Gadgetory

the best slider we've ever seen all that and more on this week's edition of Android Alex a weekly for January 11 2012 I'm Justin Eckhouse alongside antuan goodwin hey guys how's it going we're in Vegas we are in Vegas and we have a guest with us Ryan Biden the Director of Product Marketing from samsung mobile how's it going thanks for joining us no problem thank God so I'm going to jump right into it you guys had some big announcements from the show and some of them were actually Android related we're not going to talk about the washing machine probably for the most part but you know you can maybe sneak it in here okay so let's start with the galaxy note which there was a lot of rumors about and we've heard Antony was confirmed the moment we checked into our hotel across the way and saw all the big banners say when you saw the giant bus is driving down we saw the giant buses we saw the banner which actually for a while said the Samsung Galaxy no I guess the wind was brutal on day one here okay so walk us through this what is this this is a phone is that a tablet is it a okay so be a player so it is pretty clearly a 5.3 inch smartphone it's basically if you just look at it it feels a lot like one of our android galaxy s2 devices yeah so it looks like 12 just bigger just bigger so as I said it's 5.3 inch screen Super AMOLED HD and it's 1280 x 800 resolution so very high res great image quality you get all the vibrant colors and richness that you expect an ax and a super amoled display so kind of as our great displays are going this is kind of the evolution of that and another beautiful bright phone I mean from a kind of pure hardware perspective it's got a dual-core 1.5 gigahertz processor 8 megapixel autofocus camera on the back with LED flash it's got an another camera on for video conferencing that kind of stuff if you may have seen the international version of this I know it's been out overseas for a couple of months now a little bit of a design difference on the front of this one we've got kind of the four capacitive touch keys as the rest of our Android devices in North America instead of the one single large touch button and who do you think that who's the ideal user for this well and that's the thing about this device I mean if you just take those specs in and of themselves it just feels like another high-end smartphone right so the really unique feature about the galaxy note is the S Pen right so what this does and please don't call it a stylus is it allows you to interact with device and do a bunch of stuff that you couldn't do with either your finger or just a normal capacitive stylus so what we've actually done is integrate the stylus with I just called it sighs we're going to get in trouble or two probably already email coming you use the S Pen with the digitizer integrated into the touch screen allows you to do a lot more stuff so you get really fine grain details so down 2.7 of a millimeter with this thing and also 256 levels of pressure sensitivity so you can start to create really fine drawings notes create things essentially where it so is this for artists is it like a doctor well I mean you can start to imagine the obvious uses when you're talking about note-taking right so you've got this single handheld device you got the stylist allows you a lot of cool stuff like draw take picture or draw pictures edit photos that kind of stuff but we've also gone a step further on the productivity side of things and integrated it into Polaris Office so what you can actually do is open up a powerpoint annotate it with the pen send it back to somebody and they can kind of see those edits in Microsoft Office as another as objects on the device and go ahead and continue to use it with that or continue to make those changes remove your edits and continued use of files so it's got some productivity pieces as well like our safe so Samsung approved for enterprise features so additional VPN support additional exchange in act 2 synchro while stuff so just a lot of under the hood stuff as well that make it great for business so when you asked me who the ideal customer for this is it somebody who wants a really high-end smartphone wants the portability associated with that but needs to do a little bit more and doesn't want to carry an additional top of the wall as well all right so let's jump to another product which you announce which actually it's kind of been around for a while right but you sort of have an enhanced it with a slightly new name and that's sort of the all-share yeah product line or woody call service yeah so let's do let's think of all sure as a service I mean traditionally it's been a bunch of very desperate or disparate kind of pieces right so we had kind of all share remote which was the remote control functionality and then we had all share which allowed you to share content then very similar to DLNA across devices that are on the same Wi-Fi network so push content from your phone to your TV watch content that may be on a remote server those types of services what AllShare Play does as we added the cloud so now they don't need to be on the same Wi-Fi network to be able to share that content and do that you just need to register the devices and then they'll start to see each other seamlessly ok and the suite of devices we're talking about that support this so your phones TVs phones tabs TVs washing machines what can I really but yeah ok fridge what do I do with the fridge so basically think about it the fridge in very much the same way you'd think of having perhaps a smartphone in the kitchen except for the making calls piece so download apps right watch TV on it push pictures so say you're out at the park kids are running around shoot some shots of the kids and actually push them right to Grandma's fridge right and this is the kind of thing to use your competitors terminology is this can I do airplay type of stuff where I'm watching a video on