Gadgetory

Google dishes jellybean surface and all the mobile world congress news that matters on this week's episode of it is februari 29th leap day here what every caught year leap year I am Justin Eckhouse that is Jay Mark V V this is Emperor Stephen Beecham good morning everyone your highness uh welcome how's it going good are you asking me yes I'm asking our special guest nobody yes all most of our team is busy doing this little thing called Mobile World Congress there in Spain so are we yeah yeah yes and we'll pretend ah si si um let's talk about what's happened in the Spain since at least at least we could read about it and see what our colleagues had to say there's a lot of interesting news there's tons of hardware and we'll get to some of the more interesting stuff but Google had a lot to say the first thing that Andy Rubin talked about was tablets and Android tablets and how they are doubling down on tablets to win that market because obviously they are not winning right now according to him they have activated 12 million android-based tablets so far that is sort of since the beginning of time compared to apple who in the fourth quarter last year sold 15 million oh the beginning of the time I like that and they have sold about 40 million iPads overall so cool is behind but he says that 2012 is going to be the year that we double down and make sure we're winning um I I mean can they do it I want to I want to make sure did he say that in 2011 they think they would win that 2011 would be the year that they would double down and make sure I don't know I mean he certainly they talked a lot about hey we came out with honeycomb and honeycomb is a tablet-optimized operating system and now we have ice cream sandwich and that unifies them right I 2011 was just kind of laying the groundwork I think so and you know Google so they expand on this a bunch o the andy rubin should have over all laid out we're going to double down on that and then the vice president of engineering hiroshi lock up heimer sorry second one sorry i have to cough maybe you can say it yeah anyway well it's called hiroshi yes he said you know he did an interview with pcmag and they sort of said hey what can change your position and he said look phones took a while to to ramp up we launched those in 2008 and now they're sort of dominant and we think that tablets are going to sort of have similar trajectory and that they're going to continue to invest in content so they have a video rental store to try and spur tablet usage they have a bookstore they're going to continue to invest in content to try and make a difference yeah I mean they don't have control of features the way you know that other company does as far as hardware goes so yeah they're definitely going to have to ramp up their store and their offerings to the people's maybe get some awesome apps in their awesome apps yeah I mean so he they did talk about apps they went through a lot of different areas that Google the Google ecosystem for tablet has challenges with like it's hard to find tablet based apps and he said are you going to do something to address that that was for the question and the response was it's a challenge of course how do you define what a nap the tablet app is versus sort of a phone app and he kind of takes the tack that there's not a whole lot of difference that because the way into it is architected that they're the same thing I think that's not quite a great answer I think in consumers Minds there's difference and there's clearly differences in apps that are optimized for tablets that are laid out that have the graphics to support that and those those that don't and I would love to see the Android App Store take a similar approach to what Apple is done and separate them out and really call out ones that are optimized and will give you a much better user experience than ones that won't right so I mean Hiroshi if you're asking a user yeah that's what we we'd like to see it's not I mean I like you said i don't i'm not satisfied with the answer that it is a challenge and that's just something that that is better now that the environment has ice cream sandwich and things like that i like what you said that with apple things are separated a little better tablets iphone apps you know you know what you're looking for yeah and i think i'm constantly on the track i'm not looking for the apple ecosystem model with google but i am looking for google to be more aggressive in creating an easier to use ecosystem easier to use market back minimum specs i mean these are common themes that I certainly bring up that I think will benefit consumers I think they Google underestimates how confusing it is and multiple levels from buying a phone to getting into the market for consumer and yes it promotes choice but there's just so much confusion that how are they differentiated now like app tablet apps versus phone apps for Android how do they have that different differentiation in there it's a great question I haven't spent a whole lot of time to be honest in the app storage because it on tablets in in the android market because I frankly find the experience easier on an iPad and I end up using iPad more often as my tablet then yeah my android tablet yeah I mean I know I know when you go in the market there is at least an editor curated section that's right you know featured apps for tablets and things like that but I'm not sure how good of a job they do as far as promoting you know some of the best tablet south there right the users yeah I'd like to see more of that curation on their side in the market in general spouse especially around tablets the interview goes on to talk about ice cream sandwich and like you know when do you see big consumer you know basically how can we get ice cream sandwich and future operating systems out to consumers quickly more quickly and his answer is there's actually says there's very rapid adoption of has cream sandwich lada OEMs have