Gadgetory

hello everybody and welcome to the Friday debate podcast by android authority discussing topics in android every single week i am of course your host for the fdp Joshua Vergara what's going on everybody and I'm joined this week by Joe Hindy Jonathan Feist and andrew grush had to step out for this particular episode so we brought back lawn when so we could talk about the age-old debate of specs versus experience now I thought this was a very interesting topic and thank you andrew grush for creating it for this week and we recorded it on friday which is why i had to bring you this episode a little bit later again i'm sorry about that but we were busy this week with a lot of great content one in particular the samsung galaxy s6 review the device that actually comes up in our debate this week as an example of what could be a loss of specs but an upgrade and experience we talked about that and also the HTC program that was announced earlier this week the program as another possible way that companies could create an even better experience for users and then we talked about what we will want out of our phones if we were thinking about the idea between specs and experience but before I get into the episode as usual I want to get some housekeeping done thank you very much for listening to us all over the different podcast networks we're on iTunes stitcher and pocket casts and if you're watching this on the YouTube channel remember that you can head over to any of your favorite podcast apps and those are the best ways of listening to the fdp if you want to follow all of us on social media if you're watching the YouTube version of this podcast there's a little card on the side that will bring you straight to our podcast page and you can find all of the links there for the rest of you make sure you head on over to android authority calm and see the post for the friday debate podcast but even then remember to head over to android authority for all of the best coverage everywhere and you can find us on our youtube channel in the forums and on our website and android authority calm after all of that this nice little canned intro for you guys i do want to jump into this episode number nine of the aaf DP and don't forget to tweet us out or give us a shout out using the hashtag fdp as some of you already have so you can let us know what you think of the podcast and give us your thoughts on the topic without any further ado here is episode 9 specs versus experience of the Friday debate Mahad cast and that's how lon saved Christmas it's very thanks Santa by shaving a Christmas tree into the side of his head all right you should totally make that a thing along you should start shaving seasonally appropriate shapes into your hair when people can tell what time of year you made the videos yeah was funny I like maybe I'm wrong here but wasn't the first thing well actually you were with Darcy already at mwc before I even showed up with you guys did Dorsey ask for the mwc in your hair like right away was he expecting it no you didn't say anything at least I don't remember him saying anything but I don't know I I didn't want that I don't know what make that like a routine thing is just too much work didn't he has like I oh and yeah my favorite one would probably be like I'll be great if you get like the packs logo yeah that would be really good uh so I am a little bit tired not gonna lie after all earlier this morning I released or we rather release the galaxy s6 review and I was met with a lot of tweets and a lot of messages directly after for what was the longest review i had ever done and one of the best good job well thank you for that I take it all of you guys I've been able to check it out oh yeah I watched it this morning it was a it was really it didn't feel like a 17 minute video you know and it now it's totally sounds like you know we're kind of all was the phrase you know we're kind of promoting ourselves in the in the podcast but no it really didn't feel like a 17 minute video my is well paced yeah I got to the end I was like man I cannot believe I'm six minutes away from watching an episode of dragon ball z here 17 minutes that's uh the daily show without commercials that's sure but yeah I mean it's going to be interesting going into what at what topic we do have for today because the s6 I think school like it falls squarely in in this topic about this whole idea of user experience versus just specs and it's an interesting topic because I feel like they go hand in hand which is funny because the argument is always for one or the other so you know before we even got into that I just wanted to do like a quick check in with everybody as we usually do i mean we keep it loose here on the friday to be a podcast you know i just give everyone a little glimpse into what we do for our daily lives sometimes you know and obviously it's been a long week at least for me i'm ready to disconnect from the world right after this podcast to be honest and then i have to come back and edit the podcast but that's okay so has everybody been doing this past week oh man alright so Jace is on vacation this week so I've been kind of covering all his stuff and let me tell you guys Jace has an interesting job because uh I've just been all over the place you like answering questions like various questions about updates and talking about all the various things like he has a lot of stuff he has to cover I kind of have a new respect for him you know especially since he deals with more sponsors than I do mm-hmm well a holy cow he's just he got a lot of work I now know why he does like two or three shows a week and that's it because like I've done all two or three of those shows this week on top of my normal stuff but I'm like I'm like Josh right now I'm beat I'm dead tired yeah but I am working on something that's making me really happy I'm revamping my entire best android games list and there's gonna be over 60 titles on it oh man yeah do a lot of great games out there that's awesome yeah let me tell you it best job ever testing 60 of the best games ever give us like right give us like a some of the highlights you don't have to give us like top five cuz I don't ruin the video but like what are a few of the ones that are that are that are in that list um i'm just gonna scroll down and just list some stuff here at all right so when i added in was bloons td and you guys have heard of that one it's a tower defense game or you blow up balloons every time i do any kind of best games list or best tower defense games or whatever people yell at me because I did not put balloons td5 on it and so I finally downloaded it and played it and it's actually really good it's a little childish but still really good like it's really great for kids and you know simple graphics casual gamer kind of stuff but I was really impressed by how good it was um and then I have some stuff that was on the last list like clash of clans and CSR racing those clash of clans really that good because I've never touched it I see it on TV more than I care for there is a lot of content I've been playing the game off and on for like two years now and I'm still not at the end no way I think I've been playing it for almost a year now it's it gets updated like real frequently so there's always like you never it's hard to ever like reach the end because they're always constantly adding new things so yeah and like right when you start getting sick of where you are now they go ahead and add something new like you know you've always been able to get into clans and like donate troops and stuff like that and I got sick of the game and I put it down in like a week later they're like now we have clan wars where clans can go head-to-head and I got right back into the game and then like I started getting tired of the game again a little bit and they're like now there's a new troop that flies and draws damage and I was like flying tank I have to try it so you know and not and then I made the mistake of getting all of my friends into it so now you know I get to play with them all the time see but yeah nice what I like about it is that like they actually like give you what you want like they will add little things to the game that we're missing before and things up like the ability