my phone and I pause it and then I'm like oh I need to watch the rest of this recipe on my you know refrigerator yeah so it starts to enable all of those types of things so I'm watching TV on my watching TV in the living room I can actually then seamlessly start watching the TV on my phone tab go into the other room with it push it to the fridge if I wanted to do that but very much those kinds of let's take content with us like to use it seamlessly wherever we're going on whatever device right okay great so what's next ok so we've already got the washing machine control with an android app when's the car that's what aunt was really interested in right yeah I'm really into coarseness and Samsung car you'd be into that yeah we do lolz roadster drive your car with your phone so Samsung is a very big company as you know washer dryers TVs super tankers rank giant building some insurance fashion you name it we probably do it and so what we're thinking about and kind of the approach that we're taking going forward is about how can we add more Valley to you by being in the Andrew herb being in the Samsung ecosystem right so this idea of okay so today I've got a galaxy phone tomorrow maybe I add a smart TV maybe down the road I upgrade my fridge or my washing machine and every time you incremental e do that we want to incrementally more valued Thank You rating okay well great thanks for joining us today those great overview of both those products which are pretty interesting and I'm sure we'll be hearing more about them yeah more about extent thanks we're going to take a quick break but then we're going to run down all the news from CES so stay with us and we are back how about pretty a good interview thing yeah it was good i like the all-share stuff i like that now in the Android world we have you know a choice for the whole whoops Apple ecosystem I think its own yeah we ignored that and have a one iphone atlas for that but let's talk about cameras okay yeah anyway hehe the there's a camera so I don't know how to describe this but for a long time we've seen you know phones get better and better cameras and now what we're seeing is I don't know if this is first but it certainly it says right here on the headline Polaroid first with Android camera so it's a first yeah so it's the opposite of what you just said and a set of phones they're coming more like cameras camera in this case the Polaroid SC 1630 it's more like a phone it's not exactly a phone that yeah this is interesting for a couple reasons so I know that Molly is discussing to earlier abuzz out loud how we've been looking for Wi-Fi based cameras for a long time and Samsung actually introduced one but it's not android-based as far as we know so we're not going to talk about that but yeah this one is a 16 megapixel camera that has a touch screen on the back which you know for all intents and purposes looks like and well is android right i mean you'd be it's kind of like you know the performers they used to have back in the day word one half is like a man when half was a woman and they do like to do it with themselves prices like that one side of this is basically a portable media player an android portable media player and the other side I mean looks just like a camera a really big lens placed front and center and in really simple controls for and whatnot place place friend center where you can get to them yeah I mean I think this is really cool i'm most excited i have to say about the connectivity less so about the android I mean it's great on the phone but you know the fact that it can connect over Wi-Fi can connect over 3g and a bunch of other sort of cellular networks at an extra cost just makes your pictures so much easier to get off their camera which has always been the problem for me with cameras you know if-- i tried to solve this problem in sort of an aftermarket way but it just never really came together for most people I think to be fair there knew I ficar do do work with Android and iOS devices that you compare that directly with the phones with the app but I mean I've understand when I played with it when it first came out it was a little weird yeah i think it was but i think an integrated solution in this case is going to be better so let's talk about some real phones for a second here and this is one that we've been talking about it reversed for a long time this is the droid 4 so both you and I have the original droid right right motorola droid one right a groundbreaking phone in the Android world I think really propelled Android into the map and now we finally have what I think is a good successor to the original droid which is the droid 4 and our own Brian Bennett says is the best android keyboard slider yet so I'm assuming that you know the the interesting thing here is the keyboard because the phone itself looks pretty much like the droid razr with the added bulk of a keyboard right but it's the first you know droid slider keyboard with 4g okay it has you know processors not that much faster than the droid 3 I guess and it's still only running android 2.3 i was saying before the show i'm a little disappointed at the lack of ice cream sandwich phones that have been introduced I mean to be fair it just came out you know ice cream famous was just sort of like just hit the market on in the first phone weeks ago yeah and a lot of the vices that we're seeing here at the show I mean they're new to us but I mean to the developers or not they've been working with these devices for month at this point so I'm really not surprised making excuses I'm not giving them any slack I'm not making excuses and just saying surprise right okay I guess that's that's true I'm a little surprised but I have high expectations for our Android ecosystem let's talk about another phone the droid 4 is a great one are you going to switch damn it you're good alright so the Galaxy Nexus my phone of choice been out on verizon for what like