Gadgetory

whoo live that happened really fast weekly we've got a week of lunches Huawei took the wraps off of the May 10z te took the wraps off of the axon M and the pixel 2 has finally arrived in our office we're excited about that plus cat CrackBerry Kevin let's try that again plus CrackBerry Kevin from CrackBerry joins the show to lend some insights on the future of BlackBerry we've got a lot to talk about so make sure you're charged and ready for episode 275 of the pocket met weekly immediately at the top of the show I have to apologize to our viewers as I am once again super congested and I'm gonna try not to do a whole bunch of gross biological stuff right in front of my microphone the podcast recorded october 20th at noon pacific this weekly podcast is where we dissect and discuss those gadgets that make our lives mobile smartphones tablets and wearables it's all the stuff you wished existed when you were a kid and a floppy disk was more than just a graphic for a save icon i'm juan carlos back now senior editor at pocketnow.com joined as always by plucky podcast producer mr. jules Wong out on the East Coast how's it going buddy boy hey hey welcome back from your stint your first show actually at Newegg now congratulations on launching that with trisha hershberger that was really the show yeah that was that was that was a great time and there's nothing types of urgency to it yeah yeah big time we had that full production crew like backing us up to do that live broadcast and then um it was really exciting because we actually had all those vendors to talk about things and people were like oh it's just really a deal and you look up the pricing they're like oh wow well if it was a deal then it just evaporated because they just sold out of all those gaming chairs awesome but we're stoked to be to be doing the live broadcast over and they've got a couple other things that are gonna be coming down the pipe at new iknow and Newegg studios NDA that's that's not I mean I can't I can't tae Joos write it but I can't say there will be more more there will be more all right well at least at least there's that end we should look forward to that and in the meantime there's plenty to look forward to this show around we have very kevin i'm gonna try and pronounce his name kevin make a look neasha Luke like Alec machala I mean I tried finding a pronounce er for his name because everyone just calls him truck berry Kevin and I walls himself CrackBerry Kevin I went through like four of their podcasts I was like well what's going on I I'd like that's it's ridiculous but he's he's a ridiculous guy in the awesome so we're gonna be with them in the next hour in the meantime make sure you get your questions in through hashtag pn weekly on twitter and that's pretty much the only place will look i mean i we know we got the YouTube chat going often but even in slow mode that's a pretty fast feed to feel like have to look at so hashtag being weekly on the Twitter's or wherever else hashtags are accepted but Twitter's also pocket now has the email address that you can send questions to we won't be able to get to them this time around but maybe in the next episodes podcast at pocketnow.com definitely your source your spot your place to send along questions if you can't listen to us live you can't watch us love but why else would you not be here if you're not watching us fine well and I think we should probably make it more because we've gotten actually a couple really good questions coming in through the email I don't know Jules maybe we should do like an end of the month viewer mail wrap up as like a segment yeah you know we get to the emails a little inconsistent ly we just put it on our calendar like hey guys answer the email questions then if it's on the calendar then I think we'll pay attention to it we should have like a whole like calendar setup for this kind of thing that people know what's going on like you know what's happening and what the what feel is what's the buzz that's I'm about to break out into like a Broadway song so let's let's not do that well the don't don't sing especially with your congested lightly pat my face here but we've got some news want to jump into some Biggie's the official announcement kicking things off our following pretty much here in the office somewhere and you got to get that throwback back into the view here but in the meantime this is one of those phones that has decided there has been always been a stalwart of just being what it is it's a six inch monster with a 1080p screen even when people other manufacturers have tossed in quad HD and all this other stuff about zoom lenses and dual cameras and whatnot it's just carved its own path Huawei partnered with Leica to do this mono chrome in color lens kind of combination so that produces a hybrid image and then there's also the fact that ain't display well not anymore finally 2017 is the year of that Samsung Samsung Huawei has jumped to the two by one trend and there's a lot of confusion going on here because like there's it there's a mate 10 and then there's a mate 10 Pro just like last year but right the resolutions kind of crazy said to me 10 pros 1080p plus well the mate regular is just as a quad HD plus and that's I'm not sure what to make it is a mismatch outside of just the screen I think this is one of the dangerous aspects of a brand like Huawei which is his has sort of grown through being an Asian focused in Asian centric brand he's become a top player worldwide one of the dangers of trying to launch globally while having region-specific hardware these are almost like three different product lines that are all being called the mate and different regions will probably end up getting different flavors of this phone I don't believe there is one flavor of the maintain that I mean the mate ten that's gonna be global some will get both versions of the phone I'm I'm pretty confident the United States is probably only gonna get one version of this phone and so they're working with different technologies what they can source what they can what they can count on for manufacturing and so I'm sure there are a number of like to buy one aspect ratio HD resolution panels they can get so many of those verses sixteen by nine quad HD panels so you have a cell here yeah you have this like mix and match of different aspect ratios and panels and parts and pieces and I think the only thing that we can count on tying it all together is like the chipset some regions are gonna be getting different storage options some regions are gonna be getting different Ram options the cameras seem like they might also be pretty consistent too but but this is this is one of the big concerns is you have one big launch showing off the entire lineup but now we're playing the wait-and-see game who's going to get what flavors of this phone and I think that's a really difficult conversation to have with your audience after the fact I think that's really hard to get across like and and not have someone feel like they're gonna be left out of the good version or the version that they wanted and so this this to me is one of those danger points this feels like something that a smaller manufacturer would stumble through this isn't something that the number two or number three depending on you know how many iPhones have been sold recently I the the the second place worldwide smartphone manufacturer should not be confusing the market as much as they have well I brought in Samsung as a 40 and slip because the thing I remember the most was back in like 20 when was the Alex this phone I think was the 2015 they had a Galaxy S five Prime with an snapdragon Snapdragon 805 or something like that like it was it was the quad HD version of the snap of the galaxy s5 and that was back when they were trying to introduce that resolution and people were feeling kind of kind of gypped oh hey it's only Korea it's only their home market that got this why not us and at that time we just said hey everyone take a chill pill you're not really missing out on much now when we come to standardization and hey we're missing out on this resolution that everyone else has or whatnot I'm gonna correct myself here with with or clarify this situation the mate 10 has a six-inch near six inch sixteen by nine 1440p screen then week 10 Pro has a six inch 1080p plus at two by one and it's OLED not LCD so yeah I understand there's gotta be sourcing issues to be had and there's some sort of and there's some sort of a mess to be had in just creating this and tailoring each device to the markets as opposed a lot of Southeast Asian markets will get the more advanced ones as opposed to maybe Europe maybe they want to simplify their Western expanse I suppose that AT&T there they've been working with AT&T for a while maybe they just want to they've always been more tepid in introducing their products to the US and so maybe we'll get just them eight ten with four gigs of RAM and whatnot but well I mean that's that's very much how the main nine went down you know there was no maintenance maintenance design that ever officially was launched in the United States and I think we're probably gonna be looking at that happening again and that comes with another series of small bummers so officially if we get the unlocked may 10 and not the may 10 Pro it's highly unlikely that that's gonna have daydream support because of the screen panel used it means it'll will probably only be getting the four gigabytes of RAM model with the 64 gigabytes of built-in storage and we probably won't have access to any kind of mate 10 with a 6 gig of 6 gigs of RAM option or 128 gigabytes of built-in storage and especially after coming off the phones like the P 10 P 10 plus you know like there were some really nice benefits - moving up to the higher screen resolution and having more built-in storage like those things those things improve on the experience of a nice premium smartphone so I'll be really amazed to see how all that plays out but that's awesome what's so frustrating about announcing now this is the same criticism I have with LG the way they launched the g6 and the V 30s now Huawei I think is kind of felling fallen into the same trap you've announced the phone you've impressed us with a ton of really cool specs on different variants of the phones and now we're all waiting to see who gets what and so we've got a from Renato in in on twitter using the pn weekly hashtag and apparently the netherlands is getting the pro and the light and they might not be getting the regular May 10 you need to make the my Mon six aka I love that cranky