This phone starts fires on purpose

The Vergecast

Vox Media Podcast Network

News, Tech News, Technology

4.3 • 4.3K Ratings

🗓️ 6 March 2026

⏱️ 105 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

While most phone makers work hard to ensure their products don’t start fires, Oukitel made a phone that starts fires on purpose. This week on The Vergecast, Dominic Preston joins Editor-in-Chief Nilay Patel to wrap up all the weird and wonderful phones he and the team saw at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Then, Sean Hollister takes us through Google and Epic’s enemies-to-lovers saga: A secret $800 million deal, a non-disparagement agreement, and something about the metaverse for some reason. Plus: Nilay just had the best home movie experience of his life thanks to the Kaleidescape 8TB solid-state server, Dom’s charging his smart phone on a mini racecar, and Sean delivers some disappointing news about the Lego smart brick we were all rooting for. And Brendan Carr is still being a dummy. Further reading: ⁠Nothing is finally covering up with the slim, metal Phone 4A Pro⁠ ⁠Nothing couldn’t wait to show off the Phone 4A⁠ ⁠Nothing’s Headphone A are something worth considering⁠⁠ Honor’s Robot Phone is a bad robot, an interesting camera, and maybe your friend⁠ ⁠Honor claims its Robot Phone will launch later this year⁠ ⁠Honor’s Magic V6 is the first foldable with an IP69 rating⁠ ⁠Xiaomi’s Leica Leitzphone mostly earns the name⁠ ⁠Xiaomi, unlike Google and Samsung, thinks camera hardware comes first⁠ ⁠Xiaomi 17 is a small(ish) phone with a big(ish) battery⁠ ⁠Here’s the upgrade to my favorite phone camera of last year⁠ ⁠Tecno is doing a modular phone (again)⁠ ⁠Lenovo made a Framework-like laptop with modular ports — and a second screen⁠ ⁠ Google isn’t waiting for a settlement — the 30 percent Android app store fee is dead⁠ ⁠Here’s how Google describes its fee-reducing Apps Experience and Games Level Up programs⁠ ⁠Epic and Google have signed a special deal for a new class of ‘metaverse’ apps⁠ ⁠Tim Sweeney signed away his right to criticize Google until 2032⁠ ⁠Fortnite is returning to Google Play globally⁠ ⁠FCC Chair Brendan Carr is pushing for US-based call centers⁠ I’m not ashamed to admit the Kobo Remote is the best gadget I’ve bought this year⁠ Did Live Nation punish a venue by taking Billie Eilish away?⁠ I charge my phone on a racing car. Do you? ⁠ ⁠Investigating the 61-pound machine that eats plastic and spits out bricks Subscribe to The Verge for unlimited access to theverge.com, subscriber-exclusive newsletters, and our ad-free podcast feed.We love hearing from you! Email your questions and thoughts to vergecast@theverge.com or call us at 866-VERGE11. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Support for the show comes from Retool.
0:03.0	Too many companies run critical operations on duct taped spreadsheets,
0:07.0	Slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together.
0:10.5	Not because they want to, but because building internal tools means weeks of waiting on someone else's backlog.
0:16.1	That's where Retool comes in.
0:17.9	Build custom internal tools just by describing what you need. Proms something like build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data in your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to retool.com slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software.
0:42.6	Hello, welcome to Vergecast, flagship podcast, the binding non-disperagement agreements.
0:48.3	It's contentious this week.
0:49.7	Who is allowed to say what?
0:50.7	About whom?
0:51.9	I think I got the who and the whom right there.
0:53.8	I'm your friend, Neely. I'm here. I'm running the show for the first time in years. I'm going to kind of remember how to do it. It's going to be great. David Pierce is off because he has the temerity to have children and need to care for them. And I think that's completely inappropriate. But so it goes. Anyway, to replace David, we have an all-star crew. Sean Hollister's here.
1:12.7	I am here.
1:10.8	I am not David Pierce. That's completely inappropriate, but so it goes. Anyway, to replace David, we have an all-star crew.
1:11.8	Sean Hollister is here.
1:12.7	I am here. I am not David Pierce. Don Preston is here. Hey, Dom. Hey, also, not David Pierce. Maybe we'll summon him throughout the show. No, it's fine. David, David had kids to have to take care of a well-deserved break. We've got Sean and Dom. It's a huge week of gadget news.
1:27.4	If you've been paying attention to the show, you know,
1:29.0	we did all of the Apple news in a live stream earlier this week. You can go watch that. You can watch me get a spec wrong and then just melt into a puddle of embarrassment. I got texts from my friends who told me it was okay because they have not seen me be embarrassed by getting a spec wrong in that way in quite a long time.
1:45.7	Thank you to everybody in the chat who corrected me. We got it right in the end. It's an OLED display. I don't want to talk about it anymore. That's all you get from me. But aside from Apple, it was an enormous week of gadget news. Dom was at Mobile World Congress along with Allison. A million Android phones are launched there as well as 6G, which, sure.
2:04.2	Sean, you covered Google and Epic settling a giant dispute in the Play Store.
2:09.5	There's all kinds of other gadgets to talk about this week.
2:12.1	I actually want to start by talking about a gadget one second.
	...

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