Gadgetory

hey guys and welcome to the first ever pocket now podcast we're calling this the pocket cast we've never done a podcast before even though we've gotten a lot of requests for them over the years we wanted to do a podcast in a little bit of a different way than what you see out there so the format this will take is sort of a raw unedited conversation between two smartphone geeks and it will vary from week to week probably in the form of one pocket now editor to another pocket now editor this week we're going to start out with Evan Blass he's the managing editor here at a pocket now and Evan say hi hey thanks i re-read awesome and so yeah so we're just going to cover about seven or eight pieces of content that we posted within the last seven days things that we thought were particularly interesting and we're just going to talk about it and so you might hear mess ups and bloopers and whatever we're going to leave it all in there for the sake of keeping this as raw as possible and this will be this will continue on only if you guys want it to continue on so please leave comments please let us know if you like this if you like it will keep doing it if you hate it will stick to video because we do a lot of video so we are going to start it off now the first-ever pocket cast so when we started with them why don't know I heard that you i got the dell venue this week i just want to know what you thought of it so far and they for the listeners who don't know if you could you could tell them a little bit about it sort of an android-powered venue pro right that doesn't have a keyboard obviously yeah yeah exactly we saw this device a long time ago I think engadget leak did they had or I think it was actually the venue pro that got leaked as the lightning and did we ever actually see the venue as a leak or was it just the the lightning that you as the Thunder ah yeah so we saw we saw it as a thunder and everyone was like whoa look what Dells doing they're coming forward with some awesome android phones these things are never going to come out and then they came out um and yeah that supposedly they have a in a pipeline called the flash and if that's a code name or I been at the detail dave was going to be admist ADV is T so you heard it here first folks right now that's the only smartphone trademark that dell has that not being used ha interesting and so the flash looks like the venue but it's got a front facing camera it is white and it has a different interface right interesting specs at least at the time you know that they live about nine months ago and at this point they seem a little bit antiquated imatra i think they would have to bump up a little bit they want us to be competitive at least or maybe they're not looking at yeah a high-end hands at this point except you know i would i would agree with you with an 800 megahertz processor but hmm it has a front facing camera which kind of implies high-end so maybe this you know this is just not going to ever ever come around ah oddly the the buttons are in a different arrangement I'm looking at the flash so anyway yeah the venue really cool phone because the dell venue pro i think had the highest build quality of any phone i've ever used and we rated it really high in our review because of that is also super fast it made windows phone 7 look awesome and then the venue is basically the same thing it's a little bit thinner it has no slide out keyboard and it's running android 2.2 with the dell stage you I that you kind of get off of the dell streak and it's it's a commanding device like the venue pro i mean it's got this curved glass display it's beautiful 4.1 inch AMOLED display it's the biggest AMOLED that they make you know Samsung's in there with their four-point-oh inch Super AMOLED so it's a striking phone but anyone i give this to to hold in the hand say wow this feels great but it's heavy so that's um i think that's that's my biggest complaint but it's it's asked in Quadrant it doesn't really measure up for some reason but in day-to-day operation it feels fast but overall I'm pretty impressed with it I I'm looking at this device which is on tmobile the venue and I'm also looking at device like the Nexus S and I got to say the nexus s just looks a whole lot better it's a lot faster the fit and finish just seems to be a little bit better on the on the nexus s so kind of a hard decision really lets you know came of the processor is in the venue yeah it's us 1 gigahertz Snapdragon okay versus what the an 800 megahertz um hummingbird and uh miss amisom I think the Nexus S has the one gigahertz hummingbird just like the the other galaxy s devices okay yeah and you know they both have 512 megabytes of RAM what was really interesting was that I was getting HSPA on the venue and I ran like a million benchmarks over the last few days and it's not HSPA speeds and then I was trying to determine if there's a difference between HSPA and HSPA+ which there probably is but it's really weird because the Nexus S is getting hsdpa on tmobile then you turn on the the venue it's getting HSPA but they're both getting the same data speed so that doesn't really matter you know the hspa+ is live at your network in your area I mean I don't but I would have to assume that it is because I live right outside of philly and we tend to get you know the sort of bumped up wireless speeds are kind of first and I was just driving through philly today I did a benchmark and I wasn't getting hspa+ so I just I guess it just doesn't support the the plus which is technically called enhanced HSPA so that that bit of excitement kind of went away when I when I discovered that it wasn't that fast and we just learned out at CES that t-mobile is actually going to be pushing their network to I'm 42 megabits per second this year theoretical speeds yeah that's that's going to be great and then they want to go all the way to six on you written what 72 megabits per second down whether they're really going to go every last drop a band like that of this thing I guess I guess the the the downside is the opportunity cost of investing in hspa+ you know they're not going to be able to spend those resources deploying their LTE network they'll have it ready by what like 2013 right but I think it's probably a lot more expensive to to roll out LTE which is a completely new technology as opposed to just upgrading their existing you know backbone which is no they already have the hsdpa in place I think it's just a matter of you know making enhancements to it as opposed to putting completely new or we're out there