Gadgetory

hey everybody welcome to the second pocket cast this is our version of a podcast we did one last week just as an experiment to see if anybody really wanted us to do more of them and apparently the feedback hasn't been good so here we are we're back again doing another one the format will be like last week so we're going to go through about eight stories from the last week things that were interesting that we posted about on pocket now regarding smartphone news and this week we have three people joining us including myself we still have Evan we still have Evan blast managing editor if he got a new microphone and we've made a lot of improvements to the setup so you should be able to hear him better say hi Evan hey guys favourited hey and we've also got Tony senior editor also known as Anton on the site he's coming from Romania so he's got a fantastic accent that I wish I had say hi Tony hey guys nice to be here thank you so so yeah and this podcast should were calling the pocket cast work we're eliminating that word podcast from vocabulary should be distributed not only on youtube like last time but also iTunes and zune if all goes according to plan it's a little bit more complicated than I thought it was going to be but we should be able to get it out there or at least as a direct download so you can put it right on your device listen to it on the way to work I don't know why you want to do that but so let's get started we're going to start with what do we what are we starting with thinking this blogger the inspire yes just a couple of notes on the inspire 4G of course this is a tease first 4g phone but it's not really for jamming it's been certified as a 4g standard but it's it's probably 3.75 g if you were to define it as anything and we're actually getting some problems with it we're talking to AT&T right now but right now what's happening and hopefully by the time this podcast pocket casts goes up we'll have an answer i'm getting an h+ indicator all the time and yet i'm not getting hspa+ which is very deceiving and you know AT&T has advertised that there VA plus network is reaching millions and millions of people as if they flip the switch and everyone lights up that's not true they did flip a switch but it will only turn on hspa+ in areas that have the quote enhanced backhaul which means that they've upgraded the equipment on cell phone towers and whatnot but AT&T isn't making it known which areas are getting the enhanced back also maybe some small corner of New York has hspa+ while the rest of the country is dark or maybe come februari 13th when the inspire 4G hits it will be turned on we're branded let me let me interrupt you for a sec I think the problem here is that that you're you're getting an indicator showing that you're getting hspa+ say that you're um you know that you're connected to the network but you're not actually getting the speeds yep that's it that's it's just misleading you know okay that was an interesting sound in Romania do they have hspa+ or is it pretty much all hsdpa its moral hsdpa so we get suburb once you advertise but it's nothing close to that what do you get in real world testing best case well let's say someone points 8 + 3.5 if you have full coverage yeah that's pretty much where we get around here Evan have you at benchmarked your iphone 4 yeah nothing special nothing special Tony tell everyone how fast Orlando in connected oh well let me just say this without advertising my eyes be in Romania it's the fastest internet and the cheapest one in the whole Europe I mean we may like the nine dollars per month and I had 100 megabytes per second for downloads and some are close to 10 for uploads fantastic that's any uploads are faster than my down that's unbelievable and what do you what do you actually clock when you go to like speedtest.net all its around 80 for a 690 it depends on the distance to the server so so Tony's in Romania getting 84 megabits per second down for nine dollars and in the u.s. I think there's a still a tremendous amount of people that don't even have regular broadband yet it's really interesting how how did that come to be this is totally off topic but well they're our topic and this is another discussion related to a salaries and wages while you are bringing some thirty dollars for internet and it will be lets say around a 15 spark of your salary in Romania people pay for internet somewhere around the tents or the 8th part of their monthly wages so it's so expensive if you live and earn your money here Ghani the issue is also i'm like geographic and that it's a lot easier to roll out the infrastructure and in a small area in europe then than it is over the entirety of the united states so yeah I mean I bet Romania doesn't have vast stretches of farmlands like we do here nobody's internet access is mainly in the cities so don't think that the whole Romania is covered by I speed internet no major cities are yes but villages and other lands are not so I think there are people in Romania many many many that don't even know what computer is so don't get me wrong very interesting already well so let's move on from the inspire 4G again look for the post on pocket now in a video showing this in action and we're waiting to hear back hopefully within the next hour and a half from AT&T on this just to make it fair because there's got to be something going on here so let's move on something we posted on actually today and actually several times through the week about the HTC saga we first showed you a picture of what we thought would be HTC's flagship the desire to basically a phone that looks like and what does this look like this is like the desire maybe yeah like a rounder version of the desire with a bit imagination a little bit imagine a little bit nexus one it overall kind of a bland design I mean if this if this is really HTC's next flagship proof they're going very conservative on this one indeed so so we're seeing we're seeing some pictures of it and now today we saw a picture of it with three microphone holes which no one else seems to be noticing and I guess the thought is that two of them are for noise cancellation and the third is for kind of honing in on the audio when you're filming a video is it I'm not a sir I'm sorry coming continue I'm sorry so I was just asking click record maybe stereo so oh that's that's a possibility or if not stereo sound maybe it's the first android HTC phone to do 1080p video recording and they wanted to add a better quality of of audio so I was just going to say that you know it it's far from certain that this is going to be this is going to be a flagship device I mean you know I think we can assume that it's probably the follow-up to the desire HD but I think it's also possible that that HTC has some other handsets in the works that that you know we just haven't seen yet including this this one called a pyramid that you know we really have a bother to talk about because it hasn't been much said about it other than you know it'll be might be one of HTC's first devices to step up beyond the 1 gigahertz or or 800 megahertz some Snapdragon processors that that basically you know been