It's still way too hard to switch phones

Hello, and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of number portability. I'm your friend David Pearce, and today on the show, we are going to answer your questions about phones. We try to do a hotline episode on the show every week or so. We have a lot of questions about smartphones, but not about, like, which smartphone should you buy because increasingly, I think that's a pretty easy question for most people. But questions about how do we move around in the world as people who have smartphones? How do we use our smartphones a little less? How do we manage our phones in a family full of people? We We have a bunch of your questions. Allison Johnson's gonna come on, and we're gonna answer as many of them as we can. There's a lot of fun stuff to get to. But first, here's everything else happening on The Verge today. This is ninety seconds on The Verge for Wednesday, 07/08/2026. New Pixel phones are coming. Google just announced an event for August 12 in New York City, where I suspect we're gonna get new Pixels, new Pixel Pros, maybe a new Pixel Fold, maybe even a new Pixel Watch. Who knows what's coming after last year's deeply bizarre event with Jimmy Fallon? But in terms of the devices themselves, we're not expecting real, you know, fireworks. Slimmer bezels, thinner foldable phone in particular, maybe a new design for the giant camera bar. Most of all, I think the biggest new thing about the Pixels is that they're going to be substantially more expensive. Because everything right now is substantially more expensive. Thank you, Ramageddon. Oh, and by the way, there is a new Samsung foldable coming July 22. It is phone season, baby. We're so back. Meanwhile, Meta just issued an update to its smart glasses that makes a very small but very important privacy change. If the glasses detect that someone has tampered with or destroyed that little light that blinks when you're recording, the camera will now be disabled altogether. This is a good change, and it's a response to a very real phenomenon of people hacking and disabling those lights. But that is just one of the problems facing Meta Smart Glasses when it comes to privacy, and there are many, many more to reckon with. Finally, I'd like to briefly introduce you to Benny, this new dog like drone that runs and jumps and falls down and gets back up and was created by a bunch of former DJI employees. It's a Kickstarter project, so all normal Kickstarter caveats apply, apply, but The Verge's Sean Hollister took Benny on an adventure and frankly had a great time. The thing is adorable. Creepy, dystopian, always on camera hellscape? Absolutely. But also, extremely adorable. I kinda love it. You can read more about all of this at theverge.com. That's ninety seconds on verge for Wednesday, July 8. Support for this show comes from Fetch …