right but I guess it'll be a shame if you know they finally do invest in their LTE they bring it out in 2013 and it's doing speeds that verizon is achieving today while in 2013 verizon will be you know doing speeds far far greater than where they are today lte-advanced the TV yeah is so it I always wanted is that just a matter of flipping a switch on verizon's in or they have to climb up every tower and put a new like you know cartridge in it or something to turn on the events it would be nice to get someone here on the potty Catholic if you tell us about that i think it's it's more than turning a switch i think it has a lot to do with software and optimizing the way that the you know that the packets are passed around but but beyond that it's way too technical ways to actually get a game on here but he understands it yeah give us our new highly technical writer on pocket now and perhaps he could shed some light on this so that's definitely something to consider because i think a lot of people are kind of mystified by all of these wireless standards that come and go over the years so so let's get into some of the content we posted this week we're going to start off with nvidia talking about their Tegra 2 3 d chip and then their Tegra 3 quad-core chip coming out later in 2011 the stuffs going to be launching Mobile World Congress quad cores in a smartphone why is the world ready for quad cores and smartphone first of all um sure I mean you know as long as the developers are able to write software it take advantage of it I don't see why not and let me also say you know that they have to keep the power consumption down you can't have four cores point is or using as much power as a tool for or you know the batteries did a dream you know almost twice as fast yeah they've got to be building in some some really fantastic power saving technology because I mean we're going to see some I think crappy battery life come dual-core time with the upcoming devices and add double that I just think it's going to be kind of ridiculous in terms of battery drain especially when I'm sure it has the ability to turn off three cores and only use one but if you're doing a lot of intense gaming I can't imagine your battery lasting very long yeah sort of when I remember you know back in the day before we had smartphones batteries they used to last a couple days and every store just accepted the fact that you know your battery's gonna last a day at that sometimes did speaking of which do you remember the days when you had a windows mobile phone and if you let the battery discharge you lose all of your data no I was you were doing that lucky you yeah it was a that was before Windows Mobile 5.1 of ridiculous but yeah back in the day pda's would last for days on end because they weren't constantly sending and receiving wireless data and you know using GPS so that was pretty reasonable what what kinds of kinds of applications do you think can take advantage of quad core configurations um just about anything that's processor to rendering web pages watching high resolution or my definition video gaming like you said doing like virtual desktops BNC know if you want to control your computer and and you know look at your your desktop in real time on the phone right like that you know you can never have too much power but I suppose I you know I it's it's crazy because I pick up the Nexus S which as far as i know is the fastest android phone out there right now and everything is instant you know bringing up a web page of course take some time if it's graphic heavy but going into email and SMS and using the phone playing some games it is so fast I just can't imagine I know this is gonna sound weird in a year from now but I can't imagine it being any faster I donated random what do you mean when I was like you know that editorial I wrote ah I said you know I can't in smartphones really get that much better than they are now and yeah it was it was sort of half funny that was advocate at half true you know i mean it just smartphones never done any better than they are right now like we still be totally happy I home you know we never got one I ever better you know they just kept coming out with with apps on a mistake calverley it would be fine you know I mean maybe other people don't feel that way but but that's certainly my feeling at this point well I guess you mean to say that for what you use it for you would be satisfied if you didn't get more advanced capabilities on top of what you guys today here's there's almost nothing I could think of and I've never used to be the case I you know it's going to be faster it can have a high resolution screen on cam give you better and and now you know they're so close yeah the camera could still be a little bit battery how the flash could be better but the you know i'm not sure that wherever is the really great cameras on on the phones just because you know that the lenses are so small you know you have today it's a balance there were you have to decide whether you want you know whether you want portability or you want good optus I gotta say though that the camera on the iPhone 4 and a phoner to more like the like the Galaxy S will both the nexus s in particular it is better than the sony point-and-shoot camera that i paid 300 bucks for like two years ago sure I mean they've agree that just because of the the nature of the lens needing to be large to let in a lot of light you can never have a cell phone camera be as good as a DSLR but they they are darn good I mean some of these i zoom either was really working there well tell that to I think they're I think a couple of weeks ago we posted about a an android phone that had an optical zoom it was really ugly but uh it it was there was that repairs on it could have been is that is that right or out there it was it was a no-name company and it looked like crap um this is a case so grand and it's gonna be children listen to this do better watch my language I hope not this is this is rated pg-13 just so so to kind of conclude about the quad core thing I think thinking about phones in today's context and what we do with phones today it's sort of impossible to say it's impossible to say that yeah we need quad cores but if you sort of think for a minute and kind of extend out what phones will be used for in the future perhaps desktop-class applications made into a touch friendly interface then it sort of starts to make a little bit more sense and I don't think by the end of 2011 when Tegra 3 is going to be around we're going to have this answer and a lot of