Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of clicking agree on pop-ups on the internet without ever reading a word of them.

I'm your friend David Pierce, and I got a new phone.

I know I told you I was done with this wild phone experiment that I've been on, and that's true.

But that doesn't mean that I don't get needlessly excited about some wacky new idea about how phones are

supposed to work, especially if they're supposed to save me from using my phone too much.

The new one I have is called the side phone.

And the idea is basically, it's like a minimalist Android phone, but it has attachments for

the bottom half.

So essentially, imagine a BlackBerry, but you can lift off the keyboard,

and it just has sort of individually replacement parts. So you can have one that looks like

an actual kind of full keyboard, but then you can also put on just number keys, if all you want

to use it for us to make calls. But the one I think is most fun is it has an iPod style click wheel that you can

just stick into place and suddenly you have a thing that looks like an iPod. I find this so charming.

And I love the idea of a phone that can be lots of things, but tries very hard to only be one of them at a time.

And you have to be like, I am using my phone as a camera now. So I'm going to attach the thing and use it as a camera and it's less useful as everything else. And then you're like, well, I'm going to use it as a music player now. And it's not everything to everyone at all times, even though it can do lots of things. I think it's very cool. I need to test this phone a bunch more.

I have a bunch of questions about how this hardware I need to test this phone a bunch more.

I have a bunch of questions about how this hardware is going to hold up over time, frankly, but also whether this idea of interchangeable keyboards can make a phone feel minimalist and useful all at the same time. But I'm pretty excited about it. But today's show is not about smartphones, mostly. Today's show is about two things. first, Kate Connaick, a professor and author,

is going to come on the show and talk about cookies.

Specifically, those cookie banners that appear at the bottom of just about every web page you go on,

which she thinks need to go away and right now.

Then Allison Johnson from The Verge is going to come on and tell us about her experience with a feature called Ask Maps, which lets Gemini and Google Maps use AI to plan your life for you out in the real world.

I think it's really interesting and exciting. Allison's had some fun experiments. I'm excited to talk about it.

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