Gadgetory

hey everyone welcome to the fourth pocket now pocket cast we are now on not only itunes but also zune so you can download the pocket casts in many different ways that we're really excited about that so on our call today we've got my permanent copilot here Evan glass Evan say hi hey guys hey Brandon hey hey and we've also got Tony who just came in from Spain after being out at Mobile World Congress which were going to talk a lot about say hi Tony hey guys hey Brandon hey Evan and let's let's start there Tony general thoughts on mobile world congress what did you think about it well it was a first for me and I can compare it only to the coverages which we had in the past and saying that I might say that it was quite a successful MVC I've got plenty of thoughts on surprises on let downs on success stories but generally speaking it was it was a good show get here so let's let's jump right into that what was the biggest surprise of Mobile World Congress Evan um I thought the biggest surprise well first of all I should say unfortunately that there weren't that many surprises in and you know where we as as bloggers and journalists were part of that because you know we'd basically sort of leaked everything beforehand so there weren't all that many I can't think of almost any products that that we didn't know about ahead of time except maybe the the name of the Xperia Pro so so I would say the biggest surprise was the fact that we didn't see anything really high-end from HTC I can talk about that a little bit more later but we were really expecting to see them the the pyramid or the hd2 or whatever it's going to be called you know they're they're dual-core device that they have in the pipeline and the fact that we didn't see it that was pretty surprising to me yeah we're going to talk more about that indeed Tony biggest surprise of Mobile World Congress well it's not the biggest surprise as Evan said we knew everything before the MVC but let's not talk about devices for the neck 10 seconds for me the biggest surprise was Stephen Ballmer's keynote and the announcements which where he said that features which will come to Windows Phone 7 will be pretty pretty good so for me the biggest surprise was microsoft keynote I gotta go with you on that Tony I was not expecting there to be so much information coming out of Microsoft in fact we were talking on the site about how you know where's Microsoft this year with with their with their hardware or any sort of announcements but you know he talked about the mango update with the ie9 integration and the new way of of multitasking with the you know the press and hold of the back button to bring up like a card like view so I concur there wasn't expecting that I don't think anyone was expecting so much information out of Microsoft what else was part of that announcement for Mango so we have fan of apps Twitter integration with winter integration People Hub ie9 I 9 gaming improvements uh-huh and that was pretty much it yeah there's going to be a time with Kinect apparently that looks like it's gonna be kind of cool hmm yep the time of connect for me though I would love to go back to Windows Phone 7 right now I'm on Android but I can't do it because it still feels like an iPhone first generation having to go back to the home screen to change apps it's just ridiculous and the back button is so limited in its functionality to take you to a previous app it's just it's messy all right so that next let's talk about the biggest winner of Mobile World Congress whether it was a device or company Tony what do you think was the biggest winner I think it was a company and its cold LG we heard about the optimus 2x and the optimus black with the occasion of CES so it was really down to the optimus 3d and having a 3d a glasses-free 3d smartphone on display was was great and on the same note i should say that there was also another 3d smartphone which was the links 3d which nobody seemed to mention but taking that putting that aside I think the biggest surprise the winner surprise was was LG let me ask you a question about LG Tony how is their build quality it's been a while since I played with an LG device well i'm using the optima 7 as my daily driver and I've got some serious hands on with all the LG devices on display at MVC and I think they are they're coming up right on par with HTC really well yeah that's a that's pretty impressive I didn't I wasn't under that impression I thought that they were sort of just accelerating these products to market for getting out of the water quality not at all they're so solid there's no squeaking sounds the materials used are top-notch so bill qualities good to hear kadir and i have an biggest winner before Congress um I think that the biggest well I don't know if you would you would say this with this was necessarily at Mobile World Congress but in the same time frame I thought Microsoft getting nokia on board for them is just huge and so so if you consider that Mobile World Congress then then microsoft and windows 17 were definitely the big where's very good yeah that's a huge win for both sides there for the biggest winner I would have to say sony ericsson came forth with a portfolio of android phones and it wasn't it wasn't that long ago when we were writing sony ericsson off as a player in android when they had the xperia x10 which was running old software he was slow it took a long time to come to the u.s. and it finally seems that they're kicking up the the gears and releasing new hardware hopefully it'll actually land on carriers around here but the play is coming to verizon relatively soon is March the