people are going to think it's a little bit ridiculous that we've quad core cpus and phones but you know that's just that's the way things are going and maybe it'll all make sense a year or two from now I said that last year and it was I was wrong anyway so let's move on let's see here so on january 25th google voice opened number porting to everyone which was a feature that a lot of people were waiting for like me my tell us about your experience with that yes so I've always had this okay call it a fancy if you want a fantasy of being being able to use any phone that I want and you know either do you okay all right so you know I review a fair amount of phones for pocket now and if i'm reviewing a phone on another carrier I've got it forward my number and so with the idea of porting my number to google voice i could set up future phones on any carrier so that i can receive calls and send calls from my native number and everything would be great so you know i took the plunge on january 25th i ported my number to google voice I probably incurred a two-hundred-dollar ETF on AT&T I was about probably forty percent of the way through the contract but i figure i'm going to be saving money because i was paying probably one hundred and eleven dollars or hundred ten dollars for AT&T unlimited data 1500 minutes 1500 texts and now i am using a tmobile prepaid card that's giving me unlimited voice and data plus 2 gigabytes of data or unlimited voice and text and a 2 gigabytes of data for 70 bucks so you know in about four months i'll break even from this early termination fee and so far I've been happy you know there's a few caveats to google voice but you know I've got freedom to use any phone as let as long as it has a google voice application and i feel like a new man so now you're making calls over the standard cellular network you're you're not making voice over IP calls correct right and that's I think a misconception of google voice what it does is a little complicated you use your phone and I'm talking about Android iPhone us a little bit different you use your phone as if you are just calling anybody you'll get a little pop-up that says you you know it says like now routing your call with google voice and google voice is going to call another number which will use voice over IP and somehow connect that with your actual google voice number i'm not sure the technicalities of it so it is working over your minutes so it will go against your minutes using google voice okay okay now that google also has a product like skype right where its voice over IP the whole way yes so you can connect your you can make google voice calls over your google voice number through gchat and that is totally voice over IP okay but now you can't generally do that at least in carriers over over your data plan you could probably do it over Wi-Fi I'm imagine or maybe not at all okay can you do gchat at all from the phone um I i don't i'm not sure i don't i don't know about that we should we should look at the answer no but a little annotation on the video we will we will do that but that would be a good question whether you can use google chat on your phone to place a call through google voice over voice over IP over your data connection i'm gonna i'm going to say probably not but we'll look into that so my question to you evan is why don't you put your number on google voice well number one I don't want to pay the termination fee and number two I like having my google voice number as a virtual number as opposed to an actual number meaning i like using I like you in that number two people and then you know being able to just sort of have it like a firewall you know to be able to manage things at at that level the same thing is having a virtual email address hmm so so there's a number of reasons for doing so but I mean couldn't you use your primary number as a like a sort of firewall as you as you describe it I why does it have to be a sort of random number that google voice assigns you another story I understand buzzing so you want to have us you have a google voice account right right and you're using a random number that they assigned to you more or less you picked the area code so and and you like that because you can give that to you know new people that you need and you're not actually giving them your real phone number so you can rest assured that you could block their call if you don't like them earth or knowing or something right and then you can also decide which pose that room 2 i'm right now actually have a landline but you know if I ever want one again it would be nice to to be able to control that you know from from from that one panel but while also being able to have the center numbers to give to people you know people like my parents do who don't necessarily understand about that that long distance is free now so have you know they like to have a number for me too that's in a local area code for that I see I think that you would be able to achieve the same benefits by putting your number to google voice but you would I don't know yet and let me say something else's is how how you it's how you get a data right now on your phone your you're just doing a you still have to you still have to pay pay a cell phone company for service right yeah yeah so it doesn't seem to me that that I mean you're benefiting mind terribly all that moment are you well well as i mentioned i'm saving forty or fifty dollars a month so i guess for most people they probably are on a plan that is already optimized but i was on this AT&T plan that was just too expensive and i wasn't using you know half the features are using half the messages so from there I decided to be bad you could you could've just moved over to you anyway I got any plan without doing another cool and save money yeah but another consideration is that you know I'm on this t-mobile prepaid plan I can cancel it at any time I'm really staring at that HTC Thunderbolt on on Verizon's 4G network I may want to switch to that Network full time and if I do that there's not going to be more number porting that I have to go to you know it'll it'll immediately using google voice i can immediately basically use my phone number with verizon's LTE phone if you will have you will have to get a phone number through verizon right yeah i mean when you sign up for a new contract you'll have a phone number and basically you're just forwarding you set google voice to forward to that new number and all the elevator now through a wall yes two gigabytes but uh you know i was on the unlimited 18t plan