Gadgetory

Mobile World Congress the largest mobile conference in the rest West West is running februari 27 through march first in barcelona spain that's next week and it is here that some of the hottest phones around the globe our first announced and we already expect to see at least 21 smartphones and tablets emerge with more surprises sure to come this week we take a closer look at the Android and Windows devices that we think we'll see and we also share some news stories of the day and answer your burning questions so this is dialed in cnet cell phone podcast I'm Jessica dual-core joined by Lynn LA in San Francisco hello and by Brian Bennett in New York hey guys and Steven Beecham is our technical producer so welcome everybody okay so Mobile World Congress as I mentioned is coming up where you are going to be there on the ground and I'll be there with kent german we've got some news folks as well Lynn and Brian are going to be covering it from New York and San Francisco so we've got all time zones covered and some of the themes that will definitely be emerging are going to be quad core and ice cream sandwich for real this time I swore we were going to hear a lot more ice cream sandwich phones for CES and that just didn't happen not as such the major disappointment failed prediction but we swear they're happening so guys you know we don't have time to talk about all 21 leaked or rumored devices that we think are coming but what are you most excited to see well I mean I'm definitely excited to see anything with quad-core in it so I know we talked about some HTC devices that may be coming out this couple tablets that may come out with quad-core definitely want to see that I want to see I'm very curious and I'm sure a lot of our listeners very curious exactly how fast quad-core will be over over traditional or I guess boring ordinary dual core phones that are out now so yeah that's true i mean a lot of it does come down to the processor and to how tasks are managed and it's not exactly clear if quad-core automatically means double that's what it means in theory but is that what it's really going to come out to be and to see quad-core perform arm versus some single core processors for example with Windows Phones that's true and also i mean there's the the LG optimus vu or are you boo i know i want to save ooh cuz it do it just sounds like French or something but but I believe that is supposed to be a quad core right no no it's supposed to have I big massive 5-inch screen and it's supposed to be sort of LG's answer to the Galaxy Note so that'd be interesting to see how that plays out so that one has a stylist as well right Layton you've kind of been keeping your eye on this one the LG optimus view yeah yeah it's a it's really it's kind of it's really big ok and I guess I'm just really excited because it's just another contender for the galaxy note so the Galaxy Note won't be the only one that's coming out there with the stylus with the big screen and this will be good for someone who doesn't want exactly what the Samsung Galaxy offers and this is something from LG that people could be really excited about so this kind of makes me wonder you know are the stylus is really gonna are we going to have a resurgence of this I mean LG and Samsung pretty much had to know what each other was doing in order for these 5-inch stylus things to come out um pretty soon after each other I I guess samsung had like a nine month lead on LG since they introduced their is at the ephah conference in September but we also heard about the samsung galaxy note 10.1 which would actually be a tablet so it seems like the phone makers are trying to kind of create this category maybe not around a certain size but around a stylus that lets you do more with it and trying to get the developers on board to come up with interesting ways to interact with your phone yeah I'm not sure soliant buying this sort of thing Yeah right phone tablet phablet i don't know i mean brother you also took a look i I mean you and I have both used the samsung galaxy note for the last week what are you thoughts on the stylus and just using it in general well you know I'm right now I'm working on a little story on how I'm surviving after a week of just using the note as my primary phone or tablet or whatever it is and my feelings that the stylus is actually you know what it's actually not so bad as not as not as bad as I thought it would be because i'm using what they call the s-pen to you know write notes into to do as long as you stay within the little grid there that you're supposed to enter text in with the pen it actually does right and and recognized your handwriting decently well though it does get confused and that's that's really annoying it's not it's not as easy as writing on on a piece of paper I agree with you there and i actually did sort of an in-depth writing test since I actually do write things by hand yeah and I totally agree what you said to because I read a read your post as well I noticed that yeah you can accidentally hit the capacitive buttons or other buttons on the side like if your finger brushes against them on the bottom of the phone when you're writing you know you have to be careful it's it's almost like you know you have to really kind of learn how to write all over again in a way which is which kind of defeats the purpose but it is it is cool to say go into Evernote or one of these sort of note-taking apps and be able to jot down quick little reminders for yourself in your you know using the pen type of device and to me that that actually really feels good you know it feels like I'm actually writing down on my notepad but it still has some way to go especially since you have to use a samsung keyboard to actually put in the pen input you can't just go from the android keyboard or swipe or something right exactly yeah so so it's sort of not quite as you know where I'd like it to be but so like it or not we're definitely