in all of their hands heads for last few years yeah and what is to say that the saga also doesn't have a dual core processor with a 965 540 screen plus some other quote stuff that maybe sense three-point oh so it looks a little bit uh unassuming but perhaps once we see the spec sheet it's more than just a you know conservative designed phone one more thing guys I smell something fishy here regarding this data I mean I inclined to believe that HTC is doing say a control bleep member do you remember how they did it would be incredible HD in the Thunderbolt I me now yeah they have those prototypes and most of the pictures that were surfaced on the internet and elite they came from Taiwan I mean HTC you must for sure know which one of their employees got to throw the dice chair isn't it something is she here so yeah because I'll tell you something else that the vivo which is which is going to be the incredible a lot to that that's all over picasa right now so you know that's taken quite a few pictures the saga hasn't taken anything so i think HTC is well aware of what's going on about information that's leaking in and some of it is indeed done strategically what we want to remember all these leaks started after our exclusive of the render we found the posted it's a good point good point well but what would their reason being doing this well the same reason the units for the Thunderbolts by the way its variants anticipation building but from now we're talking about it you're advertising it we are or another theory could be that this device the saga is a prototype maybe last generation because it actually looks very last generation and maybe they're going to come out with something that blows this out of the water and so they're setting expectations kind of kind of kind of low you know what I mean well let me tell you this one doesn't come up with a dual core processor and gingerbread HTC is losing the game Evans gonna have to write another dear HTC bra that was a good one um cool well let's let's move on from here we are going to februari first talking about the HTC mozart being Wi-Fi certified and perhaps heading to the heading to t-mobile in the US you know it's it's been kind of quiet with Windows Phone 7 hardware releases in this I mean this isn't really news this isn't that I mean we've seen the Mozart before yeah should I start or Evan sure good I'm sorry ok so look I don't think there's really much more to the story here I mean manufacturers have laid down their cards on the table at the time where you know windows phone 7 was launched the devices are the same will accept the dell venue pro which is still in and out of markets and the HTC 7 pro so i don't think there will be any change in devices until the second wave of devices come out and until then manufacturers are trying to somehow move devices from one region to the other they are moving the sprint exclusive 7 pro to europe and they are moving this with the mozart to us so i think that's the only option until the sector where it comes out to their detriment clear on my dad yes yes yes and i think the HTC trophy like launching on verizon and whatever it's going to be you know march april which which is going to be you know possibly as much as six months after it launched in Europe and when in the first place you know it was really sort of a you know I'm not all that impressive device you know sort of at least in terms of the windows from seven devices launch devices it was pretty on unremarkable so I certainly think that six months later when it's going up against you know that atrix is and it infuses it just doesn't look very good it's they need to keep the momentum up but I mean this is very this is very typical of Microsoft you know they do a little they do something pretty great but too late and by that time the competitive landscape has changed significantly I mean they needed to keep the momentum with Windows Phone 7 by bringing forth a wave of new phones as soon as six months later and in the corporate world that may seem crazy but I mean you got to be agile and you got to compete a little bit faster than a Mozart or or trophy six months after we already knew about it it's ridiculous nobody handsome now I will say the Mozart is handsome I like it I think it sounds a nicer launch pond's I mean first of all it's got an 8 megapixel camera it's got a pretty nice body style compared to some of the other ones and material if they use and and the shape of it you know it's it's fairly slim you know it's pretty compact for for this first wave devices so I like it so I was just saying that by the way momentum and second wave of devices what do you think of this these rumors that started these days with the microsoft and nokia preparing to announce something do you think that the nokia will finally adopt windows phone 7 and if yes will be a second wave device or maybe a first worth of us there's so many issues at play there there is smoke the the primary issue of how I think Microsoft has NV nokia for many many years I remember going to the microsoft campus in 2005 for for some mobile get together and the head the head guys we're talking about nokia like they were they were gods i mean nokia number one number one billions of dollars we got to get there you know they they have a great strategy so it would come to knows it would be no surprise that they would work together but then how would it fit in wood nokia sort of be the premium hardware partner of Microsoft no because Microsoft wants to make sure HTC and Samsung and LG have a lot of have a lot of notoriety to get their devices out I mean what could they possibly do together well I think it behooves I mean if he who is Microsoft a lot to get there's many manufacturers as they can on the on the windows phone 7 bo I mean it you know it's the same strategy with desktop PCs is you know gopher gopher quantity and try to get as many as many OEMs on board as you can because you know obviously there's more you know throw as many darts at the dart board as you can some of her gonna stick well they'd have to do something special with Nokia because no key is in a position where they could go with Android and make great you know put some great software on there and on great hardware and so if they're gonna go if they're gonna date Microsoft exclusively Microsoft's got to be giving some better deal oh absolutely not theirs I can almost guarantee you that it would not be an exclusive relationship I'm almost one hundred percent guarantee that that Nokia would not give up me go and Symbian to go for a windows phone 7 only strategy I mean it's it's almost impossible to see that happen if anything I think this would just be added to their their stable of platforms I think Nokia probably looks at at HTC and and how they've been successful but you know two person with their dual platform strategy of Android and Windows Mobile first and then Windows Phone nouns you know it's been working out well for them HTC just had you know another record quarter and I think Nokia sees that and says you know what do we have to lose by by picking up yet another OS the worst that's going to happen is it's you