Gadgetory

I'm Jessica doll court from cnet here in New York actually where the phone launched at an event last night and i'm joined by kent german in san francisco hello how are you I'm tired yes I imagine you were up pretty late last night yeah I was it's been a busy couple of days but a good couple of days and the event started I guess they do this we're not accustomed to event starting so late in San Francisco but i guess in New York this just happens all the time it's normal to have a seven o'clock start okay well um it was a very interesting event wasn't it it was extremely interested I was live blogging it with Roger and we were expecting something because it was the Radio City Music Hall but I don't think we were expecting quite the theatrics that we got where Samsung was basically creating its own Broadway show in order to tell the story in the futures at the galaxy s4 we seriously everybody who's there char tip can Maggie Riordan Sarah to on photos everybody pretty much thought that we were going to have the Rockettes because this was their venue but um yeah didn't show up yes now I wanted I want to broadcast dresses into Android costumes you know are with green androids dancing in a line I think that'd be pretty cool it's kind of like dude you okay lion right there yeah that's one good that would have been something to talk about um you know another thing that we were saying around the office is that you know how they have a whole campaign and they had the kid Jeremy in his box so here's kind of play a pivotal role but what we were thinking is how cool would it have been if they had to actually instead chosen to extend the whole super bowl commercials and have supper again and Paul Rudd there actually that would have been very cool I didn't like the sacral commercials another kind of funny but I eat I actually thought that the prequel to the super bowl commercial like the teaser post I thought that was better than the Super Bowl commercial they had yeah I'd agree on alright so I got you got the has a chance to handle the phone yeah I checked out the phone before the event and that was pretty cool and we were really rushed for to him there were a lot of people in there and there were a lot of different journalists to go through so it definitely didn't have quite as much I'm you know I could have spent hours they're looking at the phone there were so many features in there there's just no way to digest them all in the short amount of time that we had and even afterwards seriously you could not believe it we were sitting in these cues right these rows in an auditorium and as soon as it was over the MC said okay if you're in the first like four rows come to the ones in the front if you're anybody else go to the ones in the back well everybody took that to mean why don't we just go in this massive cattle call to the ones in the front so I had to push and shove and elbow people out of the way just to get out of the row we were just trapped yeah and I heard that it was hard to get out exactly it was yeah I think that's why was there so long I just couldn't leave pinned in well so you know a lot of people are asking about the release date and it seems like we you know we know a window right but we just don't know exactly when that's going to be correct correct last night was a global release and launched so they didn't want to well in one way they didn't want to preference any region by saying it's going to be launched blah blah blah sometimes they do that which tells me that they also just don't have it we do have the window of q2 so that's basically April and May samsung did say that they wanted to try to release the phone as quickly as possible in as many markets as possible so hopefully not where we saw like May first for the galaxy s3 or May eleventh whatever it was last year and then you know middle of June for the u.s. hopefully it will be a little bit tighter and won't be able to see those phones in other markets because it's the worst thing if the phone that you want shows up somewhere else months or weeks before you can get it well that's really the that's that's really one thing I was hoping for this phone i mean i was even looking beyond the specs and I said Samsung really needs to release this to a lot of carriers in a lot of markets and do it quickly and then all at the same time so we have this you know we don't have the scenario where it's verizon gets it may 14-18 t gets it may twenty first and then you know t-mobile gets at me 28 and then and then in the meantime retardation yes yeah and then in the meantime somebody else has released another phone that distracts us away from that one I don't know why they do that I think for production reasons but it just seems like it would be everyone to follow apples model announced the phone one week send it out the next week yeah so we still don't know so and we if you mind right into the carriers so for people that don't know the carriers that are going to get it in the US at least yeah US carrier so it's going to be the major big for carrier so that's verizon AT&T sprint and t-mobile / metro right since they're merging and also US cellular which got the galaxy s3 and the note 2 last time and then cricket is getting it right off the bat too and then actually also can't you wrote about ting getting it yeah this is a bizarre story because you know this was the night before that we this is the night before they haven't even happened and you know when we knew the galaxy s4 was coming but you know all of samsung instead of the invitation was the next galaxy phone so feeling on actually it could have been anything it could have been a tablet it could have been something else but and this carrier ting which is a MVNO that uses spread service so an MVA now if you don't know as a mobile virtual network operator that's a that's a carrier like horizon I'm not with sorry verizon virgin like boost where they don't operate their own solo network basically they rent space from a cellular network and they roll it out to answer them and then they usually have phones that