time frame of enters it may I think it's April April so right in between there very good okay next thing about Mobile World Congress biggest disappointment Evan start with you um well as usual I thought not as usual but you know the CES and now Mobile World Congress is two shows in a row that that HTC really hasn't come through with any exciting hardware all we had in this show was two phones that you know we were really expecting which was the desire s and the incredible ass and you know nothing really exciting there and then also the Wildfire s which you know another mid-range handset and then to other phones which which did give something different but but not different in a way that that I think most of our readers are interested in which is these these Facebook buttons which you know for for a segment of the population and and for the market I think that that they will they will have some you know that they will have some popularity but but for for people who want high-end phones HTC really didn't just didn't come through yet and like I said before there there was no pyramid there was nothing to a poor nothing bigger than you know foreign screams or wvga and it just wasn't really that exciting yeah I've got I've got a side with you on that and I was looking more into the salsa and the chacha which is of course HTC's Facebook phones they kind of had a really interesting function with the Facebook button that's more than just taking you to the facebook app when you are in a screen where you can share something some sort of content whether it's a song or a website or a picture the facebook button actually glows so then you know that this is something that you can share it's kind of an interesting idea I think it's kind of a going to be a novelty for a lot of people and I agree with you have an HTC disappointed we we were expecting every year we expect from them something amazing last year we have the desire HD and the legend which are the first sort of unibody phones with a new version of sense that was truly different and then they brought forth these you no point in one upgrade phones with a slightly new version of sense and it was just it was underwhelming Tony what do you think biggest disappointment well I think I have to agree with you and I think I'll have to agree with everybody saying that HTC was the biggest letdown and not only because we've had the remakes the S series for the incredible and wildfire which are pretty much the same internals in another box taker leave the 8 megapixel camera and the 1.3 megapixel front-facing camera on the incredible s but the biggest let down inside HTC was that they were not allowing us to have any hands-on action with with the Facebook phones they've had it on display but they were closed in a glass box it was like a HTC got word that I & Q is releasing the facebook phone and they had to do something with it but I get the feeling that it was unfinished hardware unfinished software and it's it's the same with the flyer tablet which they had so as far as I'm concerned with no hands on possibility no pricing no availability these devices are still a rumor for me yeah that a capital R rumor a location yeah capital R capital are definitely well they're they're coming to the US the salsa and the cha-cha I guess HTC and eighty thinks that Americans are more Facebook obsessed than people in other countries but ok let's move on finally about Mobile World Congress what phone do you guys want to buy that came out of Mobile World Congress let's start with Evan oh I'm think I'm most looking forward to the optimus 3d not only because it's supposed to be you know smoking benchmarks so far but just the fact that that you can both record and playback 3d content on the same device i think is pretty intriguing so so just for the novelty alone I'm excited about that but you know even if that wasn't there it's supposed to be a pretty a pretty smokin device yeah Tony tell us more about before you answer the question tell us about how realistic the 3d well on a penis it really is they had some demo videos which were playing on on the screen like I think I captured the one with the occasion of the hands-on with the parachuters jumping out of the airplane it's it's really really great I mean you have that cinematic 3d feeling when you look at the content it's not the same when you record your own 3d video I mean you can see that it's recorded with a smartphone camera you have free d all right but it's not that standing out jumping out of the screen 3d but if you have content which was professionally recorded and sync to your device it's fantastic it just blows out so so when you record the 3d from the phone with the dual lenses it's not as captivating as the pre-existing content is somewhat right yeah it's it it's somehow washed out like like you're used to recordings with your smartphone interesting and it's so hard to imagine 3d on a smartphone is there anything else you can tell us about it that would make us understand what it's like well it's like when you sit in with the with the your glasses at the cinema at imax and you see let's take a video no let's take a game because they had also some games on display you have that depth of field you can see you can see your enemies coming out from from around the corner even if they're far away which which you cannot really see on a 2d to the display let me ask you this I saw a glasses-free TV at CES and it was it was ok it was the technology is not there yet for a bigger display you have to stand exactly one spot the resolution was very low did you have any of that sort of problem with the optimus 3d where