know it's going to be unsuccessful but we're sort of you know in a little bit of dire straits now anyway so why not take a risk well I think it's a win-win situation I mean Microsoft wins because they have the new manufacturer nokia rings because they are selling devices and users will be because nokia is building fantastic phones just look at HTC look at LG windows phone 7 s they all have crappy cameras look at how you look at your nokia n8 review its upcoming it's fantastic the build quality is good and when windows phone 7 on it I think it will be huge what in a big good wouldn't it be cool if i agree i mean nokia has has really good hardware and as you apply Tony in Adams upcoming review he thinks he finds the camera on the ne ne to be so sometimes rival his DSLR what yeah it's it's incredible what would be awesome and we kind of talked about this a lot Evan nine tony about how hardware so important you'll be awesome if nokia created these like awesome devices you go to their website and you could like fill in a little radio check box I want windows phone 7 on this i want android 2.3 on this and it comes to looks leo semi customized in that respect well everyone if you get the chance to see this in the future you should know the idea came from us haha right and I mean furthermore I think it would be awesome for any on that note to any OEM to come out with sort of a customization platform for smartphones you choose your CPU you choose your RAM this would be probably what was that site that we saw to go grab it yeah I know what you mean there's a like a prototype just like it but I mean that would be too expensive for the consumer unfortunately it would be probably potentially too expensive for the OEM so that's why they don't do it because all the drivers and you have to actually two or three or more operating systems on the same hardware so it will be a bit difficult yeah yeah and I mean those you never get software upgrades because they have to configure for potentially dozens of different types of devices both hi so so I guess the takeaway here is hopefully we see some some interesting nokia windows phone 7 hardware or at least there's a forthcoming wave of Windows Phone 7 devices I think keepsake at the very least would say something big is happening with Nokia whether it's a move to other platforms or you know a bigger us push some you know they they said that something big is gonna happen you're a major strategy changing and so I maybe definitely have something to look forward to yeah yeah all right let's move let's see we are talking about med on january thirty first we were talking about the pre to on verizon we've been talking about the pre to on verizon for many many months i think it was announced back in october and you know as HP palm have their event coming up in what a week and then the pre to is gonna launch kind of late don't you think yeah it's kind of funny we've seen the pre to the verizon pre to show up just about everywhere about verizon it's been on every other like retailer site it's been an ads you can now buy unlocked gsm rhythm which I actually have right here there you go so yeah I don't know about the timing of this i think it's sort of suspect them and if anything this is going to end up being you know a mid to low low range of webos device if there is anything else released i think or announced it would be that the verizon is pulling all old ball models and they will be lets say announcing a tablet to replace them hmm well they look I they still Nina we still need to have a phone we're pretty sure that they're going to launch the pre too so I mean that's going to happen so the question is where where is the pre to then going to sick and in a lineup of new webos smart phones you know presumably pond has to go higher end now to to attract some attention but you know they may also try to slap something you know pixie like underneath the tree to and try to capture some of that entry-level smartphone market don't this verizon pulls this off then they will have the iphone for the Thunderbolt for Android and the bomb-bay tuned to webos so I think that will cover pretty much the meteors except when those 17 yes have you used webos Tony no no unfortunately on is it available in Romania no maybe if I import or buy from another country but as far as I know years or other shops or e taylor center selling phone devices yeah i haven't seen it on anything romanian websites either and i do like each other actually really mm-hmm have you have you used webos Evan yeah I wouldn't say I'm you know expert in it but I definitely have some sub working familiarity with it I think it's it's interesting so many people agree and say this all the time that webos is awesome i mean the concept of the cards and the way that it works is awesome it's just it's already stale and dead in the hardware is horrible it's not horrible but the screen resolution is low the battery life still not great the keyboards junkie so you know presumably the tide will turn come next week and they definitely need high end devices and with on-screen keyboards and high-resolution screens and you know can I go a little bit off topic here while talking about webos i'm not totally off topic there's an online survey coming and going for like three or four days now it's the OS bowls finals yes i like yeah HP webos is in the finals with guess who windows phone 7 happened i'm looking at the current results and HP webos has 49.7 to 2% of oats and windows 7 as 5528 i think that the system got game yes somebody somewhere lovely most probably published something saying people go vote for windows phone 7 i mean i'm a windows phone 7 a fan but it can be windows from seven beat apple iOS for the finals so it's strange i think i found that reason it's posted on XDA developers and there's like a thousand replies so that's right so that's kind of a that's kind of a difficult thing to determine because naturally people are going to vote for the operating system that they use are using yep or they're going to try to game the system and make a winner out of something shouldn't be a winner or wouldn't be a winner but uh further wearing Dada for the win hey mesons and that's such a bad little platform there oh yeah even reviewed a bottle phone yet mmm we didn't because it's not technically a smartphone uh I mean I they are they are for well they're not in the in the in the context that we define the word in their old last one but f decays and developers there they're very much it's very much I'm entry-level smartphone platform isn't it the same like blue M V like the dumb smartphones or smart dumb phones no I I think that it's you know it's more akin to to webos and it's got you know they've got an SDK to people developing for bada so yeah it's it's it's own legitimate platform um you know certainly they're not they're not monetizing it the way that the android or iOS is but yeah it's um and i think that there are you know that they're iterating their only on a father should chug 1.5 now oh yeah there it's becoming something and I'm a little bit surprised because it's pushing the needle a little bit it's starting to show up