four weeks now and sprint has announced that sort of as part of their LTE rollout which will start soon and then hit I think ten different cities by 2012 one of the first phones on that is going to be the Galaxy Nexus which is going to be almost identical to the verizon one except it's unadulterated meaning people yeah that means that the Google Wallet implementation that was cherry picked out of the verizon version it's actually going to be in this one presumably because if it doesn't have the sort of contractual conflicts that verizon has we're not developing their own payment system right the ISIS payment system yeah I wonder if this is going to put any pressure on verizon to should have yet the Google Wallet on there or at least their own wallet solution I think the biggest problem with the verizon solution is there is no solution let me there's a very simple solution it's called root your phone and put it on there I mean that came out you know literally lift same day that the the Galaxy Nexus hit the market was people had already put the Google Wallet implementation back on in the aftermarket but if you're really into that sort of thing and I mean there is a solution i mean there's the good thing about integrated is usually no problem that's not really solvable with you're willing to void your warranty it's true but most people are unfortunately but i mean it's good to see I you know I love the concept of using an a/c to pay and I'm very disappointed I haven't rooted my phone yet I don't something about rooting your phone and downloading google wallet from some server that holds all your credit card information then make unsteadily the Google wall that you download comes from the android open source project it's not you're getting it from Google server you're just basically rebuilding it back in there all right a little less delicious logic but it's still unsettling that you have to install that yourself man up Justin ah alright what's next what's next is another motorola phone quick hit on this one it's the the droid razr maxx it's another droid razr variant it seems like ma xxxx yeah 2 x's because it's double extreme it's basically again the droid razr a little bit thicker but what's interesting here is that that little bit of added thickness point zero seven inches thicker it is I adds up to about double the battery life right Motorola's boasting a 12 and a half hours was the old one yeah now they're both in 21 hours of continuous talk time so it's not a bad trade-off 4.07 inches thicker but my question is does an extended battery merit a new name for your phone oh yeah sure yeah because I just ordered an extended battery for my phone but it didn't change the name well that's kind of like you know you buy a mini cooper yeah you had a turbo to it it's not still a cooper and stuff cooper s you got to put it's a new model it's a different model you've always uses all right fine far as EPA concern first EP well it'll regulate phones thankfully so the droid maxx so let's talk about we are hosting the best of CES awards we announced finals this morning and the words are tomorrow there were some interesting android devices to come out of there we're going to talk about a couple of tablets the first of which is from toshiba and it's the excite x10 and this is this is pretty interesting tablet because it is the according to our own eric franklin the lightest and thinnest tablet yet yeah it's crazy expensive yeah so again this is a point seven seven point seven millimeters thin by about a half a millimeter point six millimeters thinner than the transformer prime that's about a blade of grass we're talking about thickness but I mean you know accolades or accolades but yeah it seems like a looking at air support that it is a pretty impressive device but I mean it's kind of expensive too and compared to other Android tablets but compared to the ipad not excessively expensive right not excessively but I mean you know you're paying for things like Magnum agni-v mal Lloyd chassis and you know just really I guess the the build quality that you need to make it a bicep man and not feel like a creaky mess when you're touching it is one of the things that when I talked to Eric he said that it felt pretty sturdy for it to be that thin one thing that I'm a little bit you know they're going to a magnesium alloy back side this is metal and I'm I haven't seen any pictures of the back but I wonder how they're gonna you know avoid the pitfalls of the transformer prime remember that metal back on that device actually caused issues with it it's Wi-Fi connectivity that's why it costs money they you know made it stronger to put in some crazy glue I don't know I for one can't wait to steal this off of Eric's death okay let's so let's jump to the other end of the tablet spectrum also best of CES finest finalist the asus memo 370 t so the previous one was a solid fast tablet but really expensive right and this one is a quad core and vidya ice cream sandwich tablet for two hundred and fifty dollars wait what yeah like subsidized by somebody I don't know that by asus like yeah soos it's a 7-inch tablet so the period the other tablet was 10 inch but still two hundred fifty dollars for what ballot and yet at all you know quite a core tablet I mean you're talking about Oh potentially viable laptop replacement just and think about that compared to the kindle fire which is 199 right and ideas subsidized so the fact that they've been able to make this sort of unsubsidized tablet for 250 that pretty much can do everything the Kindle Fire can do plus a whole lot more I think it's pretty interesting product that could really sort of change the tablet space in least on the Andrew type of thing no I'm looking at the post right here and it says second quarter 2012 base price of 399 ringing 250 from accessor right there at the top I think it comes in different configuration okay then three glasses yeah so it's