Gadgetory

um very good are we recording yep we're on very good um soon hmm let me see your all right so we've got some stuff to talk about all right so which episode are we on 1111 hey everyone welcome to the eleventh episode of a pocket now pocket cast podcast I will be your host Brandon minimun editor-in-chief of pocketnow.com also in the line managing editor of pocket now mr. Evan blast holler back how are there we go and also on the line senior editor and Tandy naggy holler back Anton however hey guys hey everybody hey hey hey all right so a lot to talk about although it's funny because every time we podcast I say there's a lot to talk about so next time i will say there's very little to talk about and we'll do half the amount very nice can we have only a half-hour show then yeah i'm curious as to what is the ideal length of a podcast i'm assuming that people that listen you know put the time into it they listen on the way to work they listen on the ride home on the subway so there's not much of a difference between 30 minutes and 60 minutes but i might be wrong so those of you that are listening you rather our podcast be 30 minutes or you like it 60 minutes or you want it 90 minutes which I can't promise we can do let us know I think the average out there is is 60 minutes for for the other podcasts that occur on the Internet of which there are many very good so let's get started so cyanogenmod 7 version 7 final was released I've got to admit that I don't follow cyanogenmod that much Joe Levi our resident Android expert does and it's a really really big deal in the Android world it's a it's a series of roms that include a lot of really cool features that you don't get on stock devices and if you go to cyanogen com I think it's cyanogenmod sightsee sayat sign antigen here to cyanogenmod com and you click on devices you can see that there are Rob for pretty much every device so you root the device you you add this rom and Joe did a pretty comprehensive walkthrough of what's new in cyanogenmod 7 and the list is is pretty comprehensive I was pretty curious to see what they would be for example you can move the top the notification bar down to the bottom of the screen which is kind of cool you can change the way you know notifications happen you can change themes you can change performance tweaks certain things about the display and it's a it's it's a pretty cool thing have you ever used cyanogenmod either of you I know I haven't but talking about those small tweaks especially the one with the taskbar I have to come in here and say that windows mobile 6.1 and 6.5 had the option it so it was a third-party application to the taskbar down but no I haven't used antigen mud yeah I haven't either um basically because my my main on Android is a droid x and you can't use it on that model or any of the the motorola motorola models to boot loaders a lot so okay yeah i'm looking here there are no motorola devices mostly HTC and yeah they're pretty much all HTC I don't see any Samsung devices supported here I'm just looking at some of the other features a lot of them are sort of novelty features which you could achieve if you were to just get third party apps but i guess the draw of cyanogenmod is it puts everything and it's it's been many years in the making it puts all these tweaks under one roof under one rom so that you don't have to download you know 20 different third-party apps to get the same functionality for example there is a feature that might double your battery life because apparently there are red blue I might get this wrong and two green pixels on your display and if you the reason our two greens is because it requires the most amount of power to actually be seen but if you disable the green and only have the red and the blue your screen might look weird but your battery apparently goes through the roof and cyanogenmod it gives you that that functionality another thing it does is it includes phone goggles which is basically a an add-on that disallows you from calling people a late at night presumably when you've had too much to drink or even taking too many drugs or something so so a lot of stuff a lot of features really and also a fair amount of performance tweaks sort of just wanted to talk about that for a minute so say if you guys remember back in the day approximately two or three years ago maybe it was more windows mobile was the standard for power users windows mobile was everything a user wanted in order to tweak to improve performance to tamper with the registries and so on and when Google Android came out it was all about the usability actually if i recall well Google Android was at the very beginning what iOS with Apple is today it was a simple operating system for somebody who wouldn't need to tweak or to enhance performance but things changed over time and the Android became the number one source and ROM and the platform for customization windows mobile of course is in the best Windows Phone 7 does not allow you to do any of these and well with the iphone it's another different story and with cyanogenmod users who are really interested in improving performance tweaking adding that that edge that very little which doesn't come stock on Android devices is very useful but there's the other part of the users who just prefer a stock rom as vanilla as it gets and I think it really comes down to personal preference I always was a vanilla rom type of guy I wanted everything stripped down and I installed those five or ten applications that were especially good for my day-to-day use and I applied those tweaks which were good to me with cyanogenmod you get everything of course you can customize it by different categories and you can turn on or off or tamper with the settings for specific parts of the of the operating system but if you don't want that then you can always go with with a vanilla rom but after so many release candidates I think cyanogenmod 7 version 7 I think it's the final version has matured and I don't think when we will see the next version I think we will see some next release candidates once Ice Cream Sandwich your sunday comes out and then it's a whole another level yeah and you raise an interesting point um Android is sort of revered right now as the platform for tweaking and