you know on when they do on evaluations and surveys of who's of what platforms have percentages and it's starting to to actually make it into those surveys he's had a you know one for one or two percent of the market it would help if they launched in the US one of the problems is that why would someone choose bada when they could choose you know like Android which looks a lot like pada most cases what I don't know Owens I think are the hardware they're pushing it is as less expensive we know with the androids are still some licensing fees associated with it even though you're not paying Google you have to pay all these companies that have patents that now Android may or may not infringe upon but would buy you know that some that Samsung's home-brewed OS so you know they're they're paying very little to to roll it out on a lot of devices and I can bring the price of a hardware down usually you see that the bottom of us that's more budget oriented than a low end android device like the HTC Wildfire i think if they start out like that but if there's some body phones now that that aren't cheap i mean like the way of to I don't think that's I don't think that's entry-level by any means so I don't know it'll be interesting to see where body goes because it is making more of a splash than I thought and and you know Samsung is smartly diversifying beyond windows phone seven and an Android which HTC sort of is trying to do with the the brew MP I mean if it's not going to happen but if Android fails and Windows Phone 7 fails at the same time again not going to happen you know if if people sunday is combusted if the world ends well then HTC is left with what well brew MP products I was yeah right we'll have to be impossible just a note of clarification I think you mentioned Evan that when an oem puts android on the phone they don't have to pay Google a licensing fee they do have to pay a licensing fee if they include any of the above android market you know gmail the Google Maps any Google application and they get up they gonna I think they get a fair amount of revenue from that because most OEM is included yeah every device isn't really I would think that that Google would be paying them to take it like they do on with the search agreements because if you who's google to get their products on as many devices as possible while while OMS have a choice of going with Google stuff or or possibly thing or you know their own their own home brewed applications well I I think I think that I sort of look at it the other way in OEM would want to have the google search and would want to have google products there's an exception to this our coast which has a line of 2.8 4.3 5.18 all these different they call them tablets they run android a lot of them especially the low-end really cheap ones that are like 150 bucks don't come with the android market they come with the archos market which links out to like and apps and they're doing that to keep the cost down at the detriment to the experience of the user interesting yeah don't buy the rocket ass is so informative no boy it should start listening in we shouldn't try it I'm gonna start listening to the pocket casts and we have we have free subscribers already haha very fun alright well let's move on from the pre to hopefully there's going to be some really cool stuff coming out of webos soon because the boss is good what was good alright so let's talk about the yahoo mail issue turns out that the mysterious source of Windows Phone 7 data usage came from yahoo mail but I guess even though it was birthstone suspected to be HTC right I love ya the hub how I mean it seems that Windows Phone 7 is quite locked down to avoid any application taking control of really anything and doing anything negative edge I gotta wonder how this could have do you guys know the technicalities behind this not actually but there's there's a post from Rafael Rivera who is explaining it very well and he's been the one with how it go well that pointed the initial finger towards yahoo mail and he's the one that points in the face pointing the finger towards yahoo having the same problem on iOS because if you remember yahoo to its own defense said that there is no problem with the ugly real application on other platforms this was after apologizing but they started pointing fingers at microsoft and this rafael rivera guy has made some tests and guess what iOS has the problem to the same problem only the differences that is less noticeable the iOS version of yahoo mail goals for 50 messages if i recall well from the server role in this 47 fetches around 200 that's the biggest difference so that's that's the conference is that right yeah and I think the answer your question Brandon is that there's certain um developers big developers like you know netflix or yahoo who have more access to be on the core api's and the code the native code and then say you know your your average developer house right right cool cool well I don't know if there's much more to discuss about this do you guys have any other although I just say it's it's not fair from yahoo to point the finger back at Microsoft and I'm not defending Microsoft I say drops the mattress off for actually admitting the problem and bucks yeah 3 4 for apologizing for the problem but the they should have stopped here is that they have started pointing finger pointing fingers again and i think this got a little bit ugly everyone needs to just hug it out yeah okay haha all right let's move on this is a story I wanted to cover because um well I guess you'll find out why kin studio closes permanently we're kin which also technically doesn't fit under the smartphone umbrella of course was launched in May of 2010 and it was cancelled in what like July so three months later this project that Microsoft spent millions of dollars on they had a big press conference about they they killed it and now the pork in users the five of them up oh wow but alright they they they can't use their phone as it was intended i think they should all get rebates or something or you know well i think that was a story back in december when the first rumors got out that verizon is actually killing that in studio that they will give out free 3g phones for King users and as a reparation yeah I don't know do you know anything about this then does those who all the way I remember hearing I care about not honestly that there was there there really were probably so if you can solve any you know it just really didn't that if there was an exchange program or just really did make a news because there wasn't a lot of people taking advantage of it I was uh I was watching the engadget show on the way to I don't know las vegas for CES and i watched an old episode where they were talking about ken before Kim came out and I forget who one of the guys was saying you know hey you know I think Kim could work you know it's hitting a market that doesn't that doesn't have a particular phone targeted at them and then the other side said this is the biggest piece of garbage to ever of graced our computer monitors and then we wrote of course why you know the five reasons why kid died hasn't it's