before but I was never did that bad I know and that was the hardest part but but listen to this I looked over my data usage in the last two years and you know I'm a pretty heavy smartphone user i tether all the time I've never gone over nine hundred megabytes of data have you have you taken a look at your usage yeah all it takes is one time where you're on vacation and you want a slingbox like phillies game that's right yeah slingbox ille will do it that's for sure and said if there's there's any 80 people listening this you never heard that no i don't think that you're technically allowed to do that with your phone or through your phone you're not supposed to but I mean your pain you're paying them for data you should be able to use the data for whatever you want right yeah anyhow so let's move on I'm going to write a kind of lengthy editorial on Google nuttin voice poor doing why people would people don't want to put their number over there sort of the compromises I've had to face because I think a lot of people could benefit from doing this it's not for everyone but definitely something to consider let's it I might write a counterpoint to your editorials and then it's not really that very sad a challenge I wouldn't say it's a challenge I'm just no sense and i think our readers should get to death both points of view and you know really should necessarily Vinny tell them to go right now do something that that the average person that many benefits problem especially if they're gonna have to pay ya alright so my title will be why you should port your number to google voice yours will be why you shouldn't port your number to google voice and we will see who wins but i want to read yours first if i want to do it more like a counterpoint to your article ah ok ok we'll do it we'll do it i'm always up for a challenge alright so let's move on we another thing we posted on january 25th talking about the LG optimus 3d potentially the first 3d smart phone and you know certainly 3d has had difficulty getting traction in the TV space and now they're going to bring it to a smartphone although potentially without needing glasses mmm I might argue with you science had trouble getting traction I I look at three years of same way that come HD high definition was the beginning I mean you know for four years I mean you know it was it was a niche thing you know people couldn't afford it they were expensive and you know it seems then in a matter of just a couple years you know maybe two or three or is it you know like that took off and and now everyone's got an HD set and you know it was the same I think it would be sort of the same thing with blu-ray and same thing with 3d it it really it has to be a tipping point that's reached and unless that happens you know people just just rushed in technology so I went necessarily count out yet there's there's a lot of money behind it there's a lot of big-name manufacturers and I don't think it's going anywhere I think once these these corporations that put their minds and then you know wallets and then vani caps find something like this yeah they're they're gonna going to make sure it gets adopted well I I sort of agree i think this the the glasses 3d TV thing is going to die out in it's not going to work and then you know a bunch of times going to go by three years four years we're gonna have glasses-free 3d TV that's actually going to be good and then people will be willing to pay for it because they remember back ten years ago to when they coughed up lots of dough for the HD set and now they can eat more easily justify another big purchase because right now you know these people that are sort of looking at 3d tvs probably got a HD TV just a few years ago so they're already spent from from that so so I think your next question power you know what are the 3d applications on a smartphone and I think 3d on the smartphone hinges a lot upon the success of 3d in the in the living room so i'm not sure than that that that smartphones are ready for 3d you know i'm just not sure that there's enough content there to justify it it seems to me gimmicky at this point interesting so you think that 3d on the smartphone will work when there's enough 3d content in other words you think that 3d on the smartphone will be for viewing movies and TV shows that are in 3d right and also playing games but and you know it's another ticket right thing that the screens have to be out there but I making content but but people want to say I understood making the content I'll there enough screen and Africa great so we'll see what you know right now it's you know they're only even doing like the first dedicated 3d gaming system nintendo 3 yes and you know you have a smattering of these sharp 3d handsets but but right now it's really a sort of a boutique thing and yeah I don't really think that that the average person's did it get much out out of buying this first round of you know the LG optimus 3d unless unless LG to push you know it's none of their own you know content that they that they pay for mission and whatever yeah that's I think that's the key i mean if LG has developed some revolutionary 3d interface for your home screens or some new email experience that utilizes the XYZ axis which would be confusing because you can't interact with the z-axis huh it's only you know it's really lame for life display purposes right so we'll see i feel like in kind of a sense LG is kind of rushing this product out to be the first yeah and hey would it be the first time that they did that yeah they're they're big on yeah I'm the first dual core smartphone you know having a brightest everyone wants to to be able to hang their hat on something it's all about the marketing material well we will were sending Tony to Mobile World Congress so hopefully he will provide some hands-on time we don't have a 3d camera and youtube doesn't do 3d yet so and monitors can't do three so it'll be inside by the way to our readers who just read by lions yeah yeah aunt Tandy naggy we call him Tony because that's when he prefers to be called but he will be in Barcelona in the next couple of weeks for mobile world congress so we'll see all this stuff will be talking a lot about it should be interesting let us move on something we posted on january twenty sixth 2 million windows phone 7 s shipped so far so Mike what my question here is is this a sign of success or not for windows phone 7 no I think you know I obviously do a lot of reading about the stock and see a lot of numbers and everything is conflicting but I'd say overall the feeling I'm