you are about guy when they call it like a mate light you know Huawei is doing its game with pushing different names for one fare like we did like the honor eight light and like Nova something it's it's just crazy and whatnot but why the other from Peter hating me here I'm curious about the message who are we sending by placing a headphone jack on the non premium version of their premium foam so that would be the mate 10 is that is that something is that hinting at anything that maybe hey maybe Bluetooth is full or bourgeoisie that see I guess no I mean cuz I think you're right there Jules doesn't this play into a regional conversation that you are talking about targeting different parts of the world with different products and so you want to offer up a flagship but for a market where a thousand dollar phone is a no-go so region shopping uh they vary very much throughout the entire you know sort of Asian continent and then I mean you know for Europe European people European consumers where there's I think a bit more of a notion of buying a phone outright versus trying to engage in any kind of leasing or a payment plan you know those price points I think matter a little bit more than here in the United States where people have largely been excusing $89,000 phones eight hundred nine hundred thousand dollar phones because you're only gonna increase your bill three dollars a month so nvd know I think this is definitely a considered strategy for the different communities in the different regions who likely have different you know buy ins I was just listening to the all about Android podcast and run on the olive an Android podcast is super about Bluetooth headphones but I'm listening to that and thinking like man if I were in Brazil right now that would totally sound like let them eat cake oh your phone doesn't have a headphone jack just go buy some Bluetooth headphones for $200 you know like that to me is is why you know part of this conversation makes sense in a developed first world economy and a lot of this conversation does not make sense at all when we start drifting into different economic regions and this is also I think why I mean getting back to the main ten specifically why they're looking at that kind of feature fragmentation that one of the phones has the headphone jack one of them doesn't that makes sense to me who you're targeting with each device yeah and well there's also a b67 water resists and water and dust resistance for them a 10 which is also kind of was it ip67 for the main 10 pro or was it ip67 yes just for the may 10 pro okay it was me for the weekend pro so the other ones just with a splash resistant like IP 53 but then you flip this you flip the script on that and you can say this is what I love about numbers when you don't give all the numbers so the May 10 five point nine inch screen but it's sixteen by nine the May 10 pro has a six inch screen but it's 18 by 9 so if you just tell me the screen diagonal one phone sounds bigger than the other the main 10 Pro but if you're talking about surface area because of the difference in aspect ratio the May 10 has more real estate for you to play with it's just wider so this again you've got the higher resolution larger screen the bigger screen and the higher resolution screen are on the May 10 the small risk resolution is on the May 10 player Pro I mean it's like really difficult to convey the nuance of which phone is for you you've got a lot to consider and I think Huawei is moving moving the goal posts on their consumers more than they really need to and it really makes sense that you know at the May 10 Pro is 8 grams lighter than the May 10 following that conversation up I do want to get a quick hits from you I mean I know that you don't like having to deal with the camera and you know the DxO mark and you know it's a reference lab and it seems like everyone respects it it's pretty much the only gimme respect DxO it's just I didn't like the numbers and it's right that they use and you can always get rejiggered I mean when we talked about this so let's just tell the story here the huawei mate 10 Pro got a overall score of 97 on the DX Omar global scale and that comprises of a 100 photo sub score and a I believe in 91 video sub score the 100 sup score by the way matches the Galaxy Note 8 and it just is that follows the overall of 97 falls a point shy of the Google pixel - it's just impressive optics all together but it's I've never really liked we're still trying to figure out what this new first of all what this new scale is because they're incorporating more of the book and zoom features that's a lot and some of the phones / respective feature are trying to incorporate you know / iPhone 8 + or Google pixel - yeah I mean computational photography is becoming a huge deal in mobile they had like a I powered zoom a I powered beauty mode a iPad everything other modes like the pixel but if we had had a drinking game for AI you know I got I'd have been dead in the first 15 minutes the Keurig 970 is the first a I'd ship good I I respect the Richard you but there's yeah there's a lot that's actually kind of why we're making fun but I'm getting back to DxO I actually do rely on them as a resource for when I'm crafting our real camera review the problem is you've got a one size fits all scoring system where you as the reader need to go through their analysis and see what they scored higher and what they scored lower in each individual category to see if it's the right fit for you if you're trying to make any kind of purchasing decision off of just that score it's a 98 it's a 93 well you might be missing out on something very specific to your style of usage and then I so I feel like I think they weight certain categories more than they probably should I think they leave out a lot of quality of life stuff especially like app navigation and ergonomics and responsiveness things like that which I think can make the difference between getting a shot and not getting a shot but that's not something that you can we've talked about this on the podcast before like how do you test app launching time in a way that's consistent and is meaningful to someone that you can say like pro or con like this this is something that that you will experience once you load all of your data and your apps into this device so I I still I'm always reticent to say you know because I know a lot of people will go out there and say oh well DxO they're totally rigged or they'll go to whoever pays them the most to give them the best score and I do not believe that's the case I think they've built a reputation that we can trust they're not compromised but that also means it's up to the reader to go and examine the individual testing parameters to see how they arrived at that score and I think that's what's always going to be horrific ly misleading about any kind of scoring system where there's a certain degree of subjectivity to that scoring system and it's all being expressed in one thongs of or thumbs down like that can't work even when we're doing our own reviews I always have to cringe personally when we've got to do our ranking system at the end you know like build material I don't know 9 it's it's an $800 phone they're all pretty good like what that doesn't it doesn't mean anything to me as a quantifier of what materials were used in the build of this phone to give it a number grade you know 9.2 it's a great tune but I can't dance to it you know like III don't know what that means so I was at the axon M event transitioning over yeah yeah I was with my colleague not from 95 Google hired a huge man who got an early unit of the pixel 2 and right and I feel the same way because even though it's supposed to be aluminum that's casting around the whole body of it it felt it felt more like a hard you know a hard polycarbonate kind of thing so and what's what's hilarious is now I'm inclined to give it a better grade I mean if we want everyone talking about pixel to mean like I've literally had mine out of the box for a couple hours I've only started setting it up today it came late last night and I was just too wrecked after doing a live broadcast yesterday to really start setting it up but this matte finish is so much easier to hold on to the unless yeah slightly more satiny texture to the aluminum part of it there's less glass which I actually do kind of like now that I see it in person the glass isn't under the fingerprint sensor that it's only really at the top module and you're under the camera and computer bills so much like the cyan Lumia 920 that matte finished polycarb I'm I'm in love with the texture of this part of the phone and I really wish they just hadn't done any glass like just don't give me any like crackable slippery fingerprint smudgy part of the phone make it all out of this and I think it just goes back to the point like plastic really wasn't bad for a phone cheap glossy plastic was bad for phones you can convey a premium experience and not ever have to worry about aluminum or glass if you do it right and so this this cut it's hilarious that it took google going to this matte finished aluminum frame to get me back in love with something that feels like high quality plastic i don't feel like people should or are evaluating how much of my $800 is going towards this feel in hand like as long as you get there as long as you're able to hold on to it just a little bit tighter so that you don't end up dropping it and then taking it to like you brick i fix for like a two hundred dollar deductible yeah yeah that did you have pretty well oh it totally does and then also it's just i'll be curious to see if i can find a good fitting screen protector with proper cutouts for this front-facing stereo speakers cuz this is the first phone in a while i mean it might be the first phone since the key one that we'll be talking about more when CrackBerry kevin is is on the show that i'm really wanting to not put a case on this phone I cringe every time I leave the house with the new iPhone I mean cuz I I cracked the screen on that with any of the galaxies with my LG my LG v 30 thanks to TK BAE a guest of the show he hooked me up with a spare case that he got from VRS so I have this is now like how I leave the house with my V 30 even though it's spec it's still glass on the back all of these phones I don't want to Lee and I used to be the guy who was like I only ever want to use my phone naked and that was during the note for era the pixel now feels like as long as I can just protect the front glass with a good screen protector I might leave it naked and I don't get to feel