Gadgetory

hey everyone and welcome to the sixth episode of the pocket now pocket cast I'm Brandon minimun editor-in-chief of pocket now also on the line is the managing editor of pocket now Evan glass Evan say hi okay Brannon hey guys hello and so today we are going to talk about phones because we think about phones when we sleep when we eat when we're taking a shower and doing anything in between and we are obsessed with phones would you say you're obsessed with phones Evan um upsets is a pretty strong word which is I'm sure why you used it um so so yeah a little bit they're very good i mean even when i worked at engadget the phones were always my favorite part of the job um so yeah I've always had a special thing for there's always been a special place in my heart for the smartphone well said it's it's the probably the most interesting segment of consumer technology because it involves faster than I pick pick your topic I mean there's there are new phone's constantly new technologies new operating system it's like a constant race among these companies yeah and more than that the phone is really the I would say just sort of Swiss Army knife of gadgets and consumer electronics you know it does almost everything that that your other electronics do plus it makes phone calls no I mean you got your entertainment so it sort of like a TV / you know PMP plays music obviously it's a gps device of course it's a computer with a browser so so i think the reason people are so many phones is because they do so many things yeah and and i think i think HTC in there there you campaign characterized that real well by saying phones the first thing you see in the morning the last thing you see at night it helps you remember it helps you to forget it's it's very true and they're not even there not even calculating in those of us who dream about phones oh yeah it's the it's the first thing you dream about and the last thing you dream about exactly very good all right well let's actually go into some things we're very proud our podcast test was featured in the zune marketplace as a featured podcast for a few days last week so that was really really exciting so we're excited people are listening to this and we're having a lot of fun doing this so let's jump right in we're going to talk a little bit about iOS to start this week we saw I believe it was on 27 februari a new kind of notification system for iOS that works if you've jailbroken your phone it's called mobile notifier and the way that it works is is very intuitively and we should preface this by saying that the iOS notification system right now is so last generation I mean you get these intrusive pop-ups you can't you have to action on them right away you can't ignore them for a second like you can of webos do you find fault in how iOS notifications are presented Evan mmm I don't think it's too bad um I mean it's to me it's it's no worse than than what you were getting up and some of the other operating systems it could be better but um I think what's to me what's more interesting is what it is what you can do with the home screen here right right right before we get into that let's briefly talk about how other operating systems do do notifications just to get some color here so in Windows Phone 7 you get a little toaster notification at the top which you can swipe away with your finger or you can leave up there or after a period of time it will go away so that doesn't interrupt you now windows on Windows Mobile 65 and below though they would just have regular bottom of the screen popup notifications you know it's been it's been a while since I used 6.5 was a bottom of the screen or top of the screens i believe it was bottom of the screen if you got a text message it would it would pop up in a little white box you know that would take up you know maybe twenty percent of the bottom of the screen and then like you said you would have to action on it either ignore or reply fair fair and then we've got webos which of course a lot of people think have one of the best notification systems where the screen size will actually shrink and a notification will appear below the screen actually they can build up and kind of like in Windows Phone 7 when you want to take it away you swipe it off the screen and then the the display size sort of effectively increases or the amount of resolution you get on your main application a lot of people really like that and then we've got android which of course puts everything in the notification shade up in the top then you've got to reach your thumb up to the top pull down the notification shade and and from there you can either dismiss all of them or you can action on one which will cause that particular one to go away this is I note have you ever found that the the notification shade on on samsung device is a little bit annoying and that it'll it'll bounce off the bottom of the screen when you don't want it to so if you pull it down too fast it'll actually close again is that what you're saying yeah it's got dumb it's got some inertia to it and I don't like it I much prefer how motorola does it where you know you just pull it down and it drops down and and you know you have to you know use some some actual only call it force but it has to be a dedicated upward swipe and and when Samsung I found that you know unless you're really holding the shade and you slowly pull it down it'll bounce right back that's that's annoying it's kind of like a real shade though right so you pull it down and then it just Yanks back up right but this is I think a case where we don't want our digital world to mirror the the real world I agree with you there I think the notification system and Android having to put your finger at the top of the screen is a little bit annoying which is why launcher pro is so great because you can map the home button to bring down the notification shade when you're on the home screen so you don't even have to move your thumb past a few inches from the from the bottom of the screen nice so yeah so mobile notifier works pretty awesomely so you'll get a little pop-up a little strip on the top from there you can either tap on it dismiss it or you can open it now if you dismiss it what will happen is when you open the multitask menu when you double tap on the home button you'll actually see a build up of your notifications so even if you dismiss every notification you get you can still come back to them when you go to multitask an action on them from that screen so it's it's a it's a really smart way to do things which begs the question is Apple finally going to improve their notification system in iOS 5 do you think