Gadgetory

welcome to this very special edition of the dialed in podcast at CES we are alive here we've got the whole cell phone crew I'm Jessica's all court senior editor at cnet joining by Brian Bennett yes Brian Ben and I also review phones for cnet com we've got kent german inland law and what we're going to do we're going to tell you about all of the phones that we're seeing here so basically you guys what have you been seeing in terms of themes what's showing well I think we're seeing a lot from minor players or at least players that we don't really know a lot about we don't usually hear about it CS you know but traditionally it's been motorola HTC nokia nokia nokia a big thing last year Samsung we have one from sony ericsson well to their kind of the same phone and then we saw a lot from alcatel and huawei and CTE so a lot of smaller players that were used to dealing with in the United States they don't really have a huge presence with a lot of real of high-end smartphones but they did make a presence here definitely what else are we going to see in terms of the designs in the upcoming year well I mean I can say that I've seen a lot of phones especially leading up to the show that have flush screens and edge to edge panels and also a lot of phones with glass you know back plates which can be a little dangerous especially the way I treat my phones so it's interesting because it's sony ericsson xperia z i keep on a colony to end for some reason you know it does have the glass on the back which you know that came out on the iphone and that got a lot of you know i think people now complain but they said you know it's really dangerous there's a lot of people breaking it so it's interesting they made that choice right because it makes it look premium but then if you put a case on top of it you're kind of covering up the thing that you wanted to see in the first one case on it because it's just gonna glass it's gonna break so i don't know what there's nothing there but it's definitely gonna fall and it's gonna break absolutely a lot of other things that we've seen our colors that's like really surprising that we don't just see black and white and with the ZTE grand s it comes in a lot of finishes there's like a matte and glossy finish but there's also yellow red pink and mint blue and Xperia charger blazer yeah last night when I looked at the lenovo k900 which is a new phone from Lenovo announced yesterday that has a fast intel processor they had a copper one and actually you might think it's really got Ian you know I got just too much light but it was actually pretty cool i liked it i don't know but it was sort of a special version they had to be in a box and i did get to touch it at one point but it is one black I've ever seen a copper phone before diamond-encrusted yes copper no I would hate for it to turn green though you know copper turns green when it's out in the Sun for too long so anyway but I did like that I thought it was pretty cool so we're also seeing a ton of really large screen phones for example I've got this huawei ascend mate right yes 6.1 inch screen it is massive it is the size of my face you could just put in LeBrons hands to make it look really small back what is the word we're not supposed to call it phablet I like it one of our long it dialed when we have dialed in podcast one of our most loyal listeners hated the word phablet and said that we couldn't use it but it is kind of a word though it's but I don't think there's a better way to describe these things out there tabloids the phones it's my favorite portmanteau like the perfect combination of those words it is quite perfect I wish I thought of it myself first I almost did but I think the point is that we're going to start seeing these things they're not just going to be an anomaly anymore they are going to be the phones that we see on the market a lot of 5 inch screens a lot of 6 inch screens 5.5 5.3 and a four-inch screen or 4.3 inch screen or 4.5 inch screen it is going to seem a lot smaller yeah i mean remember when smartphones first come out you know there were three point five 3.75 to think how small that is now I mean that's just soon well yeah the first many iphones for 3.5 and that was I I look back on something I had written in 2007 talking about how that was an enormous display yes and back then three was the minimum and now it's sort of like four is the minimum so it is interesting right because we definitely have the touch also high high resolution so 1080p HD is going to be the standard for premium phones there were a lot of them out there they're coming right I'm not just to mention the grand s again this is a full HD phone again here are the colors but this is like the yeah it's the it's like everyone everything's look like a little bit of the Lumia a little bit but all these colors and it's the edge to edge screen I are talking about and it's just kind of big it's really big but a lot of people like that and now we're seeing like the original iphone it's too small so everyone so I'm wondering why it's taken so long to kind of cut down on that bezel right a lot of the times the screens were smaller you have a lot of housing on the side of it you didn't have an edge to edge but it seems like that's something that we could have had years ago we're only seeing it now really component the manufactures are getting better making components smaller things like batteries things like antennas I mean antenna you know usually it takes up so much space because you sit around all the sides or it's down at the bottom or maybe it's up at the top and they're making those things a lot smaller they're making the sim card a lot smaller with the micro sim and the nano SIM so and that of course helps to make the battery bigger but a consequence of that also is that they are able to take that display and really bump it up and make it nice so also quad-core processors