he is so you have to look at it to regulate on you have to be directly in front of it with a certain viewing angle take or leave a few degrees in an angle but I've got something I don't know if it's if it's the display or if it's my eyes because about five or ten minutes after watching the 3d content on the optimus 3d my eyes hurt so maybe it's the free see or maybe it's my eyes I don't know but it was the same with the with the links 3d too so I guess it's my eyes men that really just proves that these these phones with 3d aren't ready for primetime yet I mean when you shoot a 3d video or you're watching a 3d movie you're going to want to share it with people and if you can only have one or two people directly in the line of sight I mean it's it's kind of silly yeah well LG will tell you that you can hook it up via HDMI to your big screen 3d TV and you can share it that way so they have an answer for that too as far as I'm concerned 3d on a smartphone is more like a gimmick we're not there yet so I don't think if there will be a demand on the markets except those typical excuse me fanboys who will buy something just for the sake of it just for the novelty so you're saying that LG thinks that if you buy an lg tv as an accessory to their smartphone they'll work in tandem just right yep it's it's the same with your tablet i mean the tablet also records 3d content but it cannot playback 3d content on its own screen and while you can play it back on the optimus 3d you have another feeling when you played back hoots to your 3d TV very good very good so so Tony which which phone would you want to buy obviously the optimus 3d so yeah it rocks both display wise because the display is also when you get out of the 3d content and you get into the typical Android interface which is 2d of course it's it's vibrant it has contrast and of course it's it's kicking some real competition but with the quadrant score right right right I'm gonna have to stray from the pack here I'm not impressed with really any of the phones I'm looking at my little cheat sheet here and I'd have to go with the galaxy s2 because AMOLED Super AMOLED at 4 inches is awesome on the Nexus S on the Galaxy S 4.3 inches super amoled plus this thing might have the awesomest screen ever it's going to be fast it's going to be probably as thin as the xperia arc from sony ericsson even thinner yeah thinner thinner yeah so that's the phone that I'm not rude it take off touchwiz put on stalked Android and you've got yourself a pretty good thing he Brandon Kenny lived with a device which is feather-light weight because the galaxy s2 is you can barely feel it in your hands it's so thin and it's so lightweight that you're holding like two pieces of papers in your hand does it feel cheap though um no it feels I don't know how to explain this like like you're holding something which should be heavier unsubstantial right that's the word unsubstantial hmm yeah that's an interesting point because you would think that people would tend to want light phones but truth is that when you have a heavier phone it feels more significant more substantial Evan wasn't the LG expo extremely heavy yeah I've had a couple phones that were real that were like that the xperia x1 was the same way now that thing was a little tank yeah so I personally know Monta you know a phone that that weighs a little bit more you know especially if they're going to have some some metal in it and some you know higher-end components and materials yeah definitely I mean heavier to me means more complexity and maybe that's just in my head like the the inspire 4G which I'm still using as a daily driver it is it is heavy but it's it's also made out of metal and glass and it's got a big screen and I'm thinking how complex it must be inside to run all these components and I don't know I guess it's just a matter of perception so let's let's move on from Mobile World Congress over overall we were we were relatively underwhelmed CTIA is around the corner Evans going to be there and hopefully we'll see something higher end from everyone especially HTC with the with the pyramid that we've been we've been hearing about and talking about and maybe we'll get some hands-on with the Facebook phones maybe we'll finally get some hands-on with cha-cha and salsa so let's move on so this week it happened several times it even happened yesterday android 3.0 honeycomb or at least the emulator sdk version the pre-release was ported to the droid incredible the desire HD the evo 4g and now the nexus one and the question here is you know once honeycomb is released and it's all the source code is out there it's going to be able to be ported to every android phone that you can think of as long as it's rooted so people out there that have a rooted phone will have the opportunity to run the tablet version of android on their phone and a question then I'm proposing is is honeycomb for tablets a good option for for phones I think it has certain elements that are definitely conducive to to to any size device really and i also i'm not sure that that the question is quite right the people who are putting this on our are you know the people who want the latest and greatest you know the the stuff that's that's unreleased just coming out the same way that I used to flash my my windows mobile devices you know every couple days it's just fun I don't think that that people who are on the cutting edge necessarily are looking for their phones to have the same functionality as as stock builds or more more mature and more polished roms so so people aren't necessarily using these to have the most functional version of