to opt out of clans and stuff or whatever it was that they recently added and that's just something that like was kind of missing for a while those I like the opposite of destiny or so what did they give the fans what they want and suppose yeah and yeah then another thing they added along with that was a clan levels where your clan gains levels and based on its level you get like little perks like you can ask more often and you can discard troops and you get more storage space and it's it's you know that they do like lanza they do a whole lot of stuff pretty much all the time um I also have out there on this list and that was something that um Taylor Martin actually reviewed before he was at android authority and I watched his review and I love the game ever since so I put it on there no good um I'm trying to think of one that's like a surprise were like I'd say it every was like what that's gonna make the list well I really is actually gonna say everyone I was actually gonna say like where do you stand as the the app review of the game reviewer on games that have been adapted from other systems like a pc game like like star wars kotor for example it's on that's on the list is on the list that in a grand theft auto and xcom enemy is an enemy unknown or is it enemy with its a ats enemy within XCOM really messed with me because I went out and went through all the trouble of doing this big huge review for xcom enemy unknown and then they trashed it and came out with enemy within which is exactly the same game with a little more content like you guys couldn't just done an update the reason why i love the adapted games associated with the ones from pc like like right now I'm playing shadowrun dragonfall two directors cut and I love that game yeah I just got into it it's really great the learning curve is kind of steep but once you get into it it's actually really fun and I love that they keep it they keep a tabletop in the sense that if you put in like I'm at that part I'm still early in the game where you get these dvds and you have to watch them and it basically gives you the story that's going to lead the rest of the game on instead of actually showing you a video of what's on the DVD it's actually a big block of text describing what you're watching is so tabletop it's maybe laughs because I was like yeah this is definitely tabletop roots um the reason why i like those games far better than all the other ones is you not to pay for basically progression because like even with Sky Force I paid for the power-ups and I paid a couple times for the five thousand stars in order to buy new stuff and I don't wanna have to pay just pay for something for progression in a game and I feel like the adapted ones don't do that yeah um that that's something I was really aiming for with this list because I had to list before was about 35 games but I included a lot you know a lot of popular games also along with that I had candy crush on the last one and it's one of the things were most people hate that game but like a butt like a billion people love that game so it's one of those you know like well it's it's good because it's popular and a lot of people don't like that that that mindset but I mean it's true if you can get 500 million people to download your game and you know eighty-eight percent of them like it it's a good game it sucks to say it but it's a good game did you use a flappy birds is that what you said nope I now say crappy birds okay okay can goodness gracious that game was bad you remember when I will not be a journalist remember when all of the variance of that came out like I remember when Android wear was first a thing someone made like the floppy droid or something for Android wear I have that installed in my watch for a little while I was kind of I don't know it's a good time waster for when we were in line and someone looked like what the hell are you doing your watch it's just like tap tap tap tap well yeah that's good really looking for tile is show let's move over to feisty feisty what he been up to this past week since our last episode which finally is in our in house you know rather than the live ones from the show certainly uh you know this last week kind of bold down to it of course there was tabtimes and everything that that pertains to but my android customization series i took on a project that i thought would be fairly simple but it kind of consumed most of my week what I did was a hands-on tutorial how to do a factory reset on your device now of course the actual factory reset is just a couple buttons but but going through all of the steps the things that you should do before you do that you know backing up your apps how to back them up all that sort of stuff and it turned into quite the adventure yeah backing up apps is not an easy thing to do like if forgive me I didn't get to read the article yet but what were your solutions for backing up apps what what what it's funny you use an app to backup your apps but what did you uh what did you use for that X I broke it down for the users gave them three basic options first of all obviously just uh you know the apps so helium backup for non rooted rooted users and titanium for a sort titanium backup titanium root folder whatever it's called I forget the name already that's terrible but yeah so apps of course from there also suggested just installing a file explorer and just manually going through and just copy and paste those files out of course from there I got to you know reference a USB OTG connector just you know if you don't have a micro USB port alright sorry micro SD card slot is what i meant to say you know just OTG you hook up a flash drive and copy your files off and and then copying back on ok and then of course put everything up to the cloud same sort of thing of course but last what would Dan helium do that wasn't it doesn't have an option to put everything in like a dropbox or something or it does yeah dropbox or your google drive but you have to pay for the premium version for that and i try and keep it free on our android customization series mmm other than tasker but yeah whatever yeah yeah backing up everything and trying to keep everything safe I've had to do that multiple times for like my my parents s5s and as mostly because of their pictures cuz they went on a couple trips this past year so they filled up their memory so quickly and eventually I just broke down and I got my mom like a 64 gigabyte micro-sd card ozik just use this and it exactly and it's not even like a fifth filled and they went to like frickin Budapest like a couple months ago so much in there alright cool well um are our what's I'm trying to think of the term i almost said non regular but i mean obviously andrew grush is not with us right now though he did come up with the topic for this week but in replace of andrew graham macphail in he's a fill-in I was trying to think of like our non regular i was i was gonna say but it doesn't sound right sounds like you need some metamucil or something substitute teacher our temper lon hasn't begin this past week I saw you came out with a couple of key reviews this past week yeah I mean I wish I could say I was as busy as you guys but I mean this I mean I had a shammy review last week and then the Moto e this week but than that like I haven't really had too much going on so well until it just tell us about that moto e cuz I saw the videos a great video and I I thought its I thought it was a good way of encapsulating white this budget basically budget phone was able to bring it's about time they put LTE on that thing I'm just saying yeah yeah yeah well good I I actually really like this phone i think it's i mean obviously it's not like you know super powerhouse of a phone and it does get slow every once in a while but for what it is like you know 150 bucks LTE like I think the Ltd like makes the difference like I think because that was kind of like the kinda like the drawback for me like for the last year's model so i think the LTE really makes a huge difference on this one and i don't know i like it's like a nice little phone that you can just like grip in your hand easily and use in one hand i don't know like it's what i love most about it's kind of refreshing to just be able to hold it in one hand and just