that way very often anymore so that's that's actually a pretty positive feel yeah yeah I'm with you on that can we talk about the display I don't want to touch that topic with a mile long pole play on the V 30 because on the pixel oh I don't know like everyone's been complaining about this inside about the well at least the pixel 2xl but like that's where most of the complaints have been but even with the pixel - it's just like hey it's still it's it's reddish and it's like well yeah that's kind of that's I mean Sam if we were to go to it's a little ready it's already but like if we were to go with the like last year's pixels we would assume that these panels are provided that the pixel twos panel is provided by a Samsung and they've been having a little trouble this year so hey I mean you know this is this is one of the things no you're absolutely right there and because I think if we're gonna touch on display quality and consistency LG is the is the inconsistent factor this year so you've got the verge and you've got people going out there talking about how this is like a distractingly poor display and how can you even look at this thing and I want to caution people it does seem to me that LG is is having some problems with display consistency but unfortunately I mean if you really want something like a V 30 or a pixel two you're probably gonna have to play the did mine come out okay game now that being said if your test is let me put a completely plain gray image with no characteristics it's just a complete one shade of gray image and then turn my backlight down to 0% is that how you normally use your phone looking at one panel of color at the backlight slowest setting I don't feel that's a good way to demonstrate what your screen problems might be so there's there are some people on reddit who are sharing images from their V 30s where in in an app like in a browser you could see some some distinct inconsistency in the lighting and in the color that is a problem display that you need to go and get replaced my note 8 is brighter in the bottom left-hand corner of the screen than it is at the top there's a hard band about two-thirds of the way up or one-third of the way from the top of the display and that screen is super ruddy red that is still an AMOLED panel that's operating within the threshold of acceptable performance so if you're going to test is that it's like maximum lowest you know it's some sort of you know way out there sort of benchmarking style issue then you're gonna run into problems and so my v30 is way brighter at the top in the bottom than it is in the middle but it it's gradient is enough that in daily operator operation use it's not distracting when I'm in a browser or when I'm playing games anything like that it only manifests when I push it to some extreme limit in a way that I never use the phone so my v30 is actually in my opinion better than my note 8 because the color tone is cooler so I don't have this ruddy reddish overlay on everything when I'm not in some kind of adaptive color mode I got lucky that my V 30 is actually pretty good so that that's the kind of word of caution I would put out there III want to say you know like if you have a real problem with your screen go get it replaced you know if you if you think you're gonna like the phone but don't push this phone to some sort of artificial extreme in a way that you're never gonna use it and then go oh well this is terrible this is completely unusable because the verge said so that's not how we should be going about evaluating our devices we're so far beyond I don't know if you remember like back in the day where we had to worry about like dead pixels all the time does your phone have more than eight dead pixels well then you can get it replaced that's not the situation anymore we're doing way better but I also we've got to be careful not to create this like knee-jerk echo-chamber response every single time there is a perceived problem at the phone yeah I mean there's always a bar that we've said that's way too low high and I think we should probably get a little bit more control on that as a community but also I think that as you know part of the unsexy context of this this is the first real drive from LG Display from it's a fledgling OLED operation that it's just starting to build up and starting to build out thanks to money from you know multiple sources Google for one which is why you see on the pixel to excel and this I mean it's not I don't I don't know I don't know how to think of this as like any other device that might take three generations to start him before it starts improving and whether or not we should take that appropriate risk every time that we deal with an LG OLED display or like that's because that that's that's BS I don't want that to be a thought that I should be having and there's also like the context even back to the G flex devices plastic OLED the first G flex was very terrible 720p six inches so here paper here's part of the issue though is like when we're talking about these things there's a difference between terrible and completely unusable or a technology which just hasn't caught up to the leader in the market so the original G flex at it first time was behind 1080p displays with a six inch screen okay well that's definitely something that we had be concerned about but the actual OLED technology was only about two generations behind what Samsung was doing at the time and I kind of feel the V 30s in the same boat that not necessarily for the quality of display but for the QA LG is probably about two years behind Samsung now what's hilarious is right now I'm not super impressed with Samsung that as they've been shifting their manufacturing to these to eighteen point five by nine displays I actually think display quality on their phones has gone down from the sixteen by nine era I like the screen on the Galaxy this has been the market leader that has 95 percent market share I like the screen on the Galaxy s7 a lot better than I like the screen on the Galaxy s8 I mean if we're talking about the display and color quality and we're eliminating some of the hyejung Curry of an adaptive brightness color mode the galaxy s7 was for me one of the most color accurate displays I'd ever used on a mobile device the Galaxy s8 makes me look like I'm always on Mars so again we need to have reasonable conversations about these things and know that what we're complaining about and if you're someone who's gonna be more sensitive to color shift than you are to brightness then Samsung vs. LG is a completely different debate than if you're more sensitive to patches of your screen which might be a little bit brighter as opposed to differences in color tone and hue now if you guys give me just a second I actually I think I might have it in my camera I think I have I did a test between my V 30 and my node 8 so let me see if I can grab that you've amped for just a second jewels I'll be but I can just say III think I'm gonna try and vamp on the axon m4 just a little bit I know this is kind of unfair since we're still talking about pixel and LG but two displays as opposed to wine all right talk about your display well I try and maintain this facade of continuity I'm it up since 5:45 this morning and trying to an interpretation it's fun it's it's been great and I'm kind of hungry too again like a No so here is let me go into screen share real quick mmm YUM screen share is the best share law so can you see that so this is this is matching the brightness so at its lowest level then no eight screen is darker than the v30 screen so that's also one of the things that I find very disingenuous if you expose for the V 30 screen the note 8 screen will seem more consistent because it's brighter at that I mean you know because it's darker at that level so we have those kinds of problems too where you're gonna see more of the impurities on the v 30 screen because they're not matched so what I went through and I matched the lowest level brightness from the V 30 against the node 8 which means I had to turn the note 8 up to match the lowest level of the V 30 and you can see I'm you can definitely see at the top corner on the V 30 I don't know if you can see my mouse cursor here on YouTube the V 30 is brighter at the top corner and a little bit brighter at the bottom than it is in the middle but you can also see that there's sort of a gradient shift on the node 8 from the top right of the node 8 screen all the way into the bottom left and I have a hard band that just cuts through about a third of the way from the top of the screen which display is better the node 8 but not by much in a usage mode that is completely unrealistic for how people are going to interact with their devices so I am saying I got lucky that I got a pretty even inconsistent LG screen all things considered but this is something that if you're really interested in the V 30 I don't think it's gonna be a serious deal-breaker unless you happen to get one of the panels that's way off when it's just the bummer that you have to go through and you have to you know potentially well you try one and unfortunately that means like you might need to exchange it but again you for yourself as a consumer have to weigh like how sensitive to that kind of you really are so you know there's a more economical way of getting two displays together in near proximity to each other correct why yes you could totally go for a sony p series from 2012 so that's that's totally one way you could have dual screens on a device oh I I mean probably from a very similar time error you could go with like like a Kyocera what was this Kyocera echo just do your before yeah that's good you could do that too I mean both of these were what they were like super popular devices at the time right really so yeah they were they everybody watch Sarah back in 2011 so indeed indeed and I surely believe that the revival of the two screen single device format will come with the ZTE axon which Heimat Rivera a pre-brief on and I was able to attend the New York events the launch event it's going to be on AT&T it's gonna it's gonna have a Snapdragon 820 one which is still commendable for 2017 but um when you're considering the price of this thing which ends up being $750 you're really paying for the novelty screens or well I guess like a mini tablet display as a novelty just yet because we haven't actually tested it but there's just I mean it's not cheap device at all not in terms of the price but also not in terms of the feel they've packed a lot of technology that the fingerprint sensing but um the power button