customizing and previously it was windows mobile of course and Windows Phone 7 is probably the least customizable but I phone you know it doesn't have the reputation as being met customizable and yet if you jailbreak you can completely change the experience why do you guys think that despite that that the iphone is a very hackable platform it's not known as the hackable platform because there's so many updates i think and every time it gets updated you have to read jailbreak it so for for a lot of people it's you know it's not something that they want to even get into you know it's like the sony PSP and how those the the home brewers were constantly battling with with sony every time a new firmware upgrade came out that that's a good point I I was using the iphone 4s my daily driver for a while and i jailbroke it and i did all these cool tweaks it started to get slow I fell behind on upgrading the firmware because the there's always a flag and when the new firmware gets gets unlocked or whatever term they use for it and it was just it wasn't as pleasant an experience as it is an Android to to upgrade to new versions and to tweak so it's not as user friendly in terms of tweaking as Android probably makes sense yeah that's right but we have to make a differentiation between performance tweaks and those visual mods you can jailbreak the heck out of apple's iphone and the iOS and you will still get that same icon ish home screen that you cannot change but with Android there are so many visual mods you can apply and you can you can have another device with another user interface looking fresh every day if you want well actually and this was surprising to me when I was standing in line for 11 hours to get the iphone 4 I talked to this guy that was trying to convince me to jailbreak the iPhone 4 and I I was throwing everything at him i was like what if i want to have a screen just of widgets what if i want to have my missed call on the lock screen and to everything i wanted to do he said yes and when i got home and i jailbroke what he said was true you can literally change everything about the iphone the big problem is that these changes dramatically after a while of installing lots of different things impact stability and performance not only that but you have to update the tweaks which sometimes aren't done very often and so you'll get like a homescreen tweak that isn't updated in six months because the developer made it put it out there and then didn't support it so i think that there's an issue with the vibrancy of the development community for for Apple devices although to be fair I mean there's you know there's enough of a jail breaking community that it supports an entire on App Store and for a while it supported to app stores and so they all merged are you talking about cydia uh-huh and then I forget the name of the other one mmm bonus points if anyone can think of it without looking it up um I'm gonna look it up mm-hmm let's see I've got my jailbroken iPhone here is it called rock I think Drock yeah it's good call yeah very good all right well that is interesting to sort of figure out and understand the perceptions behind this is like class all right let's move on all right so now we're talking about the HTC Sensation previously known as the pyramid it feels like this thing has been out forever but it was just it was just in the past week that it was announced at an HTC press event in the UK a lot of other announcements with it t-mobile will be get the sensation 4g which we're going to talk about its kind of big news the sensation is what we thought it was going to be dual core snapdragon 1.2 gigahertz CPU running on android 2.3 it's got 768 megabytes of ram it's got the the qhd screen making it HTC second device to go beyond wbj the first was the evo 4g or not the evo 4g the evo 3d and we're also getting a new version of sense finally a dramatically different version of sense for a while for the last year all the way back from probably the desire HD era where there was also the legend and the evo and the Thunderbolt all have the same version of sets version 2 point 0 0 or 2.1 finally we're jumping to three-point oh there's a lot of cool stuff with sense three-point oh it allows you to launch apps from your lockscreen it gives you weather on your lock screen if you want it or the time or stock quotes it features a new email application it has new widgets really nice-looking and of course it has HTC watch which is HTC's attempt to do their own sort of video store that live yet i don't i don't think it's live i think it comes out with the flyer and the flyer has is going to be released when when they say mid-may so didn't we also see that there's um it looks like they might have a couple of other stores in the works what was it we saw HTC read an HTC aria yeah listen and read so they H TC filed a patent app or not patent trademark application for HTC read in HTC listen which presumably means that they're going to come out with their own ebook store and music store and this is a very good strategic move for them because if they can make a profitable music video and ebook store bundle it with all of their devices that can be very very profitable for them so you think they're kind of butting heads with carriers there though I mean you know like especially verizon has invested quite a bit and it's V CAST and I don't know how it would feel about HTC coming in and you know preloading a competitive marketplace well if verizon continues pushing v cask which would make sense because it's been around for like a decade they could have HTC scale back some of the features they did this with the Thunderbolt the Thunderbolt doesn't have HTC's remote management HTC Sense comm service it uses verizon's you know remote management service so mmm so annoyingly almost HTC will have to you know customize their devices and and and you know be subject to the demands of Verizon Sprint t-mobile and AT&T when they roll out their devices but yeah so in the u.s. we are going to see the sensation as the sensation 4g on t-mobile it'll basically be a and an EVO 3d but without the 3d screen it'll be a little bit thinner is this a huge win for t-mobile yeah i think absolutely it is i mean this is a hot phone you know any way you look at it and and