reach every corner of the screen and it's you know it's pretty good for most things but obviously if you're trying to like multitask like crazy it's going to like get a little bit choppy but ya know it's it's it's nice for what it is so I think motor did a good job okay well I think that's a great jumping off point for what we're going to talk about this week basically we are going again to this this oddly named warranty program that HTC unveiled this pathway called uh but the it was sort of the jumping off point for what we're basically an you'd be talking about here which is the the debate between what's more important the user experience or the specs features what is really required for a phone to sort of be successful I suppose at least in our eyes we're jumping off the Moto e lon so here's my questions here you have the moto e that obviously doesn't have what many would probably say raw power but it's experience is still adequate enough what what's important to you in the Moto e is it the fact that it is a very accessible package and doesn't does it really sort of is it a bummer for you that it doesn't have those specifications I wouldn't say it's necessarily a bummer because I mean you have to sort of put the whole package into perspective and I mean when you look look at what you're paying you know you're getting you're paying a hundred fifty bucks for it so it's I mean it's your kind of just you have to really think about you know the price and I think it delivers pretty well for what it is it's not obvious not a powerhouse but it does perform well and like the overall experience is good so I think that's really the only thing you can really expect from it for for the price and and the LTE totally makes it worth it i think because that makes a huge difference in the overall experience because like you know you don't want to have a phone thats 3g and then you have to deal with slow load times on top of you know some random choppiness here and there so the LT just makes a huge difference I think in the user experience so so I mean we just got back from mwc where lon well I mean well on was there at CES so you got you know you got you got the chance to deal with some pretty high end devices like the G flex 2 and just this past month he had the s6 edge and lon will be the one to do the review of the s6 edge when the time comes so given that you know especially for the two of us we've been able to use so many different phones across so many different companies and user experiences and different design languages so what what what is more important to you then in a general user experience not talking about just the Moto e or anything after that but just in general if you're going to buy a phone but your hard-earned money down on something and let's say well I was about to say a price is no object but I don't think that that should be a factor here but what is important to you is it is it raw power specifications as it features or is it design because some people are harping on that recently I think for me it's like it's it's kind of a combination of things but at the end of the day like I I want a good user experience I'll take I'll take a good user experience over you know the greatest specs out there and I'm not saying that I don't want the great aspects like I'll take it if i can get it but like I like a user experience that works and that's why I'm like I'm such a big fan of like the Moto X like it's not like a powerhouse of phone it didn't it didn't come out with the latest specs when it came out but the user experiences is great and you get like you know i mean motorola really nails it with you know all their features are not gimmicky they actually work like motor display or the motor display and motor action and all that stuff it all works really well and then you know it's running basically we're as a pure version of Android so I mean I and I love pure Android basically so that's why i love the Moto X so much and it has like to me it has a good looking design I love design of the moto accidents it's premium but you know it's again it's not the best spect phone but I think it delivers a good overall experience and that's what I love about that phone so much ok feisty how do you how do you feel on that on that subject are you aspects person or are you a features / experience well see this is this is the weirdest questions to kind of put into one side or the other there's so many different angles to this so I'll just put it this way what is more important to you want to what is most important to you when it comes to a phone and my answer is as complicated as the question it just like you said in the beginning here Josh it you know one is kind of the other so when I look at the hardware of the device design is very important to me not so much for looks but for how it handles you know you get the flat back devices sometimes they don't fit in the hand very well but you got these motorola devices and actually I like the htc's as well where they just they have that curve back and they feel really nice and more importantly they stick in your hand I find I've yet to find i should say an LG device that i haven't dropped on the floor just slides right out doesn't fit right just the slippery backing so in those regards it's it's important to me that the design provides the function but I you know for me that the big thing really is I live in a multi multi device world so for most of my devices I'm not looking for high-end specs you know I keep referencing these two little devices that LG realm the HTC Desire 510 I you know they're very low-end devices but that's why I bought them you know they for the most part they've both turned into mp3 players just for different positions in my world and and so for those I do not need high-end specs and the same thing goes I mean my daily driver has been the first gen Moto G and it's been that way for over a year now I am looking to upgrade but again the distribution of all my devices so I'm okay with the Moto G you know being in my pocket relatively low end it's powerful enough basically if I had to sum it up it's powerful enough to supply wireless hotspot so that my tablets which you know I've got an HTC the nexus 9 sitting in my lap right now that's my high-end device it's made for productivity it's made for the you know entertainment stuff my phone and I can live with the low-end phone because I have a high-end tablet the handles mother feisty with his glass of cognac and all of his money have all I want at all well Ian and that I don't know how to put this yes it does take some money to have multiple devices but then again does it the HTC nine was 400 that they you know I got the Moto G at the most expensive 200 that's still a couple hundred less than buying a you know a galaxy s6 straight out yeah that's fair so I mean it is a it is true that if you are able to have the same exert experiences across multiple different devices and I guess you would be able to sort of skirt the the issue you know and perhaps that's what's going on there and to be fair to feisty that some of the phones that you said he's had for years now so it's not like he dropped all that money at once um so here's where I think I was wondering what what Joe was gonna say here because I mean you are apt guy and you've got you you need to have a powerful device I'm assuming I don't like assuming but this is where I'm coming from here you need to have a powerful device to be able to run all of these games all of these applications sometimes at the same time and you have all these apolis so the phone needs to be able to hold all of those applications supposedly if you're going to be using one phone for literally all of them so where do you stand on this particular question we're going to hash this out a little bit later but where do you stand on specs versus experience let's put that way um well I think like three out of pretty much everyone said so far but one kind of baguettes the other doesn't it i mean you know when lon was talking about the Moto e earlier he was talking about how it slowed down sometimes you know it's good phone you know for what it was for the price point but you know it slowed down sometimes you know struggled a little bit here and there and it's it's one of those