on the side just like Sony hey you can get that technology finally just not on a Sony phone gonna say ZTE worked out their licensing issues Sony maybe you could work out yours so I don't have to flash different firmware on my really awesome little Xperia xz1 see compact all you have to do is get behind a teensy instead of Verizon but yeah it's a and it's not without lacking of some you know features to make those things with me it brought down by the bezels because everyone's been still still just your can of I don't have words for let me just ask this go I I have a hard time imagining what the usage of a fold-out mini tablet would be if you don't have a good way to hold it I don't always love my infinity displays on my Samsung's because I actually still do have some issues with some apps that interact with like the pad under my thumb because I'm holding the phone not because I'm actually trying to interact with the screen so if we have something that expands to double the screen size and you don't have a good control surface all the way around that device I feel like that would just be a recipe for a lot of broken dropped hinged dual screen phones it's not just that it's also the mid screen bezel that people are just like yeah so I think that's fair I that that that definitely I feel like could be distracting if you've got a bar that cuts through your viewing experience but I also don't know that there's a way to solve this right now before we walk into the era of like thin is a sheet of paper bending OLED screen crease or Samsung you've got to show us some concept on next year which Lenovo Ravenna showing us some prototypes on stuff like that and they all look super flimsy and super fragile and like something I think I'd really want to look at my watch and just say that go on go on people yeah you do that in the meantime I'm just gonna I'm just gonna use my ZTE axon em I don't know but I think he has arrived at what I think could be the best solution with our current manufacturer for a phone that costs less than $1,000 I would be okay with the bezel if it's not dealing if it's you're not putting like video in there and thankfully you aren't web pages more forgiving because I know it's just static text you just move along the text as you can really the modes that they're trying to you know get people accompanied with are you've got the traditional you got the extended for both and using two apps dual mode so you have just one app running on one screen one app I'm running on that or screen its full size so hey you got that and then there's the mirror mode which has confused some people or has you know they've drawn negative conclusions on just because they don't see the case where you might be facing another person and showing off a video or a presentation or something that it's not a practical I I don't see where that modes gonna get a ton of use on a phone but again what I want to credit ZTE for doing is illustrating usage scenarios which don't involve the bezels interrupting the screen right so they're actually making a point out of showing you different use models or usage scenarios that are hopefully won't distract you or won't highlight one of the flaws of this current kind of design and I think that's at least a smart play for trying to improve on that discussion they're barging the whole design of it and I think that's a whole it's a clever bages to call them at least I do have questions about the single camera there's only one camera on one side and the whole paradigm in the software app software is that you switch the screen that you use it on that you use the app on so that you can do a twenty make a 20 megapixel rear camera but you have to hold the phone this way and then if you want to do a 20 megapixel selfie you have to switch the app and then turn the phone around it's like yeah that's just what I'll be curious to see though is because didn't I mean Oppo played with that to where you only had one camera but the camera would flip from the rear to the front it would actually fit for you yeah so I I I'm actually positive on this idea even if the implementation is a little clunky because I got to tell you like using the V 30 I never want to use the selfie shooter on the V 30 it's pretty poor it's not unusable but it's really like I only want to tackle this when it's like video call kind of stuff I don't want to use it to kind of capture memories or shoot photos or portraits but I've gotten really good at using the rear cameras on almost all my phones blind to shoot selfie photos family and friends so if there's only one camera and it's the best camera like the rear-facing camera I wonder if that's actually gonna help improve the selfie situation for a lot of people if if now it's just you've got the full rear camera the mainstream camera on the back of this phone which it sounds like it's gonna be pretty similar to what we had on the axon 7 which was a solid camera it should definitely I'll perform most front-facing cameras I think that could be a really compelling usage use I think one compelling use a juice that renowned in LaPorte has is that keyboard inputs that's going to have its own dedicated screen so that if you're using a chatting app in extended mode you just you don't have to worry about not seeing the message or not having the context in front of you you just go on and look at it and then start typing with a whole display to you know do that with and which is always cool and I kind of like it yeah again it be as barges I just sell write mode in holders on toes kind of a poor use of space II sense but yeah so shockingly the this Kyocera actually did have some battery okay it booted up it's on there's like 10% battery left and I gotta say ZTE made the right choice in not having this overly complicated swing out in I mean props to kyocera for trying something different way back in the day but if you're you're worried about you know Black Bart interrupting your screen it's not as big as bad it's pretty good it's it's not that bad oh no I think people are over blowing the issue but you know that's it's all relative and I could even have like a way to fire up in an old sprint phone anymore it's not like I can put in a SIM card I really want to try and use this because it looks terrible oh well part part of my concerns too is the battery which is the the one battery is serving two full sized displays and potentially two full sized apps at the same time we're talking about 3100 nearly 80 million power battery which i think is kind of undersized for this purpose but it's too small and especially because we know that the Qualcomm 821 was not a lean chipset it was the sort of the running hotter version of the 820 and I really do think it speaks to ZTE s philosophy on this device is that it's still a regular phone first and foremost but it has a larger screen mode that you can use in situations that the general purpose of the phone is not to be used with both displays on all the time and so I think they made a compromise there it's a compromise I don't agree with because I think I think most phones would do better with more battery especially phones with gimmicks like this but I can at least understand where they're coming from that this is a phone with a flip-out feature not a mini tablet that needs the kind of runtime that a tablet should have if I've expressed myself as that's that's me all the time you don't have to worry about that so AT&T NTT DoCoMo in Japan they're both going to carry this phone it's a big step up for ZTE which I'm not sure whether this in correlation like between this whole concept or this this unique point pointed statements and the fact that this is their kind of first platform that they're able to shout from a mountaintop well I think I think one of the bummers for ZTE is gonna be they're sort of relatively the first again to come to this kind of screen usage and they're a company that's a little bit smaller so their ability to make noise is also not gonna match like a Samsung and so we're all sitting here and we're kind of you know we're kind of lovingly poking a little fun at this concept even though I think it is really well executed considering the compromises involved I when Samsung does something like this I think you'll see just a generally bigger more positive reaction to them experimenting and trying something bold even if it has almost all the same compromises so that that's always gonna be one of the bummers if you're a smaller manufacturer in this space is it doesn't really pay to be first what you'll do is set up the stage for the next person or the next company I should say who's going to try and experiment with something like this so I want to give ZTE some some huge kudos for trying to do something different with the smartphone form factor because I think one of the common breads and a lot of our conversations especially on YouTube is this stuff has gotten a little plateau II it's gotten a little stale you know there are only so many variations on you know glowing rectangle no other buttons touch screen get app that we can really engage with and you know we we want to see companies that go out there and try and try and experiment and do something bold but then we're also sat there and mock the first come in that ever goes out there to do something Xavier winter by the way I think has a great conclusion to all of this and that is screen gates all the phones have screen gates they all have issues if you push anything to the limits it's going to show flaws so I agree Zayn I agree Kevin Kevin is jumping in Kevin you joined us just for the adblock let me get this sponsor out of the way and we can jump in we can chat some some BlackBerry I've gone through like all of my old storage cubbies for blackberries and BlackBerry OS 5 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kept one so that's awesome well I mean yeah I think it's just a testament to the to the fan base and the popularity of blackberry and a company that were we're I mean here at hockey now we're excited to see finding some footing in a modern smartphone world without having to wreck what the brand represented yeah so we wanted to jump in and again that didn't make this too much of the wordid blackberry go wrong because that's tired and it's played out and we're actually excited about some of the things that are coming down but really quick like a 60 second elevator exactly the you know what made blackberry a brand that companies respected where they maybe missed the boat with consumers and now what they're doing to rectify that in under four minutes if you could so