are around a specific theme you know virgin is sort of like youth-oriented boosters tend to be a little more budget models but anyway ting said the night before the event we are going to carry the galaxy s4 when it comes out in a few weeks time and we're going to have the galaxy s3 mini and the HTC One you know which is a new phone so even before the night even for the event we a carrier saying hey we're going to get it which was just odd because usually that never happens and I don't know whether though is you know maybe they had an agreement of rice or Samsung to do that err maybe they just said you know we're just gonna do it ourselves because we want to drum up some publicity and of course they were very successful in that because I wrote a story but it was it was just a very odd thing about it um and it's wise that spurt was going to get it because they've gotten the note 2 and they've gotten the galaxy s3 so they were obviously going to get this phone yeah so anyway we'll see it a lot of phones which is good um in a lot of carriers yeah yes so oh wait I know we're getting some questions and seems like Matthew was wondering about and this is a question I have because it seems like it's not quite sure what's going on with it yet so we have two months like the galaxy s3 where we had two different models we had a 1.5 gigahertz version for the u.s. that was LTE and then we had a 2 Giga heard right was to get hers that was not processor and so we have two processors in this phone you can you know two versions of it so what are we going to see in which market do you do we know that yet samsung hasn't said anything really they have just said that there's going to be the quad core Qualcomm Snapdragon first they said fusion pro and then Qualcomm just literally 10 minutes ago released a statement saying that it's going to be the Snapdragon 600 series which was announced at CES we're trying to find out you know all these things like why the discrepancy y will be quad-core for some and why it will be the octa-core the Exynos 5 octa that Samsung's own ship in other markets and we're not sure which market gets wet so if we find the answer to the question of what the difference is between those chipsets it could be the cdma radio it could be LTE my guess is that the u.s. is going to get the Paul conversion just based on sort of what we've seen in the past with the u.s. getting Qualcomm and elsewhere getting something else and usually that's an LTE issue even though Google global LTE roaming will be a possibility with this phone I don't actually know which version I tested out the same time representatives that I was exposed to didn't seem to know what was in the phones that I was testing and to be honest we weren't testing games we were really testing and doing and so it seemed fast but it there I mean there are a couple benchmarks out right now I don't really know how useful those are because this was still pre production software so i think that when we actually get the full device in for review as one will be able to sit down and really contemplate the processing speeds yeah cuz you don't have enough time really to run a lot of spin marking tests or anything so i didn't have time to really test the camera mm-hmm it was more like let's quick look at all the new features and now please leave yes what so what exactly I've heard a company will assess what exactly is an octa-core phone our process Iranian right so instead of so quad-core processor has for application processing course CPUs basically unless one has eight so maybe that would octa but you never know great in theory I always imagined an octopus I don't know it's like an octa-core phone and I think about like all these tentacles coming out of the phone anyway um well I device anyone listening to Jessica wrote a really good piece as part of her smartphone some large column a few months ago there's miss about quad core phones and you know we think that I think that quad core phones are automatically can be faster about everything and so well tweet that out a little bit when we're done but it's a pretty good piece about quad core phone so I heard you to read it give you some background thanks yeah so in theory it's supposed to be much faster but in practice it really just depends on the quality of everything and how well it all works together sure you know you mentioned LTE roaming that's something that I'm really interested in about this phone is cuz you know LT mark lt's it's you know in the US has been around for a while it's it's gaining in other markets you know we have seen at office in singapore UK asia australia and they're getting to get LT more there but one thing that you know we see with a lot of LTE phones and this was true with the iphone 5 is that it wasn't necessarily transferable so if you had an LTE you could take the you could take the iphone 5 overseas you can make calls you can send data but you're going to be on 3g most of the time even if there's LTE in those markets LTE roaming sounds like a pretty big deal and if they can make it work yeah but we don't know a lot of specifics right about where we're like if i have a US phone for instance one from AT&T for instance would i be able to take it to UK would i be able to take it and use it in france or Australia so we don't know those specific my guess is more Asia like Korea for example and and you know are these the same bands that are being used will it be supported it sounds like it will be because that's what they're trying to do here so my hopes are high there yeah I think it's pretty cool though I'm really interested in that that you could get the same data speeds um and pay for them of course just wherever you go yeah yeah and one question I think it's interesting is Maurice del Prado is asking one concern I have is that the s4 has too many features eyeball tracking gestures that will make it slow and prone to problems and you've written about this a little bit that Samsung and this is a typical Samsung thing you said in your first take of they just kind of throw everything in the phone