announced it here which seems kind of odd considering that ice cream sandwich came out a couple months ago so how could it seems like it's only on one phone right can you say that's rapid adoption that's maybe maybe he's talking about the developers or something or who I thinks that's kind of what he's saying is that yeah we're gonna see a bunch coming out soon but from a consumer perspective when you're comparison is Apple where they're say like this OS is out and that means it's out on all the phones no yeah right it's big difference like consumers who are like well this was announced a couple months ago but I can't buy it like I just bought a new phone and coming with us old now we have no idea when when we might get it you know depending on what device we have yeah that creates a lot of confusion and you know I think a lot of buyers even say like I'm going to hold off by until I understand if it's going to come out or it's just too confusing so I'm just going to get you know I phone or something that I understand how the release cycle works right let's see what else they talked about how they release Nexus phones and OS is optimized for that so google strategy is kind of when they're coming out with a new OS like ice cream sandwich to optimize it for the Nexus device on the chipset which makes it hard for other developers other hardware manufacturers who don't release phones with that chip set to adapt it takes them a while and he said could you change that strategy and the answer is kind of the google strategy is to get something in consumers hands as fast as possible so if they made an OS that was available to all the different chipsets it would take a lot longer to get that out to everything at once yeah which i think is true but I don't know that that is necessarily a bad strategy I mean I feel like wide availability is maybe better than having something that comes out a couple months sooner but it's only available to small subsection of people who want to buy that one device yeah I mean you're certainly going to piss at least a few users off by releasing it to just one phone and then having everybody else salivating over it right one phone one carrier yeah you know wondering when they're going to get it and and on top of that I mean you still have users that are working out the bugs on that one phone because like he said Google you know wants to release it as soon as possible which is totally Google style just to throw everything out there get it out there as fast as possible and then fix it lee yeah no I mean I think I think I think it's great for a lot of things you know but I guess we're just pointing out the problems with that strategy yeah I mean it's all a balancing act here really what we're talking about is the strategy between this closed ecosystem where you control everything in this open ecosystem where everything is just a free-for-all almost and you know both have benefits I feel like there's probably a middle ground that I'd love to see Android move towards where again they say like here's minimum hardware specs that you need to meet to have the android market to be called sort of an Android you know certified device so that has a consumer I can sort of know that when I buy a device it has these minimum specs that maybe that can guarantee it's going to be upgradable to future os's for X number of versions so I feel like I have some security and it's not just I'm buying this device that may be worthless and dead and not upgradable you know two months after it comes out right so can someone fix that please what else there was some news about android activations we had you have that story we have on that let's see this this was I think we've seen a lot of tweets from andy rubin this is how he typically releases how many activations per hour yeah I'm is accordingly according to Andy the Android platform is now seeing over 850,000 device activations per day so I think what was it just last month that we heard it was 700 that was right yeah in January yeah and so there's over 300 million devices activated to date or device activations to date right right and that is significant because Apple's OS was last seen at 315 million cumulative devices and so you know they're probably hovering somewhere around 330 right now which means that I think android may be poised to overtake them right yeah this is a pretty interesting out at a tipping point or something like that where they could sort of really cross over and it's possible that they've already overtaken if you just look at overall Android devices that include like the Kindle and the nook which aren't sort of official android market devices so i think google is not counting those right but um and he knows Apple there no right but Apple is also counting devices that are phones here like i pod touches for example all right how many Android is too they're counting tablets but there's not many top of tablets and right exactly so tipping point we will keep a watch I'm sure we'll have more data in a month or two that's this is really interesting because just like a couple laker last week cisco put out a story that says there's going to be more mobile phones than humans in 2012 which just blows my mind look where are they all going landfills writing right well what's happening and we were just talking about this morning actually there's a lot of people who have multiple phones like you see people around the office who have their blackberries for work and their iphones for personal use is there are there really that many how to to compensate for all those people out there that don't have go look at Jessica doll courts desk yeah yes she's not a good thing you know what it actually is is in other countries where there's multiple networks and sometimes you carry multiple phone just so you can have coverage in different areas of a country I know Africa as they issue a lot yeah yeah and I know just in the Philippines you know I've been to the