that's a good bet Evan I don't know honestly I mean ha I certainly think that because you know thing things are being done in the jailbroken community that's not going to push Apple one way or the other I do think in general that the that the home screen and the lack of customization is starting to get stale and and I think now that Apple finally sees excuse me Android as a real competitor we're going to we are going to see some some ability to do other things with your home screen other than just a big block of icons I don't think people want that anymore and and frankly it's pretty dated you know people want some some real time information on their screens like with this mobile notify or how you get you know the little drop down with each time you get a message but but maybe you know i want that i want to widget with my text messages in them are you know a widget with my MLB scores or whatever um when that's something where where where Apple and and I'll say I'm Windows Phone to have really fallen quite behind yeah the the widget model seems to be very desirable from a lot of people and we it seems that every passing generation of iOS people think that we're finally going to get widgets on the home screen no longer will just be icon after icon after icon but they haven't done it yet probably because it would require a developer support it would require a lot of software optimization to not kill the battery when your MLB squirrel or loading oh it's yeah it would be a huge undertaking for them no doubt also because they would probably have to you know toss instance or a landscape support do why would they have to do that well I guess they wouldn't have to but um you know it seems to be something that would that would give them a leg up I would say if Apple could finally get done because no one's been been able to do that really well yeah um you know turning turning tortured into landscape when when there's widgets on the screen and I think if anyone could could work it out it would be Apple probably by restricting what you could do with your widgets but nonetheless I think the problem with widgets isn't so much the landscape orientation because like the desire Z gets it kind of right you can get launcher pro and rotate your device it gets kind of right I think the issue is making it intuitive the problem with widgets is that most of the time they're not updated when you want them to be they use a lot of battery life that use cpu cycles it just it's a mess I mean they give you seven home screens on most android phones but i tend to use one or two of them because i'm not going to be flipping my finger a thousand times to the left to see widgets that aren't even going to be updated when I want them to be so I think there's a real opportunity here for Apple to use their innovation to finally do something better with widgets and real-time information glanceable stuff hey have you gotten that cool clock on any of your android yet the one that was ripped from the newer LG phones snow gets that sort of 3d clock with um with weather on it I saw that it wasn't too appealing really i love it i think i think is totally cool does it do anything rash so i compared to like the no sense flip clock or no duh or a blur like digital clock you know it's got some 3d too it's got a lot of information it just looks nice yeah we're gonna now yeah it's basically at a a new spin on the HTC weather clock it has a little bit of depth to it which is interesting yeah I'm digging it try it out try it out very good let us move on so hopefully the takeaway here is that hopefully there will be some sort of improvement to the notification system in iOS come iOS 5 which we should presumably be hearing about come June or so as is typically the case with Apple releases all right so some more iOS stuff and never get it on what's that to never get enough forget enough especially if you enjoy the iphone yeah so finally 18t is giving users the option with with iOS 4.3 which comes out on Friday on March 11 to tether wirelessly of course you could do this if you jailbreak your phone and you get a program called I think it's my why for 10 bucks or so now is this this is tethering or is this mobile hotspot aren't they pretty much the same thing well tethering is where you're using either a USB or Bluetooth connection well mobile hotspot is is over Wi-Fi and the hotspot is pretty dead easy because you know you're just connecting like you would to any other to any other on access point but you know as anyone who's tried to to tether with Bluetooth or USB knows it can be a little bit trickier anyway as I recall Apple promised that kind of tethering number of years ago yeah do you remember that I was trying to think about which keynote but Steve Jobs said you know and and were expected to release this feature that the tethering later but we're working with AT&T to get it up him I believe it was the same one where they promised um mms wasn't mad yeah that's right so it was the iphone 3gs and I mean that came through fine but but as far as i know the tethering sort of just kept getting delayed and delayed and and it's it's actually a little bit surprising that they're finally doing it because there are still a lot of complaints about 18 tease network not being up to par and you'd think that if they were going to let people tether they'd have the infrastructure improved to know yeah so so the pricing for this is instead of the the data plan how much is your data plan Evan for the iphone 25 I believe it's 30 but i have i have a grandfather into the unlimited all right so you have the $30 unlimited grandfather plant so everyone else now goes with the $25 two gigabyte plan if you want to use your phone as a hotspot you have to pay twenty dollars more which I guess is reasonable if you think about how much Verizon and Sprint charge to use the hotspot feature paying 45 dollars a month will get you four gigabytes of data and if you use an extra gigabyte your charge ten dollars per so I mean these I sort of think that these these tethering plants need to catch up with the way people are using the devices I mean I can see you know two gigabytes being ok 44 stuff you're doing on your phone because not a lot of people are streaming video for a long time or you know and use extremes not going to take that that much that much of your allotment up but when you're talking about using the phone as an access point and you know then using your laptop as a sling player to watch Netflix you know try to watch a full length movie I mean you're gonna you're going to kill that those those megabytes and gigabytes in no time yeah it's a it's a game changer when you