getting is that Windows Phone 7 is doing is doing okay as expected to a little bit better than expected yeah I agree with that the more i think about Windows Phone 7 sort of in the confines of the other operating systems that are sort of advancing the more I think about it as a platform that isn't meant to compete with Android these these updates are coming out slow there's still a lot I can't do on Windows Phone 7 I mean the interface is gorgeous using it is a pleasure but going from windows phone 7 to an android phone I just feel like my handcuffs are coming off and I can you know flap my wings in the breeze and do a lot more yeah I feel it that way I mean it's definitely a first generation product and no I it's fun to play with but I certainly would not spend my own money on one of the insects until you know they at least get this first round of updates if not you know the second round it supposedly come later in the year as well stint mango yeah and something else I'm kind of disappointed about is the the developer support I mean obviously the platform is locked down enough to where the most we can do right now with Chevron wp7 is change ringtones change maybe some theme colors but there's I mean I was hoping by now we could you know completely change the interface and remove rich restrictions and have a third-party way of multitasking through applications a simple fast app switcher but so far that doesn't seem to be the case and I know the develop development communities working on this but it's taking a while yeah the security is tight on this operating system really really tight you know the trauma to Titus that run on the mobile yep and yeah they they work hard to make sure that that that that there's you know a number of different restrictions of that that are keeping um hackers from from totally opening it up and as we've learned it it may never be totally open any of it is your you're probably committing a crime if you um if you use a lot of these services that he didn't pay for yes I'm Xbox Live and you know anywhere you're connecting to Microsoft server the only way you're supposed to have access to that is if you paid for your handset and implicitly for a license to use that copy of windows phone 7 yep yep I on the on the bright side to this HD two owners have been able to finally run Windows Phone 7 on their device I don't know if you remember Evan but you know when windows phone 7 came out there was almost daily rumors of whether the hd2 could run windows phone 7 one day was yes one day was no one day I was it just kept going on mmm and finally through through sort of unofficial unofficial means we can run windows phone 7 on the hd2 and it works very very well of course you can't run you know xbox live and all the other services connect it to the cloud but if you want to push it a little bit better though what he says compared to the previous OS what are you really losing other than market clips access and that was even only there for four very late in Windows mobiles you know life span I mean that's I think that's the biggest thing and I think a lot of people will look at Windows Phone 7 with the stock applications not being able to load Twitter and Facebook and say this is this is ridiculous ya know where there's a will there's a way I'm sure that those patient's will will become available through side loading and you know they'll they'll have an entire catalog just like they do it with itunes apps you know they they've cracked those and you know you're in the piracy you can get those off for free and silo them and you know it's all it's all possible if you want to do stuff like that so well hopefully though there will be a legitimate way to access the marketplace with a I guess unsanctioned copy of windows phone 7 and everyone will be happy just one final note on this piece of news about 2 million windows phone 7 shipped sort of an unfair comparison but was doing some research windows phone 7 has been out for about six months now and the iphone was around for about eight months before it sold two million units but of course that's kind of unfair because not only are we three and a half years later when smartphones are becoming more ubiquitous but Windows Phone 7 launched with nine or 10 devices whereas there was only one iphone on one carrier so it's hard to carve out a call is that all that says is how well it doesn't think anything all about about Windows Phone 7 but it does say that the iphone was an incredibly successful product that's that's fair that's fair cool all right so let's move on to January 26th where we were talking about the galaxy s2 dos how do you say to in French da yeah but mobile Congress would be in things I think those more appropriate there so Mobile World Congress the galaxy s2 the galaxy s was a very very important series of devices for samsung you know they were able to strike up partnerships with every carrier in the US and we saw it also in other versions abroad and you know that that relationship led them to get the galaxy tab on every carrier and now Samsung potentially rivals the the brand notoriety that HTC had in you know 2009 yeah well I mean when you think about the bigger picture Samsung has always been a bigger company in general and HTC and you know HTC sort of came and ate their lunch for a little while but you know Samsung has had the deep carrier relationships in place for years long before you know HTC mood was a glimmer of anyone's eye so I so it was a potentially find in other words what's a samsung sort of a sleeping giant her for a few years at least in the smartphone space yeah that's that's true they had the inroads they had the the bigger brand the bigger company and they you know they spent some good time on the Galaxy S the galaxy s was a great device you reviewed the fascinate right right why don't you think of it mmm you called me was no the swallow I liked it overall it's a good device you know it's very similar to I think a lot of the other high-end Android and it sets out there one thing I didn't like so much on it and how much probably we keep it from being a daily driver for me that didn't have a dedicated camera shutter button and versus day at the droid x which does have that button and also I I like the form Packer a little bit more of the X even though the fascinate is is you know slimmer and sleeker I sort of think there's something cool about the box eNOS of the x and the same thing with the iphone 4 and from the rumors we hear the galaxy s2 is also going to be a little bit foxier at least at those you know those