Philippines a few times I know a lot of people have different phones for the different carriers there as well so yeah I think it is it's big and it's crazy and it'd be an interesting problem for someone to solve that's insane I just I don't want to believe that there are more phones out there than human life I don't want to believe that well there are so one last thing before we take a break and this is on the ongoing topic of the Google acquisition of Motorola and so at Mobile World Congress Andy Rubin who we didn't mention before is sort of the head I don't know his official title is head of Android for google he's the head android is they had android yeah maybe he is a robot lady the same picture of him he's got like a helicopter behind him i don't know i don't know where the helicopter comes into play it's android-powered i'm sure honey so he sponsored the Google take over a motorola originally however he wants to make it clear that they have built literally built a fire wall a wall of fire now why fire they've literally built a firewall between the companies and that quote I don't even know anything about their products their separate from me and I'm going to continue to do my thing he has no idea what's going on down on her yeah which I you know I keep calling BS on this because I feel like what you know really about this big company I know you jeopardize your other relationships with carriers if you get involved but um hi do you think this is really true can I really maintain this firewall um you know I think I think to an extent he's he's trying to keep his hands off that's what I want to believe but as far as him not knowing anything i'm going to say he's overstating that firewall a little bit um I think he's got enough something you know or his employees it'll bump into each other and like the cafeteria right right at the softball game just like hey what he you know yeah I forget it don't tell me I mean maybe they're different buildings and what I'm thinking Motorola's built based and like you'll no way or something like that so maybe they're not moving any of them and they won't run into each other but i don't know maybe I mean I mean there there's a conflict of interest you know so there is we'll see what happens we'll see how long this lasts i think i had a prediction about this yeah I'm all right we're going to take a quick break but when we come back we are going to tell you everything we know about jelly beans stay with us eddore back welcome back to the discussion of her of one of my favorite candies jelly beans Joey bishop I love the jelly belly yeah you guys fans big time they're open they're over here too in the Bay Area too right thinking back on the Fairfield airfield yeah it can take a little factory tour oh yeah hmm so we talked about rumors last week that Google's next OS would be called jelly beans and jelly bean this week we have a little more hilarious reverse evidence if you will evidence yeah so apparently in Google's booth if you just go into the booth at Mobile World Congress they are giving out ice cream sandwiches but if you go deep into the booth into the leg press area they have a little bowl of we have a photo here I think as well it's actually kind of a large bowl filled with jellybeans and androids all around it delicious and google declined a comment on their candy bowl but we try to get Eric Schmidt on the phone about it yes we have yes did uh there were no black jellybeans in there no no um that's it that's an Eric Schmidt's writer actually is no black jellybeans anyway could this be a sign could it huh I think it is absolutely definitive proof that the next OS is going to be called jelly beans but that's just my opinion that's the only way we could take it yeah anyway that's all we got on that it's pretty funny i think though all right so now we're going to do a couple little hardware things there was a lot of hardware that came out of Mobile World Congress if you want to look at it all good at cnet com / android atlas we're just going to cover the interesting parts because you don't want to hear us just rattle on about those phone two percent more cpu than that phone we talked about last week and one extra core yeah this is the first two and a half core phone but we did talk last week about the galaxy note and rumors that there would be a galaxy note tablet and there is da da it's the galaxy note 10.1 and it is everything you would expect it's basically like the Galaxy Tab 10.1 but it has the S Pen thingamajigger TouchWiz Ice Cream Sandwich 1.4 gigahertz dual-core 1280 by 800 it is not a phone so don't try to make calls with it interesting but it does have gps yeah and this is interesting right yeah talk about this yeah it actually comes pre-loaded with Photoshop Touch and it's interesting because we actually had someone what was that an email a voicemail right i think an email we had someone talking about what was it a stylus enabled photoshop app Ron on a stylist enabled tablet and this is this is pretty much it i mean it we know that it comes pre-loaded with the photoshop touch app but what we don't know is whether that photoshop touch app is optimized for use with a stylus but yeah you know i'm going to go ahead and assume that it is because it does come pre-loaded on i'm sure it does or at least works well yeah and that app is the comes pre-loaded here otherwise it's ten bucks which is for photoshop which is normally like seven hundred dollars is a pretty good deal right yeah i mean i've actually played with the app a little bit oh um it's i mean i just i used my finger i didn't have a stylist at my disposal finger is the best possible stylist stylist who's than that then some of these jobs okay but i might have to disagree when it comes to this photoshop app because it was very hard for me to trace objects on the photoshop app with my finger so i'm i'm kind of excited to see what that might be like with the stylist yeah I think it'd be kind of cool