debuting at 250 but yeah I'm sure you can add more memory and you can always make things more expensive and of course you can have the requisite the keyboard dock to make it into a little clothes elab hoppy thing right yeah everyone's kind of go in the way of the prime there all right let's talk about lenovo and their ideapad ideatab s2o you know what I open the wrong oh you did okay i confuse me oh that's the one that's 399 look right so this one is a getting there it is a competitor to the prime right right so this is Lenovo's ice cream sandwich tablet that you know can be a full laptop full android based laptop which as I was just saying this sort of the way of things are going right now it's pretty well powered 1280 x 800 resolution qualcomm you know dual-core 1.5 gigahertz chip and all the sort of standard bells and whistles that ball standard now well standard I think for high-end Android tablets yeah Dan dirt yeah and apparently for low-end 7-inch tablets made by a sous standard as well yeah well yeah for that in what I'm seeing here the the 399 pricing a little bit more more reasonable does that price include the actual doc is why I very seriously doubt it yeah I'm pretty sure that's $150 doc that's why that can they like they like to charge triple digits for those things as you can get first people think these convergence devices are going to take off I mean where we going to see the Prime and you know this what I always forgot the name the lenovo sort of tablet docking station take off motorola try to do year ago didn't really work out very well yeah they dreaded a year ago but that was that was a phone getting slapped on to basically a screen in a keyboard when they came out with the docking station for the atrix so it was there's a bit of redundancy there to basically you have a perfectly good screen that you're hiding behind another screen in this case it's like you've got a tablet I mean the the the tablet market is already kind of proven that people really love to buy cases that have keyboards in them so why not make it a little bit you know more elegant of a solution not just strapping it into basically a trapper keeper with a keyboard built into it love to talk about the Trapper Keeper part of my childhood alright well we'll see what happens here there's some other interesting stuff running Android the first is some google TV announcements i think we talked actually a lot about google TV last year at CES and we have some news sprinkled in throughout the year but Google is again getting serious about Google TV and has signed some new partnerships they have to the Sony partnership and they have a logitech devices that came out which haven't done that well but now they have new deals with vizio LG and Samsung to offer you know Google TV in their various devices from the TV's to set top boxes and also deals with Marvel and media tech to produce chipsets that can be used in other devices going forward so question is will this actually change the game for Google TV is the sort of manufacturer support what is lacking there or is the user demand lacking well i think you know tvs are becoming connected they're getting aptly the TV manufacturers are definitely wanting to make these things more than just a dumb display and I mean Google TV is is there I mean it right it's an option too all right well here's how what's the easiest way to do that well it's just basically take something that's already built and slap it in there instead of you know calling Sam phones around basically developing your own sort of interface for your TV and then making your own partnerships and and basically having to get in contact with with Netflix and form your own partnership there like you already have sort of a built-in ecosystem there and you know when these manufacturers who are mean maybe not late but maybe not early getting into this connected TV game start thinking about doing it I mean of course it's just easier just to go like oh well let's do this and it I don't know if it's going to be from one of the things that puts google TV on top of the game or you know but it definitely adds a little bit more relevance it makes them more of a viable contender as far as like you know competing for Google's resources and attention right I mean I interests say that I'm still skeptical I think that what people want on their TVs is kind of a curated experience something that's very easy to control from their living room from their couch and Google TV has gone the route of like let's put the internet on your TV and I don't know that that's what people want you know they've introduced apps which i think is going to simplify everything but we haven't seen tons of apps come out so I don't know I think you'd be amazed by you know people wanting internet on their TV I would be amazed by that you're right the other question is what we've seen in the past is google has signed deals for Google TV on you know with various manufacturers but normally those deals are like we're going to put that on two of our 20 different models and they're going to be on the models that no advice anyway so when we start seeing devices from Samsung and LG and Vizio you know I think if it's that kind of deal then it's not going to work out but if it's going to be these are on our big best-selling devices then they're going to start to sway the industry I would hope that LG and video would want to fill all of their TVs and they weren't just making TVs to be shelf warmers well know why it's going to make it let's just put it out anyway I would really hope that that's not and I'm pretty sure that's not their their their way of looking at it sort of thing but again those are often the low cost models and you don't want to spend dump a bunch of R&D money into something that you're not going to make a ton of you know it doesn't have like a ton of overhead you know so it would make sense on a low cost budget TV to go ahead and