start tethering have you looked at how much data you use Evan on a monthly basis I don't look at that but I think I mean I think it's less than a gigabyte generally but that's because you know i have i have other devices to use to tether with i think if i tethered using my phone it would be a lot more yeah especially if I go on vacation I mean just watching one Phillies game that'll that's going to eat you know giggs you'll you'll easily go over your your allotment yeah so it's good that they're giving 4 gigabytes of data would have been extra cool if they would have done something unlimited but then people would obviously take advantage of that and it would really detrimental to their network alrighty let us move on let us sounds like lettuce selenium salad lettuce mm-hmm that it did this is good do you like salads I do probably not as much as as you'd like them but um yeah in general and more of a a hamburger guy than a lettuce guy although i do like lettuce on my hamburgers ah there you go keep it green mm-hmm except the the lettuce that they use it you know fast food restaurants is typically whitish in color applying that there are no nutrients I'm surprised that you would even know what fast food looks like all right I've been to a fast food restaurant really I'll have to talk about this more tape true so let's talk about on februari 28th kind of a minor piece of news but sort of symbolic sony ericsson head developer made a comment that they're actually in favor of routing if we do it right of course routing is the process of granting your your phone superuser privileges so that you can install custom roms you can do things to the software that basically the OEM doesn't allow you to do out of the box and of course on development forums across the internet you can root pretty much any device and it's a good thing to do if you know what you're doing because it gives you a lot of flexibility and what typically happens is that it's known that manufacturers don't want users to root their device because it's going to cause problems it's going to cause people to call in and say hey my phone's broken it's going to cause people to go back to the stores return their device and that's a legitimate concern it is a very legitimate concern yeah I mean there there are cases when if you try to root your phone you'll you'll you'll break it which means that you need a lot of expertise to fix a big problem you might not even brick it I mean you you just might get stuck somewhere on a flashing process if your time to put your own Rahman and you know people aren't going to go to to XDA first you know the first thing they're going to do is call up you know 18t a verizon or motorola and and they don't want that that hassle and you know that there's a question should day you know should they have to deal with with with inexperienced users trying to do do i'm trying to undertake cats that are there really meant for um for people who have more experience they should they should require users to take a test to determine the level of expertise and absolutely like a driver's license you know flash yeah exactly maybe a touch screen monitor like you're getting your learner's permit you know what happens if you see a you know how do you how do you get your device into flash mode or whatever if they answer the wrong thing then denied denied d and denied so I mean so if is it is it in OEM benefit to say okay we're fine if you root your phone I don't know I mean I think that that in in sort of the little world that that we live in we're reading a lot about phones and going on two forms a lot it's it's a big deal but I think in the general population you know out of all the people who buy a given a android phone it's probably not that big of a deal in other words I think that it's it's exaggerated because of the reading that we do and and the people that we talk to yeah you're right i mean the statistics are vastly skewed towards in other words most people don't hurt their phone i mean in our in our universe a lot of people do because people that read pocket our power users and they want to explore their phones and tinker and you know i don't even think it would matter if om's were to officially sanctioned routing because it's going to happen anyway and they can go and send scouts to the forums and learn about software weaknesses and learn about how people are creative creatively using their interfaces but I think that's the extent of it I don't think we're going to see some more official stance on unrooting to the point where one day sony ericsson includes instructions on here's what to do to root your device just doesn't that's not going to happen I think it's possible that they'll make it easier to do but they're still going to be some sort of barrier to entry that as you like to say so that that the average person is going to have trouble doing it but but the people who know what they're doing are going to know where to find the tools and you know hopefully know where to find the support if something goes wrong yeah exactly i mean that's pretty much the only thing they can do is make it easier to route but even that I mean you know some of the motorola devices were assumed to be unreadable and then they were routed and you know it was just a matter of that game came along and gabe came along and you know took care of business I think I study his atrix today oh I he is ah Tegra 2 well that's good that he's getting the atrix let's talk about the atrix and motorola likely bringing the laptop dock to upcoming smartphones this was posted on februari 28th implying that this laptop dock thing is sort of a long-term strategic bet for motorola and they're going to keep bringing it out and keep bringing it out and make a standard dock connector to hopefully make this a thing and you know we've talked about this on the on the podcast about whether the laptop dock makes sense and we kind of concluded that for some people yes for a lot of people man I don't know I mean I feel like for for people who are buying netbooks and there's a lot of those people that that this might no be a be a totally legitimate substitute for that but for anyone is obviously looking for a real laptop power and needs you know any sort of gaming any sort of real multitasking is just not going to do it so it could go either way now the question is are those people who are buying netbooks going to want to spend the same price as a netbook and perhaps more for a device that doesn't have you know a CPU in it or any of the guts that you're getting with a dedicated laptop that I don't know I'm I've been feeling the price on these things is going to have