things where you know if you did a direct spec by spec comparison with a flagship phone you know not thinking about cost whatsoever the Moto e is clearly an inferior device that offers an inferior you know user experience in comparison to say a motorola x 2014 edition you know same manufacturer pretty much the same software but the specs matter vary greatly in both price and you know price and experience so that's it you know I'm I lean toward specs because you know in virtually every instance specs almost guarantees a at least a more smooth user experience even if the user experience itself is not optimal like you know i've been using TouchWiz for two years now I've had my note 3 for 2 years I am NOT a huge fan of TouchWiz but the Snapdragon 800 the three gigs of ram you know the 32 gigabytes of storage you know that that's the hardware package that at the time I really wanted and I've been able to kind of disregard the things I dislike about TouchWiz in order to have that kind of you know device that has that kind of power to as you know you say the one phone that i use to review all of the apps tonight all the apps that i do um and that's why I got the Nvidia shield tablet / say the Nexus 9 because you know it's the quad core over the dual-core you know they're both pretty much stock Android so it's not like that matters at all but you know it's just I like having a lot of power cuz I know that its software can be fixed hardware cannot so you know I try to tend to lean towards something that's gonna make me happy hardware wise and then either hope that you know the software gets better or root my device and install a rom with software that I prefer okay I mean I love that you brought up the spec idea where where you stand on leaning towards specifications just a little bit because I i think i think my tastes have really evolved over the past year or so because while i would love to say that you know oh all i need is a moto g that's all I need you know it gives me what I it gives me the ability to use the apps that I want and blah blah blah I don't play dead trigger on the highest level of graphics quote unquote you know like I don't do stuff like that but now that we're coming into this new crop of flagship devices you know we have HTC here and I'm holding my m9 that that's being reviewed currently I'm holding my m9 right now and it's got a great design on it and it's it may not have changed a lot from before but it kind of refined it it's not as slippery as the m8 which kind of would have made sense to me last year if they came out with this uh-oh campaign I hate saying that but if it came out with this little warranty warranty program where basically if you drop your phone and I mean that if you drop it it says free one time phone replacement within 12 months of your purchase of the phone for carrier switching or damage and now that's a pretty interesting III ideas the fact that you know I could drop this phone well not this one I didn't buy this one but yeah I could drop the phone i buy from HTC crack the screen go to a store and say hey I new one please and basically they would say okay no questions asked that's that's essentially the ideal part of this so which kind of brings me to this other question that I had where user experience doesn't necessarily mean just software it doesn't mean the congruence of the hardware with the software with the specifications but there are also those perks that you get with a phone and an HTC started at last year with the crap i'm linking on the name but they had a warranty programs advanta vonage you see advantage they had last year within now they have this even better version I suppose you could say with this uh which they really need to change that name the doo doo perks like this have any any any uh any step what's the term looking for done does it help at all in terms of how you feel about a phone before anybody answers this can I just get it out of the way that we're assuming that this new warranty program is not related to the HTC CEO stepping down well I was wondering if we were gonna bring that up because yeah the CEO stepped down and then cher Wang who when I was at HTC frequencies and she came by and spoke to all of us press in that room she you know I have to say and I'm just putting this out there for the record it's great that she is not a CEO we have more women in higher positions across the board and HTC is going to be one of those shining beacons for stuff like that if she's an incredibly smart woman graduated from Berkeley and she's she's she's I think she'll do fine there but my question to you feisty since you brought it up why would they coincide oh well there's two ways of looking at it first of all mr. CEO steps up and says you know what let's give everybody a free phone so to speak you know and then the board steps in it says now you're fired the flip side he knew he was sleeping but studies the flip side of course is you know he's disgruntled he knows he's leaving so he's like you know what I'm gonna give everybody a free phone now we're gonna laugh both of these off but you know you always have to wonder if something like that is legitimately at play or if this is you know obviously it's going to be how it is moving forward and I hope that that is HTC's policy but that's why I brought that up just almost for the laughs yeah almost and you're right it does sound laughable both of those situations really but oh man I hadn't thought about it that way I I always maybe I'm naive but whenever something happens in the company I just see it for what it is you step down and now cher Wang is uh is the CEO rather than thinking that something very nefarious is going on which is almost always the case e oh but yeah so back to our question there and yes that's it that was this very interesting point to bring up so thanks for that feisty and the where was I going before oh um do the perks of what a company is doing for a phone actually help in terms of its experience overall cuz maybe looking outside of the phone itself let's think outside of the box um you know do do you think that people would buy let's say the HTC One m9 solely not solely but partially because of this program um in this case with the HTC One m9 I think so because you see all of the uh you know the overheating rumors that are going around and you know people are legitimately worried that they're gonna get this phone and the processor is gonna blow up out of the back of the phone because it's overheating and you know so you see something like HTC stepping in like look if the phone screws up we're gonna give you another one you know so you don't have to worry about it you know at least if you don't have to worry about at least the first one and I think that's gonna help you know alleviates a lot of the trepidation that goes into buying a phone that you know pretty much all the way up to let's launch is gonna have to deal with these you know overheating rumors you know until you guys you know until all the reviewers you know all you guys get the final software and can show one way or another if it is going to overheat I mean like HTC One devices have been you know hot forever the the one m7 was a really warm device I assume the One m8 was I mean it's made out of aluminum it's a natural heat sink but you know like looking at the you know the that one report that showed the HTC One m9 is like bright orange and everything else is like dark red showing the super hot and you know could burn people you know having you know a something in place having a backdoor to you know to fix a problem like that um I mean at least you know I'm gonna buy the HTC One m9 regardless of whether or not it overheats and I like knowing that I can get that protection plan and be totally okay with it so I think that it does the outside peripherals do in you know help with the customer experience at least make them feel more comfortable with the potential flaws of the phone that they might be getting okay um lon let's say you're a klutz let's say you drop phones all the time like you you you go to the restroom you do your business and the thing falls in the toilet like let's say stuff like that happens from time to time Deadwood with that would something like this program make it easier for you to