going to see the same thing in the LG optimus view and we're definitely expecting to see that at Mobile World Kong LG has another phone that leaked as well then why don't you take us through that one real fast yeah it's called the LG x3 and basically screenshots of it got leaked and it says that there it will be running a Tegra 3 chip which is also a quad-core processor yeah and it will be the only what's up for what we know the only other phone besides the HTC One X that will have a quad-core processor right and so this HTC phone that we're talking about Brian I gave us a low down on that could be called the 1x right but used to be known called a million other name edge yeah never exactly aliases yeah you know the endeavor or the crane the edge supreme I didn't even hear that one before you makes me think of fun I think that was about its name for like five minutes well you know I don't know as long as it has you know dual-core that's that's pretty much the primary kanpur quad-core sorry course are see I was so conditioned already I know dual-core was was it a year ago dual core phones were the end-all and be-all now it is quad-core I can't even you know say that fast enough but uh but yet so I'm supposed to have quad core power arm and and actually you know the whole thing is that this device they teased it at a mobile world congress in teaser invite that they sent out saying that it's going to you know revolutionize the way everybody computes and everything like that and that press event i believe is going to happen on the 26 at 9pm I think that's local time correct I that sounds about right I think so I think someone's are all befuddled at my calendar and like I enter it in the Spanish time zone but it shows up on my calendar and pacific time so i don't know what anything is yeah i mean all it says it kind of has this cryptic postcard with a bunch of pictures and you know sort of pleasing look at this given a picture of a cat in one corner and a raspberry and flowers flowers a flower theme along the borders yeah index finger pointing a beach I mean you know hey that sounds baby nari yeah insert revolutionary product here you know um so down oh that phone we expect a 4.7 inch screen nvidia tegra 3 quad-core processor what else do we have there um let's see basically camera it may not be the only one it's gonna have a buddy or two oh you mean with a 12 megapixel camera oh well that was the Titan to that we saw could definitely be seeing more camera power we could be seeing that had actually a 16 megapixel camera Oh the Titan too so we could see something like that here yeah I mean it seems like 12 is going to be the normal maybe I think I mean I think you can still have a perfectly good 8 megapixel camera I think they've got to be careful with 12 and 16 not to lose inequality regression would be the worst for all these phone makers that's true so there was also the HTC one s / ville / maybe primo I know that was named going around for a while so that one also has 1.5 gigahertz but that's a dual-core Qualcomm processor right right that's right that's right dual-core 1.5 gigahertz dual-core for like I said 4.3 inch display and you know actually I don't think there's any word yet as to if it's gonna get an ice cream sandwich or not I would expect yeah most of the phones coming out of the show to have a better image on this point exactly yeah I mean you better get I should sandwich at this point everyone's been waiting and waiting and waiting okay so what else there's also the droid 3 incredible that we heard something about which was a to use Lin's favorite new phrase spied on the Y in the wild it's in a lot of other thing he's at terminal a lot of other things it's out very wig in the abyss in space running loose and uh yeah in the in the fly me you can't really say in the flesh yeah in somebody's somebody's holding it so what about this phone what do we know about it um probably Ice Cream Sandwich hey right ready a dual-core 1.2 gigahertz processor 8 megapixel camera Verizon Verizon Verizon Verizon isn't having a press conference yeah that's kind of is it's kind of interesting because you figure verizon it seems so non you're not a European carrier so it's interesting that that would leak ahead and yet where was verizon last year they were at Mobile World Congress with a huge showing that's crazy though I mean that's so wild why would they you know what's there what's their purpose there just to get international are they expanding or no I mean they're US carrier I think they're just doing it because mobile world congress is such a huge yes yes they're gonna be around 1000 people there it's gonna be nany everybody so sorry I said everyone's trying to make an impact there to catch you know make sure that everyone is paying attention because everyone's gonna be talking about I suppose exactly and the press are all there with their fancy new cameras that's true so we know that Sony is going to have something they have bought out sony ericsson and their partner in a joint venture and now we're going to have sony xperia phones they're having a press conference they've also registered for the name for the trademark xperia sola so not sure what that's going to bring but something nokia is also going to be having a press conference and they're going to have something clients at least one maybe more Samsung has already come out with the galaxy ace 2 and galaxy mini to information and we already know that ZTE has a couple phones up its sleeve including I love this one mimosa mimosa it's very nice I don't actually know if I love that or if I just love the Moxie of using mimosa I think that's the next trend maybe it's gonna everything you know is going to be cocktails and instead of name-brand yeah actually that's true maybe that's not I see your jelly bean and I raised you mimosa I have a CT Tom Collins I have whiskey yeah that's right HTC bourbon you just can't call it sours whatever you do can you