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  The Asus Zenfone 10 in a variety of colors. [credit: Asus ]

 

Lovers of small phones: Meet the Asus Zenfone 10, a tiny little device headlined by a 144 Hz, 5.9-inch, 2400×1080 OLED display. For those asking for a one-hand device, this 146.5 mm×68.1mm×9.4 mm phone is one of the smallest on the market, and it has flagship specs. It's not quite the size of the iPhone SE (138.4 mm×67.3 mm×7.3 mm) or the microscopic iPhone 13 Mini (131.5 mm×64.2mm×7.7 mm) but on Android, this is as small as you're going to get.

With those flagship specs, you get a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 gen 2 SoC, a baseline of 8GB of RAM with an option for 16GB, and UFS 4.0 storage options of 128GB, 256GB, or 512GB. The big downside to a small phone is the battery, which here is only 4300 mAh. Asus somehow found room to pack in a 3.5-mm headphone jack, along with 15 W wireless charging (wired is 30 W), stereo speakers, NFC, IP68 dust and water resistance, Wi-Fi 7, and Bluetooth 5.3.

Enlarge / The Dropcam line was eventually replaced by Nest Cam. (credit: Dropcam)

In a post on the official Google Nest Community page, Google announced it is shutting down the service for several old Nest smart home products. Most of these have not been for sale for years, but since this is all hardware  tied to the cloud, turning off the servers will turn them into useless bricks. The good news is that Google is giving existing users deals on hardware upgrades to something that is supported.

First up is Dropcam, which Nest and Google acquired in 2014 for $555 million and eventually turned into the Nest Cam line. Dropcam (and Dropcam Pro) server support is getting shut off on April 8, 2024, and Google says, "Dropcam will no longer work after that date, and you will no longer be able to use your Nest app to check status." The video clips are stored online, so Google adds, "If you wish to keep your video history, please download and save before this date."

Nest replaced the Dropcam line in 2015, so these cameras are all around 8 years old. Nest promises five years of support for its own products. Google isn't just cutting these users off, though; it's offering discounts on new Nest Cams if they want to keep rolling with the Google ecosystem. Google says if users are currently subscribed to Nest Aware, they'll get a free indoor, wired Nest Cam (a $100 value). Nest Aware is a $6 or $9 monthly subscription that lets you record video from the camera and store it online. Since that subscription fee will match the price of a Nest Cam in a year or two, it makes sense for Google to try to keep that subscription revenue flowing. If you don't have a Nest Aware subscription, Google is offering a 50 percent discount on the wired, indoor Nest Cam.

Enlarge / The regional headquarters of Samsung in Mountain View, California. (credit: Getty Images/Smith Collection)

Samsung's next quarter is shaping up to be even worse than Samsung's last quarter, which was already at an eight-year low. The company warned investors today that it's a shocking 95.8 percent year-over-year drop in operating profit for Q1 2023. If that expectation holds, this will be the company's worst quarter since 2009, which dates back to the company's pre-smartphone era.

Samsung doesn't have much explanation for the drop other than a weakening economy and lowered demand for chips. Preliminary results have the company making only 600 billion won ($450 million) in profit for Q1 2023, compared to 14.12 trillion won in profit ($10.7 billion) for Q1 2022.

While phones and TVs are probably Samsung's biggest consumer-facing products, the company's nigh-invisible component business makes up most of Samsung's profits. Components like RAM and NAND storage chips don't just ship in Samsung products, but also land in most other phones, laptops, desktops, TVs, and other electronics from Samsung's competitors. A DigiTimes breakdown of Samsung's business for 2022 has the memory division at 55 percent of profits, mobile at 22 percent, and displays at 11 percent, so Samsung's profits mostly go up and down with the memory business.

Enlarge (credit: Arm)

What's in store for the future of chip maker Arm? The company's owner, Softbank, has been in financial trouble lately, and that has caused Arm to bounce from one dramatic possibility to another. Initially, Arm was put up for sale, and Nvidia was the front-runner to buy the company. That plan was shut down by regulators, and now "Plan B" is an IPO, which is supposed to happen on the New York Stock Exchange sometime this year. If you want to succeed on the stock market, you've got to show revenue, and while Arm enables the sale of billions of dollars of devices around the world, the company's chip licensing scheme only brings in a comparatively small amount of money—around $500 million a quarter.