and not that that's necessarily a bad thing but do you think we could suffer from future overload and almost having just so that things get lost in the details so to speak definitely and that's a risk that Samsung's taking it's a calculated risk for them because their hope is that either the majority of people or some people will really glom onto one feature or another future and that for them will make the difference between buying that phone or loving mouth phone or buying another phone or ditching the galaxy s4 short tip kenna has written about this to a really good article that I believe she updated today as well about how Samsung can control its feature itís doesn't seem like Samsung wants to control a feature I this but it's definitely a problem you know and then you have something like the eyeball tracking that I think really captures everybody's imagination but in reality this is a very minor an optional feature that in my experience worked okay but not great and part of that could have also just been done its pre-release software part of it might be because that's just the way that it works it just depends i tried one camera feature and on the test unit that I had it didn't work at all I couldn't make it work Samsung people can make it work you're like well it works on this one and it did because they just showed it to me on that one but that's not the one that I had in my hand so some of these features if we can sort of get the idea of them now but it won't be anything really concrete until again we get the phone in our hands but as for all of the features I agree sometimes I even forget how to do it there's this one called group play and it's basically if you get all of your samsung galaxy s4 phones together in a room you can I guess do simultaneously or do simultaneous gameplay in a room share music share videos share photos so there has been something like this before it was like a group cast or a group chair I do like that idea kind of music just because just thought of having surround town in a room so I could picture that for a party but everybody has to have a galaxy s4 and the same taste in music exactly well it's funny this phone Sam sensing something big everyone that uses is or everyone that uses it has a lot of friends like that you're always surrounded by 20 people that you want to share all of your life with but yeah I also just remember one of the use case scenarios from the galaxy s3 we're like the scenario is we're all at a concert but we're standing in different places and we want to see what it looks like from each other's viewpoint mm-hmm I just thought like that just seems so silly because whatever happened I've never been able to devise reasons for that feature or some other ones like it but I guess what guess it's cool but it's there maybe enjoy your own view not someone else that's right um so what about which we think about this phone I got this question actually today is is it if you're a galaxy s3 owner and let's just say for instance that you are at a place in your contract we can extend a contract and get the discount on this phone you know they're all these carriers have different rules surrounding by that but do you think it's worth an upgrade my thought is not really uh you know maybe if it's you can get a really good discount on it but I don't see a lot in this phone that would make me stitch it and go upgrade if I had an s3 I agree with you I mean it's hard to say because I do and am definitely lured by the next new thing but in terms of features i wouldn't spend any money really because i don't think that the future differences are that great and some of the new software features are supposed to be able to come to the galaxy s3 so for example there's the Google s voice drive no not Google sorry what am I saying it's s voice it's samsung s voice drive so it's basically a dedicated driving doc app and you can give voice commands and pull up the weather call somebody hands-free and navigate to a certain location so it's a break away from the google earth i keep saying Google why am I saying Google from the samsung s voice and that specific for cars and maybe I kept saying Google because s voice in my experience with it previously was really terrible and it was a lot worse than google voice actions and a lot worse than Apple Siri but I did talk to some Samsung representatives last night and I tried out the future briefly and they said that they've put a lot of work into improving s voice now I was testing a driving app sitting in the middle of an auditorium and could not even get any GPS signal so really there are limitations to what my tests could cover um but it is one of those things I guess um but again if that comes to the galaxy s3 then you don't mean by the galaxy s4 what is your as far as the best voice I know that that was one of your big issues when your Galaxy s3 review that you just think it didn't it just didn't quite cut it as far as its effectiveness as far as you know how you can use it so did you and you said they've made improvements did you get any specifics on what they might have improved not yet I'm working on that ok yeah it was one of those features were like why I don't understand why they spent all that effort and money ain't paying engineers researching it they probably paid partners on the back end they could all of that effort into creating a product that just really wasn't anywhere nearly as good as Google's which was already on the phone part of the reason is because Samsung is just all about differentiation differentiation and getting ahead of the competition and offering something new they kind of want to steal some of Google's thunder Roger Cheng has written about that as well and you see that happening but I think they're also trying to play the long game with this in mind and maybe other s voice implementations in mind for future releases is that they're going to start with something they don't care if it's that bad because they'll improve it and then they'll create something that people actually want to use yeah well and Samsung I think