EU's New Battery Rule

00:33

S1

Hello everyone. Welcome to Talking Tech. This edition available from August the 29th, 2023. I'm Stephen Jolley. Great to have you with us. Listening through maybe Vision Australia Radio associated Stations of Australia or perhaps the Community Radio Network. There is also the podcast. The way to get that is to search for the two words talking Tech and Danica Noor commercially on a Tuesday afternoon just after it's been produced. Another option is to ask a Siri device or smart speaker to play Vision Australia Radio Talking Tech Podcast. Vision Australia Radio Talking Tech podcast. 

With me someone who can explain all this tech stuff really well. Vision Australia's National Advisor on Access Technology, David Woodbridge. David, when we think of Pacific Vision in Australia, those of us who use the blindness products think of blindness. Products consultant Sam Taylor. Sam is no longer with Pacific Vision. He finished up last Friday, the 25th of August. But the news isn't all bad.

S2

No, it's not all bad because when you hear of these really excellent people vanishing, you think, Oh no, they're guys. All that knowledge and experience and everything else. Well, I'm actually very pleased to say that Sam Taylor is now part of Vision Australia and he joins our excellent team of assistive technology specialists at Vision Australia. So not only can he help, quote Pacific Vision people, if you like, he can also help everybody else as well. 

So we can freely talk about all the different products that Sam also uses, because I've known him since he was at school and I know he uses a lot more products than what Pacific Vision sells. And I guess the one thing about Vision Australia is that because we deal in all products from every supplier, then I really think that Sam's going to bring a huge thing to Vision Australia, particularly in the areas of Braille and speech output devices like the Sense Player OCR, but also things like the Victoria Stream and all those other different types of products. So I'm really, really happy to see him being part of Vision Australia now.

S1

Welcome, Sam, to Vision Australia and we wish Pacific Vision well with filling what will be quite a large gap indeed. An interesting item that you came across concerns batteries, particularly the iPhone in the future.

S2

Yes. So this is one of the stuff that's coming out of the European Union at the moment. Is there sort of battery decisions in 2027 which everybody's going to start fighting with? So what it is, is that any electronic device should be able to have its battery changed. And what they're really talking about is consumer products. So they're not talking about electric vehicles and that sort of stuff. So what they're saying is you should be able to use any commercial tool that you can buy in a shop to change your battery. 

Now because Apple in particular, but this also applies to Samsung phones as well and pixel phones is that these batteries are pretty much part of the whole system. I mean, you've got to use glue guns and special screwdrivers and everything else to even try and get the battery out, let alone do it yourself as a non technician. In some ways I agree with them because like you don't want battery waste or like you and I talked before the show, Steven, half a time when you get rid of your phone, you're really getting rid of it because one, you can't afford to replace the battery or the battery's dying, so you buy a new phone. 

But wouldn't it be nice back in the old days, remember that if you had a phone and the battery was getting a bit woozy, you could just pop that one out, pop a new one in and off you go again. So I would like the fact that Apple did something, wherever it's going to be, will replace your battery for nothing. Because when I got my battery replaced in my phone a couple of years ago, it cost me just on $200. 

So maybe one way they'll be able to wiggle out of it is to say, well, look, we'll no longer charge for consumers. But remember, this is 2027. It just got announced. And I'm sure most of the major manufacturers of phones and tablets remember and computers because remember the MacBook Air and the iPad, again, the batteries part of the whole unit. So I have a funny feeling we're going to see a lot of benefactors screaming and yelling with the EU about, no, no, no, we possibly can't do this. So let's keep looking at that over the next couple of years or so.

05:06

S1

Yes. Because it really will make a big difference to the business models for those products.

S2

Can I say for the famous quote, they won't be the thinnest iPhone or iPad Mac ever made, because you're probably going to have to make it bigger to be able to cope with the fact that you want to be able to remove the battery.

S1

And by the way, by then the iPhone will have been around for about 20 years. It's gone quick, hasn't it?

S2

Oh, my goodness. Yeah. I wish you wouldn't have said that. I'm starting to feel old now.

S1

Tell me about the EU's Digital Services Act. More ramifications from that.

S2

Yeah. So this came into effect last week. So what it basically says is that any major company that has over 45 million users is responsible for the content that is on their platform. So what they were really talking about in this article was what to do with ads. But when you think about content as well, you've got things like appropriate content for children, parental control, where you can opt in and opt out of ads or data sharing, which is one of the things that everybody's really concerned about. 

So again, I know it's, you know, part of the European Union stuff, but this stuff always has global implications because you can imagine that major companies don't want to start filing with the EU. And hopefully for me in particular as a parent and a granddad, it has implications for the rest of the world. 

So to me, I think this is a really good thing. It's really holding up places like Amazon, Google, Apple, Microsoft to a set of standards that just basically says, you know what is at the end of the day, you just can't do what you feel like. You've got responsibilities. And if you like it or not, tough luck. We're going to make you do it.

S1

A big driver around these changes, and particularly with the battery story we were talking about earlier, is about the need to be more sensible with the materials we use and recycling. Et cetera.

S2

That's right. Both of them are really saying, you know, common sense with batteries and common sense with content.

S1

Google, apparently you can hum a song and it'll find it for you.

S2

Yes. So this is in beta on YouTube. So people are part of this Android beta testing program. So remember with like Shazam on iOS, you can actually let the microphone slash Siri listen to a part of a song or you can sing it and it will recognize that, Well, Google has taken this one step further and you can hum part of a song and it will recognize what you're humming. 