just been sort of it fun to watch because that is just well I think ken is a product that it could have worked no two or three years ago but I think at this point Microsoft's or so under estimated that the sophistication of the market that they were looking at and and they thought that that you know teens and tweens want to dent want to dumb down smartphones when in fact they just want regular smartphones and you know if you go into any school kids are using iPhones and you know android and and really you know blackberries even just regular smartphones they don't want something that's you know stupid what should I say smile what's the right word then stupid is not the right word haha there's sort of the functionality has been reduced that they've been dumbed down a little bit yeah yeah and about those of five users you remember that there was this rumor that there were five hundred or so Kim's so yeah Adam Adam wrote a post on 7th of July 2010 and he was saying that according to a certainty an application on Facebook there were at that time around almost 9,000 users of the key an application of facebook which implies approximately the same amount of kids being sold and I'm looking at the page right now and we have somewhere close to 2000 so uh it was decreasing oh that's interesting so maybe if you don't login or I guess what's happening is I don't know why would that go down people i bought a device I don't like it and I work in summer those uses them waco you return it yeah yeah on that note evan with this sort of trying to be a low-cost accessible smartphone for young people the data plan was as much as a standard smartphone which just didn't make sense yeah that was a fail fail they should have had like a tween data plan you know no no data during school hours you know it's funny guys thinking about when we were in school we didn't have maybe maybe we had smartphones I didn't have a smartphone until I graduated last year brer yeah yeah I just I'm not that young uh it's just funny to think about like if we had iphones in class if we had joy texts in class we could I guess would it be make school better or worse we could text our friends before we get the lunch I'm sure that there's many rules prohibiting that but it's just fun to think about yeah it would make it worse I mean it's phones are already distracting for adults at jobs you know imagine like kids who are trying to learn in school where they're already kind of bored yeah it's a distraction one time my brother who actually started pocketnow had handed me down an ipaq one of the big I packs with the expansion sleeve and one of the add-ons of the expansion sleeve was an ethernet adapter and i remember at my in my high school they had you know plug-ins for the computer stations and one day after school I was so excited I was like well I can get internet on this little screen i plug in the ethernet cable to my my ipaq expansion sleeve i plug it the other side into the little station and i'm like surfing the web on this qvga transflective display it was it was heaven yeah I remember getting that feeling using like a palm constancy for the first time that I think was the first palm Wi-Fi yeah it was one of those tiny little screens but just two TVs like great like color web pages showing up yeah pretty much how they were supposed to look on I'm a desktop it was just amazing what do you guys think would make let's say if Kim studio made it to Windows Phone 7 would its boost windows phone 7 I love the idea of remote phone management you know the HTC Desire HD and they inspire all those new devices can let you access HTC Sense calm and depending depending on what day of the week it is you'll get different functionality but I love the idea of being able to send text messages through the web browser having all your photos sync to the cloud I think I think windows phone 7 would hugely benefit from a kin studio like product I mean think about it android has web cloud products in sort of different pieces iOS doesn't have anything like it and it could be a real real thing to to differentiate so what do you guys think can we expect in studio to come the windows phone 7 I vote I hope you haven't they said that they're going to try to bring something like that I mean I know he's not even called kin studio but help so I can imagine that there will be some go before you know what was the what's the name of the other the Microsoft service windows like now the one the one I was on windows mobile 6.5 cloud oh oh my phone my phone phone phone yeah I can see that that's sort of been expanding and becoming a little bit more user-friendly he'll think I don't think my phone is necessarily as optimized as it could have been for for the average user hmm yeah it is a little bit technical I mean yeah there's there's no doubt that this would be a winning thing to do it's already been proved in a little bit with the previous cloud products but the again it's about timing are they going to wait until 2012 to bring this out or are they going to do it soon when they the strike while the iron's hot hopefully oh it's comes to windows phone 7i think it will come summer in the second half when when we can expect the second major update for windows phone 7 so this is my guess yeah and by then you know microsoft's working on the next update of Windows Phone 7 so probably done and then they're working on this bigger update by then we'll know about iOS four point or what are we up to now 5 you know and and it's gonna it's going to have stuff like that we can't even imagine and you know microsoft's going to come through this awesome update that would have been cool today but it's just 10 months to wait boom I'm being really down on Microsoft but sometimes it just it just frustrates me the whole the whole timing it's just really puts them in a disadvantage sometimes anyhow um alright soak in studio closes that's probably the last thing we'll ever say about Kim alrighty he can yeah alright pkn but that starts the look oh I hope so yeah there's a everyone should check this out I think it was our IP KN right mmm we're all checking we should edit out this part now we'll leave it I don't know it's not here anyway next thing I want to talk about here is something that I really don't want to talk about because things aren't working out the way that I thought they would or hope they would ha I know we're gonna get into sad yeah yeah so you know this is about honeycomb and you know we have the the Google event I think was on Tuesday which would be februari first Oh is Wednesday second and we were hoping very much that we would see something about the next version of android on smartphones thinking that there would be a version of honeycomb for phones and it would kind of make sense we've had a ton of posts about how this could work but they didn't talk anything about honeycomb on phones which sort of makes sense they just released gingerbread android release cycles for phones is like six to eight months so you know we'll see something this summer but it would have been nice to hear at least one utterance of an indication of what the next version version of Android will sort