of course it can take advantage of the 4g hspa+ speeds yeah and it's interesting because usually you know the u.s. lags behind and getting these high-end devices from HTC now here's two in a row that that the u.s. is either getting first you know as as with the evo 3d or you know probably simultaneous to to a European and Asian launch in the in the sensation why do you think we've seen that shift I mean just a few years ago it used to be Europe got the devices first and literally one year after even even as recent as the inspire 4G the desire HD was released year before that why is it all of a sudden we're seeing releases in the u.s. first I think that the the market here has matured to the point where I'm you know we've now it I you know enough people were that are they're interested in smartphones are you know on their first second and you know in some cases their 10 smartphone now that's a bit of an exaggeration I'm on my channel your beat you're well beyond your tents dude um so yeah I think and who was it who just said was that the think it was the CEO of sony ericsson who said you know the west coast of the u.s. is now is now the the center of the the smartphone industry you know now that's where it's at Tony are you are you upset about this you guys always got the cool stuff well no I try to look at it as as objective as I can and the of course the US market is one of the biggest markets when it comes to smartphones and one of the biggest markets has one of the biggest markets with competition and don't forget that Motorola is very strong in the US and it's not that strong in Europe and I always expect big players to fight on a huge market rather than on a let's say European market which is divided into several smaller markets because the reality in Germany might differ from that in France Spain Italy especially UK Canada USA and Australia are some outside and the devices are trying manufacturers are trying to launch them at the same time on these markets because these markets are of course targeted by everybody and the sooner you get to that market you had the edge yeah well what's what's interesting is to look back and remember that one of the reasons Europe got devices first was because there was standardization almost from the beginning I might be wrong about this but don't all countries in Europe operate off of similar cell phone frequencies yeah you're right but not all countries and not let's take two separate and different countries let's stake Germany and let's take Romania we have the same operator I mean we have several others but we have the same operator let's see Vodafone in Germany in the UK and in Romania the same operator in Romania or in Germany or in another country might bring the same device later than in other countries which wouldn't mean a Europe europe-wide lunch for the same carrier for the same device but in the u.s. once you get to a carrier it's a nationwide launch I say I say that I think that although the the US wireless market is a lot more fragmented than Europe there's been a lot of investment in network I mean the US was was first with 4G as far as I know with the wimax network on sprint first with the LTE network so there's been an acceleration towards faster data and and the the OEMs really like that I mean they want to put their phones on the fastest networks possible and is there a 4G network in Europe Tony there is but it's in the western part of Europe which is more let's say trying to keep up with countries like us and japan and those countries which are trying to adopt technology faster it is it LTE and no i'm not sure it's LTE its 4G I know there is 3.5 g and which is HSP plus i believe but and then i'm not sure about ltd rushes have wimax for some time I know remember the I'm the maximal t he had yeah Matt they were actually first that was HTC's first 4g phone banking 2005 we were so jealous but why were you saying Brandon that that the the US market is more fragmented than Europe well I mean because if a company wants to release a phone they've got to choose between you know for different companies all which utilize for different types of spectrum and in Europe they could build really the same phone right and put it on vodafone or you know orange and really not have to reconfigure the device that much besides branding and built-in applications from the carrier yes that's right but there are only a couple of carriers in Europe which are present in most countries besides those there are several other local national carriers which which also can be part of the game so I think Europe wise we have lots more carriers than in the US ah so perhaps it's it's even more fragmented in Europe look at it that way but I'll make a point brand and it there might be more carriers but there you know basically using the same bandwidth the same bands while in the US you know we have to gsm carriers that use different 3g spectrum and then to cdma carriers who's who's um handsets and devices are not interoperable yeah well uh there should be a world carrier world cell right you know we could all just have the same devices at the same time imagine the turnover yeah but it would be a utopia one more note about the the HTC Sensation I I'm very much concerned with weight and thickness but fortunately the sensation is actually thinner and lighter than the desire HD by a little bit and that's kind of a big deal because the desire HD the inspire 4G is a thin device if you stack it next to even an EVO 4G or a thunderbolt it's it's pretty razor thin so the sensations going to be a stunner um in terms of you know feature set feel in hand capability we just need some Android to take advantage of multiple cores a little bit better and then we've got and we've got a conversation to have do any of you guys have that same feeling I had that HTC devices are boring nowadays I mean of course there's a company signature when it comes to everything even cars or all bmws will will have that signature but take HTC for instance the new devices all looked the same I have the impression they have a wooden box and they try to draw them and make them fit in that box it's dull I find them to be the same design same button layout same speaker grill and they are playing just a little bit with the thickness