those are going to be the new standard for high-end Android phones in Windows Phones they just announced support for multi-core so we're seeing dual-core with those you're going to see a lot more quad core nvidia and paul com had some quad core news samsung also is developing a chip there's a new player called mediatek well they're not new to chipsets but they're new to quad core they're out of Taiwan so we're going to start seeing some phones like that too there's an alcatel phone that was announced here that is not only the thinnest phone on the market right now I think it comes in it for the next week for the next week it's and then there's to be something else but yeah it's like 0.25 inch thick it's really really slim and that also is the first one to have this MediaTek processor and processors are important of course because it matters on how smooth the video you're watching is or the game they are playing and how quickly your tasks actually complete so that's going to be a big selling point so we've actually seen a lot of the handsets why don't you share with us some of the favorite ones that you guys have seen well the first one I saw was a sony ericsson xperia z and i think Brian's got a kind of a special demo for us here it's pretty exciting here we go this guy's is the this is the Sony Xperia Z was announced at the show here it's actually one of the nicest Sony phones I've seen a long time as you can tell it has that same edge to edge panel here very flat the buttons are flush with the sides of the phone and also on except for that at start back yes that's the power called out this power button here to you know highlight it with a you know a big silver circle I don't you can see that from here that guy's an audience and online you probably can't tell but this is actually a really classy looking phone with some interesting details on the edges that you really see it up close Sony is usually very good with their displays they always have been and this is a great example of something that you really bright really bright rich and vibrant you know the thing about display of course is how does affect the battery life how to spec the processor but I think this one has a lot of promise I want to know how this fishbowl is going to affect battery life basically one of the features besides this being a quad-core Snapdragon device HD resolution screen all that it also is water-resistant so technically you could drop this phone into this thing of water here just like this it's on there it goes I call it well you know you know I'm not gonna sit here for like 30 minutes yeah i think we wrote a liver unfortunately that's true but you know you can see that it's going to be fine hopefully there won't be in too many bubbles coming out of it as it sits there so we can take it off green still on screen still up on everything basically this is water resistance not waterproof but it's supposedly will you know can survive a little dunk and that's good especially if you know judging how many people actually use their phones in the bathroom which you know i'm not admitting i'm just saying that people just maybe not in the pool though if you drop it in the pool you might have a little problem you don't want to go diving with it you don't want to go snorkeling this snap phone you don't really do much with it underwater anyway so that's true yeah listen to me as I can't make a call I've stream your fish encounters what about Lynne I'm Lou you away I have the ZTE grand s right here now the specs are very good for ZTE phones I mean it has a quad core and a 5-inch screen it's nothing that we haven't seen before on other phones but this is high-end when it when it comes to ZT it has the whole new realm or they don't usually go for the highway yeah it's a in the u.s. it's usually known for the the mid to entry-level phone send them metro pcs or cricket or additionally other prepaid phones and small android phones but that's right like this yeah this is like in the fray for the for the high-end phones in the US and there is no carrier announcement yet and there isn't oh sorry there's no carrier announcement or pricing but as you can see it has a really nice screen and it ZT put on its users user interface there it's called me favor usually we see like a really skinless kind of Android experience this one is running jellybean so it's so you do know it is running like a recent version of Android and it's just really a really nice phone on the back there's a 13 megapixel camera which is you know really high and yeah and this basically it so it's really good it's it's a unibody construction so it's very solid and if we get an availability on that one I don't I can remember um it's going to come in China in the first quarter or either the end of the first quarter the beginning of the court the second quarter and after that it's going to hit the US but we don't know when that will happen what was the thing they said during the press conference about traditional Chinese design like there was a release before that came out and said that it was going to show like the traditional chinese style and we didn't know what that meant and so later went during the press conferences said that they were inspired by chinese like traditional Chinese ink colors for for the colors of the phone so mystery solved I guess yeah but I would like to see a document written in right if I see like an ancient Chinese scroll in pink and yellow like call me and let me know because that'd be really good I'm so actually you brought something up the camera megapixels we are seeing a lot more of those too not just eight megapixel cameras but 12 and 13 and just because you have the megapixels doesn't mean that your photo quality is going to be good either because there's so many things that go into actually making quality photos or imaging there's the lens size all of that good stuff really quickly this xperia