won’t be a possibility down the line?
Google even did hint that they want to work with partners to enable gaming through the Linux VM on Android devices. And that would be I think a big deal, if they’re able to bring, for example, work with Valve on bringing Proton, which is a compatibility layer that the Steam Deck uses because the Steam deck is also Linux based. It doesn’t run Windows. But it does have the advantage that it has an x86 processor, not an ARM processor. So there’s less work involved in getting a lot of those games to run.
But if Valve, for example, wants to switch to a future Steam Deck with an arm chip, then maybe they might improve compatibility for that translation layer with ARM processors, which in turn would theoretically benefit Android devices in the future because Google is working on improving Linux compatibility. And then if you are able to port that Proton to the Linux VM, then Android games, Android phones in the future could theoretically run Steam games, which I think would be a big deal.
And that’s why I see Qualcomm’s decision is disappointing because this feature is basically just future proofing devices. Right now, there’s not many phones you could take, hook up to a PC and actually use it as a proper PC. But five years down the line with Android on PCs becoming a much more mature platform and the Linux feature becoming much more powerful, I could see that happening.
41:01 – C. Scott Brown: And it’s also a little incongruous because at Snapdragon Summit this year, Rick Osterloh came out on stage with with Cristiano Amon and they talked directly about the future of Android on PCs and Cristiano said something along the lines of, I’ve seen it and it’s amazing, get excited or something like that.
And for the company then to launch their chip without the ability to do these things, it does seem a little incongruous, but I don’t know. Qualcomm also named its processor the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5. So, sometimes they just make silly decisions.
41:42 – Mishaal Rahman: And that’s everything we’ve got for you this week. 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.
41:52 – 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 @AndroidAuthority and you can follow me personally on Instagram, Bluesky and at my own YouTube channel @CScottBrown.
42:08 – 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 news on Android, follow me on X, Threads, Mastodon or Telegram @MishaalRahman.