um anyway I'd like to check this out with Photoshop that'd be cool totally uh we will so we solve someone's problem where we didn't yeah all right adobe and Samsung solve someone's problem but we let them know about it right that's it that's our job so we'll take a little bit of credit yes all right this next one so we have two more pieces of hardware here that I find pretty interesting ene that's awesome I'd never buy that kind of way the PadFone may we can take a look at this video while we talk about this but so you're gonna walk us through this is this a phone is a tablet as a computer what is it so it's a phone it's a phone but it's got a wait there's more it's got a docking station that is not actually docking station it's a tablet so what you do is you slide the phone into the back of the tablet and today you now have a tablet I'm not sure what the specs are oh wait inches if that's not good enough that is yeah if that's not good enough there is yet another contraption to be added on which is a keyboard that folds into that tablet making it look somewhat like a notebook well I'm ultimate so it's very much like I mean so this is from a sous it's similar to the transformer prime right right except that the phone is the base rather than a tablet being the base of your operations there and so the phone stores all the data you know so you can just take that off and you have everything and it seems to be a pretty nice phone even without all the mumbo jumbo 4.3 inch AMOLED display ice cream sandwich but I guess it's kind of I know it's cool there's no pricing I mean it hi I'm if i could pay like maybe 200 bucks and get all that extra stuff maybe that's worth it but may feel like this is gonna be like a six hundred dollar investment on top of the phone right i mean if it's if it's not expensive you might want to just get a kindle fire or something in addition to your phone right you know funds for just a netbook or something yeah I mean a lot of the phones you can just actually plug an hdmi cable in and use you know a bluetooth keyboard with now yeah so behind this is specific hardware for this specific phone that when you upgrade your phone is potentially worthless as you know they're not going to keep the same form factor yeah and then and then without the phone these add-ons are then useless right yeah I mean if you had a separate tablet then you can actually use two things you know exactly and that this does have a pen as well so following up on the note orejas a pen which doubles as a bluetooth headset that I don't understand but I mean I did see that there's a button on there that allows you to answer the phone right you just kind of click it right James bond-style exactly this does seem something like you would invent right uh anyway cool are you gonna buy that I'm not gonna buy that but i might play with one if one ends up somewhere in the office and you'll ruin aw i will this next thing is something that i would want I don't want this phone but I do like this idea a lot it is the Samsung Galaxy Beam and it is a samsung galaxy phone which is not super powered it's a 1 gigahertz dual-core phone with a 1.3 megapixel camera blah blah blah only running android 2.3 but it has a pico projector which basically is just a small little projector that is handheld built in so you can project I don't know exactly what you can project but potentially anything you're seeing on the screen just on the nearest wall to you yeah I think you might actually be able to project your just your phone's desktop which would be cool but also just so if you think about how you would use this like how many times are you showing people photos on your phone and everyone's gathered around and you're like swiped by five and then they have bad breath and they smell and you're like a backup always and you don't want them to touch your phone because it greasy exactly so this solves the problem like just project your photos on the nearest wall swipe swipe swipe through that yeah it's pretty awesome yeah I mean I think for me I would probably use it to show people some YouTube videos because i find myself pulling up youtube videos all the time you know it's a friends showing on paint check this out it's hilarious right but now everybody can see it at the same time on the wall I don't know how good the speakers are in this though yeah I mean that's a good question and this is it's 15 lumens what up which I don't think it's super bright but maybe it's really bright for a pico projector I don't really know how those are rated but anyway I think it's cool I really I wit by phone with this I don't know if a I would pay a whole lot extra maybe like 50 bucks extra but more importantly I don't know if I would compromise on specs like would I buy a slower phone just to get the projector piece or a phone like how it's got gingerbread right it got gingerbread and it looks a little beefy like it doesn't I mean it has to be pretty much right yeah have a rejecter on there but there was a camera that came out and if you guys remember this may be last year at CES or something like that that projects from the actual camera yeah i think i saw that which is pretty cool but people don't really use cameras anymore they just use phones yeah so this makes a lot of sense but uh we'll see where this goes yeah I'd like to see more phones come out yes I think HTC made a phone like this for the projector built in ico really I think so like a long time ago I remember seeing commercials about a long time ago interesting we'll check into hath school idea um alright gonna go through this touch note app of the week real quick yeah should we have am I wrote a little how-to on it basically you can use your phone to send actual printed postcards to friends anywhere around the world for a dollar forty I pretty cool price you just you know take a photo of whatever you want to take of whatever you want to send and then you can you can add your message to the back of