Gadgetory

alright so you want to start up that recording mechanism it's already recording oh we need a theme song yeah how about we use the the old song which we are using in the videos maybe maybe or we can just sing together yeah too bad that's got no lyrics uh-oh the theme song yeah all right well we should probably get started hey we should actually include this part in the recording just for fun okay I'm in all right great well hey everyone welcome to the eighth pocket now pocket cast we skipped last week because there's a lot going on with ctia Evan was out at ctia so let me introduce everyone I'm Brandon minimun editor-in-chief of pocket now Evan blast our managing editor is here with us say hi Evan hey guys hey Miranda hey and Anton Dean Aggies here also known as Tony a senior editor say hi Tony hey Brandon hey Evan hey everybody awesome so we've got so much to talk about today and a lot of exciting things a lot of forward momentum in the smartphone industry which always makes us sleep better at night somehow evan has just gotten back just a few days ago from ctia where lots of new phones were announced Evan what would you say how would you summarize the event if you had to do so in a few sentences exhausting from my point of view from fit for those of you that don't know covering a trade show is exhausting it's constant walking and writing and calling and yeah I mean for someone who you know whose job it is to sit behind a monitor for for most of the day not used to nearly this much walking you know must have been a couple miles each day we need to meet you we need to all exercise so that you know these trade shows be done but the little easier yeah but um I'm more serious note um I thought there was definitely some good stuff there and a few surprises but but in general and in talking to some of my colleagues I think I think most people found this to be a rather uneventful event if you will I mean and just like Mobile World Congress just like CES it seems that Android ran the show here yeah but but unlike those events which which did have quite a bit of announcements there there weren't really that many new phones I mean we had the you know the evo 3d the the g2x at well some of these are rebrands so you know how many new new phones were there at besides that the evo 3d I can't think about eight I'm getting back to my old rent the HTC allow any of you members of the media to have some hands-on with Facebook devices because they wouldn't allow us to touch them at NBC I didn't ask I didn't see any of those devices there oh so they weren't even there hmm yeah that those should be landing I guess when is it where this event later in the spring or maybe the summer the chacha and the salsa and the tango and the merengue or the cha-cha-cha as we've heard of chacha is not a word to use in spring yeah that's that's all very confusing so yeah this uh this evo 3d was somewhat of a surprise though not a couple of days before the event pretty impressive hardware here impressive enough to where Evan is satisfied having written to HTC many times expressing his dissenting dissatisfy word this is satisfaction the satisfaction yes oh that's happened schooled by the Romanian on your grandma I know but they but they really came to the table with some good stuff I mean two cores clocking at one point two gigahertz hopefully batteries not too bad 3d display with a dedicated camera button so you can switch from 2d to 3d they brought a new version of sense to the table with a spinny carousel thingy that kind of comes off the flyer haven't actually got some hands-on time with the evo 3d what did you think about it I thought it was a great device I mean you know you always have to preface these things by saying that but you know probably wasn't running final firmware in this case Polly nowhere near close to final form work because it's several months out yet from from getting released but the functionality i thought was impressive there there really is a 3d effect to the screen when their proper content is loaded up you know so that's not just necessarily marketing but the question is and this is the question we've been asking over and over is this something people really want at least in the demos I saw me to it it was a neat demo but I don't think that they've come up with a lot of content dumb where I should say a lot of pre-recorded content that we're really adds to the experience now one one area I think that could probably change is games I think they'll be able to do some clever things with 3d that new we haven't seen on you know 2d sex before but as far as you know the blockbuster bringing out you know movies in 3d it's you know it's really just going to be you know sort of gimmicky up until they're they're they're adding some more on some more value to the content I should say yeah it sounds like games is really going to be the the main focus of showing off 3d technology once once people start doing that both of you have actually experienced a glasses-free 3d 3d display on a phone Tony I think you said that