have that peace of mind is it because let's put it this way the HTC One m9 when you compared to the other phones in the genre in the flagship space i should say you don't get all of those specifications you don't get let's say the 16 megapixel camera of the s6 which i gave a pretty rave review on in my review we have yet to see what HTC has in store for this 20 megapixel one now that we have you know final software coming out and stuff you don't get a quad HD display you do get an aluminum body which is nice but then the s6 does have a metal frame also so is that it is is a program like oh actually enough to sort of alleviate those holes in the m9 s philosophy I don't I don't know if it's enough to really likes way users one way or another but i think it is like a really good incentive for like what they're doing because like i think at least for like the average consumer i think this is something that they would want as far as being able to carry their phone and not have to worry if they're going to damage it like they're just going to be stuck with it forever not that they've broken it or whatever and but now they can just replace it because this program and like that's one thing about android phones is you can't like you don't have the option to just walk into like a carrier store and be like my phone's messed up and you get a replacement like on the spot but this is like kind of the next best thing with what HTC is doing so you know i mean if you break the screen or if it gets the water damage or whatever like you can just send it in and you get another one so it's like it's no questions asked which is to me it's like it doesn't appeal to me personally because i i'm not like a klutz like I'm pretty careful with my phones and stuff but I mean if I if I wasn't that type of person then like this would be like I think it would definitely sway me into getting the device and uh and I hate to like you know pull like a company like Apple into the conversation but you know like like all my friends are like own iPhones like one thing when their phones get messed up they just walk into the apple store and they just get another one no questions asked and this like type of incentive like it's pretty close to that pretty much because you don't really have that same advantage with android phones are also I think they're doing the fact that all the iphone users I know have had replaced their iPhones like so many times yeah they just walk into apple store and like they just get another one like I've even had friends that like faked that their phone was messed up just so they get a different one because there they had a ding on it or something so it's this is like kind of the next best thing and there I don't think there's any other company that's doing anything to like it so and it's kind of hard to do with android phones there's so many of them yeah for sure so I mean it there might be a little bit of incentive coming from HTC with this program whether or not because one of the first things you have to do is and this is how it's always been HTC's problem it's this is no secret to anybody who follows the industry but HTC basically has this main problem of they have a great idea they have a great product but they just cannot market the thing like well enough so that everybody knows i agree with you it would be a good swaying option for people to say you know i can get a really great phone and then if i drop it in the toilet or something i can get a replacement i keep saying drop it in the toilet because i knew somebody who had that chronic problem it was always dropping in the toilet for some reason so i'm just harking back into that but anyway uh yeah if HTC is going to offer something like that how good is it even going to be unless people know that that's a thing and yeah that's that's something that I was wondering too like how are they going to market this thing because I hope like they're actually going to advertise it and not just like put like a piece of paper and the best advantage was right it wasn't that what that was its yeah yeah it's just a piece of paper in the box but they never really said I don't think there was ever any advertisements for it so I think they would have to really push this if they really want to sort of throw it out there as like sort of almost like a feature I guess the phone well I mean didn't you see those you know those Robert Downey jr. videos i'm pretty sure the third one where he's woken up in a firefight in a military uniform I think that was supposed to be about the Oh plan because you know he had the grenade as an O and he plugged it into the wall socket or the light socket which totally embodies the Oh experience totally I'm being sarcastic guys if you could figure say you made sense of any of those videos I am impressed I just I we've been talking about HTC marketing for like you know going on five minutes and no one has brought up the Robert Downey jr. videos yet so I felt like I had to well for sure we will add frequencies we got a glimpse at did they show because I didn't see the entire the entire presentation was that South by Southwest right or am I wrong well I don't know okay I'm trying to word they they posted them I knew that at South by Southwest I think HTC was inviting people to come by and they were going to show off all of the videos that he did was it did you guys see that one with a buddy no I've only seen the first three the first 30 I've I've not seen a single one okay that wasn't sure if they showed that one because I had seen that one so if they didn't show it I can't talk about it so there you go yes yes they did show caught a clip of all 10 of them assuming that's that's all there is but the 10 of them yeah the bunny shows up at least twice oh okay there you go so I was just curious of you if you guys saw I would like that was probably the oddest one of the bunch of my opinion this is what I was saying um yeah but in any case this will be a nice way for me to transition into actually I do want to bring up the s6 I mean obviously I just got done with the review we lord knows I'm I'm through talking about it for hours on end 17 to be exact inside 17 minutes to be exact inside my video but it's the so we're going to look at a different perspective when it comes to user experience so HTC is putting out this this warranty program and you know maybe you're not getting all of the specifications that lets say the s6 has quad HD display the metal on there but I'm going to circle back a little bit to where we were Joe and I were basically on the same age where we were saying that specifications really do drive the experience and if you are going to be the spec or let's say then it could it could pretty much they can pretty much mean that you're going to get a great experience on the phone because they should go hand in hand but that hasn't been the case for the past like couple years especially when it comes to phones like let's say samsung galaxy s5s for you get the best processor in there but then it's still a stuttery experience dropped frames everywhere and it's it gets slower over time but speaking as the person who has been using the new flagship so far we're not we're finally passed that point for this year the great specifications are coming up and the s6 is a great example of how I mean they are using the XE knows from their in-house processing team but man this thing flies I've had no slowdowns whatsoever now we finally did we finally did get a great software experience a great user experience in the s6 but it's without a couple of key features like the replaceable battery the expandable storage how do you what do you guys stand on this never-ending debate of whether or not Samsung brought everything that they could do you think that the replaceable battery is important or do you think that expandable storage is more important considering that the phone has a great freakin experience underneath um I'm yeah I don't have a whole lot to say about Samsung because I haven't used the s6 yet but um you know I've thought about you know the expandable storage being a big deal that they got rid of it but then they turned around and gave us what was it like 32 64 and 128 gigabyte options yeah so I think that you know that the problem that that that