to go down before they really find a widespread audience yeah I mean it's the price is so it's so important here I mean it's got to be it's it's got to make sense it compared to a netbook and even compared to a tablet which is sort of taking over the the netbook sales the world what are you talking about netbooks tablets are taking over the world they are taking over the world sure it's you know everyone has different use cases and and for me the only advantage I see to this dock is that one it's really thin really lightweight so it's very unsubstantial and to you don't have to fumble around with with the internet connection so if you've got a netbook right or even a tablet well not not a tablet cut because that makes it easy let's say a netbook because you need a keyboard and you want to turn on the internet tethering well let's see you turn on the device it boots up you know about 10 seconds you go to the ATT 3g wizard or the verizon connection manager and you start the connection which usually takes another 10 to 20 seconds I know we're complaining about 30 seconds here but in the case of the motorola doc you plug in your phone turn on the device instantly in boom within five seconds you're connected ready to browse the web ready to use everything with its full functionality well when you say full functionality what what what is the the lapdock bringing to the table you want you're getting um you know Firefox browsing but you're basically only getting a bigger screen other than that right i mean it's not like you're you're getting a new OS on there you're still just going to be able to use your your regular Android programs yeah so you're getting a bigger screen and more power and ever since using a google voice and being able to manage my text messages online it's so much more comfortable to do than to pick up a phone and to go in text messaging app so with the with the doc the motorola doc you know you get a virtual picture of your not a picture it's a it's a rendering of your phone screen and you can actually use your phone while you browse the web so I don't know it's almost like I'm talking myself into the idea right it's cool i mean if you're you know already sitting down somewhere but if you're on the go that you know that's just not really a practical solution you're still going to have to be you know thumb typing true true independent that's sort of the other thing is that that the whole set up there with the with the doc it seems a little bit dumb I won't say fragile but I don't know it doesn't seem like the type of thing that you know it it just seems a little ungainly I guess to have that sticking out the back like that I thought that maybe they would come up with a little bit more elegant solution yeah maybe some sort of sort of plugging in like a cartridge at least so that's there's a lot did you see I'm um you know I am knock nak our friend yeah the neck neck design which we talked about the tablet yeah weird that I think was called the tube where they have a smartphone that actually inserts right inside the tablet I thought that was kind of an innovative idea yeah yeah we'll put a link up to that on the podcast description the HTC to buy neck and basically lets you insert your phone and then get sort of a if it's a windows phone 7 you get like a windows phone 7 tablet interface if it's an android phone your tablet turns into an android phone that that is awesome I mean that would be sort of revolutionary I think to be able to take your Android phone plug it into a larger screen and then you get like a you know two or three times larger resolution and more power and that would be awesome you know I was almost gonna buy a pico projector this weekend no you were yeah I was uh I had to go pick up a mouse and I and I had him there but yeah I don't know I just thought that there wouldn't it would be like a fun gadget to have but there wouldn't actually use many of you such cases for it what would you use it with well it's got a number of inputs including hdmi so you know you can you could go regular composite out of your iPhone you can go hdmi out of your laptop or out of your droid x I mean it's definitely got it's definitely got some some possibilities in terms of Isis you can hook up to it but but at but you know what am I actually going to going to be on the go and I want to watch a movie you know a whole movie on someone's wall how much was it and what was the resolution it was done it's the optima 301 that i was looking at and it's um it's four hundred dollars with that wvga resolution and fifty lumens if you have it plugged into the wall which is pretty high for for these sort of things wbj is it's it's ideal for a smartphone on an unrelated topic it would be really cool now the projectors have come down in price projectors that can do HD resolution to take a projector and have it act as almost a fourth monitor if you can picture this you sit at a desk with a white wall in front of you and you have the projector behind you and you can kind of use your whole wall suddenly becomes a monitor you can put you know Twitter up there or something like a timer or your email inbox that that seems so cool yeah absolutely i think that the problem there is is the same problem people have had trying to hook their computers up two up two projectors is that you have to get the the fonts big enough you know you have to change the DPI so that you can you can see a screen that's you know more than a foot away from your face oh good point but but wouldn't you know just by the sheer size of the display let's say you get a 10 foot monitor on your wall I mean wouldn't that just blow up the fonts all already yeah but I mean you don't need a super short throw projector to get a 10 foot throw if the projectors only you know a foot or two away from the law I don't even know if it's possible oh well I was talking about kind of putting it behind you you know wow I yeah okay yeah yeah theoretically it's a it's a very good idea and I'm sure we'll see something like that and and in fact they'll probably have it with um you know with with minority report style touch displays oh I think they already have that it's just extremely expensive a projector that can you can actually use you can't it's like a touchscreen it becomes a touchscreen well yeah it probably uses cameras for you know motion sensing I mean that's sort of what surfaces so yeah there's some cool stuff coming up I definitely don't think that we've hit the peak of technology at it happened in 99 with windows XP that was a good OS it was a good OS in a superior to fist of course well anyway let's let's get back on topic now we are talking