it hurt your eyes when you looked at the optimus 3d yes it might have something to do with the either screen resolution or refresh rate or simply my eyes are bad and I was asking Evan this question I think it was a couple of days ago and the he told me that he couldn't really see the screen directly but he didn't notice any flickering and I did notice light flickering when not looking directly at the LG optimus 3d screen and this brings up a question to to you Evan did you see any dedicated 3d software coming from HTC pre-installed on the EVO 3d because if i remember well on the optimus 3d at MVC in barcelona we sell some dedicated YouTube application in 3d I know excuse me that's a good question I didn't I didn't really look um I will say that that anecdotally from from other people who have seen both devices and who have used both devices I guess I could have taken a look at the optimus 3d at dca I probably should have done that that the the evo 3d screen gives a better 3d effect than the the optimus 3d mm-hmm that's interesting and of course the the e-book 3d has a 960 x 540 display whereas the optimus 3d has an 800 x 480 display not sure if that makes much of a difference at CES I saw 50-inch glasses free TV and the two problems with it were one it was very low resolution which really doesn't matter for a phone and to the viewing angle was incredibly limited did you guys find that if you move the phone kind of wrong the 3d effect turn too blurry junk yeah but i think that's that's almost going to be inherent in the technology you know you're the 3d it's the way they're designing it is for you know the effect could be for the viewer looking head on and and I'm not sure that and you know until we get some of these um these TVs like they have in and sit in some smaller on lcds where it's a you know you can get a totally different picture from each angle you have someone sitting on the left and someone sitting on the right and they can be seeing something different until they bring that to 3d this is going to be a problem that I'm you know I don't even want to call a problem it's just going to be a part of the experience yes if a drawback definitely it's the same ya go i'm sorry i don't know i would i was going to say that it's definitely the same thing with the optimus 3d too so with desert tolerance took approximately 22 maximum 25 degrees in angle in on the side so you have to stay straight in the front of the screen to see the 3d effect on the optimus 3d but i played with the sharp links 3b also at MVC and that device seem to have a larger doing angle in terms of the 3d of course but but larger probably means that if you've got five friends and you're showing them a 3d video probably two of them on the three of them yeah two or three of them will see you will see front in front of the device and the one on the left and the one on the right but the fourth and the fifth will not see anything well if you guys use the the 3d assets where you do need glasses yeah yeah you have captain and are they limited as well or is it is only these glasses free that are where this is an issue i think it's the glasses free and i think this is why we're sort of in in terms of the big screen televisions for your home that's why we're stuck in this glasses thing because the technology isn't there yet to do glasses free at a wide viewing angle it'll be here eventually but right now it's just it's too expensive to do it's funny that we're saying that because just a year ago we were saying glasses-free 3d was too expensive to do so so it's probably just going to get better with each generation I don't know if the pathology actually allows for a larger viewing angle in 3d take only the classic LCD TFT IPS or AMOLED screens they all lose quality when you are viewing them from the sides now some start losing at 45 degrees some third are thought the Sun below but because of the glasses free technology which combines the left and right the images like on an interlaced video but not really interlaced because of this technology i'm not sure they will be able to magnify that angle yeah most probably they will improve it but don't expect this is my personal opinion don't expect to see a wide viewing angle on a glasses 3d display yeah we're gonna have to get in our time machine once again we're working on building one right now but we can't talk much about it haha i have to say that excuse me in general that seems the reception to 3d hasn't been great all that so far you know I sorta compared to when HD came on seen in you know even though HD it was sort of slow and getting adopted I think everyone saw the value there yeah and what was holding most people back from getting a set which is they were they were really expensive yeah but now that you know they're there seems to be almost a bit of a backlash against 3d as as if some people think that that the manufacturers are sort of pushing the technology on us and we don't really want it yeah I mean it's very clear that the the manufacturers need to bridge the gap to to start generating