honeycomb but they you know they want to try out some of the features and and for that I think it's great good point good point yeah that's it the question is what should we be asking about honeycomb on on a smartphone 20 what are you what are your thoughts well I'll start with a little bit of off-topic introduction off topic because we obviously don't cover tablets but geek in me wanted to had a hands-on with all the tablets running honeycomb at MVC so I met the zoom I am at the galaxy tab 10.1 and the optimist bed and of course they all run honeycomb and I don't see how anyone could use it successfully on a smartphone I mean it's so well designed for the tablet and everybody was was unhappy to to find out that google said okay 3.0 is tablet only believe me it is just to give you short a quick example the browser they have implemented these tabs in the browser with a small X button for closing a single tab you can tap it with your hand on a 10 inch tablet but you will not be able to do that on a smartphone and of course the home screen which is designed to landscape portrait which I'm sure it will look let's say uncool on a smartphone running portraits in the instead of landscape so my thoughts are that honeycomb is for tablets and should remain on tablets only yeah I think you hit the nail on the head Tony I just an hour ago got honeycomb to run on my nexus one and it's fun and interesting and kind of has that wow you know fun effect that Evan alluded to but the truth is that the buttons are so small that I cannot use this without paying attention to where my my finger is and you know even if you put this on a device like the desire HD with a 4.3 inch display it's still not going to be a good experience right and I'm just I'm imagining myself walking down the street trying to use this web browser on this tiny little screen with the small X buttons that the point is that honeycomb is made for for bigger screens and unless you have a 5-inch phone like the dell streak or even maybe the samsung infuse with a 4.5 inch display you're just not going to be able to use it as a phone because it's just not made for small screens period absolutely that said it is cool the widgets are fun I really haven't spent much time with it we're going to put a video up of this we before people get to listen to the pocket cast so that will be that'd be good so alright so moving on last week there were a lot of rumors about the next iPhone and one of the rumors which is still a valid rumor if there was that Apple is going to be bumping the screen size of the iphone from 3.5 to 4 inches now if you do the math and I'm going to do the math again just to double check I've got this little Excel spreadsheet that lets me see the PPI setting or the PPI because over what's the value 640 over 300 PPI you get to a pixel density where the human eye cannot distinguish between pixels that's why I Apple called it the retina display now now that's that's what Apple's saying there's there's some controversial quite a bit of controversy over that over that either ok that's fair but I mean unless you have like like the vision of a ego booze genic eagle vision you're not going to be I mean can you see pixels on your screen Evan you have the iphone 4 no but i'm saying you know it could be even lower than that you know that that number was sort of something that was just thrown out there by Apple and and and different people different experts will tell you different things yeah yeah fair enough fair enough so if they bump the screen size 24 inches their ppi drops from 332 288 thus rendering it according to app will not a Retina display and so I have trouble understanding how Apple could bump the size of their of the iphone 4 24 inches I don't think it's really really a problem of seeing the pixels I mean if you obviously can't see according to Apple's logic 301 ppi pixels you could obviously not see 299 so the thing is that i think the retina display and all the fuss around it just a good marketing catch from apple and if they bump the screen size and resolution or the resolution will stay the same and the ppi will go down they will come up with something like I don't know iris display or whatever I should make the product sales spike that's funny that's a good one it's like retina two point oh it's called the Irish display right yeah I think it's good to note that itachi just started sampling these um diese at 1280 by 720 screens that are that are just four inches or maybe a little bigger 4.3 so there are definitely you know higher resolution they're higher pixel density screens than the retina display you know just on the horizon and and if anyone is going to be first in line for something like that it's definitely the Apple okay guys on a side note a quick question what do you think is the maximum resolution manufacturers would or should go up to on smartphones they're going to go to 1080i think so so people can watch the blu-ray content I have 1080 on my 23 inch monitor can you imagine that on a 4.3 inch display that'd be insane that would be reducing what would be the sweet spot I I disagree with them going to a full 1920 x 1080 because there's just it's just it seems that I mean eventually okay in the future one costs become super low but I don't think people will have the same experience watching a movie in high definition unlike a display capable of near 720p let alone 1080p I mean my dad will tell you that he can't tell the difference between 0 for 8 and 7 20 so there's always going to be that that contingent but but you know equally there there's always going to be people that wanna that want to max out their