and the radios and so on obviously you haven't seen the cha-cha D'Antoni yeah cha-cha-cha-cha with it natasha is it yeah you're totally right they do have the same design but then i'm sure they they do it you know a little bit to save costs to keep development there they're psycho kind of short because if they went back to the drawing board i made an all-new carbon fiber phone that was you know two millimeters thin that would take six months and they can't afford to take their time in rolling out devices so they iterate and they iterate and they iterate and eventually they're going to have to sort of break away from the same form factor that they've had since I mean you can even see similarities between devices of HD see you today and like the touch HD of two thousand four or five yeah mm-hmm I mean maybe they honestly think that what you know what they've got going is is the best you know in each of the aspects of the phone you know the speaker grill they finally gotten it perfect the body style they think you know it's the most arrogant you know the screen is the perfect size so you name you know from from their perspective they they may be making the the absolute best phone and secondarily they might be thinking that they're making the best phone and compared to what else is out there they have no reason to change the hardware I mean no one else is innovating no one's being the catalyst in changing you know the iphone really really pushed the bar a little bit with with glass and metal construction a lot thinner but HTC is doing metal construction now they have glass screens their devices are thin so we're really waiting for the next era I guess of hardware design whatever company decides to be the catalyst for that but for now you know there's there's almost no reason for HTC to to do anything anything big they they have a formula that works and kidding competitively they've got a good product yeah which wasn't you know which wasn't so true even a couple months ago we were saying that you know they were kind of falling behind what you know what you know LG was doing certainly what Samsung was doing right right cool all right well let's move on we're going to talk about the skype for the HTC Thunderbolt which we showed on video if you remember the early Thunderbolt commercials you might have seen this guy sitting on a park bench chatting with with his with the video camera in the front and looks kind of like a native video chat solution there weren't many you know status bars on the screen or buttons to press it looked really clean well that was actually skype and skype video chat did not launch with the Thunderbolt but it's been leaked in sort of a beta form it only really works on the Thunderbolt it's been tested on other devices and it works pretty well but the problem is that it's not an actual native solution still standalone app you can't get to it from the dialer like you can with Apple FaceTime you guys think that will ever see Android with a native FaceTime like a chat solution or do you think that there are too many models too many software versions too many OEMs too many carriers to even begin to do this yes and no and this depends depends on the market them as we've been spoken we've been speaking before about this it all comes down whether carriers or a specific market is n2 video calling whether you call it skype facetime or standard video calling it's not the same in Europe like it is in the u.s. so every market has its own specific we've had video calling here standard / / gsm in europe since years now and people don't seem to use that maybe because of the rates may be because they they don't find it useful and for me as an end user it's the same thing whether i use skype for video facetime or regular video calling it all comes down to whether i want to use that feature whether i want the other person to see my face or I want them to see or I want myself to see their face so I think the question is whether verizon really wanted the skype to be part of the phone or they did not it's I think it comes down to to the market that I said yeah I think it also comes down to as you implied well on these on the topic of whether video chat matters it could it could be the best video chat solution in the world of the best frame rates it could have the most stellar integration with the native f dialing application at the end of the day most people aren't going to use video chat because they don't want you to see their face or to see what they're doing or where they are at random moments in time it's a very top we've talked about this a lot but it's a very specific use case scenario of when video chat matters like when your kids taking his or her first step and you want to show your husband or wife that's that's one example or you want to pick out a new shirt and you want to ask your husband or wife or girlfriend boyfriend whatever how does this shirt look you know we still love me if I get well that you can always take a picture or or shoot a short video send an mms put it to twitter to your Facebook I mean um calling somebody and the actual calling screen which asks you to answer with video or without video puts that certain amount of stress for the party which is receiving the call why does he or she want to see me in video oh my god how is my hair look what am I wearing and and that's I think it's unnatural and you only have like what 10 seconds to decide or to put pants on absolutely and if you answer only but with voice then you are in an awkward situation why did you decline my video call do you have something to hide and I think it's it all comes down to people it's that so funny you mention that I've done this before when I first got the iphone 4 I would call my friend my friend Mason he got an iphone 4 as well and I was so excited about this facetime thing and I would you know I would put my pants on because I always operate with my pants off and I would you know good brush my hair put on a nice shirt I don't know why I did all this and then I would FaceTime chat him and he wouldn't answer with video well probably because he was in his pjs or he just didn't want me to see Anna I felt for a second I know it sounds kind of trite but I felt almost insulted that he didn't answer with video yeah so