of focus on four phones well I'd say it doesn't surprise me that much because first of all the gingerbread which is fresh and second of all I think we should have seen this one coming because I think I remember summer on the way we saw some rumors some here say about honeycomb being actually a tablet only platform and it's normal with the with the market being dominated by apple and ipad of course there's galaxy tab and there's the upcoming tempts you but they both run android 2.2 froyo so come on they should come up with something to to bring that competition to a point where maybe Apple will actually start losing points of the market and bringing it didn't you watch that interview with was it Matias Duarte I don't yeah I've got it right on my screen now and and i wrote a post right after i saw that you know josh Topolsky from engadget interviewed him at CES and I could have sworn I listened closely I could have sworn he said something to the effect of you're going to see Android or you're going to see honeycomb come to phones now what he probably meant is you're going to see parts of honeycomb come to a future version of Android and write that I think that that kind of threw us off a little bit or threw me off but I mean there's there's a lot of I guess there's a little bit less potential and sort of bringing the honeycomb experience with the new what are they caught holographic interface the new home screen manager the button list design the stacks are kind of cool I think those could translate to smartphones especially the ones you know with now that we're moving up to two qHD resolution yeah yeah no problem I was just going to say you know it would be awesome if in a future version of Android you could have a tablet mode that you could turn on or a phone mode so people with good eyesight and large screen phones could use sort of the split pain view in certain applications that would be awesome what does that imply maybe a hypothetical minimum requirement the five inches plays at least I mean it will be difficult on on 3.7 3.8 some or even four point freeze yeah yeah it would which is why I would be nice to be able to turn it off you know on a 4.3 inch display looking at a dull pain emailview probably would be reasonable yeah it seriously depends on how good your eyesight is and also of course how small they can get the pixels on a on an android phone so we are going to keep our ear close to the ground about the next version of android naturally since we don't cover tablets we're trying to give it a smartphone spin so as Android Honeycomb comes around two tablets will be diving in a little bit to see what we can learn about you know what Google has in store for the next version of android cuz it's always fun to look ahead boom it is we love looking ahead at one of our main things here that is right all right bro hard always ahead full speed alright so next thing and we've got just a couple more things to talk about this pocket cast is probably gonna be a little bit shorter than than the previous one for better or for worse so the next thing we're talking about is the motorola atrix 4g kind of kind of a surprise but not really if you're if you think about it for a sec the atrix 4g with the doc whether you get the laptop or the or maybe it's just with the laptop if you get the doc you have to pay the tethering fee which is another 20 bucks a month and people were kind of outraged about this because you know you're not necessary but not really what you guys think about this well i think you know um I think in one in one sense it's reasonable because you you are using it you are using the internet with a device that that's going to naturally be be pulling down you know more data than than you would or could with the smartphone itself you know especially because they have that full firefox browser on there presumably there's going to be a lot more video watching and you know flash browsing whatever so in one sense i can see yet you know it's basically like you know tethering your your regular phone to a netbook and why shouldn't you have to pay that extra feet but but another hand you know they're they're selling this as one of the on the integral features of the handset you know one of the main reasons why you should buy it so it leaves a little bit of a sour taste in your mouth that you should have to pay an extra you know x dollars per month to be able to take advantage of what sort of being sold or or implied a little bit as a core functionality yeah do you guys remember I think we weave unit approximately two years ago the CEO red flight a new you're going to say that I knew you're gonna say that yeah I'm actually that one was a dummy device it wasn't operating on its own my question is the eight races duck is it operating on itself or is it tied to the agents and they are forming one I don't think it has its own its own OS or anything I think all that it brings to the equation is the ability to to to have a full firefox browser as opposed to you know your your your standard Android browser 20 point you're just using the handset so then was the justification of a daring feat is the atrix and about our one because it's the usage on the usage scenario is i think so if i have a keyboard or a larger screen i tend to consume more intimate than i would be on my age makes alone right I think that the theory there and I think I'm actually the atrix doc that speaking that on the laptop there's nothing inside of it but a screen keyboard in the mouse I'm pretty darn sure that everything's happening on the phone you know thanks to the dual core and the one gigabyte of RAM absolutely um it does sound like they they might be charging quite a bit of money though for this is dumb terminal well I think that the the laptop was there a price i think was 150 night now I'm hearing closer to the 400 or 450 really which I guess the multimedia dock was 150 the thing you can connect here boom what I think they should do is and I mean you're gonna this is you're going to make people unhappy either way you could either charge them extra data and add to their monthly bill and people hate monthly bills because when you get a smartphone it's already much higher much higher than you were paying with a feature phone they could do that or they could increase the price of the the little laptop you know by a significant amount and sort of have all of the extra data fees paid for for you know two years or whatever well I think money will turn their backs on the HH stock and mata for that matter for the veteran feed but i think the real loser here besides the user is motorola itself because this is their sort of first attempt at something like this and people aren't going to like it is it i mean would you buy a dog if you had to be a tethering fee for for that dog to use with your phone yeah i would use the money to buy a freakin net no not netbook a tablet or a macbook air or something else that's then in light and can compute yeah i think people buy it in the same way that people bought that that projector that that you know um tacked on to the LG expo even though it wasn't a very good projector and for a couple