step one you gotta remember that blackberry did not sit out set out with his grand vision to build smartphones right we didn't even know what smartphones were gonna become at that time they started with literally a two-way pager and it was a messaging device and at the core of it was literally the BlackBerry OS and as you know demands from consumers and carriers and partners everybody's sort of evolved they kept building layer on layer you know PPOs one two three four five that's something that at the core was like a two-way pager never never envisioned even the network data we would have today and everything else and because they were at the right time the right place you know iPhone didn't exist Android didn't exist and carriers were investing into these networks and trying to find products to use them blackberry was in an amazing position which obviously propelled them into the number one smartphone position for a long time and then they started going after enterprise customers but what happened was carriers wanted to sell to consumers so blackberry which was never really a consumer focused company at the core right they weren't about building beautiful products for users they were like the antithesis of everybody's you know sort of Steve Jobs onstage type of vision they just found themselves selling to consumers and consumers started buying a product which was really kind of never fully suspect out for that but they still blew up the grew you know people love their keyboards people love the instantaneous push email DBM as it was coming out all those types of things and you know money and shareholders were happy and plentiful and all that stuff but but as the game started to evolve it became clear that you know where smartphones were gonna go was next level and something would have to happen to that and then if I that's about two minutes now in the next few minutes if I talk about like the three fatal mistakes that I think were made in retrospect you know hindsight was 2020 you know step one is the day the iPhone came out at that point blackberry should have said okay bebe OS is not gonna be able to take this thing on in the long run we need to build you know quote BlackBerry 10 at that point in you know 2007 instead what did they do they kept you know they built the blackberry storm on bebe OS they took it an operating system never you know designed for touchscreen and they made a touch screen touch entry compatible that kind of thing and then that led them down a lot of years of fixing problems instead of starting to build that platform then what starts to happen well then they decide okay we need to build a new platform and they start working on BlackBerry 10 had they at that point said you know what let's go Android instead because clearly Android is Google's behind it it's gonna go big you know you know it's gonna become probably but if you look at the world of pcs it's gonna become like a to platform race and you also had Windows Mobile fighting at the time so you have sort of forward for people you know fighting for their their position at that point and they said you know what let's go fully Android we'll bring our own blackberry flavor to it we'll do our security thing or productivity thing our efficiency thing I believe they could have out Samsung Samms so you know Hadley started bb10 when the iPhone came out came out they could have maybe out Android at Android had they then said okay let's just commit to Android they could have out Samsung Samsung they did neither of those things and then you know we sort of ended up in the position where they launched BlackBerry 10 the apps don't come there was quite a bit of excitement around it they actually had a good comeback story happening but you know once the apps income it was gonna be a slow painful painful thing and you knew that and even I and even I checked out the last you know couple years and where it got exciting again to me was once they went Android because they might have all the apps and I'm not sacrificing my experience to tone a blackberry I can actually have a blackberry now that gives me you know the best of all the things I love blackberry years back the things that are still true to their corn and even more relevant and prevalent today like privacy and security which has become a hot topic in 2017 where you know and through that in 2007 it wasn't that hot and you know in the early days people just didn't think about unless there's a breach and you know now they're back and they've got they've got a keyboard phone here I'm holding up the black edition blackberry key one and and just for you guys I've got here a blackberry motion if you want on the pocket a podcast also was a good idea I wasn't supposed to do this but I'm like guys you know we got to bring something special so we're talking to one of the fathers come on a lot so now it's been a crazy year in a year I did not see coming you know at all if you want to get into that later I can tell you about the weird and awesome 2017 it's been and I think you know it we're at this place now where the years almost over and you know these we have one phone that's out and still rolling out globally there's you know new iterations of it you got a motion that's gonna hit select markets and you know before you know it you're gonna be into the 2018 and I don't think it's gonna stop coming so I kind of feel like the good old days of back but with with better phones that have all the apps and crazy good battery life and it's fun and even even as we were making that transition I think one of the things to kind of go on your point we went through this sort of teething pain transition with the BlackBerry label on the back of the phone running Android and it still didn't feel like we had that hope it didn't feel like we had that potential of this device really cracking into the market I'm talking about the Prive which had a lot of fans I've got a brand new one here I just found in a box I'm gonna give you guys like this is like Pele here oh sweet I don't know if that came through it was I got just the last of it ASMR but but pretty close pretty close so yeah the primp was you're right the print was like a glimmer but they kind of messed up right they went like here's the way I would frame it or go ahead go ahead because I don't want to lay that on BlackBerry's feet because I think BlackBerry tried their Android experiment as a first party hardware manufacturer at the same time that every other company but Samsung was getting burned by qualms we watched LG have one of their worst years ever we saw HTC basically destroyed after the m9 the Flex - and even phones like from Google at the end of the year the Nexus is didn't whether the Qualcomm 808 well and I really feel like had the Privy it would have been a remarkably better device and user interests and then but that what's hilarious is that that's what carries us directly into this relationship with TCL and the company's futures never looked brighter to create a partnership that that I'm actually really excited to talk about go ahead I was just gonna ask about John Chen because I think he has sort of this pride in pride that you know there's at least blackberry pride about you know just holding on to its hardware division and making sure that it can control every little bit of the boot stack and you know all the little parts of it I was wondering how much of that was a factor into leading into 2015 and 2016 oh you know that's a good question I think devices like the prin I'm trying to think yo John Chen has been there three three years now and what year did the proof come out - two years ago 15 yeah yeah I think a lot of that was probably in motion but for he leave ya unclear you know I think like when he came on board before I think I was at his first press event at my World Congress in Barcelona and they announced the BlackBerry leap which was on bb10 he teased the blackberry classic was coming so I was still very bb10 bb10 focused yeah yeah it's hard to say if you know the privily you know would have been already sort of I would assume they were probably already at that point starting to play with Android and work on it just given the development cycles I think one of the mistakes that they made or not mistakes but your my impression was when they did the prytt was kind of like a blackberry for Android people and if you look at what they did with a key one they built an Android phone for blackberry people and probably for them to just force an upgrade cycle and bring their customer base with them as they move to Android they should have done the key one design form factor instead of the Prive you know and maybe assuming they picked the right price point and ship side and that I think you know that some of the excitement we're having this year they could have had it a couple of years ago now and even that could be more exciting for them at this point because I think you know and there's a lot of people who love the proof but they ended up most of them that I talk to you end up not using the keyboard they just go with the full touch and they've kind of transitioned away from it and you know what the thing with the key one is it's just very unabashedly a keyboard phone but it's it's a pretty solid one yeah I've got my toy chest here now too and you know you look at like this is the classic one of the best BlackBerry's ever the bold 9700 and you stick this thing to the key one it was like I could find I could find wisdom I like you sized up like wow look in I mean we talked about like oh the screen is just so small but it looks so tall and you're like it's not that small we used to do fine so so we get into this great transition was like for example here our pocket now we didn't actually get to spend any time with DTAC and then as soon as Keenan really either all of a sudden like you know we were we were really excited about the idea of getting back to a keyboard phone now you've been spending some time with the motion I really respect TCL as a manufacturer I think they've done some phenomenal work at the entry level that kind of gets overlooked like the Idol series a foams are almost always really solid performers at their price points but just read every reason don't have the popularity of like a moto G series for example but the key one has been such an interesting conversation my dad is interested in going key one my wife is on a key one she's she was she was a curve user back in the day and I was really angry when her company switched over to iPhones for their work phones like I can't use this thing I can't do documents on this