or hearing about Sprint's ctia event which you will be at Evan right on march twenty second yes correct so you'll be there and the rumor here someone tipped and gadget with the possibility that we'll see a nexus s 4g and an EVO 3d so let's sort of look at both of those individually a nexus s 4g making it the third Nexus S to be on a US carrier is this a good move for sprint Evan wait when you say to the third Nexus S you're talking about t-mobile and then the rumored 18 t1 yeah um yeah absolutely i mean you know the you you use the nexus s you like it right it's good phone great phone but had wimax would be pretty pretty dope pretty dope indeed so that's that's a good move um definitely having the nexus s it at this point it's a little bit stale but i mean you know t-mobile just released the galaxy s 4g and people seem to be very excited about that so it you know just because it was released late last year doesn't mean that all excitement has waned for it and then the evo 3d for sprint you know all these carriers have these brands and they're literally almost franchises so there's the droid franchise on Verizon there's the evo franchise on sprint what does AT&T have 18 seas got nothing but t-mobile as my touch my time they also have like the g1 and g2 they've got the g series ok so for sprint EVO is huge there's so much positive energy surrounding the evo brand anytime I hear somebody talk about the evo out in public they are very excited about it and even to this day a year later after its release the evo 4g still a phone that sells quite well and one that lots of people enjoy so they also yeah that's because I mean HTC isn't really making phones that are that much superior to the to the evo 4g even at this point that's true there's not much out there that that sort of changes the equation although the evo 4g to the desire HD the desire HD had a newer generation processor had more RAM better battery life so there has been some modest bumps and that's on the periphery though isn't it I mean it the phones i would think are going to function essentially the same more or less yeah there's nothing really that that new to the tape bringing the table so so they have the evo shift 4g that was the second evo and now the evo 3d possibly sprint being i guess it would be the first US carrier to do 3d on a smartphone yeah and 3d is certainly the the buzzword in 2011 you know LG is going to be out of the gate first with the Optimus 3d and the 3d capability really comes into play when you're recording video and taking pictures they there's no 3d interface on it or any sort of new paradigm of interacting with your phone it's just basically capturing media and displaying on the phone so we got to wonder a few things one is the evo 3d going to be HTC what do you think of it yeah definitely do you think that the evo 3d could be the first US version of say the pyramid I don't think that just because something like a 3d screen I think would have made it into the rumored specs you know who ever knew those specs or who out you know assuming that those specs are correctly the dual core and the qhd screen it would seem that that a 3d display would be big enough to note that's a good point for those that are unfamiliar the pyramid is HTC's assumed high-end phone to be released hopefully at ctia with a dual-core chip and as I mentioned qhd display so so HTC Samsung LG who do you think's making this oh I think it I think it is going to be HTC it's it's pretty rare that you see that you see a brand move manufacturers in fact the only one that I can think of in in recent memory is nexus yeah yeah you're right well actually don't forget about the droid I mean HTC and motorola are doing droids on verizon yeah but i think that the next incredible is actually dropping the droid the droid branding so I mean droid is basically a verizon thing and I bet you if you went and asked if you ask people who are doing branding at verizon they'll tell you it was a mistake to to brand the droid eris and the droid incredible because it really confuses people i mean i'm sure you you've talked to people who who want a droid and they don't know the difference between a droid and an android phone and yeah a lot of that problem is because is because verizon let that branding you know cover more than one manufacturer yeah it is does verizon of course they do actually I was gonna ask for does verizon have any android phones that are called droids and they have some lower end phones i believe like the ally is that all verizon um uh yeah i think it is i'm on the present site new they definitely have like or they were supposed to have the env pro from LG the going to have the revolution yeah okay so so the answer is that they do release non droid phones that run Android as confusing as that sounds coming out right but but not really high-end other than the fascinate right that's a good point and you know I doubt Adele will see a droid galaxy s2 or you know yeah definitely not playing at you playing jacks over there I just broke something ok cool so let's move on from Sprint's announcements and you know we're still waiting for the Sprint keo sex kyocera echo which we've seemed to forgotten a little bit about as is usually the case between the announcement and the release as is usually the case with forgettable devices reefer yeah yeah I you know hopefully uh hopefully it will be a great device although you know when we had hands-on with it it was kind of man yeah I don't have too high hopes i think it's a it's a cool form factor but i just don't think that there's going to be enough developer support for it and and so those those two screens are sort of going to be wasted yep although for some people i mean just just having that much space to web browse might be enough if you know if the only out they had that was optimized with the rub web browser them that might be enough for some people yeah but the problem is that it's just it's choppy i mean you stretch a web page to both screens and you scroll down and it is it's not it's not pretty well why is it getting stretched why can't they just why can't they just use the increased resolution to give you more of the page oh they are they're definitely doing that but it still doesn't perform very well well we'll have to see when we take it into the pocket now labs how it performs that is true all right let's move on here we're talking about the xperia arc which has crossed the FCC with AT&T frequencies this was on march forth just a few days ago do you think that 18 g is actually going to sell this or do you think it's going to be sold unlocked I think they'll sell it i think i think sony ericsson