it and the address and everything I mean we have a video in a world where agreeing and facebook likes are the norm why not show a friend you really care by sending him a postcard I'm Jay marker BB with cnet com and today I'm going to show you how to use your mobile device to send an actual printed postcard to your friends hey man hey hey I just want to let you know that I really care about you look oh cool yeah so I'm gonna send you a postcard okay all right I really care about you with touch note for Android or iOS you can take a photo with your phone or tablet have it printed on a glossy postcard and mail it anywhere in the world for a dollar 49 to get started download and install the free touch note app from the android market or the itunes app store next fire it up and pick a photo to use for the front of your postcard you can take a new photo pull one off of your facebook account or pick one from your gallery once you've made your pic pinch and drag to control the zoom and placement of your photo or do a two finger twist to rotate it next flip the card over to enter a destination address and your message the app doesn't offer any custom style options but the default is pretty clean and classy when you're done with your message it's time to make your payment touch note sells postcard credits for a dollar 49 each or impacts and it accepts paypal or credit card just sent you're gonna love it man good for the fridge cool I need some personal space yeah I really care about you and that's pretty much it cards usually arrive within two to five days in the US and UK or within three weeks anywhere else I'm jmar cabebe with cnet com and i've just shown you how to be a better friend re all i really care about you so it's sense of physical physical it does yeah and i actually sent i sent one to myself it's glossy it's it's well printed i should say and it is as I said perfect for the fridge yeah cool so I want a quick update on the projector phone samsung actually did in 2009 release a projector phone which it held this yeah samsung show which didn't work out very well apparently and then there was also a windows phone-based one from LG but just I never heard windows mobile 6.5 so I'm sure that did great yeah two big major hits oh right terrible let's do some email uh first email from Martin we had talked last week about why Korean manufacturers might be really same pen based phone with huge screens right and to Martin wrote in and said hey you wondered if it was a cultural reason why Koreans would want a phone with a stylus well one reason might be their alphabet it's a lot easier to write with a pen then with the roundabout way it can be done with qwerty keyboard the same would be true for quite a few other Asian languages and I was sort of speculating because of you know the symbol based languages where there's potentially thousands of characters that it could be hard to type and obviously I've never done this because I don't know those languages right on a regular keyboard or maybe just writing out the characters would be simpler yeah and I think we're made well we're making the assumption that in these countries in Korea saying the device would also come with a korean keyboard preinstalled right yeah but what you're saying is that for languages that have maybe you know a thousand characters that might be difficult right yeah i mean i can just imagine that on a keyboard having a hit multiple option shift command control to get to the you know the 400th page just remember having to do the n n yay in spanish always threw me off an icicle I could imagine trying to you know that's just twenty eight characters yeah no I mean I think it's a good point Martin yeah i mean it's it's certainly easier for the lot of the more complex looking characters at least to my eyes they look more complex but what do we know we're just stupid Americans all right we got one more email from mark who said I just want to compliment jmar on how well he's doing with his volume level thank you when I wrote the original email had no idea how much of a thing this was going to turn into the saga continues we actually had another email of someone saying the exact opposite of what you said mark he said that I in fact was not doing a good job and I still needed to raise my volume yet again but we chose not to believe him we did not yeah so mark thank you very much thank you go jmar all right and then we have a voicemail from Chris wanting to know it with a galaxy s2 getting ice cream sandwich my name is chris i'm curious if anybody has the information on when the samsung galaxy s3 will be getting ice cream so much and what other devices will be getting ice cream sandwich in the month ahead any information will be appreciated thank you I know the answer to this uh it's getting it on februari 30th that take well to get then uh I have no idea do you know know a funny thing i was telling these guys before went to the verizon store a while ago and yeah you know the guys that recognized me and said oh wats show and then they started quizzing me about when feature phones we're going to be released on verizon and I was wait which one of us works at verizon right again yeah so we don't we don't have inside information well I certainly don't and if we did we couldn't tell you because we would have signed an NDA right unless you come by with you know some special present a hefty briefcase kashani februari 30th huh wink wink we'll see you here um alright that's all I got for today anything else to say Oh amber think we're good all right well thanks for joining us if you want to get all sorts of crazy interesting Android news and rumors of releases for ice cream sandwich go to our blog at cnet com / android Atlas you can watch us every wednesday at ten a.m. pacific at cnet com / live except for next one say one will be a special time which will announce later you can email us android atlas at 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