Apple's new phone and more on the SmartCane

00:08 S1 (Stephen Jolley)

Hello everyone. Welcome to Talking Tech. This edition available from February the 25th, 2025. I'm Stephen Jolley. Great to have you with us - listening maybe through Vision Australia Radio, associated stations of the Radio Reading Network or the Community Radio Network. There is also the podcast. To catch that, all you need to do is search for the two words Talking Tech and Danica. And it'll come usually on a Tuesday afternoon just after it's been produced. Another option is to ask your Siri device or smart speaker to play Vision Australia Radio Talking Tech Podcast. Vision Australia Radio Talking Tech Podcast. 

With me, Vision Australia's national access technology manager. Damo McMorrow. Hey, Damo.

00:49 S2 (Damo McMorrow)

G'day, Stephen.

00:51 S1

Damo, we've got news of another in the iPhone series. The iPhone 16e series was released in the last few days.

01:00 S2

Yes, this is the iPhone 16e. The iPhone 16e is available to order from February the 21st and start shipping, I believe, on the 28th of February. This one replaces the iPhone SE variants, so it is a well as budget a model as you get with an iPhone. It's still... sort of starts at, I think around $999 Australian. It's a bit of a change from the SE format. It's not a small phone, but this one is actually based on the body of the iPhone 14. So you're still talking about a, you know, six inch screen and that sort of thing. The other significant change that people will notice is the departure from the home button. I know we've sort of been anticipating that for a while, but it's now not possible to buy an Apple iPhone with a home button. 

So this one, as with the other models in the 16 lineup and ones that have gone before it, Now you're sort of utilising face ID to unlock the phone and using a swipe up gesture, rather than tapping the the physical or haptic home button that we've had on the series for a number of years.

02:20 S1

For those who have never used face ID, it shouldn't be all that daunting these days, should it?

02:25 S2

No it's not. And if you have voiceover running when you set it up, it does give you some pretty good guidance on how to set it up. I don't find it a problem. It works in the dark. So if you're the sort of person that reads a book in the middle of the night, that kind of thing, you'll still be able to unlock your phone. It just takes a little bit of getting used to. In terms of knowing where to position it relative to your face, and also if you don't use VoiceOver but you have limited or no eye control, there is a thing which you can switch off, which they call attention mode, where you have to actually be looking at the phone with your eyes so you can turn that off, which will help to make it easier to to unlock and recognise your face. So that's just something to sort of be aware of.

03:10 S1

Remind us of the differences between the iPhone 16e, this new one and the others. It's sort of like a budget model, isn't it?

03:20 S2

It is when you consider that some of the Pro models are up over the sort of $2,000 mark. There are a few differences, and there are a few things that are the same. So the things that are the same are it does have the Apple intelligence features which the SES didn't have. It has the A18 chip, which is the same as the other iPhone 16 seconds. There would be a difference in weight because the newer the iPhone 16 seconds were, I believe, a titanium case, whereas this is using the body, if you like, of an iPhone 14, which is the sort of glass and aluminium setup. So it would be heavier than a regular 16. 

It doesn't have the camera button, it does have the action button that is present on the iPhone 15. You know where the mute switch used to be? It's now a button that you can set up to still function as a mute button, but you can do other things with it. But there's no camera button, and there's also just the one camera. It is a 48 megapixel camera. So it's an improvement on the previous cameras in the SE. They're also saying that it does contain a 5G modem, and the 5G chip is extremely power efficient. So I guess it remains to be seen what the battery life is going to be in practice. But... the fact that we are starting to increasingly see more 5G towers around and that kind of thing is probably a useful thing. So... they would be the main differences. 

It is also USB-C, which is in line again with the the other iPhone 16 seconds. So it's goodbye lightning. The other difference, though, between it and the 16 is that it doesn't support the MagSafe wireless charging, so you can still charge it wirelessly, but only at sort of seven watts. So it's going to be a fairly slow charge. So there is wireless charging but not the not the magnetic. There's a number of sort of magnetic type wireless chargers these days that you can get for your your iPhone 15 and 16 and so on. It doesn't support that magnetic charging standard.

05:31 S1

So it's USB charging you need to go with for it.

05:34 S2

It's USB-C or it will support the older wireless charging standards, but it'll only charge at 7.5W. So you're going to be waiting a while if you charge it using anything other than USB-C.

05:47 S1

Yep. So that's the new iPhone 16e. We talked about the new mobility aid, the WeWalk SmartCane 2 last week. You've discovered a little more.

06:01 S2

I have - there's a couple of things that I wanted to share, I suppose as a follow up from the discussion we had last week. First of all, if you were to buy it from the We Walk website. You need to be aware that even if you tell it, your country is Australia and it's a little bit sort of, um, confusing because they say put in your email address and your country to get the pricing for your country. However, the pricing that they quote is in US dollars, but it doesn't say that anywhere. Which means you'll you know, you think, Oh, that's pretty good for $850. But then when you get your credit card bill, it's going to be the $1300 with the currency conversion or $1370, I think it was the other day when I checked. So just be aware of that and then you may get hit with the customs duty. On top of that, it would be GST exempt, but you're still going to get hit with the customs duty. 

Now the other thing that I can now confirm as well is that Vision Australia's Vision store will be carrying the we walk to Smart Cane as well. So you can just get it from there, get it shipped to you and you're not having to mess about with, uh, you know, currency conversions and all of those sorts of things. And the price is essentially what it would cost you by the time you imported it anyway. So if it's not on the web shop already, it will be available quite soon, I believe from Vision Store.