thing why am i using an iPhone and she's been using an Android and reserve and now she's back on a blackberry but with really experiences like kind of poking around with emotion and I know you're probably not supposed to be flashing that thing off too much because we've had these experiences with different form factors in with DTAC is it that the keyboard is what makes the conversation so exciting or do we think or do you think that BlackBerry has their audience targeted correctly for this other all touchscreen kind of usage - great great question a conversation to get into so I think there's a pilot there's two pieces there's a DNA thing we got to talk about like what is in the BlackBerry DNA when you pick up a blackberry phone and you know what are the expectations and there's obviously a keyboard discussion and I think you know blackberry is the keyboard smart phone company it has been four years they've owned it since they've kind of got into it years ago and and you know nobody else even tries because there's no point it's just if you want a physical keyboard you get a blackberry yeah I've got some friends who friends and all the companies it's really you know the best thing like sort of implosion that happened at blackberry was that all those brilliant people ended up going like this and they spread and now they all work at Apple and Samsung and HTC and LG and you know how do I try it to spend a decade building contacts with all these companies never would have happened right but would you like focus on one intensity on one company that kind of goes like that Wow I know people everywhere now and it's one of the fun things right I don't want to keep my mouth shut so typically if they're doing this a while but uh you know somebody from Samsung once told me you know there is no market for like physical keyboard phones there's only market like a market and demand for BlackBerry's with physical keyboards right so you know Samsung tried years ago with was it the Droid Pro or something like that and they spend money and they were like we're gonna go after that market and it's just like fail fail fail and that's it you know so it's not necessarily a crazy growing market it's not going like that but there's an audience there that's gonna continue for a while and you know I think Blackberry with this relationship with TCL you know blackberry Mobile's kind of the business unit of TCL communication that's doing the the manufacturing rough marketing design now support everything those people are gonna get served for a long time and now you know with the motion we see okay you know they're they're gonna put out some touch full touch devices too and you know I think it's a good debate whether is that the the right decision or not like should they just stay with keyboards and nothing else and you know I like the fact they've done the motion I think you know coming back to the detect question of we weren't that interesting the Detex the key ones got us interested again in blackberry and now the motions here were maybe kind of interested in that you know why I think part of it is the DNA so you know when I grew when I picked up the D Tech phones they didn't feel like blackberries to me and I think there's this language legitimately idols with a different bat place yeah and my thing is like a blackberry I should be able to close my eyes pick it up and based on kind of the density maybe that little bit you know typically get used to this like soft touch rubber on the back a little bit like there's this utility feeling a little bit of heftiness in a good way that I expect and you know that yeah and the D Tech 60 was not that it was like why why is this the things so thin and light you know and the specs were actually very high-end for a blackberry but it was missing that that's sort of you know I like to say like tool like feeling that I want and you know when I when I got the key one I was super happy with about life I think that was one of the things I was like yes yes yes because we saw a BlackBerry screw that up in the years past where they had massive battery life and then somebody in the company decided well the battery only house lasts through the day but they didn't realize what power users would do and all of a sudden I was using blackberry devices that weren't making it through the day and I was like they can they should not let this happen and I think what we see and because that was always one of the major talking points was efficiency and not just and not just battery life I mean when we were in the the early days of 3G networks and black was really bolting on things like web browsers and we were having to email attachments and there was a conversation about minimizing your footprint to get the best possible performance out of weak signal connections and SMO a battery that can still fit in your pocket safely and in for old blackberries and could be removed from the device by the user like that all was a consideration wrapped up and the key one one of the reasons why I find it so compelling were two reasons I find it so compelling and why it's one of my favorite go-to phones of this year but first picking it up it feels like it's made for grownups like it doesn't I don't have that feeling on an HTC u11 even though I think we would all agree that the U 11 is a screamer it's a it's a great performer it's it's that candy flashy glass mirror coating on the back that makes me feel like I should be taking it I was gonna make a joke about taking it to a One Direction concert and that's just how old and out of touch I am but then that the first the first weekend I had the key one it ran with me for a 3d three-day weekend yeah charged it once and that's not something that you know I would ever trust my galaxy to do or my v30 to do like that's a singular conversation from a brand that outside of a couple like other Chinese manufacturers we just don't talk about now people grumble about it then they'll go and continue to by the thinnest possible fashion phone that they can get their hands on ignoring that we have options completely agree like when I got the key one I kind of have to learn a little bit how to reuse my phone because you could just use it more and more and more like it's almost the game to try to kill it within a day and I don't know if I ever have you know like it's even I can't we're in a city like New York which eats batteries I mean at least for me when I'm roaming from Canada and I go to New York I'm like I take it off the charger at 6:30 and it's gonna be dead at 4 o'clock maybe I make it to 7 o'clock if I'm lucky but if you're in New York all day around those big buildings in and out bad reception etc and you can get to like 3 a.m. or the next morning on that battery it's crazy and then if you're entering your home environment where you're maybe behind like Wi-Fi into your house and home and jumping around the city yeah it goes for days and the motion is gonna get even better battery life which is which is awesome you know it's four thousand milliamp hour battery on it I've been complaining especially about some of the mid-range or chipsets but I don't know in your usage I'm sure because of it because of Android we can always point to the occasional lag or stutter and multitasking might not be as powerful but I legitimately have not found a situation on Mikey one where I really felt constrained in doing something that I wanted to do exactly no I've been really happy with the phone this year and you know I've been using it since the key one since February and living on it I mean even more than ever because I've had so much travel this year yeah and it's funny something about the key one even makes me like use a laptop less like if I'm around my house where I would normally like grab my laptop and sit on the couch from that remote just like I'll just use the key one it's work you know and it you know again now that I'm on Android I'm not blackberry 10 and I can have my my slack in my skype and my Trello and all the apps I need for work there Google Docs etc I just use it as a primary like work machine so yeah I mean the the battery life equation in the mix has made it just a beast and and then coming back to like you know blackberry building a touchscreen we've ran some surveys on CrackBerry kind of asking like well what do you expect in a blackberry what do you want in a touchscreen blackberry and you know battery life is I think always this number one thing and and I don't know if I realized that years ago you might have thought all physical keyboard etc should be the answer but you know people want they never want to buy a blackberry if there's crap battery life it's got to be amazing and and that's you know obviously things like privacy secure into the discussion there but I think when I think about blackberry building a touchscreen phone that's all touch I just think whatever Samsung is doing would say the next Galaxy device like blackberry should just do the opposite like you know if they're going edge they're going edge to edge and beautiful and maximizing get a concave display and I think coming back to this one the thing I like is it's better on the DNA so when I pick this up you know if feels it doesn't feel like as BlackBerry's a key one like I picked this up I'm like this is the BlackBerry of blackberries this feels much more Blackberry for whatever that means then addy tech I still feel like it's not a hundred percent the DNA I want to see in like that ultimate touchscreen blackberry don't really but it's better like it's definitely in that right direction and I think there's a lot of people who are gonna like this device for a lot of reasons and you know they're doing some software stuff that's interesting like my favorite feature I won't say I don't want it like what's the word you know put myself in a weird position here but let's just call it the private locker camera for y'all here in personal photos it's pretty amazing clever feature so basically when you're in the camera app and I feel I can do it you know if I tap the regular shutter button on the on the touch screen it takes a regular photo but if I take the photo by using the the home screen button which has a fingerprint sensor and I closed it up there because I tapped it a little hard it basically takes a photo and puts in a private Locker which then you can only access with your fingerprint so if you want to take you know nudies or something like that and you want to hand your phone to your friend and they're gonna Stu go to your camera roll that stuff's not gonna be there right it's like a parent friendly