you know their their resolutions and their pixel densities and and they won't even if it if it visually doesn't make much of it just much of a difference you know just because you know they have the content at 1080 they wanted to be able to display it like that this reminds me of when I was younger and my brother Jared was the editor-in-chief of pocket now he would sometimes hand-me-down devices and he would always hand me these devices they like the compaq ipaq that had these qbj displays and I I hated those screens they were so fuzzy and blurry and for the longest time we had qvga smartphones and then we hit like a wall and then everything became wvga we kind of skipped vga like the dell axim i forget what the model was that had vga and then i also the HTC diamond i think that vga yeah agency diamond but the touch pro they so they had like a generation of vga and then everything for the last like two or three years has been wvga and we're finally getting out of that and we're going to get qhd so it's just funny how screen resolutions kind of kind of trend and there's a tipping point where you see another jump to higher so the same thing with processors to you have a couple generations of you know the one gigahertz Snapdragon and then before that we had that that awful lot that 524 28mm I was watching an unboxing that we did a long time ago of via touch HD and it was billed as a potential iphone killer and it had that processor you just talked about the 528 megahertz processor and then it had like two hundred and eighty eight megabytes of RAM just fun fun to look back okay so moving on another piece of news coming out of the Apple side of things is that there isn't going to be an iphone nano it's just going to get less expensive and you know Apple does a lot of interesting things with price they try to make things accessible yet they put the the ceiling pretty high for people that want the top of the line so the question I want to propose to you too is what is the sweet spot of pricing for the phone 5 remembering that you know the original iphone came out of the gate at like five hundred bucks and you had to buy it at that price it wasn't subsidized and then I think with the the 3g the second generation iphone they started to subsidize the price i think it was 299 not exactly sure and then the 3gs and the four came in at 199 so what's what's a sweet spot for the iphone 5 I feel like inspired as really started to push things down at just ninety nine dollars so i think i think we might see the iphone 5 coming in at 150 and 250 for for whatever the to capacity configurations are 150 and 250 so still stay above that $100 magical number yeah like you said you know Apple still wants to to be a premium product and they can certainly afford to be but you know they also want to get their their products into the hands of as many people as possible and so you know you have to compete on price to do that and so it totally makes sense to have another iphone you know and they're sort of doing that now by by keeping the last generation around and just making it cheaper you know it's not entirely clear what what they're going to be doing differently if they're they're going to have something that is a dedicated product that comes out you know the iphone 5 mini or you know iphone 5 nano or whatever it's going to be so if they do the iphone 5 at 150 / 250 you know they're going to keep the iphone 4 around for like forty nine bucks and people are going to go wild over that yeah it's a great phone they should it is great fun Tony what do you think they're sweet spot is in Christ well I agree with Evan with the with his sweet spot on the pricing I'd say that somewhere in time maybe Apple will be forced to bring the price as low as 99 because let's remember one of the main principles of the Nokia microsoft strategic alliance is to bring lower costs lower budget phones windows phones too the market and once nokia start shipping out these cheap windows phone 7 s with great great build quality and hopefully Microsoft will be able to add features to to the operating system by then I think that competition will somehow force Apple to to lower the price even more I think that my personnel are going to be a couple years out though I mean Microsoft has is quite a bit of catching up to do on the software side of things absolutely do you guys think we're going to a future where at least in the US where phones are heavily subsidized we'll we'll have hot new phones free on contract well I mean we do now in some cases through three no third party Beach retailers like click water fly and ad hoc and whatever yeah I think it that'll eventually be the case through the carriers but i think you know data plans are also going to get more expensive too yeah that out well i'll keep tacking on additional fees for the 4g now wearing the 5g network and it'll just yeah i mean it's in the end you're probably paying around the same your cost is just spread out different installments yep and installments and you know people in America seem to really like the idea of paying something monthly for a lower fee than having a larger upfront cost which is why the subsidy model is so prevalent in the US and it's not in Europe I that's why we spend so much on credit cards too yeah that's right okay all right so let's move on from the iphone we are talking now about LTE voice technology which they're calling vo LTE I don't know if you're supposed to save all T or volt voltage with us I think it's volte faulty it's interesting that we're finally in 2011 talking about voice quality because I remember when I got my first cell phone and I