z also has a 13 megapixel camera and it also has a backside illuminated sensor so it has an HDR mode that also works and while you're shooting video as well as taking stills which is something that's pretty interesting to see I don't think other phone that I know can do that right now yeah thinking about it's interesting about the megapixels is that is think that something's creeped up as well used to be I was working at seeing it when we had the first 1.3 megapixel camera so i know old dates me but you know there was all vga and then we had the first 1.3 and it's like oh my god that's so cool and then it came out with two and then that was the minimum and now we're really up this high I you know do you think at this show we saw a lot of you know what's happening in phones right now it's just a little bit that feature creep where features are kind of being thrown in the phone there maybe not really tested there maybe not really work all that well and they certainly have nothing to do with making a call which of course is what a phone is all about do you think we're seeing back not anymore no that's like a tertiary feature now I know making call is but did I didn't seem like a lot of these phones had features that we really haven't seen before true i think that most of the time what we're seeing is sort of everybody kind of coming up with the new standards in the new high level and status quo here at the show we don't get a lot of time and we definitely don't get the lighting to go out and actually test things like the camera so uh all of that comes later when we can actually take it back to the offices and get some real hands-on time with it so right now the specs sound good but what is that actually going to do when it's in your hand performing it that's what we find out after CES and that brings me to a phone that really grabbed my attention it is called the yotaphone we have a little bit of video and that's not yo da right it's not a star wars reference it's actually yota I got it so there's a Russian company yota devices and they make this its prototype they just announced in early December what is so interesting about it I don't have it on the stage but I do have the video and the video is playing now is it's got android on the front looks like an Android jelly bean smartphone very high-end specs you flip it around to the back and there's an e-ink display and it's that's the technology these on a kindle exactly so it's sort of like a paper display it looks really monochromatic almost like faded newspaper stuck on as a sticker it looks really bizarre but the concept is really cool and it's interesting to me because this is something that nobody else is really working on nobody has really thought to do this that could be a good or a bad thing in the end but the idea is that it's really low power so if you're running out of battery or if you want to conserve your battery you can sort of put the thing that you want to look at all the time on the back like a map or maybe it's a picture of someone or a boarding pass makes sense to me too because a lot of times you want an e-reader just for reading books in direct sunshine you know you can't do that with a lot of these tablets or larger phablets or whatever you know it's hard to read on vacation so this way you can actually have two devices in one and it seems like it doesn't look very much thicker than a regular phone right i mean it's a little bit thick but it's not super thick it's no thicker than the thickest out right now I think fan of that eating technology bit fortunate probably I going to see the phone for a long time right well it's supposed to come in the back half of 2013 to Russia first and then other markets the company is in talks with US carriers but it could end up being vaporware it could end up being terrible in real implementation but what's exciting is that they're doing a lot of things and they're adding other design elements to that nobody else is really trying and so they are going to kind of push this forward I think other people other companies are going to see their design and start thinking more out of the box so that we don't get a lot of phones that are beautiful but all look the same we will get something different something we just never seen before which we always like right we love it so what about phones that do we see anything here that is actually yes it will come to the United States or you know like we will actually able to hold it in our hands in the next year yeah so I've got some of these Huawei phones here this is the huawei ascend w1 in the US it will just be called the w1 it's a windows phone it's in fact their first windows phone 8 device really colorful might remind you of some other phones that are out on the market looks a little like a Lumia don't you think and therefore also like the HTC windows phone 8x but it is it's a really nice-looking phone and I think this is a trend that we're seeing is that windows phones are going to be colorful bold statements that's kind of where they're going right now it's just a tile interface in a way so exactly so um and we saw the Samsung a TV Odyssey that wasn't a phone that was announced here but it was actually announced it a wind a microsoft event in new york in october but is rising in cisco oh that's right Verizon's second bright windows phone right um or third even but it was really to win verizon and early samsung windows phone as well so that's something that we're going to see here we've got to go soon but let's talk really quickly about what we didn't see well phones from the big players but you know Mobile World Congress which is a huge trade show coming up in February in Barcelona these three will be there and we expect a lot lot lot from that show sore a big phone mobile fan check back for our coverage then of course and so we are going to wrap it up right now thank you so much for joining us