so from that there on out I decided you know maybe maybe text messages and and phone calls are just the best way to communicate for now absolutely very good well that is skype and the Thunderbolt it's kind of annoying I heard a video or not a video a radio ad two days ago about the Thunderbolt and they mention this video chat but come on guys video chat doesn't exist for the Thunderbolt right now stop airing this Heisman it's making people maybe they know something maybe it is yeah maybe they know something and it's coming very soon huh well if it were up to you they would they would have to stop calling the atrix and the inspire 4g 4g devices I'm so glad I'm so glad you brought that up hey Mel here comes I sent out a tweet I just what I just want to check in at once every six weeks with the world to see if this problem still exists I sent out a tweet nice I asked anyone on our twitter is getting their promised 4G speeds on their Atrix 4G or their inspire 4G and I'll clean up their responses right now due to do where we carry mentions okay scrolling down let's see this was from yesterday actually and the responses were the same that they were six weeks ago six weeks before that that they are getting basically worse than 3G speeds so they'll get burst 2 3 megabits per second down maybe two but they're upload speeds of course without hsupa are still like 200 k and so mmm to not go off on a rant that the problem still exists there is still no 18t 4G network after how long has the inspired by now that was the first one let's see februari for three months three months three months it's appalling really is and and you know they could they could solve the problem temporarily by releasing this hsupa fix so at least we can have our upload speeds back but anyway let's move okay so talky there's a lot to talk about for windows phone seven this week which is which is great because there seems to be a lot more Android news than there is a windows phone 7 yeah this is the first you know real windows phone 7 news we've heard since since the launch I would say or you know since the the devices start going on Sally mean Microsoft was kind of absent at both CES I shouldn't say both at CES mwc and ctia we hardly saw anything windows phone 7 related yeah yeah I mean six months later they they're talking more about it a lot to talk about actually we've got four or five things to talk about but first thing I'm going to talk about is applications so back when I was reviewing the the Samsung Focus I had a good time with it was a good phone of course it was missing some very key features like fast app switching you know a better way to jump to an application in the Start screen which they're fixing in mango we're going to talk about that in a minute but also very important is applications does the platform have the basic apps that you or me or whomever uses on a daily basis at the time the answer was no there was no angry birds which you know everyone of course plays obsessively there was no skype there was no amazon there was no kindle there's no new york times but that is starting to change naturally i mean over time this is going to get better and better and it was announced that angry birds and skype are coming to Windows Phone 7 so those are very strong applications that that you know a lot of people have been holding out for but it's almost symbolic that this is happening that these companies are devoting their resources you know Skype is doing in rovio for for Angry Birds they're devoting the resources for windows phone 7 which is basically their endorsement of the platform um gee isn't though I mean I mean we know that that Microsoft certainly isn't shy about throwing money around when when it sees a problem and you know it it essentially had to to bribe nokia into to coming over into its 10 and you know who knows if that's not the case with some of these big software men or developers as well that might have been true although if i'm not saying it is i'm just saying it's possible it's possible although if you were Microsoft and you wanted to have skype on your platform from day one wouldn't you pay to have it on day one a major app like skype I think Microsoft almost bit off more than I could chew with the windows phone 7 launch and and you know literally it didn't have the time or the resources to get everything done though that it wanted to so you know it just may not have had people to to go out and coordinate with the you know team skype or two Rovio and I mean it you know they did have a lot of of apps that people were looking for on liked window thanks netflix i think was a big you know launch app for them and yeah I don't think because they weren't there at at launch that precludes the fact that that Microsoft um you know what you know who's pulling some strings but it's also totally possible that that that these companies do do see some success in the platform and and see it having you know it lacks enough of a future yeah i will say that that rovio is one company that's very concerned with the security of marketplace which is why you know they're they they gave on the amazon appstore and exclusive on angry birds rio at launch um because they know you know amazon is going to have a definitely a secure environment for for transactions and and microsoft with the windows marketplace is going to be the same way right yeah very very compelling stuff so that's you know rovio is very selective and they want to make sure their apps aren't pirated so hopefully this is an indication that the windows phone seven marketplaces is secure and it's got the features and the delivery and the you know the offering that company like Rovio is made millions and millions of dollars off of their products there if they're finally satisfied with that moving on about Windows Phone 7 so we've got mango coming out which is the big update to Windows Phone 7 probably windows phone 7.5 if you want to call it and we knew that it brought you know two or three major things fast app switching by holding the back button on the hardware to ie9 to bring better browser performance and what was the third thing before we heard about the new stuff you guys remember Twitter integration I think in the People Hub yes Twitter integration of the people up but then