was 16 I was appalled at the voice quality the voice quality was far inferior to a landline and you know naive me didn't understand why that was the case but it's possible or very likely that in a year or two we're going to have phones that use this faulty service that allow us to have so much more higher fidelity audio and you know AT&T is is talking about a 2013 launch further for their phones with faulty whereas verizon's going to do it as early as this year and into next year and you know a year is kind of a long time in the smartphone industry so is it too late for AT&T to launch it in 2013 should they try to accelerate their roll out of this well I don't think it will be too late because it's a new technology and the sometimes being a bit late to to the show can be to your advantage I mean if if AT&T will be bringing in balti and 2013 they will see at least one year of feedback from the market from the verizon point of view and if if the product the service is not selling that well and it's not the big part of the market share then they might even cancel it wait again um yeah I have to agree with Tony here I don't think it's necessarily going to be going to be you know killer for them you know 18t has it Bella put a stockpile of customers but through their iphone exclusivity over the last couple years so and and as we've seen you know they'll they'll do what it takes in marketing to to close that gap in technology you know bye bye following t-mobile with their whole you know for geez that's not really 4G but it is and so so I think that they don't probably you know play down the voice body on horizon and start you know playing up their own voice quality as well you know even though we don't have volte yet or whatever it's called I haven't actually ever heard of pronounced that allowed either even though we don't have this yet you know nine out of ten customers say we have the best voice quality and they'll they'll roll out all sorts of you know funded surveys that say that so yeah I'm someone's got to be first and in this industry you know sprint had a had a year or so head start with wimax and you know they're not they're not eating everyone else's lunch so I don't think it's going to be a huge it's gonna be a big negative for 18 it's it's so funny that you mentioned about a Sprint's launch of 4G first and Verizon is here now in 2011 advertising that their network is the the most advanced 4G network I was reading a billboard as I was driving through Philadelphia and I saw that billboard a night I thought why would people care if the network was advanced doesn't that mean complexity means difficult to understand means unreliable I just was curious by the the choice of words but this this volte thing is a really big deal a few months ago some site posted a sample of what they called HD Voice in the UK / orange the quality was comparable to the bump in quality you get from a landline phone call to skype when you skype somebody the quality is so much better you can hear the crispness in their voice the boom eNOS and everything in between and and it's going to be the same way with with volte it's it's going to be it's going to be a game absolutely and it's funny you should mention that because i was just playing with my thoughts and with vote see there will come an increase of coal quality I think manufacturers will have to follow with hardware I mean you have to have some high quality microphones and speakers built into volte compatible devices because i don't think that speakers and microphones and current devices have evolved that much over the past five six years I mean everybody goes with the default I don't know what's the frequency range of those microphones but having high-quality voice on a new network implies new hardware components and that will be a bump in price tags that's a really good point something that I never really thought about with with volte will see a bump in finally speakerphone quality these tinny stupidly distorting speakers perhaps will become a thing of the past and hopefully as you imply the costs won't increase that much for handsets so that'll be something to keep an eye on all right let's move on here we are talking about now ice cream sandwich which is the next version of android for phones will combine honeycomb and gingerbread and you know I feel like we've been talking about the next version of android for phones since they talked about honeycomb and we haven't gotten any more clarity on what the heck it's going to be it's going to bring some features of honeycomb okay yeah which it's going to be kind of like gingerbread ok so what changes feel like it's going to be you know mostly gingerbread features with with a few added things for for multi-core processors and and probably a UI overhaul but so that's what I'm getting out of it maybe the they're calling the what's the name of the interface in honeycomb it's called mmm how is in the holographic or how something like that something like that well I think I think they will bring some interesting things from from honeycomb to to Gingerbread and not vice versa I mean the stacks they look great regardless if you're talking about your stacks of photos your stacks of YouTube videos your stacks of digital documents also I think a good addition to Gingerbread will be the new mail application which has a fantastic way of displaying your emails both in portrait and landscape I don't think they will bring the the browser I mean they might bring the browser and it's that version but they will do some modifications to adapt it to smaller screens but I think I think with the speed of gingerbread and