those leaps suppose of the renders or photos or whatever or turn out to be you know accurate yeah that seems to be the trend we had the sort of nexus one looking devices and many many many devices that look like that with a rounded edges now we're starting to see some squared-off edges like on the droid x and the you know even the dell venue and the very boxy shape of the the iphone 4 just want to go back to something you said about the dedicated camera ki I think one of the smartest things Microsoft is requiring for windows phone 7 is the dedicated camera key and that feature where you tap and hold the camera key when the phone is off and boom you're in the camera app I can't stand using an on-screen camera button it's it's so annoying and it must cost these companies you know very small amounts of money to include a shutter button in the design of their device I don't think it's definitely not a matter of cost that no I think for so many companies with Apple you know they they want to they would have as few buttons as possible I mean I'm sure that they would love to get rid of the volume buttons and the power button to it they could but you know sometimes you just have to have and did it's definitely just a design decision I feel the same thing with Samsung on the galaxies you know they wanted this sort of wanted to eight the iphone a little bit to end to one outfit and and what an atom saying his review he said that the thing was the vibrant said it came closest to to any phone into you know to being an iphone you know killer or feet or whatever you call it so yeah I agree with you on that I definitely like to have it and that's that's one of those some cases where where where function definitely takes precedence over over for form is pretty you know I I i think that the dedicated camera button is going to go to the way of the 3.5 millimeter headphone jack I think back a few years ago OEMs had the same opinion of the 3.5 millimeter headphone jack especially HTC that why would they add a stupid hole to the phone when they could just do everything through the charging and syncing port but you know I think in a year from now or two years from now it's going to become commonplace across the board for there to be a dedicated camera button and I'm sure you're going to disagree with that no I do actually and I think it's I think also to get her the headphone jack part of the thinking that was that that Bluetooth was taken that there was no reason for it because everyone was buying these bluetooth headphones but that it turned out to to grow into a certain point you know everyone's phone as HTTP and Abbott you really don't see a lot of YouTube headphones out there still so the battery life is so short they're not really comfortable you know there's a lot of reasons that that they haven't taken off ya dumb it looked like they might and you know at least as far as kind of tents going though those were getting really big too so yeah I can see how how the thinking was you know what why do we need this this extra port here when you know we can we can sort of gently push people towards going Wireless right all right good point oh yeah I remember back maybe four or five years ago when bluetooth headsets worked going to be the rage and I was thinking about launching a bluetooth headset website and there's others actually there is actually a bluetooth headset website out there Michael auroville mobile burn one of my friends in the community here launched a site it was pretty cool he reviewed bluetooth headsets news on bluetooth headset but i think sort of with the with the trend of people just using the phone as a phone and without a bluetooth headset you kind of stopped you know going with that site but i mean i think you could get decent SEO on a site like that yeah if you work at it yeah I realized searches or enough searches for for food stuff you know you could you could keep it going around if you could you know you could grow it anything really big yeah very very niche idea okay cool alright so we've got two more stories to cover i think this this this pocket cast is going to run a little bit longer than we had anticipated but that's okay hopefully one thing I don't know before we want in the galaxy s2 I want to mention to you and I told you that that gave and I were looking for the what firmware and actually leaked out and this was this is way before we knew that the I 9200 was the galaxy s2 hop for a long long time i 9100 harness was what it was going to be so you know that's what everyone's waiting for that firmware and are looking for those pictures on picasa and it just never hit it because room was looking for the wrong thing so once we realize this we we took apart the firmware and it's going to be sort of let downs of people that that all of the other wallpapers and there are wvga resolution ah so i don't know if that this so just a placeholder and since it was an early version of the ROM and yeah I mean they use a different screen on earlier versions the phone but I think that highly suggestive that we're not going to be seeing we're not greasy and you know an atrix style screen in there that would be despicable if in 2011 Samsung's flagship is not up to par with motorola's flagship maybe 2011 will be the year of Motorola although you could argue that 2010 was but well that's disappointing I am going to be a very upset for the rest of the day those are sorry hopefully it's a placeholder they really need to bump the resolution you know especially if they're going to do a larger than four-point-oh inch screen it's nice to have some extra pixels there the good news that that camera must definitely be a mega vessels because I'm noticed there's some icons in there for for the megapixel camera I much rather have a 3 megapixel camera that takes awesome pictures than a twenty five megapixel camera that has lots of noise when you put them on your computer monitor I don't really know where you weren't happy with yeah the galaxy acid fascinating ah no the Nexus S I think the Nexus S has a better camera than the galaxy s devices although I have to look back at that I'll tell you what the real improvement the Galaxy S owners are looking for is in gps of course that's enough aureus possibly I you know a hardware problem a defect with you know on the phone it sold millions we're going to see a Toyota style recall soon anybody that would be all right so let's move on on january twenty seventh we were talking about a blackberry leak or several blackberry leaks the curve touch among others mmm let's see so which which