The Financial Times has a report on Arm's "radical shake-up" of its business model. The new plan is to raise prices across the board and charge "several times more" than it currently does for chip licenses. According to the report, Arm wants to stop charging chip vendors to make Arm chips, and instead wants to charge device makers—especially smartphone manufacturers—a fee based on the overall price of the final product.

Let's say Motorola makes a phone with a Qualcomm Snapdragon Arm chip. Previously, Qualcomm would have signed a deal with Arm for an Arm license, and that license would extend to anyone that buys a Qualcomm Arm chip, like Motorola. Qualcomm contributes a lot to its own chip designs, but when it comes to the Arm license it is basically an Arm reseller. Arm would now want a licensing fee from Motorola (and not Qualcomm?), and it would ask Qualcomm to not sell chips to anyone that doesn't have a licensing agreement with Arm.

Enlarge / RIP Google Stadia. (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty Images)

Poor Google Stadia; the service seemed like a slow-motion trainwreck from the moment it started. The service's launch, life, and death played out exactly how the "nobody trusts Google" naysayers (your author included) would have predicted, but we were all forced to go through the motions anyway. When Google killed the service, the narrative from the company was that Stadia's technology would live on in Google Cloud, but, according to Stephen Totilo of Axios, even Stadia's white-label game-streaming service is now dead.

Stadia was supposed to be Google's big foray into AAA gaming, with a cloud-based game "console" that actually had no console—the console was the data center, and it streamed the video game to you, just like a YouTube video. The service launched in November 2019 to sales that were much lower than Google expected, and manufacturing dates on the boxes suggest the company never sold out of the initial run of controllers. The first signs that Google was getting sick of its gaming experiment came 14 months in, when it shut down Stadia's only first-party studio, relegating the service to third-party ports only.

Two years in, the news broke that Stadia would be "deprioritized" and pivot to a white-label streaming service. Later, Google confirmed it was salvaging the service as a new Google Cloud offering called "Immersive Stream for Games." This meant that Google would resell Stadia's technology to various companies, allowing them to offer game streaming on their own platforms without any Google branding. This is a normal thing for Google Cloud, which offers a ton of cloud services to companies like Apple, and you'll never see a Google logo. Immersive Games saw three main customers—AT&T offered Batman: Arkham Knight to its subscribers, Peloton launched a biking game called Lanebreak on its exercise bikes, and Capcom launched a Resident Evil Village demo on the web.

Enlarge / A YouTube overlay ad. (credit: YouTube / Summit Entertainment)

Here's something you don't see everyday: fewer ads on YouTube. Well, fewer ad formats, at least. YouTube's latest forum post says the company will be doing away with "Overlay ads" on YouTube videos. These are the old-school banner ads that pop up over the video player, obstructing the view of whatever you were trying to watch.

YouTube says the ads are going away on April 6, calling them a "legacy ad format." The ads only worked on desktop, the company said, and they "are disruptive for viewers." Now the only ads in the video player will be video ads that can play before, in the middle of, or after a video. The "view product" pop-up ad is also allowed, and there will still be banner ads in the recommended video list.

The company says it expects to see "limited impact for most Creators as engagement shifts to other ad formats." Ads are annoying for viewers, but creators often only get paid if certain ad thresholds are met. Seeing the overlay ad wasn't necessarily enough for a creator to earn money—advertisers could choose to only pay if a user clicked on the ad, so there was a high chance nobody was actually getting paid from these pop-ups. Video ads with a "skip" button also don't pay out if users click the skip button.

Enlarge (credit: Qualcomm)

Here's an interesting bit of news out of Mobile World Congress: Qualcomm says the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 has been certified as the "world’s first commercially deployable iSIM (Integrated SIM)." What the heck is an iSIM? Didn't we just go through a SIM card transition with eSIM? We did, but iSIM is better than eSIM. We'll explain, but the short answer is that iSIM is the next step in the continual march to reduce the size of SIM cards.

OK, so SIM cards are (in the smallest "nano" size) little 12×9 mm plastic cards that you physically stick into your phone. SIM stands for "Subscriber Identity Module," and these cards mostly just identify you to your cell carrier, allowing your device to be provisioned for the cellular service that you pay a monthly bill for. The idea is that if you buy a new phone, or have multiple phones, you can just move the SIM card over, and—if there aren't any compatibility problems—your service could be easily moved between phones.