add something that's already built and not to invest that money into building it yourself it's true but all these companies already have their connected TV platform but it is also true that Android is free for them for the most part right I mean why not why not hit Joe Smith yeah so lenovo has taken a different approach to getting android on their TVs so they actually have an ounce of TV that actually is going to only be released and china to start with and this TV is actually running android not android via google TV but Android itself which is a very different take that we have not seen before what do you make of this does that make any sense it seems rather roundabout yeah but I don't know it's definitely interesting i like to see weird things like this happen so basically when you turn on this TV you'll go to the android or an android home screen presumably something that skin ty Lee's good i would guess right but it wouldn't be like and maybe there'd be like a tuner window in there or something like that but my worry is that this would be like every annoying TV nets and hotels now where you turn it on and instead of just doing what the channel yet did welcome antoine it starts trying to sell me things and you have to push for buttons just to get to the tuner before you can go to your channel i worry about that but i know it definitely seems interesting and it's a little confusing though considering we just finished talking about google go baby sounds like it would be better better suited well it could be that they are taking the approach that i'm talking about where people want the curated experience they don't want the internet they don't want a web browser on their TV and so maybe just sticking android on there is like it's a free OS that we can just stick on there and you know we just want to build a TV that is smart to compete with you know samsung was built their own OS and we want to jump start on that but we don't actually want Google TV so I think it could work and they're also going to use this to connect to their other devices their android tablets and there basically second screen devices I think ultimately how interesting or how successful this is is going to depend on what they do with Android they can't just like slap you know that standard android home screen with the app drawer on the device they're going to have to heavily skin it do something like you know parrot has actually built a series of Android powered car stereos and it doesn't look anything like Android but they just needed an operating system that they could skin Android just happens to be it if this is something similar that where they just want to build their own experience and the easiest way to do that is to start with Android and then create something completely different maybe they just don't want Google TV they don't want to put the Google TV logo on it maybe they don't even want the the android marketplace they just want the the underlying you know thing that's powering it the software that's powering it then then maybe we could be something interesting from them yeah I mean I think we're gonna have to watch this one it'll be a little hard since it's only in China but hopefully it'll come to the u.s. eventually and we'll be able to scale it early long telescope and you can watch it from here I we're just gonna have to get a scene that trip to China or I mean there was also the internet the internet I've heard of that on my TV I'm on it Beach awesome let's do one quick app of the week here and that I think we're done TiVo who has had apps app for other operating systems that shall not be named for quite a while has released an android app and it's pretty much parity with the apps on the other platforms you can say Apple I can yeah I don't get in trouble if I don't like zapped you won't get kicked off the show we'll see tune in next week to find out so it lets you sort of see a guide of what's on your TV elect it actually will show you a remote control picture of so the classic TV remote so you can do all the functions you can do with your moat but you can also click in the guy then sort of jump to any given show or scheduled programming is coming up in the future or even search for programming so I think this works on both Android tablets and on smart phones as well I'm a big tivo user so I'm pretty excited about this disconnect like through the internet to your device or is I mean it says the good yeah even RF or Bluetooth because every phone doesn't have that so is it just sort of pinging a server and then bouncing back based on my usage of the ipad version it does connect sort of over your land over the internet you have to sort of pair the two devices which has kind of been a pain to do every time I've done it and that sort of loses parents so hopefully the Android one works better but it's actually a really great way and one of the best to navigate TiVo and one of the best second screen apps that I've actually seen out this gives me a very good idea for our next weeks after the week but I want to save that okay and if you want to tune in next week you can find us over at cnet com / android Atlas where we will be streaming every wednesday at ten a.m. pacific time you can find that stream at cnet com / live that's also where you can continue to follow all of our awesome CES coverage you can also follow us on Twitter that's right you can follow the show show as well and that's our music you can follow Antoine on twitter at m qu and you can follow me Justin at not my real name and immoral the shoe at Android Atlas and we didn't do emails this week we normally do if you have any questions or comment internet those or ferry we're all in Vegas so it can actually get your email well well you can email those comments to Android lff cnet com or call us leave us a voicemail 866 344 cnet that's 8663 442 638 after our show for this week all right thanks for joining us we'll see you next week