phone kid-friendly phone so you can just like within the camera app no extra work taken it's like tap tap tap public photos tap tap tap private Locker and I'm like that's clever and you know the other thing they did was software which when it got announced a lot of people kind of you know the Android Central crew made fun of it I'm like you guys are crazy this is actually a good feature I have a programmed as a shortcut on my convenience key but I tap it and the screen goes dark no but but then I can drag a bubble here and it basically lights up where my finger is so if you're on like this field yeah yeah it's a yeah so if you're on a commute on the train you have a creepy person beside you staring at what you're reading in your email you can just like click tap it's private and then you roll roll through it and I don't know I like what they're thinking even on the software side beyond this utility hardware side to kind of build a story that I think is actually very 2017 and if you think about TV shows like mr. robots and that I'm like well this is like this is you know the stuff that he should be using right it's crazy I want to get to some questions that we have for you from our PN weekly hashtag on aren't you supposed to set these in advance so I could first look at blackberry mobile from a fat produce Andrew Wallace can what can they do you know to improve on the sequel to the key one maybe a key to what would you want to see from a follow up a key to key to so I would love an OLED screen I think with especially like when I look at I actually think that's a very good LCD screen but I love OLED screens when they're done well and I think when you have something like a black Edition which is just a you know nicely black like a very they really did a good job lacking this thing out but blacked out with an OLED and the vibrancy would be really sweet I think they need to up the memory so you know the standard Silver Edition key one shipped with 32 gigs storage and yes there's a microSD slot but I don't know I'm just like you know give me I'll pay the money give me you forgive me 128 or something as like that I mean I can for it I think that was a little troubling is I wouldn't have minded a key one you know yeah a key one at 30 dude as a base model and then the ability to buy more if I wanted it exactly a Black Edition added a fourth gig of ram which is really nice compared to the the three gigs in the silver edition now that didn't really speed up like the usage of the phone and I think you know Michael Fisher mr. Mobile there attested to this - and we were arguing over quite a bit because I kind of you know you guys report you review far more phones than me right and I think probably a lot of listeners think you know more RAM equals more speed and in reality it's like well same speed note processor that didn't change but I think you can just be born on long run yeah yeah exactly and and again coming back to like this chipset and everything I haven't had any slowdowns or anything but it's especially with the Black Edition maybe with some of the earlier builds I had of the original Silver Edition and that was also pre-launch like they actually you know a lot of phones they do software updates and they get worse the q1 actually got bought like a lot better in some of those early builds as it first came to market watch those early reviews of the key one coming out of that those those first presentations you were getting a very incomplete picture of what a phone could do and unfortunately that's I think where a lot of people stayed in the conversation yeah wanna committed to TCO as well because of their enthusiasm behind the blackberry brandy were able to sort out talking about the display that little issue that brought up a jerry-rigged everything Zak Nelson with the adhesive like they were responsive and they said yeah we're gonna do something about it I have to drown drown one and throw the other one at a brick wall to break it screen did not pop out and we saw yeah they jumped on that really fast and you actually what worked in their favor though too is you know the key one for us because we live in this industry you know it's kind of even almost a it's a little long in the tooth because we got teased with it in January at CES now we're just a few months away from CES again but you know this is a phone with a very long shelf life and you know undoubtedly they're gonna do the key to but there's this is the only keyboard phone on the market right it's not like LG launches something and then another thing and they have like a two month or three month window where they better sell before the Samsung comes with the next pixel comes like this phone has a long shelf life and honestly like there's so many people who don't know where it exists so and I'm not talking and meet these people and meeting them every day and week still where they're like Oh BlackBerry's making phones again like this looks awesome I mean it just launched in the u.s. or you're only getting availability there so you know with their with that screen issue when it happened it was still very early not yet high-volume you know the unfortunate thing is it's the guys like us who are the hardcore like fanatics who are in but we're also probably the most like you know forgiving because we're still we want the damn phone so we're gonna live through the pain and and address it but yeah it was great to see them jump on that really really fast and and I actually you know I haven't really talked about this but I did do a trip down to Shenzhen I saw their HQ and I saw we're doing QA and all this stuff and manufacturing I saw the process and it was you know it's rock-solid like I've done a lot of factory tours over the years and yeah they have a really new factory built in the last few years and but the way they're going through it and the way they do the QA testing beat the hell out of the phones themselves like you know definitely trustworthy right so I think for any of the old black very faithful who are like oh you know we give it to TCL this is what happens I'm like add you know I'm kind of like just like you know my thumbs up it's not like the prints on you're doing your ad readout so I mean I've got like a plethora of fun phones with custom leather backs to just like do you remember cover they kid a ticket engraved color where this was my jay-z only man me and jay-z had these white curve 8300 at the start this is our we love these guys he's very much like jay-z I paid $1500 this is a Team Canada black people's 8700 they only made 20 at least a game to Team Canada and a couple of top like carrier sales reps and one of them sold one to me for 2500 so okay but I mean like that's one of the exciting things about going back with looking at a company with such lineage and in such a history I have to imagine that you you know the the operation you guys are running over at CrackBerry that this has been kind of a roller coaster ride over the last couple years of what this brand represents what the brand was actually executing and now where we've come out the other side and we're starting to crack through a general consumer conversation again what has the the tone of the conversation sort of been like do we see that reflected in the fans that they're starting to get excited about the stuff again - or the diehards being the ones that are kind of reigning on everyone's parade yes so that's a grow you're yeah you're the hitting like the nail on the head of some good topics here it's interesting because I'd say you know I've said this on our CrackBerry podcast before and we all know who we are and sometimes I'm that guy over the years we all take turns playing it it's like blackberry fans are super freaking passionate and sometimes we're our own worst enemies in in terms of how we like harp on things right because we do get probably the most angry when things don't go our way when we want them and I think what's interesting here is a lot of the core there's a lot of love for BlackBerry 10 which ironically left nothing like blackberry 10 was starting everybody was hating on it who was hardcore because they were just like BB OS is the best don't filthy p10 it's gonna suck and then you know bb10 want over a lot of the people and energy built its own loyal fan base which was never on the older blackberry phone there's like a lot of sort of younger BlackBerry 10 people who you know and that OS came out they loved the swipe they loved everything about it that was their first BB BB it wasn't a PB OS phone and the switch to Android they're not happy about right they would rather just like blackberry 10 be you know supported forever and to me I'm like well yes I get it it is a beautiful OS blah blah blah blah blah true but without apps it's never gonna it's it's just right it's a niche thing you know maybe you have some enterprise reason for wanting it or government reason for wanting it but but even at this point you know they've announced basically like blackberry has secured up Android to a point where it's as cure as they've ever gotten VB tend to be to be secure there or there like one release away from that being you know on par so so even that benefit of bb10 is becoming sort of null and void at that point so one of the DNA of blackberry is also making it so that security is second nature because we haven't been talking about much of it and it seems like oh yeah that's that's a that's a pretty good thing and we don't have to worry about that I think it's yeah I think it's definitely like its second nature to them it's DNA it's always top of mind I think you know with TCL building the phones now they're still like it's still at some point goes back yeah and it goes back to blackberry blackberry to do their final like intense security checks and everything so you know they're they never want to lose sight of that right I think you know John Chen has been in a few interviews recently and he's like look nothing's 100% you know secure but he's like really precise it's 100% secure as a device that even the owner can't get into yeah exactly exactly but he's like you know we build the best you know we built the most secure thing out right now right and we're always trying to stay on that and you know it doesn't mean things can't happen but I think there's a commitment from blackberry that's pretty strong you know they're they've been ok-ish on delivering on their monthly updates as they promised you know sometimes we've seen it be delayed slightly which isn't cool you know you want it to be like bang bang bang on you know on spec right but I think there is a