more than some other some other Android manufacturer hansard manufactures really likes to put a lot of their own stuff in here and in these phones I mean you know HTC certainly has its own customized interface but we tend to like that one a little better and Motorola thankfully has moved away from motoblur so this distinction be a typical Samsung thing and for someone to follow Samsung like yourself I mean GG would you agree with that um yeah I would definitely so a couple people are asking about and we'll circle back to this for a second you know we we don't know exactly if the eight-core octa-core is going to come to the u.s. samsung us and provided that information and hopeful egg it looks like we might get the the Qualcomm chip in it that's what you said correct yeah but at the same time you know for the galaxy s3 we got the Qualcomm tip instead of the Samsung chip but for the galaxy note 2 we got the samsung chip so sometimes for my understanding is that the first go around on the chips you don't get everything you want and then as it gets developed they are able to add everything so it might be that for future devices we do get that octa-core I think that's what Samsung wants but then again you know Qualcomm is also probably going to follow suit they're just a little bit slower well I think that I think again it just seems like a chip is something you shouldn't really concentrate you shouldn't focus on too much like as far as that's your make-or-break spec because even this Qualcomm chip is going to be really fast where I mean yeah examine the jump up to I octa-core is you may not it's really not enough to be sort of a deal breaker i mean you're gonna want LTE on this phone you're going to want to make sure that it's out to a lot of people are a lot of carriers and yeah that is price well but it has so much else that I think the chip is something that we can you know still disappointing if we don't get the top one but I wouldn't make it a deal breaker certainly yeah I completely agree so here's one question from clifton PO about motion tracking and gestures which i would love to talk about so he asks will it be a standard on high-end phones this year or just something on samsung phones and actually LG tried to jump the gun a little bit by announcing this yesterday and the LG optimus g ro ro ro yes oh yeah actually announced that the day before right so there were all of these rumors i wrote about them Shara wrote about them all these rumors about it and then as soon as LG released that announcing that their phone would have it too that's when I thought a hot they definitely think that this is going to be in the device or they have knowledge that it's going to be in the device because they are pre-empting so there are already a lot of gestures motion gestures especially that are already in phones we've already seen some hands-free gestures to where if you wave your hand above basically I think it's the camera that's sensing it if you wave your hand above and it will advance through your gallery something like that so we've seen some of these some work better than others a lot of Samsung's motions and just really annoy me okay there's one where it's like tilt to Pam and all of these little alerts come up all the time and you have to say never show me this alert again and then no I don't want it you can always go into the settings and get it too but I just don't think it's very natural because your hand moves every which way when you're holding phone it Jocelyn sometimes you don't want to tilt to pan you just want to do it yourself so I think that some of them are good I really like the one where if you're looking at the screen while a video is playing and then you look away it will pause because I think that there is actually a use case for that so yes I think that motions and gestures are going to be part of the experience but i think that smart motions and gestures make more sense enter some of those have been around for a long time like flipping your phone over to muta call yeah i mean sony ericsson ericsson had those in phones god you know when like 2007-2008 I remember it's the S plane with those so that's been around a long time I do have to say Samsung's the first that i know of that's actually used sort of the eye tracking feature and that was actually in the samsung galaxy s3 with a little thing called smart stay where if the screen started dimming and you looked at it then it would stop dimming oh that's right remember that yeah and that's that's here too they've just expanded it Randall's asking Randall Evans was asking if I ball tracking can be it could be go to mobile ads so if you look away like a mobile ads plane if you look away and then it will start playing again I wouldn't put it past them but yeah what to see very astute yes uh yeah there's I so was i can't remember two weeks ago i think i was right before more will congress so they begin this month HTC just introduced the one which is there a big new smartphone and if you followed yesterday's press conference GC his Twitter account was sitting out some snarky very snarky tweets surrounding the event about calling it off off off Broadway and so forth but the question from Dustin and Justin Murphy is how would you compare it to the HTC One personally I haven't held the HTC One yet but Brian Bennett who works in New York and covers phones with us he's held it and you know everyone is very positive on the HTC one's design as far as its aluminum body and this young with galaxy phone samsung a common theme throughout them as they use plastic and samsung says that they do that for they can mass mark thick for keep them cheap they can it's an easier material to work with to really make the devices mass market and distribute them but you know those those metal phones do feel a lot better they feel a lot more secure and but Jessica you've held both of them correct both phones yeah um I was very excited I cornered Brian and forced him to give me the HTC One and overwhelmingly you look at the phone you're just like wow that's a nice device it looks