think it leaves a sour taste in the mouth sour is sweet so lame so um actually I'm just gonna say what's on this list but really quickly we also caught wind of LG also coming out with some new Optimus devices with ice cream sandwich two of them with ice cream same other than the view yeah like I mean it's interesting it's rumor but it was taken from LG site I would quick post on it but it looks like the site link has disappeared and it was basically the optimist it's part of the LSL style lineup it's gonna have like three devices the the style it took at the El the optimus s 7 I think it's gotta go back and look but it's basically like three devices with one is going to have a four-point a four-point-oh inch screen 4.3 inch screen those two are going to have ice cream sandwich and then a smaller one that's going to have like a 3.2 inch screen sir they more high-end or more mid-range there's two it's basically like three devices one's going to be high-end one's going to be I guess mid-range like the amounts of phone yeah and then the other one is definitely low-end yes right more portable you know and its own it's only gonna have gingerbread so so yeah but of course that's that's L nothing nothing new should be coming out with gingerbread unless it is cheap cheap cheap which ad it sounds pretty cheap so let's see if LG has those three up to my and the view and the x3 LG could be a big winner which makes sense because CES was a really slow show for them but we're not hearing anything about motorola yeah it doesn't look like they're gonna have anything outside of the stuff that came out of yes which is not a surprise because they said they were going to slow things down a little bit and we definitely are going to see something Xperia come out of Sony as Sony gets more aggressive in the mobile phone category okay so a stick with us next week and stick with us now we're just going to go on a short break and we'll come back with news of the day we are back you are listening to dialed in and we've got some quick hits news from the day and an earlier lot or later last week for example the samsung galaxy s2 love fest continues this time US cellular gets their version of the insanely popular phone that has so far already sold over 30 million devices worldwide am speaking of US cellular they are pushing ahead with their 4g LTE plans right now they only have a 3g network and that will change sometime in the near future in other news HTC will grant more us phones with ice cream sandwich because gingerbread is so old and it will add for Verizon Wireless models to its lineup and they're going to be due out soon we don't know when though and in law making news feds say to automakers they should block drivers from texting and tweeting and surfing the US Department of Transportation has proposed guidelines that would limit driving activities to just driving as we should be do you think and next we've got DISH Network's actually looking to shop their new or at least their spectrum out to other folks who may be interested in they're looking for a waiver from the FCC to end hopefully they can farm out that spectrum to other folks maybe LightSquared perhaps since they were denied by the FCC to expand their network and then also we've got some news from blackberry from rim blackberry playbook OS to actually is out today yes which does anyone care I don't know yeah you care if you have a playbook I guess if you got I didn't like a $99 fire sale that's true that's true apparently it only brings the OS up to the level it should have been when it first launched and that basically adds email and contacts and calendar access we already built in insane what a concept rim it's awesome and also maybe a few android support for android apps though all i care about personally is kindle or some sort of google book reader or something like that and i'll be said so back in review world 1 review last week that we didn't talk about in the previous show and that was the Pantech Burst 418 tea I took a look at this one but Lin actually knows it very well because she saw it at CES it comes in two colors ruby red and titanium i think this is a really great phone it's fifty dollars for AT&T it's got LTE it's got a 4-inch really beautiful super amoled display it's got Pantex interface on top of that which I found pretty easy to use very friendly you know it's it's similar to the other ones with the unlock screen and things like that so you can do there aren't a lot of surprises with this phone I just think its overall really nice and it's got sort of a stylish design that's a really nice bill to it and i love the backing of the the wood with the grain finish that's it yeah it's plastic but it has this veneer yeah and I mean for fifty bucks you'd be probably pretty happy with a plain old plastic phone and I feel like pantech really actually tried to do something with it so call quality wasn't that good battery life also not as great as it should be um we're going to continue doing tests on that but i think that the design is really solid the features are really i mean it's got a dual-core 1.5 hurts processor and this is really hard to get 450 bucks we're seeing a lot more phones like that 18 t is starting to make a name for itself as a destination for this kind of budget phone there's a lot of competition but for 50 bucks it's pretty good it'd be really good for a little bit more than 50 bucks to four ninety-nine dollars but i think the fact that it's fifty dollars is going to get people interested in a brand that has so far cruised under the radar a little bit so let's see what are you guys reviewing in the next week i have 2 ZT phones that have moves music included it's the ZTE chorus and the ZTE score that's coming up Brian you got anything well I've actually a whole bunch of headsets which something that people don't think about a lot probably but yes as these you know device has become more and more like multifunctional you know