A New Privacy Phone and Lovely Little Google AI Rumor
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For those of you who would love to have more control over your personal information, your privacy, when using technology, there’s a new phone that may be right up your alley.
The Punkt MC02 is a phone that is light on smartphone bells and whistles sort of features, but very heavy on protecting your privacy. Here are a few slices of Punkt’s own words about their guiding principles that the MC02 enables:
… the MC02 allows the protection of what is considered a basic human right: Personal privacy and data sovereignty – A liberty that is actually shrouded in the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, yet is often disregarded.
We do not sell your data, we help you protect it.
The MC02 gives peace of mind by providing an entirely safe, secure and smarter way of using a mobile device that is away from the prying digital eyes looking to gain from your personal information.
The MC02 home space features a suite of digital tools that are completely secure – the essentials that you would like to keep free of any advertising based data infiltration: Email, Calendar, Contacts, Notes, Storage and VPN … with all data stored under Swiss jurisdiction that protects the privacy and the fundamental rights of a person’s data.
The MC02 runs a custom version of Android called Apostrophy, and you can run Android apps on it, though with some guardrails attached in keeping with the protective theme of this phone. One of its apps (which appears on its home screen in the image above) is called GMS Wizard; this provides a walk through on how to install the Play Store. According to PCMag:
Apostrophy protects user data from monetization. It says data generated by standard Android apps only exchange data with the app developers and not interlocutors such as Google. No app information is made available to third parties, and one developer's app can't track your use of other companies' apps—a rough equivalent of Apple's App Tracking Transparency in iOS.
Although the MC02 has some decent, midrange level smartphone specs - like 6GB of RAM and a 5,500 mAh battery - most of its specs are below flagship smartphones. That doesn’t seem shocking, as data and privacy protection is the big feature of the phone.
That lovely Google AI rumor
This is not an earth shaking Google AI rumor, but I was very happy to see it reported on by 9to5Google anyway. The rumor - based on their findings when they decompiled code for an upcoming Android version of Bard (Google’s first ChatGPT competitor) - is that the app may be losing the crazy, goofy “Assistant with Bard” name. If the name stays as it appears in that decompiled code, it will just be called Bard. Much better. Short, sharp, goofiness removed.
Here’s an image of the old vs new via that 9to5Google post:
This week I also noticed what seems like good news, or at least a good omen, on when we might see Google’s most powerful AI model - Gemini, in its Gemini Nano size for on-device tasks - come to the Pixel 8 Pro. The other night an update for Android AICore was available on the 8 Pro. Android AICore enables apps to “leverage Google's state-of-the-art natural language AI model Gemini Nano”.
One more smartphone related note on a still very cold night in Texas, I’m going to post an update very soon on my personal clash of the smartphone titans. The short story: the battle continues, and may even have a new combatant entering the ring.