Joe Belfiore a came on stage and whipped out a can of like ten more things that mango will do and we were very happy about this I'm going to go over some of them now quickly and then we're going to kind of discuss whether this is enough and I'm going to point tonal heaven towards an article in the skype chat while I do that so fast at management or faster at management so one of the problems with Windows Phone 7 is that if you go to the program list you get an endlessly long list of programs and if you've got 40 apps this is a big pain in the pain in the butt so now you can press a letter like you do on the zune HD or you can hit the search button and be taken immediately to the app another thing that they've refined in mango is new marketplace search results so right now if you search for something in the marketplace you're searching for a song or a nap it jumbles it all together which is kind of ridiculous but in mango it's kind of segmented in the pivot list speaking of the marketplace the app screens are updated to be more user friendly now when you have a free app the button doesn't say purchase which makes no sense it should just say install Bing results the built-in Bing application has been improved the browser has been improved even more it supports background html5 audio streaming so if you've got for example Pandora and the browser streaming html5 audio you can leave the browser stop the music clay also there is the address bar on the bottom in in landscape a couple more things live tile improvements so now there's more versatility and how developers can take advantage of live tiles and live tiles actually can work sort of within application so the scenario they gave is a qantas airlines application and you've got little tiles inside the app different flights you can tap and hold on a tile that represents a flight and put it on your Start screen of course we've got custom ringtones which is always nice to have and system-wide performance enhancements mango uses thirty percent less rampur app faster app launch times better physics for scrolling and more so a lot of improvements for mango are you guys satisfied with with this or do you think that there are still a lot of things left out well there are a lot of improvements in mango but from the typical end user point of view how many of these are major I mean okay fast app switching major system-wide performance enhancements major ie9 major but but the rest marketplace search results updated app screen and marketplace and all the other bing search results are not something huge are not how should I say not breaking and shattering your world are just some features which are added and most of the people out there would say that these features would probably should have been at launch at the Manor come on copy and paste we've waited six months for that we will wait another additional six months for fast app switching and we got fast at switching one year after the windows phone 7 platform was launched I'm happy to see Microsoft is committed to constantly improve the ecosystem the platform but there are some things which I think are overly marketed of course major features one two or three it's okay to have a refresh every six months but over marketing um I don't know a search button in the application list over marketing a improvement in the bing search results is I think it's overrated what the users want to see is huge features added constantly and the if possible they wanted they wanted them to be added at launch if possible I don't think it does it make sense what I'm saying it does and I just want to chime in for a second i think users also by the way I should preface this by saying if you look at these new features guess what they are they are catch up none of these features are our innovative absolutely compared to the other other offerings out there I think people want to see some badass features that we we as mere consumers cannot think about we want to see apple style things meaning you know Apple seems to be able to anticipate what we need before we need it which is always a fascinating prospect but all of these things de mango they're very much necessary they're great but they're they're just bringing the platform to where it should have been or should be today what do you do you guys think that it would have made a huge difference if Microsoft would have waited with the launch and the may be launched with mango I think that would killed them yeah they they already launched you know eight months too late yeah so then what what they do now it's normal yeah I mean I think what they did and was very clear as they just got it out and I'm sure there were conversations in Microsoft HQ when they said we need copy and paste and then some guy was like all right that'll take two more months and the guy in the front of the room said all right forget it let's just get it out we'll get the updates out later let's get the traction and we'll figure out the other stuff in the future and that's what they're doing I mean how's different the market now in April than what it was in in October or November we still have google android and the apple iOS and the top one or two step two spots and windows phone 7 is still playing catch-up to achieve those two digits market share I think it would have been clever to wait a little bit more maybe launch in February with all the features in it so that it wouldn't a lien ate all those users which put their soul to it I mean coming from windows mobile I came from windows mobile and I was highly anticipating windows phone 7 for me copy and paste was not feature I never used it it's okay to have it but fast that switching is something huge I don't have to always get back to the start screen to select another application go back and forth and back and forth I think my personal opinion is that they should have waited a little bit more to launch with a little bit more yeah yeah I think a lot of people agree with that and you could also argue that would have been the the nail on the coffin so that's always an interesting conversation to have real quick want to just chime in and say what we aren't seeing in mail or at least what we don't think we are going to see in mango certainly they could come out with these features but