is making a big push and they've said that all four of these um these devices that we've seen so far this year which are the let's see the ark the play the neo and the pro all four of those are going to be sold in the US on US carriers plus four more devices that we haven't even seen yet so we're supposedly we're looking forward to on eight total sony ericsson devices subsidized on US carriers this year hmm that is a lot of Sony Ericsson and they're they're really making a push so so if Sony Ericsson can can get past being sony ericsson and releasing stuff late and not updating it whatever then I think they really have a good shot of you know they're they're looking at they want to own twenty-five percent of the android market they didn't give a date by what by that point by they didn't give a date for that target but but they definitely have have an eye on owning quite a bit of this of this smartphone vertical yeah yeah and you can you can you can tell they're they're very serious about this i mean the phones that they announced at at CES where we're pretty interesting and and certainly having more presence in the united states on the carriers will help so the ark trying to figure out the the headline with the ark the coolest thing about the Ark is that it's it's very high quality and yet it's extremely thin extremely light so it definitely has it definitely has a place in the market but the apparently the galaxy s2 is going to be even thinner right and it's got better hardware specs they're so close that it's just it's it's a draw I mean dual core versus a single core oh well I was talking about the thinness of the bow the thing is yeah but I mean you know if that's a wash then then you're going to start looking at components and that's where you know that's where the the samsung really has has the edge a significant edge you better not have the edge you better have 3g or 4g uh uh uh it's a joke yeah oh man that's not just informative it's also hilarious the pocket cast hey I'm uh I'm thinking about edge because we're getting a phone in this week that is a new European phone can't talk about it yet and I'm going to be running on edge so you know I'm gonna be saying that word a lot soon and complaining about it I'm sure Oh plenty absolutely every every time I talk to you I'm going to want to complain about the edge uh cool so let us move on next we are talking about a sony ericsson phone that these shots keep coming out it's a it's a qwerty device side sliding windows phone 7 device sony ericsson you know already already said they're they're going to have a windows phone 7 strategy but this device looks kind of me me two ish me too compared to themselves i mean it it sort of looks like you know maybe like a little bit like an ex time with a keyboard maybe but it does look like an extent the only saving grace here and if you've got the picture pulled up evan i think the only really interesting thing about this phone I mean it's probably gonna have a 1 gigahertz Snapdragon with 512 megabytes of RAM a wvga screen all this stuff we know but it quite possibly could be a very very thin slider and it's very difficult to get a thin slider yeah although I mean if you look at those now i'm looking at if you look at those keys they look almost totally flushed with the screen or with the body don't day there's home doesn't almost no looks like there's almost no rise above the you seem i'm talking about yeah yeah they are they are pretty flat there it's funny because i think that some OEM is trying to make the look better than they function yeah totally like all these like Chiclets keywords I'm not a big fan at all they look cool but who is a fan I mean that HTC got it right with the touch pro 2 and 7 pro and those keyboards look good and they function well I don't understand why they can't do something like that without actually doing that without actually getting without getting sued by HTC for her you know copying a design so we'll have to see what happens with the sony ericsson slide out hopefully it'll it'll be different than at least the quantum which is the other slide out qwerty for windows phone 7 how about don't forget your favorite the DVP oh yeah the dell venue pro but that's a different type of slide is a different type of slide that phone is awesome all right let's move on so we last week i think was last week we're talking about the pre nodo windows phone 7 update this is the update that does nothing except prepare devices for the copy and paste update which is going to happen like this week or next one and then some Samsung users reporting that their phones were stopping midway through their phones were being bricked Microsoft came out and said only 100 users had the happy issue and presumably today is when you believe that 100 I mean that seems a little out like first of all could there really be that for you and then second of all if there are that few would Microsoft really be able to count them like that I know right it seems very suspect and you know this was a big deal for Microsoft to prove to the world that they can do updates over the air and so I I'd been checking seven times today on on my focus to see if the updates gonna happen and I just checked right now it's not there so yeah I know thank you for your sympathy by the way wait what do you have a an 18-2 sim in there I don't but Adam was able to update one of his devices without a sim so yeah the atoms out well I'm doing what Adam did you know I don't know Adams I mean I don't know how to set up exchange certain active sinks on Windows Phone 7 and most people don't know how to do that what I know how to do that I'm saying most people you're not those people but well it it it has nothing to do with sim as as as far as I think it's known I think Tony's chiming in that there's really no correlation it pulls any Wi-Fi connection or data connection available so I'm going to keep checking and if anything happens I'll uh I'll holler at you a holler back cool well let's move on one more story to cover before taking some questions from Twitter so it was kind of strange with this mango update for windows phone 7 which will of course bring ie9 with better browser performance it will also bring fast app switching to windows phone 7 very very very important update to Windows Phone 7 because it kind of brings it on par with the functionality of a lot of other smartphone platforms and paul theroux from wind supersite said that there may be no mango update this year because the schedule is is near nearly impossible to meet and then Mary Jo Foley reports that uh that that Microsoft's going to have the code to OEMs and partners by