devices are in question here the Monaco touched the curve touch the Monaco touch is the oh and then there is the bold touch so I think we're talking about three devices here they're quite a few devices evident week in the past couple weeks I think it's a total of four a farm i asked i think i think we look at for you and my uni five I know we're looking at on that digit code of it it's like a bowl but with the touch screen Frank and then there was the storm 3 that that were showing off the torch to and then we have both the the next generation curve which is the Sedona or the Apollo I think it's the Sedona though and then there's also the test curve so that would be five hand that's right it's a lot yep so yeah lots going on with black very well but and the specs we saw on some of these are looking like they're they're finally catching up but for many years blackberry has been totally behind the times and screen resolution processor speeds storage space camera resolution in you know you name it you name the category andrea has been you know the height of times but it looks like they're they're finally starting to catch up with this latest generation yeah the the Monaco touch has a 1.2 gigahertz processor any of these have our dual core chips I'm not sure but I mean their BlackBerry's just they're just like you to sort of get their their stuff together right now down out there their overall in your operating systems you know there's probably to be moving everything over to an ex based system away from you know the current blackberry OS architecture so I think there and I think they even quoted as saying you know they're there they're not ready to put these foos dual-core processors and the phones until you know they're there they're able to you know meet a certain level of power consumption or whatever for you know there's it's still you know a lot of these of primarily business machines and you know business people on road trips are they want you know they want to get a certain amount of battery life out of the phone yeah i think the the key is the transition to q + X + dual-core processors I think the devices we're talking about right now are sort of bridge devices that don't really bring that much new stuff to the table the specs are bumped a little bit but we're probably going to see some big-time smartphone blackberry magic you know this time next year with probably a rethought blackberry operating system running on some pretty beefy hardware absolutely very good and speaking of next generation software let's talk about honeycomb on yes the delicious honey cone on january 27th we took a we took some time to take a look at the honeycomb emulator trying to get a sense for how honeycomb will work on smartphones because we are very very curious and we know that honeycomb is coming smartphones but we don't know how and you've seen hints of it we you know if you resize the emulator strangely you get an interface that looks like gingerbread but a little bit different which kind of was contrary to my thinking which was that honeycomb for smartphones is going to have a lot of the UI of honeycomb for tablets but you know februari second is just around the corner we're going to probably be learning a lot about honeycomb for smartphones and I I think that resizing the honeycomb emulator and seeing the gingerbread interface was just kind of Google as a way of saying that hey we're working on it and this isn't complete or even close to complete because it was completely inoperable it wasn't a Kemp getting a force close on the launcher what do you what are your thoughts on a honeycomb for the smartphone what do you think it's gonna going to look like you know I just I just don't know now get to say I hope think Google is really reveal enough you know I I think in general you have to assume that that they're going to keep the same basic styling cues so so in one sense i think that you know that that they could tell us a lot about what it's going to be like but but on the other hand you know it's a totally different screen side different applications different usage scenarios so i'm not sure that that it could tell us all that much that makes any sense yeah i guess i've been on this android kick lately um no no no no no no no i was i was on an iphone kick i was then i was on a windows phone 7 kick now i'm on an android kick and you know i i've been thinking a lot about this and the tablet has a few paradigms i guess we can call it that that is completely different than how Android functions today for example the button list design so all of the buttons are virtual there on the bottom of the screen you get the home button in the back button I really think that that's coming to the smartphone to allow for buttonless hardware and then this is like the worst idea I'm so happy with that trend and how fun this needs to be buttons for stuff you know I used to love those windows mobile phones they had about a trillion but no man each of them like three you know three different functions Thursday there was like a button for calendar for contacts for web for phone for I mean it just was ridiculous yeah it was great you know you had your multitasking button and then you know you had the bows that in the scroll wheel thumb wheel sometimes they were like multi-directional thumbnails like from the CA oh yeah yeah back in the day oh man um yeah I like buggies I like the all the buttons on the trio you could you know assign the S key to launch the application or the are key so I'm a big fan of buttons and I I don't like the fact that that we're going to have phones with no buttons at all because you know sometimes your screen freezes up you know the UI goes and you know walkie and then you need to use a button or something that's not there I guess I I I tend to be on the opposite side of the camp I think that when OMS don't need to place buttons on phones anymore we're going to see these very futuristic looking screens and the screen will actually be the phone but there will be a razor thin bezel all the way around the screen the the screen size will be maximized and I think nothing can stop them doing that right now you could you know you could make an android phone like I mean if it were technically possible to get the speed at close to the edge of the phone it would have been done already I don't think it's the buttons that are holding things up you know you could you could put the buttons on the bottom of the phone for instance if you want it couples can poke that and to still keep the other requirements of the OS yeah you