bluetooth headset is actually quite a interesting device to use right now I'm checking out the Jabra sport which is a ruggedized bluetooth wireless headset just reviewed the Jabra supreme which is just a plain mono headset with fancy features and I hope to get some more into so stay tuned and let's see last week we were lamenting that we didn't have any email love but this week we actually have too many so we will share with you like we promised since we owe to you guys we begged so hard for them it seems like everybody was on vacation the week before but this week everybody is back and asking lots of questions so the first question we have that we received was from Tom I believe that's how you pronounce name I will check at that ok awesome and well you never know it could be thumb maybe could be well anyway so tom says people thommas thank you mamas mamas um maybe after a few cocktails after their drinking or ZTE with mimosa yeah my HTC bourbon um so yeah so so Tom actually is asking about whether or not you know he heard our podcast last week and he notice that we talked about QWERTY sliders and he was really interested in in court he actually portraits slider which which to me is very strange but I what he said was it was ever so briefly raised by me and then shot down by Brian right I'm like you know Kourtney's uh you know portrait sliders well he doesn't like the torch which which makes sense um but then you know actually it's interesting because well I haven't seen any qwerty sliders or even just 40 portrait QWERTYs that don't slide yeah or just any bar style yeah it's really been a you know it's a dying breed but um he actually has a follow-up question as well he wanted to know specifically about using going over to t-mobile um and he's also eyeing some windows devices specifically the Lumia 800 but it's a little too expensive with five hundred dollars and he's looking for something that has a bit more memory than the Lumia 710 which he definitely likes but it only has eight gigs of memory and that's it that's a tough question i have to say and I was looking around and I their windows phone so they don't have expandable memory yeah I think you don't have online storage hmm or or you know some of them come with with expandable we're not really expandable but they have internal memory that is pretty high up to 16 gigs but I mean so that that card is locked down I was looking at some of the other devices that you might want to check out I know that there believe it or not there's the HTC hd7 which was for tmobile a little while ago it has 512 megabytes internal but it does have a 16 gigabyte non-removable ram non-rural storage that's what I think t mobile isn't actively selling anymore but you wouldn't find that elsewhere ebay craigslist exactly yeah hopefully you can pick that up I mean I even thought about well hey what if you take an old hd2 which you know one of the devices that I was into I remember that phone came with a 16 gig card pre-loaded because I came with transformers two or something I hate to say it oh yeah no I hate to say it but a 18 t really seems to be the niche for windows phones yeah it seems like they're becoming the flagship for that but I would love to see t-mobile get more yeah i mean he's on I'll tell and he was trying to see if even a non lock device would work on alltel but as I think I think I'll tell is on verizon's cdma network so yeah doesn't seem like you'll have much luck there but so anyway you know good luck to you maybe check out the the hd7 if you can get one for pretty cheap or even an hd2 that maybe you can talk to someone into parting ways with and it hasn't been beat up like the one I have good advice from Brian and we have another email from a t-mobile customer with 16 months left on their contract and this here he asked if um they want to change her his out they want to change this person wants to change to out the LG g2x to another Android phone with a larger screen without losing 4g speed and they're asking us do we know if we could get an unlocked Galaxy Nexus or galaxy no and still be able to use 4g on a t-mobile t-mobile network uh yeah you can get them unlocked GSM they're more expensive they should be they won't be optimized for t-mobile sometimes you do get speed degradation best-case scenarios you can use it on the hspa+ network the other part of the question was are there other large screen android phones except the samsung s2 that we can recommend and i would say that the MAS 4G and the sensation 4g have 4.3 inch qhd displays so those are really the large screen android phones in existence right now there was a yeah it was the nokia lumia 800 that if you buy it unlocked you get like 2.5 g speeds for tmobile that you get 3g speeds for eighteen t so it's not always created equally so you should definitely do some digging on that but t-mobile will know and and they'll be able to tell you where other people will be able to tell you exactly what you should expect with an unlocked phone and another reader asks um well actually oh actually before we get to that let's have an exciting um commenter who were called and left us a voicemail we said we would read them and and we're going to play it here we go hey guys this is mal from the Midwest love dialed in listen to it every week I just thought I'd throw maybe historical perspective in here the last podcast I listened to you from februari 13 you're talking about the Galaxy Note the five plus inch phone is interesting I know if you all remember but the first galaxy tab which I think was Santa inches in Europe was also phone that function was disabled in America so just sort of interesting it's just really the same stuff with multiple different sizes so um you know the notes and Austin device and it helped me a group of people to love it a lot of people won't bother with it thanks Mel we've got another question that I interrupted reading so take it away Lynn oh no this one was coming from a