the early fall and of course there's a there's a delay early fall implies let's see what's early five and kind of September right yeah more like a forward september-october even with that time frame OEMs have to test and deploy updates and I mean I I think Paul is is right here although I don't have any inside information that i can report on but it sounds like they're going to get the code ready by fall it's not enough time to get Windows Phone 7 mango ready by 2011 yeah I agree um I mean I think didn't they have the or from what I heard they had the the node 0 code you know in the fall it was already go but there's still a lot of things that have to do that you need to go on you know a lot of testing and and more testing and then you know some testing after that so so yeah I think it's unlikely if we're hearing about a fall deployment I think it's actually going to happen into thin you know late fall which which means that there's almost no chance that so actually have pushed out to devices this year and it would be a shame if that bill a were to cause OEMs to hold back on their their holiday plans for windows phone 7 devices yeah we need some new windows phone 7 hardware speaking of I mean it's been it's been what I guess it's been it's been about five months now almost six months since since launch since since devices actually started trickling out and we haven't seen anything new yet right and right now there then the dell venue pro if you want to call that new because it got delayed but what we need is the development community to figure out how to get Windows Phone 7 on say the Xperia Arc or something I mean they got it on the hd2 hopefully other devices are to follow and then you know it's a whole different ballgame for those willing to do a little bit of hackery yeah I think one of the problems is that or one of the advantages i should say the hd2 is it had the exact same hardware almost as chassis one requirements well you know you're going to find that other phones they're going to differ just a little bit and that might be enough to make it impossible to port the build over true true we're at that gave about that very good well let us move on to some Twitter questions next week we're going to try to do Collins so if you're listening and you want to call in check out our Twitter will make an announcement probably an hour before the next podcast saying you know call this line and we'll we'll take your call on your questions so let's see you've got a bunch of questions here that have popped up in the last hour or so dude okay so a friend here this is from John I don't know how to say this john-boy NFL sounds like his name is John Boy in from Florida a friend is holding out for the droid bionic do you have release info any other Android device you would recommend can I take the seven uh we don't have any release info at all on the Bionic um there's a lot of Android devices i would recommend i guess if you're on verizon you know you've got quite a few of these these 4g phones coming out i'm sure that the Thunderbolt would make you happy although it's not a dual-core device could wait for the LG revolution or the samsung 4g LTE if you're not know married to verizon there's quite a few that are just coming out on eighteen t like the infuse that's that's one that I'm actually looking forward to the infuse 4g yes can be great but right now you know the Atrix 4G is just rolling out you've got inspire 4g on sprint you've got evo shift look II talking about before even the the evo 4g is still a solid phone so there's there's quite a lot of good Android hardware out there basically any of the top and Android hardware on most of the carriers I think you'll be happy with this is the verizon 4g samsung phone going to be dual core don't think so i don't think so either because there's got to be something that separates that from from whatever the big galaxy s2 variant is going to be on verizon and it's the same thing with AT&T would the infused usually does not dual core right and of course the infused as a 4.5 inch screen which is pretty pretty cool about 4.3 was big and so that begs the question actually from these twitter follower named gun sing which is the best android phone out there right and if you have to come to one answer if you were going to buy one android phone today what would it be I mean I have to say you know I haven't I haven't even played with all them so by specs alone it's got to be tricks for G right now by motorola but but I haven't used it so I can't say with any certainty i haven't tested any of the newest phones you know and in depth at all pepto yeah i think they're going to have to wait a couple weeks if not a month for us to get some reviews out and to be able to give a little bit better answer on that yeah we're on the eve of a lot of phone releases so it's a it's a tough question answer i would i would say stay away from Tegra 2 I know people are going to probably beat me up over this but I'd say stay away from tech or two on smartphones for now i don't i don't think that the software is optimized i don't think it's worth it and in fact the tegra two smartphones i have played with we're actually slower than you know say the inspire 4G which has the latest qualcomm snapdragon so the answer to that question i would say if you had to pick one the nexus s probably is is still my favorite although this is a kind of a bad time to make that choice because we're on the as i said the eve of a lot of foam releases yeah that'll be that'll be a three carat or phone it looks like a three carat yeah so you'll have a high likelihood of it landing on your or home carrier what would you say is the best windows phone 7 right now levin um they're all the same right now just paying hmm probably the dell venue pro or a lot of people like the samsung's you know either the focus or the omnia 7 yep what hasn't just what hasn't been knocking people's socks off it seemed so the htcs you know the surround and the trophy Mozart hd7 I guess the atom like the pro somewhat but you know it didn't blow it away so yeah I would say you know dollar samsung is probably the cops in that space right now I agree with you and if I were to go either way I'd say Samsung the the focus and the omnia 7 seem to have better screen sensitivity than really any of the other windows phone 7 devices I think the dell venue pro has fantastic build quality great fit and finish but it's heavy and unless you're someone that that requires a hardware keyboard the on-screen keyboard of the focus and the omnia 7 is just fantastic so do you have a robot no but I just wanted our listeners to know that my avast virus says