In ye olden days, these cards would store some actual data like contacts and messages, but with the advent of smartphones, all of that moved to the cloud. Today a SIM card can store up to 265KB of data in that 12×9 mm card, which is absolutely horrible data density considering similarly sized MicroSD cards can go up to 1TB, or about 4.2 million times more data. SIM cards are a huge waste of space in an industry that is very aggressive about saving space, so they needed to go.

Enlarge (credit: Google)

Heads up, everybody: Chrome will start doing stuff to your permanently open tabs. Chrome version 110 is rolling out now, and on Windows, macOS, and Linux, the release comes with the new "Memory Saver" feature that will be automatically enabled. We first wrote about this when it hit the Chrome nightly build "Canary Channel" in December, but now the feature is rolling out to everyone.

Chrome has a reputation for gobbling up RAM, and Google seems to think the best way to combat that is to automatically shut down your tabs when they are "inactive." Google's explanation of the feature says, "When a tab is discarded, its title and favicon still appear in the tab strip but the page itself is gone, exactly as if the tab had been closed normally. If the user revisits that tab, the page will be reloaded automatically." Google says this technique will reduce Chrome's memory usage by "up to 40 percent," which sounds great, as long as it doesn't break anything or cause users to lose the state of their page.

As a support page outlines, Google has some use cases excluded from this feature:

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  Huawei's Watch Buds. It's a watch and earbud case combo. [credit: Ron Amadeo ]

Huawei is still clinging to life despite constant trade war bombardment from the US government, and its latest project suggests that maybe all the stress is starting to get to the company. Huawei's newest product, the Huawei "Watch Buds," is now getting an international release. Like it says on the tin, this is a smartwatch that is also... earbuds? Imagine sticking a smartwatch display onto the lid of a wireless earbuds case and then strapping that whole contraption to your wrist. The smartwatch display sits on a hinge that lifts up, revealing two big chasms inside the watch body that hold and charge your earbuds. Your earbuds are always at the ready, I guess.

How many ways is this a bad idea? Smartwatches are primarily limited by their size, so anything that makes a smartwatch bigger is probably not a great design choice. Having a smartwatch open up to be a container for something else, like a 1990s wrist fanny pack, is certainly an interesting way to spend your limited space budget. You generally want your space-limited smartwatch to contain 100 percent smartwatch parts, but this one is about 50 percent smartwatch parts and 50 percent earbuds parts. The watch body is officially "47 mm×47.5 mm×14.99 mm"—a massive size that's more volume than even an Apple Watch Ultra (49 mm×44 mm×14.4 mm), which is already too big for some people.

Generally, the space-limited size of smartwatches means battery capacity is pretty tough to come by. Huawei is giving you a 410 mAh battery to both run the watch and charge the earbuds while they're in your earbuds/smartwatch case. The Apple Watch Ultra, which, again, has a smaller body, has a 542 mAh battery, and that's just for smartwatch duties. This device also has GPS, a 24/7 heart rate monitor, and sleep tracking. The one saving grace for the battery life is that it doesn't run Android—instead it uses Huawei's "Harmony OS." The name "Harmony OS" means almost nothing in terms of a software stock. On phones, "Harmony OS" means it's an Android fork, but on watches, "Harmony OS" is a completely different OS based on Huawei's LiteOS. Huawei claims you'll get three days of battery life for "the entire device," while a more normal LiteOS watch from the company gets a claimed "14 days" of "typical usage."

Enlarge / Susan Wojcicki launched one of the company's new verticals, YouTube TV, in 2017. (credit: Bloomberg / Getty Images)

There are big changes at YouTube today as longtime CEO Susan Wojcicki is stepping down from her role and leaving Google. The YouTube Blog features "A personal update from Susan" that announces she'll be stepping down to "start a new chapter focused on my family, health, and personal projects I'm passionate about." YouTube's new leader will be Neal Mohan, one of Wojcicki's longtime lieutenants who has worked at Google for 15 years.

Wojcicki is officially Google employee No. 16, and a year before she was hired, famously rented her parents' garage to Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, where they set up their first office. Wojcicki joined Google when it had no revenue and has been at the company for 25 years—basically, its entire history. Her first role was Google's first marketing manager in 1999, and in 2003 she became Google AdSense's first product manager. Wojcicki is credited with the idea to buy YouTube in 2006 and managed that $1.65 billion acquisition as well as the $3.1 billion purchase of DoubleClick the next year. By 2014 she was CEO of the world's biggest video site.