some of the features from honeycomb maybe even the media player they might pull this one off good point about the the mail application especially it's kind of ridiculous that in stock Android when you are in the mail application the only way you can make a new message is by hitting the menu button and then compose HTC got it right in the sense version of Android where there's a big fat compose button at the top of your email screen and I think what Google has been very clear on is that the next version of android for phones is going to bring forth these functions more which begs the question how are they going to fit it on a small screen you know just just like the browser where they can if they want to have tabs along the top but there's really no space for that on a on a on a small screen unless you're using in landscape so well on a tablet if you are using the mail application in landscape mode you had this split view of your list of messages on the left and the actual message preview on the right if you swipe to the left you can take the message list out of the screen and only have the email body itself maybe they might bring this one to gingerbread like you have you're presented with your message list on the while entering the application swipe to the left you have the preview of the of the email itself and then swipe back to to your message list again so there are possibilities but I feel like that the preview scenario only works when you can see your message list at all times yeah right hmm that will be interesting to say indeed either way ice cream this summer be there will be there we will definitely consider yeah all right let's move on Adele roadmap leaked that looks very accurate or believable for wpcentral and what we have here is or yeah three devices now dell is relatively new to smartphones of course they had the streak which was the 5-inch kind of tablet pseudo smartphone then they had the arrow which is a low-end mid-range smartphone that no one really cared about and then they did the venue pro which I know Tony's a huge fan of and I am too and then they did the venue without the pro which is an android phone I had the opportunity to review both the venue pro in the venue and I was mega impressed I mean Dell's build quality I think rivals or even exceeds HTC the phones just had tremendous quality to detail everything from the texture on the back to the curved curvature of the glass on the front to the speed of the operating system to the touch sensitivity it was just it was right on and so we've got these three devices we've got the wrigley which is a windows phone 7 device with a single core 1 gigahertz processor it basically is a refresh of the venue pro perhaps coming around in time for mango and the road map has it pip pointed at July August time frame and then there's the Hancock we start getting into some interesting form factors slide down keyboard running android ice cream dual-core processor 4 inch qhd display this thing's going to be a tank I mean what what slide down keyboard phone do you know of that has a bigger screen than four inches I mean most of them come in at about 3.6 3.7 this thing's gonna be huge what's the epic 4g that is ok that is forges that's the that's the only other one I can think of to and so you know it's going to be a substantial phone and then we've got perhaps a twist on the Hancock you take the Hancock and you add a bigger screen so 4.3 inches stores the dual core processor still runs ice cream so it's its base CLE a they're kind of the same device just one is a bigger screen so my question to you guys is is dell on the right track to be able to compete with Samsung and HTC now excuse me for being a jerk because I will be a jerk in the upcoming minutes I'm a huge fan of the dell venue pro and here we are four months after windows phone 7 was launched and there are no venue pros in Europe I mean you've got some venue bros in the USA but you've been following the news and I hope our listeners have been following the news that the dell venue pro is delayed and delayed and delayed again in Europe I mean how on earth would they'll pull this off when they are not able to launch a device a single device in four months time frame so excuse me well and and jerk mode so ed jerkwad well there was a flaw I believe there were the venue pros were crashing or something do you remember that well there's a couple flaws wasn't just one they had that sound a Wi-Fi way more yeah it was the Wi-Fi then then it was some unnamed reason than it was some microsoft mms settings and then again something else that wasn't named i think it got delayed four or five times now and the fact is that it's four months past the windows phone 7 launch date and they're still no dell venue pro in Europe I mean you can't buy it it's ridiculous well Tony I can tell you it's a good phone thank you very much uh-huh I mean I mean I adam has one too mm-hmm and we all do you getting oh yeah we have all got three of them actually you want life I'm just kidding uh no it's a if you get a good one it's a really really good phone and it's unfortunate that they're being delayed in Europe and it probably is going to impact the excitement for these future devices from Europeans because if they can't deliver on a device that should have been out four or five months ago you know these next wave of devices may not be that time and I really think the the winner here is HTC I mean HTC 7 bro started selling 11 and a half weeks ago and the people who were actually waiting for dell venue pro are starting to buy the seven pro everybody says waiting anymore I've been waiting for four