And I don't know about you, Steve, but my musicality is absolutely awful. So I assumed if I hummed on it, no bananas in pajamas, it might have a good idea of getting it. But I don't know about the fantastic hits on the radio. I don't think it'll work. But if anybody's on the beta team and used it, let us know and email me at David-dot-Woodbridge at visionaustralia-dot-org and I'd be really interested to see how you go with that humming technique. 

S1

Yeah, good luck folding phones now. Are they such a good idea?

S2

This was a good article on folding phones that I found over the weekend because, well, it's really saying is folding phones, even though there have been around for recently, even smartphone technology for 4 or 5 years. I've had folding phones before back in the early 2000. Part of the problem with them in one one side of the argument is that the hinges can get dust inside them. Even though they open out the actual camera inside the phone is reduced in size because the actual phone's too thin. 

And the third major thing is because it has to unfold. The battery in the phone is not that big. So half the time you've got to charge it more than once a day. On the positive side, particularly for us as blind and low vision people, you can open the phone up to answer the call. You can close the phone to hang up the call. 

And for everybody you can very quickly use the outside screen of the phone because remember, it folds down and you've got this little screen on the outside and you can use that screen to quickly check a message or reply to a message. You can check the time, the weather and do sorts of very small things without actually having to open the phone. So there's sort of good and bad points to it. 

Also got my Z three flip, which I'm still happy about, but I really, really want a flip phone from Apple. So maybe in 2027 as well. Steve I might have a flip phone from Apple.

S1

Yeah, I don't really get this, but there's a contention that note taking apps don't make us smarter.

S2

And I think what this article is really getting at is that you can write down and keep links to the cows come home. But if you don't think about what you're reading about or taking notes about, then you're not really using your thought processes as a fairly advanced life form. Because what we're saying is that apparently was it three decades ago, we used to spend a couple of minutes looking at a screen or whatever else it might have been. Now we spend 47 seconds per screen for us blind folks. We probably spend more time than that. 

But the problem is what they kept saying is that if you switch too many times doing multiple tasks, you're not really being able to concentrate on any one task. Any one time. So it's like that jack of all trades. You do average on most things, but you're not really going to be very good at one thing. 

So I this one, I like it because when I focus on a particular topic for talking tech, I try and read more about that topic while I'm thinking about it and taking notes on it rather than going, Oh my goodness, I've got to find these ten other articles. I just focus on one thing at a time because it said in reality there was really no such thing as multitasking. If you're switching every 47 seconds.

11:03

S1

One of the old Twitter third party apps spring for X as it now is still goes viral.

S2

I know. And look, I don't know how this thing has survived because we know like things like Twitter riffic went and all the other major ones that particularly blind and low vision people love. So I don't know how spring for Twitter has survived under the radar and it hasn't yet picked up and told you, No, go away, you're not supposed to be doing that. 

So remember the developer of Spring for Twitter is also the developer of Moana, for iOS and for Mac, and that works extremely well. So quietly, if you don't like the Twitter app on iOS, go and grab a spring for Twitter and it's absolutely brilliant.

S1

What's the latest with Lego and Braille?

S2

This is really exciting. So we've had Lego bricks for educators since 2019, so educators could get a whole box of Lego that had Lego letters and numbers on it, plus print, and they're all different nice colors as well. And educators could use that to build in literacy literacy into play with children, which is a great way of improving literacy. But now what the Lego Foundation has done is said, Well, now we're going to commercially sell this to everybody on the planet. 

So if you're a parent with a blind or a low vision child going blind, then you can use this as a literacy and as with all different types of Lego, it comes with instructions or play instructions on how to incorporate Braille and it really cool thing. Steve I think it's amazing you'll be able to use Be My Eyes when the Lego bar becomes available and probably in about the second week of September to talk to Lego itself directly for support people on how to use the Braille bricks. And I think that is absolutely amazing.

S1

Interesting things happening in the Bemis world with my eye out in the public beta.

S2

I think we've been my eyes in particular it's watch this space because they're adding so many specialist services. As you said, the eye one you can contact Google Microsoft via the Beam Eyes app. They are really becoming a powerhouse for doing video support and I might add, for free.

S1

The Apple event announcing the new iPhones and other bits and pieces. When do you reckon? In a couple of weeks.

S2

I reckon in a couple of weeks. So I think the second week in September, I normally give two weeks warning to journalists and mainstream media about when it's coming up. Now as we go to air on Tuesday afternoon, there's a tentative suggestion that it may be on a Tuesday in the second week of September. So hopefully by next week Stephen will know 100%. But as with people follow me on X or Mastodon, I'll certainly let people know as soon as I find out anyway.

S1

Yeah, so around the 12th, 13th, 14th, etcetera of September. Just before we go, a reminder of where people can find details of what we've been talking about in this and previous editions of the program.

S2

Indeed. So as always, you can check out my blog site, which is David would be a dot podbean pad and com.

S1

David would be our podbean pod b e n to write to the program.

S2

You can write to me at Vision Australia where I work, as well as Sam Taylor at David Dot Woodbridge. How it sounds at Vision Australia-dot-org.

14:31

S1

David-dot-Woodbridge at Vision Australia-dot-org. This has been Talking Tech, with me has been Vision Australia's National Advisor on Access Technology, David Woodbridge. I'm Stephen Jolley. Don't forget about Dad for Father's Day and there's always the vision store. You can go to just a few days to go. In the meantime, take care. We'll talk more tech next week. See you.