Wojcicki gained control of YouTube when it was already a household name, the No. 3 site in the world after Google and Facebook, and the web's de facto video site. She oversaw a dramatic expansion of the service via YouTube's pivot to multiple vertical content apps starting in 2015, which saw the launch of the ad-free YouTube Premium, in-house "YouTube Originals" content, YouTube Music, YouTube Gaming, and YouTube Kids. The cable TV replacement service YouTube TV launched in 2017, the Snapchat clone YouTube Stories launched in 2018, and the TikTok clone YouTube Shorts launched in 2021. Late last year, YouTube set itself up to be a pillar of the sports world with a huge $2 billion-a-year deal for NFL Sunday Ticket. Today the brand is basically the content wing of Google, and we're all expecting the next YouTube app to be "YouTube Podcasts."

Enlarge (credit: Google)

Android 14 Preview 1 came out yesterday, and while Google is doing its best to hide the interesting consumer-facing features from this early release (either because they're not finished, or for a big I/O reveal), that's not stopping the Internet from finding interesting features. 'App Cloning' is a new feature apparently hidden in the shipping Preview 1 build, and Mishaal Rahman, writing for XDA, managed to enable it.

The feature leverages Android's multi-user system to have two copies of the same app but with different data, allowing you to log in to each with different accounts. Some apps support multiple accounts and some don't, but this feature would bring multiple account support to everything. It would also bring a great deal of consistency to having multiple accounts—every app could deal with multiple accounts in the same way, with one icon for account number one and a second icon for account number two. Under the hood, the whole feature sounds a lot like Android for Work but without the complicated Work Profile setup process and with the ability to pick which apps you want to duplicate.

You might have seen this feature in some Android skins and third-party apps, so this is making it into Android proper as part of the normal upstreaming process. As Android System UI lead Dan Sandler once explained at Google I/O, the System UI team's feature loop is often "we see a paradigm in the wild, we take it, we learn about it, we make it safer, and then we contribute it back to the framework for everyone to use in Android."

Enlarge (credit: Sean Gallup | Getty Images)

Everybody panic! Next week Google is hosting what can only be described as an "emergency" event. According to an invite sent to The Verge, the event will revolve around "using the power of AI to reimagine how people search for, explore and interact with information, making it more natural and intuitive than ever before to find what you need"—in other words, Google's going to fire up its photocopier and stick OpenAI's ChatGPT onto the platen. The 40-minute event will, of course, be live on YouTube on February 8.

Google's parent company, Alphabet, had its earnings call yesterday, and Google/Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai promised that “very soon people will be able to interact directly with our newest, most powerful language models as a companion to Search in experimental and innovative ways.” Earlier this year, the company declared a "code red" over the meteoric rise of ChatGPT and even dragged co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin out of retirement to help.

Google has plenty of AI technology, but it is mostly not open to the public. It has a chatbot language model called "LaMDA" (Language Model for Dialogue Applications) and an image-generation AI called "Imagen." While OpenAI turns similar technologies into public products like DALL-E and ChatGPT that wow the world and earn the company a ton of attention, Google keeps everything internal and only ever talks about these projects in blog posts and research papers.

Enlarge (credit: Kevin Frayer/Getty Images)

Huawei has been hobbling along for a few years now with limited access to US chips and technology, with both the Trump and Biden administrations banning general exports to the company. Huawei hasn't seen zero US chips, but every sale has had to be approved by the government, with the restrictions being tweaked several times since the initial ban in 2019. Reuters, The Financial Times, and several other outlets have reported that the Biden administration is putting even tighter restrictions on Huawei, with FT saying the US is working toward a "total ban" on sales to the Chinese tech company.

Like every tech company, Huawei buys components from a bunch of different suppliers to make its network equipment and smartphones. While a ton of manufacturing is done in China, there aren't many options for CPUs, and US companies Qualcomm and Intel have been keeping Huawei afloat with limited government-granted export licenses. Intel chips have meant the company can still build servers, and while 5G tech was banned from export, Qualcomm went out of its way to make special, 4G-only versions of its latest SoCs.