there's a commitment there that that's yeah and I think the average person probably you know assuming they know BlackBerry's making phone still or again you know I think probably would not question or doubt that it's it's probably a smart you know secure choice and I think part of that is just the brand was built on the back of business and enterprise so strong like it was the it was the CEO phone and that that message still holds now whether you know whether that's true or not it you don't have to be a CEO to use a black bear you can use anybody but there's a there's an element to trust in the brand I think when it comes to those topics and so we we kind of want to wrap up this discussion kind of let you get back on with your day and thank you for joining us but I know from bike ride the weather's beautiful outside I'm like I brought my bike out of storage last night I'm like look at the forecast I gotta go this is the last day in Southern California before over the weekend we're gonna get scorched so I want to get outside I kind of wanted to ask your opinion of so we were just talking about you like the ZTE the dual screen phone the axon right penis will screen experiment one of my all-time favorite hardware build experiments is the passport oh yes right yeah now given the relationship with TCL and the influence that blackberry still has over their own design what are your thoughts for the future do you think that we're gonna get back into blackberry experimenting with productivity again or do we think that that pie is pretty well been baked by this point so great question so I think well so with one thing that's interesting is you know they were they put Android on a passport and they were actually working with like Google to make that stuff happen but at the year they were working on it Android resolutions would not adapt and apps just wouldn't get a welcome it possibly it could work better these days I think part of it comes to this decision of like where do you think the BlackBerry brand goes over the next couple of years like if they say you know what we're just gonna stick with keyboard like physical keyboard phones and you know you could think of like the key one I would assume kind of like an iPhone right they're gonna do a new version of every year like I think this is a winning form factor for the next five freaking years like they need to you know they'll tweak it each year make it better like I would assume that's an expectation we have but you know you also want to have other variety especially if you commit to keyboards so maybe doing like an experimentation like passport again could be pretty interesting but then at the same time if they're you know doing a full touch doing a keyboard how many phones year do you do I don't know how much experimenting you do versus just you know keep building the story built the marketing built the presence and and I mean I think the bottom line with TCL doing the art right now is they just can't lose money right so ville experiments as far as they can make money if they start experimenting they're like wow this ain't gonna work I don't foresee them doing experiments that they don't believe will work so you know is still in business 27 Chandra is the keyboard phone the big experiment like is that this experiment if you're TCL I mean look I I met I met the TCL guys back in your the BlackBerry mobile you know president TCL president sibel them back at Mobile World Congress earlier this year I bumped into them in Berlin and not ted-ed Aoife and you know the one thing I said to them when I first met them and you know Kevin being very just not thinking what's politically correct and you know proper manners at all I'm just like man you guys got some balls it's like a high ran your copy I don't know if I would take disagreement and you know so I'm like I tell ya an experiment is the experiment for them is signing that deal with John Shannon blackberry like that is a huge freakin risk and and I think it's you know I just look at the way this year is unfolded and and obviously you know they're still plugging away they're building momentum it seems you know they started out saying they're gonna launch in five countries with the key one and I think by the end of this year it's gonna be 30 plus so what started off as a very small team that's I think pretty modest ambitions they're seeing the traction and the response from carriers and you know countries around the world to keep you know to literally bring this thing back and you know blackberry blackberry they pretty much lost all that right like once once be be tended to take everything condensed down and they went to like Direct Selling only online and carrier relationships gone it's like everything this year with VB mobile has been from scratch rebuilding I mean even if you look at the things like their social channels you know blackberry has 25 million Facebook Likes but you know blackberry mobile have to start brand new and I guess you know BlackBerry's telling this story of where a software company so BB Mobile has to rebuild everything around phones again and it's gonna take time but I don't know it's it's coming and that story's there and it's gonna be happen it's in motion it's literally in motion oh look at that tying it all up I can't think of any any better way to send off this conversation I think you nailed it gonna point people to you guys for blackberry motion coverage over at CrackBerry at crackberry.com check them out on Twitter and YouTube and our pretty Kevin on Instagram yeah just crack for examine on it's my own crack breeze photos a motion now that we outed it here I feel like I can start post Marx I literally I think this is the first that people have seen one in my hand I love it well and then also I mean like it's got to feel good again against all the other like mobile nations guys that you guys have something exciting I think excited yeah it's fun I look I don't I'm not competitive like that these days I mean we went from a foot I just rode wined 10 years I'm like people saying oh I don't know these smartphones aren't gonna take off right it's you know who needs a phone in the pocket I'm like two billion and Counting so I feel like we've all wanted and there's plenty of space eclis but it's very exciting I've had just that the most crazy fun year you know I was kind of in CrackBerry retirement the last couple of years and you know that community was in maintenance mode via for the reasons we talked about earlier that's in the show and all of a sudden this year it's been crazy we've done I've done 18 in-person meetups to date you know traveling around Canada you ask a couple in Europe and we I have another I think nine before the end of the year we're gonna be hitting up this is this is exclusive news also we'll be hitting up doing Europe next in in Nova early November it's gonna be London Paris Frankfurt Prague we're gonna have Canada again probably second we could December into Vancouver Calgary Toronto Montreal and Kitchener Waterloo blackberries old hometown as a wrap up to it so I mean just like I think by I don't know if there's a phone company manufacture has done this kind of craziness of the community ever like it's just very grassroots fun this year kind of rebuilding things but yeah I mean this is stuff I would love to do ten years ago with blackberry but you know but they didn't need us back then I guess I don't know this now it's so much more fun and much more exciting you're talking about that and I can remember the dying days of palm like with webOS and how we were we were all having these sort of last end of the phone meetups when like the touchpad went on fire sale you could get a tablet for like $99 you would line up at 4:00 in the morning at a Best Buy with 200 other people all showing off like palms I mean like there was a sense that Blackberry could have been heading down that path yeah I'm like like these diehard fan communities just having nowhere else to go and it's been really exciting watching that story flip in a crazy short period of time I think it's gonna build now you know the biggest for the big thing this year was they were slow to get the phones to market from you know MWC and you know it just they I think they didn't realize I don't think they built enough soon enough right and then they were playing catch of catch-up and now I think the channels are filling up and you know now you're starting to see them and that's that's huge right because once you get them into people's hands that that's the next step to it and you know key ones got a lot of big supporters to it so and that's been that's the best part right if people bought it and didn't like it that'd be a problem but what I love is people are buying it and loving the frickin phone and that's all I need to know like that's that's a strong you know they got a future again which is great well and I have options that I can legitimately point family to again like I can tell my days I used to work in the government you know there's a blackberry again like you used to live your life out of one and you're on a little you're on a little Samsung right now that you don't necessarily love I'm just saying there's an option Kevin I really want to thank you for dropping by the podcast man this was a really fun chat especially getting that sneak peek that exclusive peek at the motion thanks for for showing that off my pleasure thanks for having me on guys have a great weekend yeah you too men take care go get that bike ride go have diner down now beautiful all right folks there you have it another episode of the PocketNow weekly has come and gone this show is over but the conversation continues on Twitter where Andrew where Kevin is at CrackBerry Kevin Jules is at Point Jules and I'm humbly at some gadget guy I think my Hannah histamines have finally kicked in at the end of the show pocket now is around the web on Twitter Instagram Facebook Google+ YouTube and our home site pocketnow.com shows like this cannot exist without your support sharing the weekly with your friends who love neurology and by dropping some reviews anywhere the podcasts came into the review once again we want to thank this week's sponsor app River keep your email clean with that promo code app River comm slash week app River calm slash weekly that they're helping us keep the lights on but ultimately there wouldn't be a show if it weren't for our listeners and subscribers who have kept us on the air since 2012 the pocket knight weekly we'll be back next week with all kinds of delicious technology goodness so make sure you tune back in