know buttons require a minimum height to be pressable so I agree with you that the technology should already exists for bezels to be really thin and I mean if you look at the hd2 that has extremely thin bezels the right and left side but then on the top it's a little bit thick obviously for the proximity sensor the speaker grill and the bottom is like 150 percent times bigger than the top bezel because you need those buttons you need the logo and I'm just saying with no buttons then we get to bump the screen down that would usually be taken up by those hardware keys yeah yeah I super saying I still know I like some buttons on the side to the phone now for four different things I'll a lot I'll compromise with UW you can take all the buttons off the face if you did you lose some other sides um okay I'll go with that at our okay just our next pay phone on the next pocket out dream phone although don't put a pressure or what was it on the continuum the pressure squeeze sensor and it just it didn't work I mean the concept is great you pick up your phone you squeeze it a little bit turns on but it wasn't calibrated properly or just didn't work type what is it the continuum yeah the one with Ted the Android with the ticker on the bottom the fake to here where it's really just one big LCD that they they blacked out are in it yeah that's the first of one so real quick just want to continue a couple of thoughts on honeycomb for smartphones so I think that that's the first interface paradigm it's going to come forward from the tablet is the virtual buttons we're also going to finally finally see a better way to multitask an android android has been multitasking since day one with a press and hold of the home button which takes too long it's a it's about a second or two delay um I know that seems ridiculous but compared I I think I'll always be in a rush in and it's just there's too much to do so so you know with android 3.0 and honeycomb you press this button that it's to the right of the home button you get little pop-up preview of the screens that are open and you can access that from any program so instead of a tap-in and a hold to see the recent programs it's just a tap and you get the previews very simple concept although think even better would be the upcoming perhaps iOS 4.3 for iphone multitasking feature where you use four fingers you can swipe right to left I mean that is awesome to be able to multitask that way yes it's complicated though so many gestures you have to remember and why not well he I mean that's pretty simple to remember well I just the beginning though you look at do you have a macbook or you know one of these these deep Mac these Apple pads the touch pads there's quite a few you know multi finger gestures it's like a whole whole dictionary of new yeah you're right I agree and I think the same thing every time I sit down in front of a Mac but the truth is that when you're spending that much on a new piece of technology you're more than willing to learn 510 gestures and I think the same will be this case for for a smartphone yeah functionality is there you're going to want to try to take you guys over totally and one final thing that I think are I hope is coming to Honeycomb for smartphones is a new way to organize the home screens because right now an Android if you have a full a full home screen and you want to switch the location of two icons you have to like delete one or slide it off the screen and then move the other one in its place and then add the other one you can't do you can't move two things at once and it's hard for you to manage you know seven six five home screens in honeycomb on tablets at least you get this awesome looking zoomed out view of your home screens with sort of like a tray that shows you all your apps all your widgets and I don't know how that you would do that on a smaller screen but I really hope that that it comes through on the smartphone version of honeycomb yeah I create home advantages is you know you have all these different sized widgets and you're trying to get everything to work in both portrait and landscape it's totally a mess and now you have some of these the OEM to just want you to let you do landscape now you know you turn up your home screen you turn your phone sideways you know nothing rotates yeah although I gotta say I use launcherpro which has that feature you can do landscape home screens I always turn it off because for some reason this the device has a hard time in rearranging the home screen at the landscape and it takes like two seconds and I guess because I'm young I don't like to wait but um well that exactly they can't get it right yeah it's like dude this huge problem the general problem with smartphone you know that's what's it at any manufacturer but you know also when you say rearranging home screens one of one of the worst in my opinion is windows phone instead of that that if that's just an exercise in frustration trying to get it so look how you want and trying to you know switch things around just nothing behaves logically at least and you know for me I don't know if you if you had a different experience with it well in Windows Phone 7 uh you know I I set my home screen and I didn't do anything else with it for you know several weeks on end I I think that because the home screen setup is so simple I mean you get either to buy one blocks or one by one blocks you don't really have that need to move stuff around whereas an Android I mean you you can download new widgets and new programs and you want to make your home screens look awesome and you're always moving stuff around so I agree it's a little it's also challenging in Windows Phone 7 but I didn't find myself with that frustration because I wasn't moving stuff around so often alright so that concludes the first episode of the pocket cast again it's a little bit different in terms of the formatting than other podcasts that are out there for one we're doing this over YouTube of course we're very open to the idea of putting this on iTunes and the zune marketplace and lots of other places but we wanted to start off this way and kind of give you a conversation about what happened this week in smartphones because we're fascinated by this stuff and hopefully you are all too so again leave us as much feedback as you can thumbs up thumbs down and you like this do you hate it we have a thick skin we just want to know if we should continue doing this so thank you evan for being the first guess of the pocket cast and we will see you guys on the site next week have a good weekend