bucks more you could have you know by your own dedicated projector that that hooked into the video out and gave you a better picture by your picture or whatever but but the fact that it's integrated with the phone people you know they really they're into their phones they want to get the accessories for it and and for people where where money is in as much of an issue i think they're definitely going to pick this thing up mmm i mean we could probably go back and forth all day about this product and and we would probably both be equally right but i think that this idea is flawed just like the palm folio was fall just like the celio red fly was flawed I mean you could are you could argue that the technology has improved lastly for this this laptop thing but I don't I I'm thinking about use case scenarios and I can't think of it I mean if I'm gonna grab something substantial and the laptop dock is very thin but it is substantial I'm going to get something that can do more than browse Firefox and let me remotely access my phone I'm gonna bring my tablet I'm going to bring my you know my laptop or something I what I think they're really looking at this as a netbook replacement end and in that sense it I mean it is if you know when the atrix has basically the specs in the phone you know a dual-core processor 1 gigahertz are hiring anybody by to ram and that's what they are he had potato fancy graphics or anything so so I think it's sort of reasonable but they they probably should have priced it lower if it is truly going to be in the four hundred dollar range because you could buy a real netbook with its own processor and whatnot and then you know you can be talking on the phone in one hand and then poking in the other yeah yeah absolutely I suppose the real test for this or the result of whether this is successful is whether in you know six months a year we still see this product for sale whether we still whether we see additional Motorola phones come out with this capability I I'm going to predict that it's not going to be successful but Evan you seem to disagree and I guess it's kind of impossible to determine say it's going to be success but I I think they will sell some of them and I think it'll probably be more popular than say a folio or red fly because it's being marketed one thumping market is an accessory that you know is motorola brandon and is meant to go with the phone as opposed to these other things which were you know especially Celia which was sort of a third party thing you know you're not quite sure how your how your phone is going to interact with it and there were some problems there with their OS so I'm not their OS just beyond the configuration between her or the communication between the devices so I think that this will this will be more successful than those but I don't think it's going to be a blowout hit but um no no well I i think that unless it's a blowout hit we're not going to see it come back because if they saw 10,000 of these things they're gonna they're going to sigh and you know go to their accounting and say okay we have to write down all the money we spent on RD for this thing in development I mean this thing has to sell a lot for it to be tonight I actually probably have it figured out exactly how many of these they need to sell / you know hundred atrix is sold and if it's above that number then it's considered success if it's below no this is all it's all set up ahead of time I'm not sure that that are metric of success is going to be the same as Motorola's you know they might think that if you sell one dock for every thousand atrix as does you know that's their target and if they do better than that you know damn successful well curious to hear from the people listening to this leave a comment let us know if the atrix dog or the atrix laptop is something that appeals to you along those lines we're going to start doing Collins in the near future for the pocket cast so that we can actually have people come in and talk about it rather than listen to us yet about what we think so let's move on on that note to the final thing we've got for today iOS 4.3 potentially coming for the iPhone and the iPad and all those other iOS devices on februari 14th and of course that will bring the personal hotspot feature and also more importantly I think is the the gesture support Evan you are a iphone user currently well you got Hawaii ghatal everyone know that ah sorry what only a nice eve in front of America no I like my iphone no I don't particularly care for all the gestures stuff and I don't you know I'm not going to be using it as a mobile hotspot so so none of these things interest me particularly but you know I think at this point iOS is very polished and you know there's not these huge features that they can add to a like in the beginning when we add copy paste now or multitasking like you know most of the the basic smartphone features and some more advanced ones are already taken care of so so now they're sort of adding you know value-added features or what some people would consider about your added features I don't see any reason for for the gestures I mean okay to finger gestures are okay three fingered registers to update let's say it's okay but four or five finger gestures on a small screen of a smartphone that's hilarious so I'd rather and this might sound strange I'd rather use that no style Inga and actually haha with my nose with the iphone rather than have a five finger gesture to bring up I don't know test manager or something I i unlocked my phone today with my nose thinking how cool would be to have that our newest dialer application um so pocket now gives a one finger death fair to the multi finger gesture but we were you I you guys do but um I've got a I think that ok so the multi fingers is kind of annoying especially people with large hands but the idea of being able to you know as an additional way to multitask swipe right swipe left I mean usually when you're multitasking you're bouncing between three apps at the most maybe the web the email and your contacts list or something and in in Android in iOS you have to do some action that is kind of unnatural DoubleTap of the home button in iOS a tap and hold of the home button in Android to get up your your list of previously used applications to swipe right to swipe left that is so fast and easy and I really hope it's they're going to have this in iOS 4.3 and I hope it comes to android or some third-party developer figures out how to do it I left you guys saw Brandon's clearly more cutting edge but not now I think this least I'm Tony and I are getting kind of old yeah okay um I mean so I I'm excited for iOS 4.3 although my micro sim is dead and I can't use my iphone because i deactivated my AT&T account to use google voice so I'm not even on 4.2 actually you are living in the past man well I was waiting for this jailbreak which untethered jailbreak which it looks like just happened this weekend so it looks like i will be upgrading soon have you done any really cool amazing jailbreak tricks i know i basically at first I just kind of did it because I didn't want to it was more you know for