caused the rise of expandable storage to begin with is kinda like not there with the Samsung Galaxy s6 you know cuz back then you know like back in the day you used to have like what you know for 8 gigabytes sometimes less than that of internal storage and if you wanted anything on your phone you had to have you know expandable you know expandable storage and i remember when i got the i had a nexus floor for app testing for a long time and it was an 8 gigabyte model and I hated it I hated the fact that I owned it phone in this day and age our smartphone this day in age only had eight gigabytes of storage and there was no way for me to expand that but you know if you're walking into the store and you know you have 50 gigs of music and you buy a hundred twenty eight gigabyte samsung galaxy s6 you're not even hitting half of your storage you know you still have half of your storage left so I think that you know like that the people that you know still want the SD card space on top of the hundred twenty eight gigs of storage those people are there not a lot of them you know people who actually need you know a hundred and eighty hundred ninety 256 gigabytes of storage on a smartphone those people are extremely few and extremely far between well I'm so excited to agree with you but on or twenty eight gigabytes you know I mean Apple kind of proved it here you're not going to get everything without paying everything and Samsung is going to have that model now the 128 gigabyte version is probably going to be through the roof in terms of what its price is going to be all two words there bud carrier subsidies that solves all problems like it's gonna be what two hundred and ninety-nine bucks on Verizon and t-mobile and i know i don't know how carrier subsidies work you know overseas so I'm sorry to our European and Asian and you know African listeners good i don't know how your paradigms work over there but at least here in North America you know we're gonna be able to get this phone for three hundred dollars or less I assume anyway like it seems like they're gonna be able to do something like that so you know when you look at it that way you know like if I can walk into a store and spent three hundred dollars on the you know the LG g4 note or whatever the hell they're doing this year or walk away with a galaxy s6 with what amounts to my laptop's SSDs worth of storage for 300 bucks and they're both the same price like I'm you know I'm gonna go with 128 gigs like it it went from being a deficiency to being almost a feature because I mean how many other phones out there that offer that much space even with expandable storage because you know 128 gigabyte microSD cards that they aren't popular yet and they're still really expensive so you know assume you get a 64 gig card and pop it into a 32 gigabyte phone you still have less than 100 now so even with you know it's the 128 gigs you know you don't have to buy the 64 gig card and you still have more than pretty much everybody who's not willing to spend you know a hundred bucks on 128 gigabyte you know card you know you're not more than everybody still even without the expandable storage so I you know battery is an entirely different thing altogether but in terms of expandable storage I think the point is almost totally moot like I don't think it matters because they do have that option for people who need that much storage okay so cold hard numbers for jogging knee and house todo yo you still don't have honor in 28 you don't even have a hundred but it's very true if you have a 32 gigabyte what the 64 gigabyte card in there but I guess where I was coming from with it is if yes to the people who are the super power users who install every single game in the in the play store and have absolutely no space on their on their phones I mean I've had a 64 gigabyte one plus one and it was a pretty sublime experience I could download every single podcast there ever was and still be ok but for the for the s6 if I'm using it just for on the daily for the very things that I need I don't even use half of that storage and it doesn't really matter to me that there are those holes in the specifications like the battery and the SD card because the experience as a whole is amazing and technically it's half because of the specifications because of how good that processor is on top of a good experience on the software long you use the you use technically both phones but you focused on the edge back at mwc was it not already a greater experience and touch with and it has ever been to you yeah I mean absolutely i mean it was so much it felt I mean obviously a pit played with it you know for a short amount of time but it felt so much faster and it was such a lighter experience I mean you could see right off the bat that it was cleaner it was lighter and it's just all the animations seem just half a step quicker than before so it was just a much better it just truly feels like and let me preface this by saying the m9 the same way it's it screams it absolutely screams it flies through everything we have a user experience versus specifications to me in the flagship space of course they're going to be one in the same which is why I thought that this debate question was so interesting because I felt like we were going to end up in this in this space it's when you factor in the mid-range devices that things get a little bit more convoluted and I and I and I think that's also expected from us but so for free lon do you use micro SD cards or any of those extra features and all of your phones i mean we could even talk about the edge are you going to use the edge if you get that boat i mean i don't know like i'll find out once i actually get it but I mean I'm just the thing about the edge that I'm so enamored with it's just the swiping experience I just like swiping along those edges it just feels a lot nicer especially with all the elements that come out from the sides like from all the apps and stuff it just it just seems to kind of make sense more with those edges so but as far as like you know the features like the people edge like and night clock I mean I'll have to find out once i actually get it and use it as a daily but as far as like you know like I'm removable like removable batteries and like micro SD cards and stuff like I don't know maybe I'm in the minority but I'm not a fan of moving parts so for me like the less moving parts the better so I've never really been a fan of like micro SD cards and and removable batteries like even when I had like phones that had those features like the galaxy s wand galaxy s2 I never really took advantage of them like I never you know bot like spare batteries just so I can have spare batteries and just swap it out on the go like I didn't feel like you know like I'm that much of a nerd I'd like to do that lookups care like Carrie like spare batteries in my pocket like and like nowadays like like power packs like a dime a dozen so like why don't just carry a power pack like Oh guys the only advantage that I really see from like having a removable battery now is that you can swap it out if it goes bad but that's I don't really see anything else that you're gaining from that so I don't know I don't understand the argument behind it but again like I guess I'm in the minority and then I don't know micro SD cards I just I just never used them I don't know I just I prefer just internal storage and like I remember like that big hoop law that like everybody made a big deal about when Google like got rid of micro SD cards like on the Nexus 4 and beyond and like I was all for that change because I under because basically the what they said was that it created a a more confusing user experience because when you plug your phone in you would have two windows that popped up and if you're like tech-savvy you understand those windows obviously but if you're not like you're going to be confused as to which one's your internal and what's your once which one's your external so I was all for that change like I was totally fine with it but I began for me less moving parts the better I just prefer to not have that I and I feel like Samsung's sort of you know they they sort of alleviated that by offering 32 64 and 128 so I I don't know i don't think there's much room to