As the US tried to balance hurting Huawei without hurting US suppliers that have Huawei as a customer, the decision was made to still allow sales, just not of the latest technology. The cutoff point for this was the always-nebulous moniker of "5G," but now even that is being shut off. Reuters says: "U.S. officials are creating a new formal policy of denial for shipping items to Huawei that would include items below the 5G level, including 4G items, Wifi 6 and 7, artificial intelligence, and high-performance computing and cloud items." It sounds like that would ban all sales from Intel and Qualcomm.

Enlarge / The regional headquarters of Samsung in Mountain View, California. (credit: Getty Images/Smith Collection)

Samsung Electronics has a big phone launch this week, but before that happens, let's check in on the company's last quarter. Following the trend of the industry as a whole, Samsung's earnings seem like a disaster.

For Q4 2022, the company's revenue—down to 70.5 trillion won ($57.3 billion), or an 8 percent drop from Q4 2021—doesn't look too bad. Q4 profits plummeted 69 percent year over year, though, down to 4.3 trillion Korean won, or $3.5 billion. That's an eight-year low, going back to Q3 2014,

Samsung Electronics makes just about every electronic device and every part you'd find in one of those devices—phones, tablets, TVs, laptops, memory chips, SoCs, displays, camera sensors, and batteries—so the company's earnings will always go the way the general economy goes.

Enlarge / An empty Samsung Store. (credit: Samsung)

With a million layoffs and rising inflation, it turns out consumers also aren't interested in spending a ton on a new smartphone. The International Data Corporation has the latest numbers for worldwide smartphone sales in Q4 2022, and it's a disaster. Shipments declined 18.3 percent year-over-year, making for the largest-ever decline in a single quarter and dragging the year down to an 11.3 percent decline. With overall shipments of 1.21 billion phones for the year, the IDC says this is the lowest annual shipment total since 2013.

In the top five for Q4 2022—in order, they were Apple, Samsung, Xiaomi, Oppo, and Vivo—Apple was, of course, the least affected, but not by much. Apple saw a year-over-year drop of 14.9 percent for Q4 2022, Samsung was down 15.6 percent, and the big loser, Xiaomi, dropped 26.5 percent. For the year, Samsung still took the No. 1 spot with 21.6 percent market share, Apple was No. 2 with 18.8 percent, and Xiaomi took third place at 12.7 percent.

The IDC also notes consumers are keeping smartphones longer than ever now, with "refresh rates" or the time that passes before people buy a new phone 'climb[ing] past 40 months in most major markets.' The report closes saying: "2023 is set up to be a year of caution as vendors will rethink their portfolio of devices while channels will think twice before taking on excess inventory. However, on a positive note, consumers may find even more generous trade-in offers and promotions continuing well into 2023 as the market will think of new methods to drive upgrades and sell more devices, specifically high-end models."

Enlarge / Let's see, you landed on my "Google Ads" space, and with three houses... that will be $1,400. (credit: Ron Amadeo / Hasbro)

It has been expected for some time, but today the Justice Department and eight states are suing Google over its purported domination of the online advertising market. The government has a problem with Google's position in "ad tech," or the tools used to automatically match advertisers with website publishers. To solve it, apparently, the DOJ has told Google it's considering breaking the company up.

“Today’s complaint alleges that Google has used anticompetitive, exclusionary, and unlawful conduct to eliminate or severely diminish any threat to its dominance over digital advertising technologies,” said Attorney General Merrick Garland. “No matter the industry and no matter the company, the Justice Department will vigorously enforce our antitrust laws to protect consumers, safeguard competition, and ensure economic fairness and opportunity for all.”

The press release gives a quick rundown of the DOJ's list of Google’s anticompetitive conduct:

Enlarge / Google's Fuchsia OS, circa 2018, running on a Pixelbook. (credit: Ron Amadeo)

Google is still reeling from the biggest layoff in company history last Friday. Earlier cost cuts over the past six months have resulted in several projects being shut down or deprioritized at Google, and it's hard to fire 12,000 people without some additional projects taking a hit. The New York Times has a report about which divisions are being hit the hardest, and a big one is Google's future OS development group, Fuchsia.

While the overall company cut 6 percent of its employees, the Times pointed out that Fuchsia saw an outsize 16 percent of the 400-person staff take a hit. While it's not clear what that means for the future of the division, the future of Fuchsia's division has never really been clear.