the not to actually I've done it but just to him for to make myself sort of feel better than up high having moved from windows mobile 6.5 which is really unlocked oh yeah I sort of did you know just just the heck of it but I have put a few apps on there nothing you know totally exciting I think the most exciting thing that you can do with it is is to trick the phone into thinking that it's on Wi-Fi when it's actually on 3g oh that's good that that seems to come in handy for quite a few on for quite a few applications but shutting than that I mean there's for the average person there's not a huge need to jailbreak because you know there's so many apps that do you know almost everything that you need you know just on your regular non jailbroken phone absolutely I I want to add a bonus topic and I'm calling a bonus because if people want to leave us now we're at the hour mark then that's fine but on the topic of front-facing cameras I was going to write a bit of an editorial about this um it's funny because you know the story the story briefly goes that in Europe they had front-facing cameras well before they did in the United States and Tony will tell you that it's a feature that's okay to have but you don't you don't use it that much as that is that our third one right and then so in the US we started see front-facing cameras with the evo 4g they were first and you had quick video chat and then the iphone 4 had facetime and now a lot of the new high-end smartphones are having video chat but like anyone that I know that has a front facing camera has used it one or two times and they only used it those those one or two times just to see what it's like um I I kind of I kind of think that front facing cameras are going to go away soon I know it's a value-add and it's good for marketing material but no one's using it and what do you guys think I suggest they start to get tied in more to on the desktop applications which is starting to happen now that you know Skype is bringing video calling to to the handsets and FaceTime has you know opened up to up to max as well I think it'll start getting used more as there's more interoperability between the platforms you know if I if I can talk to someone on Android not just another dinosaur iOS user I might be more I'm fine to do it that being said you know in general I think there's only there's only a very small portion of the population that that wants to make regular regular calls you know the technology has been around for landline video calls for years and years and no one wants it and there's a reason for that it's inconvenient i and it's inefficient that you know people like text messages so much because boom you get it done you don't have to say hello how are you because no one likes to talk to each other these days it's the future and so video chat takes it to the opposite extreme you got to see their face you got to make sure your hair is done up or your pants are on or whenever you're doing that that would be a deal breaker for you Brandon yeah what do you what do you think about a front-facing cameras Tony I just calculating something here and I was about to ask you something well we have the front facing cameras in Europe for four years now and as you said I agree I used it let's say for three or four times in my life first one was for testing purposes and second one was maybe for me to justify where I where I was and maybe this thing to get more popular if the rates were lower could you tell me approximately what the rates per minutes are for video calls in the US and schedule eating to make comparison with the with Romania freezes well I mean making a video call is doesn't cost anything beyond it will you know if you're using if you're using iOS phase or any of these it's just using your data so it doesn't actually cost I think that's actually a difference that a lot of people aren't aware of in Europe you actually have to pay per minute for video chat we're in the US has just built over the internet connection well in Romania for instance let's say Vodafone because I'm a hoarder phone subscriber we bait around 0.3 17 this is US dollar sense for one minute of video going so uh wonder why they're not using it hmm well that's a big roadblock yeah and another another roadblock is that wasn't facetime supposed to become open it yeah has that it's uh it's on max now right oh no I mean I think that'll be I'm not PC is to go well I meant I mean you know Steve Jobs when he had the keynote in in whatever month it was last year talk about the iphone 4 he said face time would be open so other OEMs presumably HTC and Samsung could enter eight this in integrate this integrate this into other operating systems and it just hasn't happened yet yeah the to my knowledge that has not happened here and and that's a really big missed opportunity because you know everyone's using skype chat or no no one's you having going with our thesis that no one's using this stuff you get quick and skype and another other things like that final note i just got an email back from AT&T about this issue and i'm scanning it real quick you're going to see the post on pocket now sunday evening I'm kind of excited about this post because it's a little bit a little bit annoying and slightly outraging this is happening let me just scan this blah blah blah ok so what our water contact is done is appropriately pasted their stance on hspa+ which is that you know let's see AT&T is the only company committed to delivering 4G using both hspa+ and LTE which is great not really answering my question about why the inspire 4G is constantly showing an h+ when it's not on the hspa+ but I'm going to look closer at that nothing really stands out in this email well you because if it technically is on the hspa+ network it's just not getting those fees I mean to me it seems like you know it's like when you're out the baseball game you know you can get four bars but you might not be able to make a phone call so you're you know you're getting a signal it's just not that the signal that you know you're expecting alas I don't think that's the case because if i go into mobile network settings it clearly shows that i'm on hsdpa i think it's just a simple matter of the indicator being misleading just that's that's it so it's the same item for for two different types of connection yeah in fact there is no 3g icon i was looking through the manual that they sent which is something that I never ever do and the the system indicators are either H+ and I'm reading this off the manual which says 4g available or h plus with two arrows which means you're connected to 4g I mean that's kind of okay fired up but ok not me whatever we care too much about phones everybody and details details details that's what matters yes all right so I think that concludes the second pocket cast hopefully you enjoyed this again we're new at this and if we messed up or didn't do something you liked let us know or if you liked it and you you're looking forward to the next one let us know that too thank you Tony and Evan for joining joining me on the second pocket cast thank you thank you i refer all right and that's it thanks guys