there's a list of nine we have here first of all Wi-Fi and USB tethering come on come on I mean that's that's almost a right for absolute here's there might be just just a second excuse me can I be the attorney rukna right now we've waited how long for Wi-Fi tethering on Apple devices we just got a 4.3 so I'm gonna be the attorney now was the prosecutor five minutes before and I'm gonna defend Microsoft on this now all right that's fair that's fair but the problem is that if if mango were to launch in February this last februari and it didn't have Wi-Fi and USB tethering you'll be fine because people would say well I phone doesn't have it so but the fact that mango is coming out in late 2011 or 2012 it makes it that it makes the platform look worse ok number to a screen capture come on come on come on the gray skirt to do screen captures on windows phone 7 is is very difficult you've got to download the developer tools and blah blah flash support in the browser which you know button some people don't care about that's not Microsoft though as much as it is Adobe right yep well couldn't Microsoft work with Adobe get a get a piece of software to get it to go I'm not sure they want them to because silver light is coming ie9 is coming and Silverlight is a strong competitor for adobe flash I'm not sure that Microsoft wants to have flash support on windows phone 7 so this again is my personal opinion yeah that's that's a good point um that's I think that's a that's a bad attitude for them to have then because I mean you know what you know most sites are still using flash not Silverlight and they're not going to be moving over to silverlight they'll be moving over to html5 of anything right oh yeah i mean silver lights almost as bad as as flash in that respect that it's a last web technology and the world's going to html5 so yes but Microsoft can tell you that we no longer or we don't intend to support adobe flash we are moving on to the next gen we will support html5 with ie9 and we already are one step ahead we're just waiting for the others to catch up then I'll go out and buy an android that does support flash I mean flash is important to people and it's a big selling point you know ladies like very playbook it's it's one of their bullet points it's one of the bullet points of the zoom and for good reason because it's annoying when you can't when you don't have flash I mean you're not getting the full web on on these devices yeah hmm yeah so other things that aren't in mango no support for front-facing cameras and video chat no turn-by-turn text-to-speech navigation with offline support like Android devices now have no support for third-party keyboards no landscape support for the Start screen no sharing options for video and smart dial you know you go into the dialer and you want to call Evan well on an android phone but I just turned off my monitor that wasn't cool on an Android you type you know 3826 is that you told everyone my phone number down cause I was similar spelling it out your name so unless they have evident in the phone book it won't work smart duh I mean some of these very base they're still very basic like USB tethering screen capture and smart dial come on is that really going to take that long to include so mango looks good although perhaps not as good as it should look and hopefully we have more surprises and hopefully more most importantly we'll see this in 2011 and not 2012 boom yep very good alright so next thing we want to talk about more windows phone 7 the chassis to specs were announced and of course the chassis wang specs are really define all of the specification are the specifications for the current crop of windows phones and devices so you've got the you know 800 x 480 display you've got the one gigahertz processor 5 megapixel camera so on and so forth microsoft sewing kind of going in the opposite direction with chassis to they want to support lower end devices at lower price points so so let's see what's the difference here you can do an 800 megahertz processor screen resolution is the same what else has changed in the chassis tooth I think everything's the same we have a low nut not specifically lower and processor because the processor on the desire z is another category of processors it doesn't drain battery that much and it still got the speed edge so it's it's a fast processor and windows phone 7 is a fast platform so I'm not sure we're losing anything here and we've got the gyroscope and besides these it's nothing I don't think anything else has been changed from from chassis 122 yeah they couldn't lower the ram requirements anymore 256 yeah I was somehow expecting they could lower the the resolution of the screen because we've been hearing about half VGA and it's been there in the documentation even before Windows Phone 7 came out and that would have made a statement for lower end devices I mean like you take with the android HTC Wildfire imagine a small device price oriented may be made my nokia and boom you got a top top seller blockbuster but no they just uh maybe shook hands with the Qualcomm and they said okay still your company still your CPU but we'll use the newer one hmm yeah I mean this is a this this whole situation is pretty pretty basic economics you know you lower price you increase demand but I think this is a little bit detrimental to the image of Windows Phone 7 because they're clearly trying to hit lower price point so they sell more devices but at the same time it looks like they're taking a step backwards I mean the average user who doesn't understand why they're doing this might say wow shouldn't they be going in the opposite direction and requiring faster hardware higher resolution screens so it's almost inconvenient that Microsoft have had to publicize this you know well as I said it's not necessarily a step back you have to understand that the processor is still fast you have to understand that the GPU which is accompanying the new Snapdragon is the 205 GPU and it's faster than 200 the GPU which is on the current cpu so um I'm not sure it's a step back I think it's half a step forward hmm well intuitively it might be other in the eyes of the you know average consumer doesn't get caught up with with aspects of phones it might look like a step back yeah