really good it does look premium and it's the kind of fun that you want to hold and as much as it doesn't matter what's on the outside of the phone it matters what's on the inside sometimes it really just comes down to which phone do you want to hold and i found this with the HTC windows phone 8x and the nokia lumia 920 the Lumia 920 has the better lots of stuff you know it's more advanced the camera was better you know sort of like smaller details but the HTC when his phone 8x was the one that I wanted to hold in my hand there's just something about the design and the materials and finish that really drew me so it doesn't matter I think you're right i mean I the plastic turns out is pretty durable in most situations but there is a nice psychological thing about having a middle phone in your hands it just feels a little weighty and as you see throughout its history is always built pretty well crafted devices there's the g1 well there was that but if we can give them a pass on that it was the first android phone there's a lot of things about that they weren't great but that was their opportunity to wow everyone instead they made this thing with the boldest chin and a stupid keyboard trough and I hated it how that flips kind of up and over it was very strange but we'll see and welcome as soon as we get both devices review you know will certainly do a good evaluation between them well one thing that strikes me too is that HTC was very intelligent in pre-empting Samsung I think to show we're not just following we're also innovating too because what they did they already have some of those camera features like the one where if you jump and it shows every stage of your jump samsung just announced that but HTC has that they have a video you know and still picture option and they actually have an IR blaster as well so they have that TV controlling capability it's actually built into i believe it's built into the power button on the front so that's even better design I think yeah yeah I said it was uh and then we're HTC people walking through the line when you were getting there I've heard I heard that but my side of the building everything was complete and total chaotic madness there were apparently three different media lines but four different kinds of media so we were originally in the broadcast media line and then we were told to leave we had a little past that was supposed to give us an faster so they told us to leave and go to a different line so it was like Roger and I went with some of our other crew to a different side of the line and then Shara and Maggie stayed in their line but then they were kicked out of their line and moved to another line but then they still got in there first it was awful but apparently on their side of the building HTC was passing out Pringles and water it's a very odd combination for a cold day but it was really smart because it was five o'clock six o'clock and i'll be here over the loudspeaker is that you can't bring in food or water so charred Roger were saying or char was saying that a lot of people didn't actually accept the snacks because they were so concerned about getting in and it turns out I snuck in lots of snacks in my backpack and it was fine that was just sort of the default rules but when we got to the fight after the event they gave us all lunch bags with food in it you could call it food it wasn't very good food but I mean it's not like there was a new food rule but anyway I thought it was a really smart move by HTC they also had a el visit LG who had their time square spoofs as well oh yeah you know and one thing we have to consider with the HTC one of course is that Samsung has a tremendous amount of money and to market this phone to distribute bit to advertise it everywhere it wants to and it's advertising budget is a lot bigger than HTC's and it's reached its ability to reach people it's a lot bigger and you know that certainly shouldn't define it certainly shouldn't be a real determinant as far as what phone is more successful but in fact it is so that's one that's a big thing that HTC is gonna have to work in against it especially with the one it can get it out to as many carriers in as many places and as quickly even if it was a better device then that's really going to be a struggle for HTC so Roger had a really great coup he spoke to HTC president jason mackenzie last night right after the event and every competitor was watching this you better believe that LG nokia HTC they were all watching this and probably equally so he actually got quoted saying i went from laughing feeling embarrassed about the presentation and it goes on to tell how here i want to find this exact quote but it was something like each according to HTC Samsung spends like more than three times the combined budget Wow all the way editor's I'm still trying to find out where it is but it's something like that you guys should find the article because it's really great yeah yeah let's wait it out after this so well Google+ it even yes we both well it's you know I want to sounds like we're getting close to wrapping up but you course Jessica you know Jessica will have a lot more coverage of this phone will have a full review when we get one we just don't know when that is hopefully the next couple months but we'll chop a grateful review and we'll have a lot more about it hopefully get more hands-on time with it and a lot a lot more coming yeah thank you for joining us today thanks for your questions if you have any more you can always tweet us google+ facebook us email us yeah jessica how can they reach her on twitter at twitter i'm at Jade all court and jessica doll court at Google+ and I have a public facebook page so you can also stock me that way yeah at kent german on twitter and i have a google Plus page and then I also have a public facebook page so but always check back to seeing it for continuing galaxy s4 coverage and all kinds of coverage on the HTC One anything else coming down the foam rail because there's a lot coming up in the next few months all right thanks everyone talk to you later