months so I think they should get this thing straight first get all the pieces together they'll make the big picture the image and then go on and make some new phones yeah i agree speaking of the seven pro we will have a full review coming up early this week so look out for that it's not really out yet it's coming to sprint it's available in limited capacity in Europe but we got one and we're going to have the four of you coming up soon or coming up soon as I like to tell Evan alright so it's got a couple more things to talk about quickly here as we approach the 60-minute market we try to keep these pocket casts to this week we've got two big phone releases to highly anticipated phone releases we've got the Atrix 4G on the date keeps changing but i think it's the 22nd or now which is actually tuesday and then we've got the Thunderbolt tomorrow or actually today's Monday well I thought it was sunday today in a at least for the pre-order I believe or they take are they sending them out today I think it's only the pre-orders yeah i think the 28th is when they're actually shipping and going on sale yeah so you know which one of these phones do you think is the going to be the biggest topic of conversation in the geeky corners of the world or at least the united states since that's where they're shipping well i think definitely atrix I mean besides the fact that that you've got faster data on I'm Thunderbolt you know there's there's nothing really new there in terms of the hardware while atrix has got a ton of stuff that we haven't seen before so yeah I mean it to me it's a no brainer you know moto all the way yeah i agree with evan a verizon was at the Mobile World Congress and so was motorola had hands-on with both the atrix and the Thunderbolt and the Thunderbolt is really just your typical HTC device with some added on radio for higher speeds but what will really sell the atrix is the performance and that fantastic idea they've got with with the dock I mean you take the device in your pocket your mobile you go to your office you hook it up to your netbook like that on dock and there you can continue working then you go home you hook it up to your multimedia dock and then you can enjoy your pictures and content now regardless of what else AT&T will be lets say demanding for for extra internet I think the Atrix 4G will generate a lot of buzz all right I'm going to go against the grain here I'm excited about the the Thunderbolt because you take the inspire 4G you add a much larger battery Thunderbolt has a nineteen hundred million power battery that is huge you add a front-facing camera you add 4G LTE you know the the Atrix 4G and the inspire 4G both have hspa+ support but they don't have they don't have hsupa as we found out recently there's an article on Android Central which means that if you're not in an area with AT&T hspa+ and we don't know where that it's it's not around here because i'm not getting hspa+ you're going to have speeds that are slower than what you would get over it with a standard 3g phone so either your speeds are crappy or they're great and it's impossible to know when they will be great because AT&T isn't mentioning anything about when this 4G network is going to be really out there and you can hear it in my voice I'm very bitter about it stone because you know you've got this you've got the 4g capability on these phones and you just don't get 4G speeds it's really a really shame yeah but that's an issue the operator has to to sell themselves it's not the issue with the device fair but I think what I'm trying how I'm trying to frame this is you know if I if I were looking for a new smartphone when I was thinking go on verizon with a thunderbolt going 18t with the atrix i would probably side with the Thunderbolt really yeah so the date is that important to you that you would give up the screen resolution and the dual core and the laptop done a huge REM yeah I don't think that stuff matters the the dual core and the huge ram in the laboratory here first folks no seriously the another con of the Atrix 4G is that it's running motoblur since the new version of sense is far superior to the previous versions of sense which was slow full of eye candy and just a headache to use you know the last sense phone I used I was I was really trying to find a way to turn off sense and you couldn't but on the inspire 4G I leave it on because it's such a powerful device it's so well tuned that the sense enhancements all work the way they were intended everything is instantaneous on this phone and the Thunder boat is pretty much the same phone just a little bit better you can but you it's not so easy to root it and then put on this it's already routed by the way I think the Atrix 4G got routed right right but but I mean there's no roms for that I've seen that have a sense so that's that's still still not quite here yet so you guys have fun with your HR sees gente and Allah I'll be loading web pages faster with the thunderbolt and we have Wi-Fi in our houses so we'll be at all I'm going to disconnect the router that's not nice alright so I think that's pretty much all we wanted to talk about this week a lot of news out of Mobile World Congress a lot of stuff with the iphones and the new new dell roadmap and we've got two big phone releases this week that was really that was really what we had to talk about today so thanks everyone for listening again we are on itunes and zune now but if you're listening to this you must have figured that out already so thanks again for listening thanks Tony and Evan at once again you Thank You Willa we'll see everyone next time that's it for now