really complain here because at least they did something instead of still offer you 16 and 32 and that's it at least they still did something they took some sort of action well that was like the evolution that we needed right because even 16 a year ago was starting to feel a little bit slim and for whatever reason all the companies were too stubborn to realize that for the general user but yeah we're coming up on our last let's say 15 minutes or so i want to make sure we hear from feisty on that's on this particular one using the s6 as a scope we have those two main features now Samsung has finally doubled back on what they used to do with all other phones in the past focused on the user experience in the s6 but we're losing two key specs and features using that as a scope but you can always go off the rail a little bit if you want to elaborate feisty how do you feel about the replaceable battery feature in the expandable storage feature let me say no you guys are all wrong need these things you are my jerk and finally we have a debate yes I know we been getting that a lot in our youtube version of it so it's not really a debate guy this is like my hey ready to be topic okay alright so I'm going to give you my personal opinion and experiences and then I'm going to play that devil's advocate here and stand up for the people who want the cards and exchangeable batteries as a personal opinion i'm also not using any of the micro SD card slots or external batteries for any of the devices that support them sorry i do have external or micro SD cards in some of those those devices but there's absolutely no substitute for internal storage and i don't care how much for example music you can install on an SD card and plug in if you can't install the app to run the music you're toast doesn't matter so that no substitute for internal storage same thing with batteries like lon said power packs are cheap so our USB cables I've got them everywhere doesn't matter where I go in my world house car the backpack there is a power supply and there's a USB cable I can plug in keep my devices one hundred percent all day long who cares about the battery life now playing that devil's advocate now the microSD card Joe you brought up a great point in that you know these do we're gonna be able to buy the s6 for example for 300 or less subsidized but what how much would it be if you got the lower end one and purchased your own micro SD card my question not so much question but point is internal storage seems to be triple the price of micro sd's right now yeah so to be able to get a 32 gig device and plug in 128 gig SD card would still be a hundred bucks 200 bucks whatever the price is less expensive than just straight up buying 128 gig you know device in the first place well you got to remember bud that you know the internal storage on a device is you know it's a different storage system you know an SD card is you know it's just your standard little flash storage you know chip but you know that the stuff that goes into android especially the Galaxy S series you know they have the the whole new storage thing that they're doing this year that's supposed to you know increase reliability and increased ability increased performance all that jazz you know of course will we won't know until the future if any of those things are true but it's it's not like they just you know took a 128 gigabyte you know sandisk uh SD card and soldered it onto the motherboard you know I mean that this is is it's a different system entirely and it should my experience you know I've had infinitely number you know I've had several uh you know micro SD cards fail on me just outright fail where you know I've never had the internal storage go bad and you know I've you know rocked my internal storage the last three years since I started working at android authority you know I've downloaded 60 games in the last you know 10 days and you know my my internal storage is still going strong but the last 64 gigabyte card I bought is in the trash so you know i think it's it's not just you know you're paying for its you know cheaper stores you're also getting something that at least as far as i know at least as far as i know i don't have any size to back this up you're getting something that's more reliable and something that works better with you know the other internals of the system and if Samsung's claims are correct something that's actually faster and more reliable I zari with you personally but devil's advocate at devil's advocate says why are you abusing your internal storage with things like mp3 files and JPEGs when those could just be you know they do not need the high speed just dump them off on the micro SD card distribute that performance and you know the wear and tear on your storage yeah that's that's a good angle because i like i mentioned much earlier in the podcast i had to give my mother a 64 gigabyte card just for all the pictures that she was taking there's nothing else on that thing she won't even know how to put anything else on there it's just the picture so that's interesting angle well i mean again it's it comes from the standpoint of reliability like me personally I've had every 64 gigabyte microSD card I've ever owned has died um I'm I I currently have a 32 gigabyte and my in my note 3 right now because my 64 gigabyte died and eight on the face of it you're right assuming zero percent chance of failure you win I can argue that however given the fact that you know SD micro SD cards generally at least anecdotally in my experience fail a whole lot more often than internal I mean I've never had an internal internal storage go bad on me once never and I have owned well over a dozen Android devices for going on five years now but I have had about half of the micro SD cards that I've bought eventually died on me so you know I put all my mem p3s on there i put all the wear and tear on the SD card and then the SD card dies i have to go buy another one i have to sync everything all over again hopefully i backed up my picture some wire damn and you know rebuild the experience that I was you know hoping to avoid by not using the internal storage which probably would have lived through the experience anyway you know agreed agreed ok and final point on micro SD cards again this last week did the factory reset what was actually was my wife's nexus 7 that you know halfway through the process of backing up all her files and transferring her pictures onto a laptop so they were stored for later she was like can't we just pull out the card so here she is she's not she's not with us she's not one of us our level of users here she just wears the simple answer and to be honest I think a micro SD card is a simple answer again for the mp3 files the JPEGs exactly what Josh was saying with his mother and the samsung phone they're just you know the simplicity of it for those external files is I think not having it on the new galaxy s6 is and you know it is a loss at do I care personally now but it is a loss I can see where people would be angry um I can't even argue that point that's that's right because you know getting stuff off of phones on two computers is probably the most difficult you know common user experience that Android has to offer and being able to pop out the card and put it in the old you know SD card reader and slipping it into the computers way easier than you know finding the cable plug in and transferring everything sinking everything uploading it to the cloud and then downloading it to the computer now you're absolutely right on that point um especially if you're doing a factory reset or frequently you know be able to just pull the carb reset put the card back in and you're essentially done is that's magic yet definitely there's one of the arts of tech that we're never going to get that that that easy way of doing it like I mentioned in the last podcast I wait printers are still the worst thing to troubleshoot all time be right I am I was laughing on the inside so hard there because I can't we just take the card out and make so much sense does it like exactly that sorry I think I dinner up did you Joe are you gonna say I was gonna say the writ on the battery excited and say anything about the battery side of things on the battery side of things I