indeed been updated the virus definitions I have to hear that I'm sure everyone is the the more viruses I have the slower that we get the news oh that's your head cook alright so one more question from Paris Malaysia this is sort of a multi-pronged question and we'll start off with you Evan so basically best thing you let's let me rephrase the thing you like most about Windows Phone 7 iOS and Android and the thing you dislike the most about Windows Phone 7 android and iOS all right well let me take them one at a time windows phone 7 i would say what i like most about it is um i like the fact that they went in a new direction in terms of the UI but i don't like the fact that it seems like they pushed out a product that wasn't ready yet and there's there's just a ton of little things that I don't like it like about it a lot of it has to do with the home screen and how it's not very customizable and I'm moving around tiles it's just an absolute nightmare they they don't they don't really fly properly when you move something around it's it's really just a mess and here i am i'm looking at done this sony ericsson's um windows phone 7 is slider and the screen looks terrible it's one tile is light blue some of the other tiles are like this like sort of faded dark blue and then you've got a tile in the middle it's multicolored it looks awful so I'm not a big fan of that at all um next up android i love the fact that that android um feels a lot like Windows Mobile did back in the day where there's a lot of potential there's a lot of customizability there's a ton of software for it I'd say what I don't like about Android is the sum of the things that you've said before the multitasking can be you know sort of a double-edged sword and and I think we're finding that that Android isn't necessarily doing the best job of managing some of the programs so that you get a ton of stuff that's that's running in the background a lot of processes that don't necessarily need to be and it slows things down but in general you know it's a good solid OS and iOS right now is the best operating system out there in terms of polish that it's what in its you know forth or if you want to count the point lawns and the point dudes it's much farther along than that you know and it's six or 7th generation and it really just does does everything right now except for the fact of course that that you're somewhat locked down into you know apples ecosystem and and the home screen is still pretty uncool but but other than that everything on the iphone basically just works and that's that's ultimately what you want is you know I'm gonna have to be dinging around you know learning you know how do I do this on my windows phone 7 where can I where can I long put long press and hold so so yeah I think iOS definitely um did you the most polish and the most features right now but again I mean I was for a long time I was a much bigger fan of Windows Mobile that I was of iOS so and it can change in a heartbeat indeed my list isn't that that different than yours for windows phone 7 and what I like about is actually what you don't like about it is is the interface I think the interface is gorgeous it's fluid it's very smooth I like the tiles it would be nice to have more live tiles from the marketplace there really aren't any I just like when you click on the music application you get a beautiful animation when you go back to the home screen it's just butter it is butta so I like that about one is 17 what I don't like about it is that Microsoft knew that they had to change the game and they sort of did they brought something new to the table but they left out some of the most important things of a mobile operating system and they'll argue you know the people were going after don't care as much about this as you do but I don't think that's true there's no copy and paste there's no fast app switching I'm not going to go through the list because everyone's heard it many many times before so they wasted I mean Microsoft lost you know if the rumors were here are right they lost years literally they had to you know they had their their windows mobile seven and they dropped it and had to retool it so yeah you know they could have imagined if they'd had all those people working all those years on on what's become windows phone 7 yeah well you know they made a mistake and they they've owned up to that and and you know we have something new and different in it in its place let's talk about Android what I like about it is it's its versatility I find that any app I can get on iOS I can also get on Android as usually a similar quality so no longer is Android lacking those major apps it's just extremely versatile customizable sort of in the windows mobile way but the downside is the same downside that Windows Mobile had things happen in the background that you can't track down I wrote a posts many weeks ago about how suddenly the battery life on my inspire 4G became horrible and I couldn't track it down I went through the quote what to do when your Android battery life gets bad checklist over and over again I couldn't find anything finally I did something that I don't remember what I did and it's fixed ok so it's unfortunate that Android allows that to happen and finally for iOS what I like about iOS is the the hardware that it comes on i mean the the iphone 4 is is gorgeous the retina display is just unmatched in terms of text readability I can read books on my iPhone and have no I strain because the letters are so crisp and clear downside to the iphone is that same same downside as you have and I mean the software stagnant you still get you turn on your phone you unlock and all you see are icons and that is boring and a waste of space you know that I don't dumb I don't fill in the bottom row of icons on my home on my main home screen why so I think it looks better to have that that space they're dividing the the top three rows for me of icons and then that bottom row along the dock that never changes so you don't so you keep the fourth real clear down there right so I only have 12 plus for what where most people have 16 plus 4 yeah that's I actually do that on my android it's kind of cool to to to get that visual space and to also be able to see the wallpaper more clearly yeah exactly cool so thank you everybody who's sending your Twitter questions again next week we're going to attempt Collins of course we are still relatively new at podcasting so we're not sure how that's going to go but I'm sure you know we'll figure it out so that concludes episode 6 of the pocket now pocket cast and thank you everyone for for listening thanks for having us Brandi