07:26 S1

You've had a little play with one?

07:27 S2

Yes, I took it for a Wee Walk. Quite impressed with it actually. We mentioned last week that there is a Harman Kardon speaker in the end of the cane in the end of the handle... and I do have to say the audio quality is pretty good. It's good and loud and it sounds quite reasonable. It is nice to use because all of the buttons are on the handle of the cane, so you can access them with your finger or your thumb. And the other thing that I discovered as well is that the handle unscrews from the rest of the cane. So if you were, you know, unfortunate enough to snap the cane further down the shaft, you could just replace the shaft and screw your handle onto it. So you haven't sort of completely ruined a $1,500 cane, essentially. 

A couple of other things. The obstacle detection does work well, so it gives you either haptic feedback or audio feedback. So you get the sort of. Dink dink dink dink sound. And it gets faster as you get closer to the object and you can adjust the range. Um, there's sort of three different range settings, and the pairing to the app works quite well. So once it's paired to the app, you know you can activate the navigation features, uh, select, you know, some somewhere that you want to go, etc., from the handle of the cane so you can leave your phone in your pocket or your bag or whatever and drive the app from the cane. 

So it is, I think, quite well thought out. What I'm hoping to do is to get my hands on one for a little bit longer than sort of half an hour, and actually do a little audio demo, which we might be able to feature on a future edition of the program.

09:04 S1

So WeWalk SmartCane 2. It's coming to a vision store near you. Tell me about network radio.

09:16 S2

This is one that I've been tinkering with for a while, but I've recently started experimenting with it a little more and upgraded my hardware. For those of you that don't know, I am a licensed ham radio operator, but you don't need to be one to use this technology. It's a good way. If you sort of were thinking about maybe getting into ham radio and you, you're not quite sure. This provides a way of doing a similar thing without having to be licensed. 

So there's two components to this. One is an app called Zello, and you can use the Zello app on your iPhone if you wish, or your Android phone. Or you can get a dedicated network radio, which feels like a walkie talkie. OK, so it has a Push to Talk button on the left hand side. It's got a little screen, it's got a little stubby antenna on the top, and it's got a tactile rubber keypad. These things run Android, so you can install talkback on them and you've got a radio where everything talks and you can use Zello on that... and it, essentially it allows you to talk, you know, all the way around the world... as long as you've got either Wi-Fi or cellular coverage. The audio is really, really clear and you can set it up in different ways. 

So there's a number of public channels. I use a group of channels called the Network Radio channels, which are set up by a guy called Carl G. 1YPC in the UK. And if you just Google Network Radios G 1YPC, you will find the website for that. There's a lot of helpful information there and tells you the names of the different channels, but you can also set up private channels. So you could have a family channel that's password protected and so on. You know, if you've got... kids or parents who are travelling, you know, maybe interstate, overseas, that sort of thing, you could set up a channel and have a talk to them as though you're on a walkie talkie and, you know, chatting from one house to another, as it were, so you can set it up in a number of different ways. 

And you can you can access a number of different types of channels depending on what you're interested in. For those that are hams, if you are using a network radio, you can also run other ham specific apps. So there's one called DV Switch and there's another called Echolink, which are also ways of sort of talking around the world from these devices. But if you're not licensed, Zello is a really good thing to experiment with on the Network Radios group of channels that Carl runs. Their motto is Play nice or play somewhere else. So you don't sort of get some of the undesirable behaviors that you get on some of the local CB radio channels and that kind of thing. So it's something I've been messing around with for a while and trying different hardware. 

The other thing I should mention too, if you do want to use it on the iPhone, you can get hold of a Bluetooth microphone, which you can pair to your phone and still have that kind of Push to Talk, sort of... walkie talkie feel, if you like. It's a thing called an Enrico. Enrico B01 Bluetooth microphone. The network radio I've got is an Enrico T320. But there's a number of different ones out there, or most of them are fairly similar. But, yeah, it's a good... sort of way to experiment, if you're thinking about perhaps getting into ham radio.

12:42 S1

The accessibility of the app. Zillow.

12:45 S2

Zillow itself is extremely accessible. If you're using it on iOS to activate your Push to Talk button, you can do the sort of two finger double tap to press the talk button down, and then do it again to to let it up. If you're using a network radio, the only problem is that they don't come bundled with the Google Accessibility Suite. So I ended up using IRA to get it connected to my Wi-Fi. And then I went to the play Store and installed it that way. So, that's the only gotcha is that some of the Android based network radios don't include Talkback and the Google Accessibility Suite. You have to install it. 

Once it's installed, though, yes, absolutely - very accessible. And because these radios have got a rubber... like a tactile keypad, you don't even have to use the touch screen. You can just use the little navy circle to move around the screen and then press the middle of it to do your double tap. So once you've got talkback installed, it's pretty accessible.

13:39 S1

Very interesting - network radio. Before we go, a reminder there are details of this and previous editions of the program available by going to varadio.org/talking tech, VA Radio dot org slash talking tech. To write to the program, Damo...

13:57 S2

Damo dot McMorrow, M C M O R R O W, at Vision Australia dot org.

14:04 S1

damo.mcmorrow@visionaustralia.org - This has been Talking Tech, with me has been Vision Australia's national access technology manager Damo McMorrow. I'm Stephen Jolley. Take care. We'll talk more tech next week. See you.