am a root user and I acknowledge as a root user that I am a fantastic minority when it comes to android as a whole but there you know when my nvidia shield is messing up and i want to restart it really quick i really miss being able to just tear off the back and pull the battery out you know the pull battery reboot you know method that has been the I mean it was almost a catch phrase in the root community for like two or three years with the phone oh it's not working pull the battery pull the battery pull the battery and now you know it with the with non removable batteries it's like all right well now hold power for like 30 seconds if that doesn't work kind of tap it a few times and hold power for another 30 seconds and maybe it'll restart try holding one of the volume rocker buttons you know and I have once SAT here for 45 seconds you know my i was updating my Nvidia shield tablet i forgot to wipe my cash and thing was boot looping on me so I was just sitting i SAT here for almost two minutes just holding the power button down until the damn thing turned off so you know like for in terms of like troubleshooting and engaging in probably the most successful IT it you know advice of all time which is turning it off and turning it back on again you know by not having removable battery you have literally killed that like you know who's gonna want to sit around for you know 90 seconds holding the power button going why isn't this just working you know so I especially if something goes wrong like your display quicksand you can't see what's what's happening and you just want to make sure that device is off until you can get it to the shop or you know in for placement you can't tell if it's on or off anymore but like you say if you could just be yanked the battery you know it's off young yeah for sure I remember doing that a lot with my galaxy nexus which by the way was the only fun I ever have spare batteries for it because the battery life on that thing was horrendous yeah it was and I hate the whole 30 seconds thing you need do these people not realize 30 seconds is a long time no I don't think really don't alright great well we have gone at length hear about our ideas behind the debate between specifications which could encompass a lot of things and user experience which in this case we focused on not only software and how you use the phone on the daily but also some of the perks that you might get since HTC was our jumping-off point here I want to thank all of you guys again for for being on a lawn thank you for filling in with fur for Andrew and and Rec she had a great idea that we should just have no prob just have everybody on like one big one big phone call and were and we're gonna have though the worst time trying to get that thing edited and then one day I do like seven people or something like that but in any case I definitely want to oh well Joe just messaged in our chat that he was gonna talk about 64-bit stuff so I mean definitely you can do something quick this is gonna be like less than three minutes um you know I was talking earlier about you know how I'm I lean more toward specs than user experience now that Android has it now that there's 32-bit and 64-bit devices getting a 64-bit device right now is almost kind of future proof proofing a little bit because you know application is going to eventually start coming out that can use that 64-bit architecture and you know if you know even if you know your Moto X 2014 can't use it you know and your Moto e even if the user experience is fantastic dick you know when the 64-bit apps are coming out and people start using Android for you know much larger much more you know immersive applications and games you know I mean 64-bit has a lot of possibilities and pretty much all but like what four or five six Android devices are totally left out of that because they're under spect so it's just another really quick argument leaning on the side of specs / user experience and how specs can drive the user experience is that one day um you know like after I get my HTC One m9 anyway I'm going to be able to say all your phones are going to be useless eventually whereas mine is going to be you know it's not gonna run the latest Android or anything but I'm going to be able to run 64-bit applications for a good long time on that thing and uh yeah that's something that I'm at least personally is it cuz I know it people are like Oh 64-bit who cares you know people said the same thing when Windows did 64-bit now look who has a 32-bit windows computer anymore feisty if you have one do you have one I don't have two of them on my okay so as either feisty in his a cornucopia of unusual over there um antiquated working on it but yet no one has 32 bit uh computers anymore and just like one days no one's gonna have 32-bit android devices anymore and you know getting in on that ground floor you know eventually is gonna be a point where it's like oh yeah I can get this budget 32-bit phone people going to go you know that's us an inferior user experience just based on the antic eight antiquated specs or have you say that word is antiquated yeah yeah all right I said quiz yeah um but yeah when a student orbit app start coming out and they start adding so much more to the Android ecosystem yeah it doesn't matter right now I realize that and it might not matter next year the year after that it might be 23 years before we start seeing really good 64-bit apps or even 64-bit apps in general but eventually you know all these 32-bit phones are going to be freaking useless because you know you're going to be stuck on 32-bit apps and while the rest of the world has graduated too much bigger and better things so I wanted to mention that really quick like way earlier and then I got sidetracked and then yeah so just wanted to mention no you're right and I just got a message from krushi he says yeah the 64-bit is very important especially if you go for the project ara phone because the Taser is only competitive a bit 64bit zapping yeah you don't want a 32-bit tase because that's like a 10 exactly you guys it's gotta be 64 I actually had an image in my head of feisty with this HTC Desire and all these app developers are trying to like throw their 64-bit apps enemies that you guys are no seas fanaticism I don't want upgrade i wanna be 32-bit forever change sucks well to the point of the the pc mart of the computer market moving a 64-bit uh i think i think for like a minute I i was reading up on why 64 bits better for processing and stuff like that but really I just did it because it felt like that's where we were going and then at some point all computers started to become that and I feel like when it when it comes to the phones all these phone companies are going to find ways of saying like over 64 bit processor look amazing that is but in reality the best thing that they could probably do is just make them 64-bit and we won't know the difference eventually yep so that was kind of what I was thinking but yeah on that note we will go ahead and sign off here at the Friday to be a podcast by android authority discussing topics in android every single week don't forget to follow all of us on social media if you want to find the links in order to follow us on twitter and on google+ you can head over to the link for the full friday debate podcast post at entra 30.com if you're watching the YouTube version of this you can pop over to that little button on the top right there that will slide out a card for you to head straight to that site we're finally using cars on youtube I gotta get used to that too but from there you can also find us on all of the different podcasts networks itunes stitcher pocket casts and whatnots so remember to head on over there because those are some of the best places for you to listen to the fdp but from there I think we're good to go and we're going to be coming up on our double digit episode next week episode number ten it feels like so long but we're only at episode number ten but I want to give a congratulations to everybody thank you so much for being on the cast every single week and I am going to go ahead and sign off with everybody as usual we're going to do our typical outro keep it tuned to android 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