very good well let's move on yet more windows phone 7 news this week whoa yeah we're just going to keep going here um the HTC maza maza mm is that my Seng right uh was it was leaked on XDA and it looks to be a device heading towards sprint it kind of looks like a trophy it's a slab style device it looks a lot like a trophy did you see I mean that the the camera and speaker designed on the back it's almost identical so so there you go the trophy for for sprint and then a little exclusive for us we came across what could be a 16 megapixel windows phone 7 device we found an advertisement it shows in the advertisement they show a device that kind of looks like the desire s but running Windows Phone 7 it could be a placeholder but it kind of makes sense a little bit that HTC would do a 16 megapixel windows phone 7 Windows Phone 7 at some of the best camera features out there you can launch the camera by tapping and holding the camera button when it's off the shutter speed is usually very fast on these devices it's very easy to review pictures so it would make sense that HTC would do a digital photography focused camera sure I think it definitely makes sense for all parties involved um and I think one of the things that that's sort of been ignored by a lot of people are you know are chiming in to say well megapixels don't matter you know the camera is going to suck because you know the optics are going to be poor but we don't know that we don't know anything about the optics what kind of lens they're going to put on it or you know how big the sensor is there anything so I would think that it that if HTC is coming out with the world's first 16 megapixel phone and you know they're they're making a big to-do about it that they're they're gonna make sure it takes a good picture yeah they're they're probably going to invest in it in the camera technology and sort of break that trend where people think okay if I've got an 8 megapixel camera yeah it takes bigger pictures but the pictures are grainy and they're soft when you blow it up the number 16 is is significant because right now the highest that is out there really is 8 megapixels so they're gonna double that it'll highest from them I mean yeah you've got that you've got 12 megapixels from the n8 and then you've got 14 from the Altech leo yeah yeah so so what's up it's a good brown number for them and that would be cool that would be a way to differentiate not only HTC from the pack and do something different but Windows Phone 7 i'm sure microsoft would be excited for that i personally would settle for a 5 megapixel camera that would take better pictures than the iphone and i will be happy ecstatic the iphone does take a pretty darn good pictures you guys agree yeah yep I actually use the I promotion what's that none of these no no camera phones or have really been good at capturing you know any motion it's you know all still shots anything with motions going to come out blurry because you know they just um they can't the shutters on a fast amount um you mean when you take HD video on the iphone not video when you're trying to take a picture of someone moving oh yeah yeah the shutter speeds it's not fast enough you're right so maybe maybe this HTC device will be the you know the first one to have a like a super fast mode actually the sensation claims to be able to do what you're describing Evan what you see on the screen is exactly the picture you're going to take there's no like shutter lag well the nice thing about having such high megapixels is that you can you can set these phones on burst mode and I want you know it'll it'll bring the resolution down significantly but point if you have a 16 megapixel camera it's really not going to matter if it you know even if it's have door quartered you know a 4 megapixels and burst modes gonna going to be um you know give you a fine result most the time indeed indeed alright well let us move on to the final bit for today um it's it's almost getting kind of annoying to talk about the white iphone 4 but the white iphone 4 according to Apple I think it was a tweet from phil schiller a vice president of worldwide product marketing for Apple I said yes there will be an iphone 4 and white is spring a full year after it was originally promised but this is kind of strange because the iphone 5 should be due out in the summer if we ignore the rumors of of delay and so does this mean that the this confirmed was that the iphone five will be delayed no i think maybe it says though that the iphone 5 won't come in white so now it's like if you want a white phone you're gonna have to go with the floor and you know they're going to sell some of that some of that stock that they've built up yeah well they probably have a massive stock and they're probably all running very old firmware but it doesn't really matter because i think when you connect your iphone to itunes for the first time they don't check those audio that we didn't wait for this thing you know like so you know for a lot of people it was like should i get the the black one now or should I wait a month you know for the white one and it turned out it wasn't a month it with many months indeed doesn't matter the wise iphone coming up now I mean would anyone buy it well I'm not gonna run to trade in mind or sell it or anything I mean it it's it's almost disingenuous to my of the iphone at such a late period in time to say okay I'm gonna go get the white one because I'm just going to wait for the five you know I don't know you know there's a father you know that your iPad and your iPhone don't match yeah I've got the pipe okay actually I are saying what you think a little bit well you can always do a paint job Allah Adam Lane yeah I could just you know I just paint it although there there was that service that sent you the faceplates or you sent your phone and that was really believable and it was actually pretty much the same as a white iphone oh yeah there's ways to do it I mean they definitely saw the parts hmm I want a green iphone or like a blue cool well I think that will conclude the 11th episode of the pocket now pocket casts podcast thank you gents for joining and thank you everyone who who s supports us and listens each week and we'll see you next time thanks for dictation