reader who wants our opinion on huawei mercury on cricket wireless what do we think about the network they've been thinking that they want to make they want to join the network they don't want to make a transition to a big company so what is and they don't care about 4G because they're usually on Wi-Fi so what do we what kind of phones do we recommend or what do we think about the network I definitely reviewed the huawei mercury and I actually gave it three and a half stars and it's one of Huawei is higher end devices released in the u.s. it has an 8-megapixel camera android 2.3 gingerbread front facing camera 1 point 4 gigahertz processor or call quality i was pretty happy with testing in on crickets roaming network battery life wasn't so great and the data steep speeds were pokey but if you're on Wi-Fi then then that's good I think that cricket has some pretty good deals there's no move music on this but I don't think that you know if you were not expecting to do a lot of data surfing and ah well with the data network and you do expect to use a lot of Wi-Fi then I think it's a pretty solid device and it is off contract so you pay a little bit more up front it's a 250 full retail but a while ago when I reviewed it it was 180 after fifty dollar mail-in rebate and twenty dollar web discount so it's possible to get it for a little bit less what what actually just said accuracy what network does what kind of technology does cricket use turn remember down crickets got a 3g network is it that you yeah you may oh yeah they write on they have a national partnership with sprint so whenever they're outside of the you know their home footprint actually they also have deals with like QVC and Best Buy so you can buy some of their phones like the ones that Lynn is going to be reviewing next week you can buy some of those phones from best buy for example and so there's no way to carry it out of area yeah there's no way to get it unlocked device I guess I mean why not using by the Huawei honor which is the global version of the mercury and you can get that unlocked but is it gsm um that one yeah probably yeah or maybe I saw some posts people are talking about you can maybe even and this is on earth is true but you can maybe figure out how to unlock a sprint device to roam on on another carrier's network so maybe that's an option too but I don't know if I'm finally spurt would take that yeah that's crazy I you can usually do that I mean that there was another network um sprint supports a lot of mva knows so basically other companies that use sprint's network in a secondary fashion to sort of offer service and you can't just take a sprint phone which is locked specifically to Sprint's own branded network you can't just take your sprint phone to another one of these networks or MVNOs you have to have an unlocked phone yeah i mean i read i read some stuff and it sounded pretty shady so I don't want to wreck the brain totally recommend you should do this right now I think you should recommend i think i should hack sprint's network I i'm imagining legal listening with this right now you know oh boy there we go let's see we have actually a cousin of draw in our chat room says that you can take a sprint verizon phone to metro pcs and have them hack it oh yeah into metro pcs and cricket so there you go play with your own life life in your hands so we have a one more readers comment or one readers email that we're going to read today sure it's uh it's basically someone from all the way from Syria which is pretty pretty amazing Omar reach out to us and wanted to know basically he's really interested in the galaxy note um but it's really expensive about seven hundred dollars u.s. I'm assuming so he wanted to let us know about that that he's really into that device and also he's eyeing the sony ericsson xperia pro as well so you know has great he says it has a great qwerty keyboard and it's it's closed or on par with to the droid 3 or droid 4 so i don't know if you guys have used anything like that or if you love it let us know and we'll put your feedback on air the subtext i'm getting from omar is quit your complaining about how much you have to spend on phones because it's their unsubsidized in many parts of the world so seven hundred dollars is really par in Syria and other countries a lot of other countries where carriers don't subsidize it we definitely have sort of an interesting typical situation in the u.s. here with our carriers who have a stranglehold on us for the best phones but hey i don't know if i'm complaining about that exactly because I would rather probably pay 200 or 300 for a high-end phone and sign a contract personally then pay seven hundred dollars every time I want to switch yeah that's a lot that is a lot of money though I think the only phone i would pay that much money for would be something I would i know would always get updated with the latest software oh really do you have a phone in mine are you getting something maybe the Galaxy Nexus perhaps he says quietly so that is our show that's our mobile world congress preview lynn and brian are going to be holding down the fort next monday at our usual time of 10 am pacific and 1 p.m. eastern and add six hours from that to get barcelona time so join them next week where they'll be sharing all of the news we're going to be hearing most of what we know on Sunday and Monday so they will have a lot to talk about and see how many of these devices actually came to light so join us next week send us an email dialed in at cnet com questions comments leave us a voicemail at 1866 4022 638 we will probably play it and check out our continuing continuing blog dialed in cnet com we will have a special section of the site for mobile world congress coverage so check that out we'll have links it's just easier that way and then listen to all of our podcasts that cnet produces podcast cnet com thank you very much for listening and join us next week bye bye Roz