Fuchsia has been a continuous mystery inside Google since it first saw widespread press coverage in 2017. Google rarely officially talks about it, leaving mostly rumors and Github documentation for figuring out what's going on. The OS isn't a small project, though—it's not even based on Linux, opting instead to use a custom, in-house kernel, so Google really is building an entire OS from scratch. Google actually ships the OS today to consumers in its Nest smart displays, where it replaced the older Cast OS. The in-place operating system swap was completely invisible to consumers compared to the old OS, came with zero benefits, and was never officially announced or promoted. There's not much you can do with it on a locked-down smart display, so even after shipping, Fuchsia is still a mystery.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson)

Google CEO Sundar Pichai has been on a cost-cutting tear over the last six months, shutting down various projects inside the company. This Friday, the ax has finally fallen on a big chunk of Google's workforce. In its largest layoff ever, Google says it will cut 12,000 jobs across Google and its parent company, Alphabet. The cuts represent about 6 percent of Google's workforce and match similar recent moves by Microsoft and Amazon.

Pichai announced the layoffs on the Google blog, saying US employees who are being let go have already been informed. For international employees, Pichai said that "this process will take longer due to local laws and practices." Pichai blamed the layoffs on the economy, saying, "We hired for a different economic reality than the one we face today."

As always, Pichai talked up AI as the future of the company, saying, "Pivoting the company to be AI-first years ago led to groundbreaking advances across our businesses and the whole industry." Google has struggled to monetize much of its AI work, though. The highest-profile Google AI product is the Google Assistant, but that is reportedly seeing reduced support after plans to monetize it failed (Amazon Alexa is facing a similar fate). Deepmind wowed the world with its ability to take on top players of the complicated game "Go," but that project never translated into any kind of business.

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  "Give 'em the clamps!" Atlas now has a pair of gripper claws. It also may be time for a new torso cover. [credit: Boston Dynamics ]

Boston Dynamics' Atlas—the world's most advanced humanoid robot—is learning some new tricks. The company has finally given Atlas some proper hands, and in Boston Dynamics' latest YouTube video, Atlas is attempting to do some actual work. It also released another behind-the-scenes video showing some of the work that goes into Atlas. And when things don't go right, we see some spectacular slams the robot takes in its efforts to advance humanoid robotics.

As a humanoid robot, Atlas has mostly been focused on locomotion, starting with walking in a lab, then walking on every kind of unstable terrain imaginable, then doing some sick parkour tricks. Locomotion is all about the legs, though, and the upper half seemed mostly like an afterthought, with the arms only used to swing around for balance. Atlas previously didn't even have hands—the last time we saw it, there were only two incomplete-looking ball grippers at the end of its arms.

This newest iteration of the robot has actual grippers. They're simple clamp-style hands with a wrist and a single moving finger, but that's good enough for picking things up. The goal of this video is moving "inertially significant" objects—not just picking up light boxes, but objects that are so heavy they can throw Atlas off-balance. This includes things like a big plank, a bag full of tools, and a barbell with two 10-pound weights. Atlas is learning all about those "equal and opposite forces" in the world.

Enlarge / Like it never even happened. (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty Images)

Google Stadia is scheduled for execution this week. The service dies on January 18, and while there will be tons of spurned developers and hours of lost game progress in its wake, the shutdown of Stadia is going about as smoothly as it can go. After refunding every game purchase made on the service, Google is now responding to calls to open up the service's controller so that it can function as a generic Bluetooth device after Stadia dies. In a post on the Official Stadia forums, a community manager wrote on Friday: "Next week we'll be releasing a self-serve tool to enable Bluetooth connections on your Stadia Controller. We'll share details next week on how to enable this feature."

Having the controller live a second life is one of the last things people were asking for from Stadia's shutdown. As a Stadia product, the controller took the unique approach of connecting directly to the Internet over Wi-Fi, rather than the usual route of connecting to whatever device you're playing from and then to the Internet. Supposedly, this was a way to shave a few milliseconds off the lag inherent in game streaming. Nothing else in the world uses a Wi-Fi video game controller, so once the Stadia servers shut down, the controller was going to turn into e-waste. It was technically useable as a generic controller if you plugged it into a computer via USB, but nobody wants a wired controller anymore.

Google's product listing was always upfront about the controller having a Bluetooth chip in it, though it noted that "no Bluetooth Classic functionality is enabled at this time." All the parts are there to save the controller from the trash heap, and now Google is promising a firmware update to do just that.