profits again because everyone bought an HDTV and if they didn't they're going to buy one soon and so so TV sales are going to plummet and the only way to get them back up again is to have something new and exciting and yeah I think there is backlash I don't think people want to sit in their living room with you know funky glasses on and I don't think they want to pay a big premium for something that there's not much content for still I mean there's just like two or three 3d channels out there it's like HD all over again right cool well let's move on a sprint also announced the kind of knew about this the nexus s 4g coming this spring at one hundred and ninety nine dollars that's going to be a cool phone i mean the nexus s is a very lean android phone with no UI junk and to add wimax to that is a pretty good proposition nothing terribly interesting beyond that to either of you when I comment on that or should we move on to the next thing now it's just the Nexus S you're right just the next yeah I here with you I didn't for anyone who's on on sprint it's going to be a really compelling device indeed okay so another phone announced was the LG Thrill that's it the 18th he's really good with the inspiring names pun intended they've got the inspire and the thrill and what other uplifting names use infuse yeah you see 7's good but yeah that that one's a little depressing yeah so I mean the third not much to talk about here either the LG throws coming to AT&T it's going to be the optimus 3d in the u.s. you know Tegra 3 or 3 that'd be great patek or two glasses-free 3d um so yeah yeah it's just a thing that that 18t sort of sort of one upping t-mobile a little bit with the you know the thrill is basically you know a 3g enabled optimus 2x which tmobile is getting is the g two acts and you know within within a couple months you know a little bit over a year it's really not going to matter yeah it's it's kind of funny because LG has the optimus 3d if you take out the 3d part you get the optimus 2x now HTC has the evo 3d and if you take out the 3d you get the pyramid perhaps hmm I see what you did there yeah I've been I've been thinking about that all week said it uh we don't know that to be true do we Brandon I mean for all we know the pyramid could have 3d right as Tony's mentioned on several occasions you know the pyramid is one of the is one of the most iconic on three-dimensional shapes oh that is a very very interesting observation but then on the other hand I mean how often does HTC really you know associate or you know make a connection between the code names and what the phone does functionally you know what a few of them yes like Mondrian that was that was definitely hearkening to to Windows Phone 7 and where the the homepage you I came from you know that guide Pierre Mondrian here with the paintings so so some of them they do but but I would say that the vast majority they don't this plus then there's the the other parts of the story which is the marketing and sales part we know that the main markets for smartphones are the USA and Europe and if you take out the 3d from from the evo 3d and you get it to Europe with other 3d then Europe will remain without any 3d HTC devices and I think HTC does not want to do that Sharona on the on the other hand the evo 3d is is and is going to be a very thick and heavy device as thick as an EVO 4G and they need to they need to bring these specs for qhd screen 1.2 gigahertz dual-core processor in a smaller petite sexy razor thin form factor and they can't do that with the 3d added remember what we just saw yesterday Brandon is that it's very very likely that that the evo 3d is going to be released internationally there was a whole specs page up with mentions of gsm bands all over the place and that HTC pulled that down today so it's no longer there and and the phone is even unbranded it it doesn't have sprint branding on it the pictures that they use so I mean I don't I don't think it can be any more clear that there's a gsm version of the that phone on the way the question is whether the pyramid is going to be that or if the pyramid will mix the 3d display know that i'm saying is that i mean we have we actually seen pictures of the gsm evo 3d if you want because if the only evo 3d out there is on sprint then only pictures of it should have sprint branding on it right that makes sense yep have you ever seen like you know a droid incredible without Roger branding knew how so so the only reason that they would have all that stock photography of have the evo 3d without without a mention a sprint on it is because it's a it's also an international gsm phone and speaking of verizon when do you guys think verizon will have its first 3d device and what would it be because obviously a TNT has its own sprint has its own silver aizen has to keep it up it'll be from motorola live at mmm it's good thought Samsung needs a 3d phone too yes they don't have one soon I do too I think comes in the same boat as LG we've discussed this before and that you know these are our manufacturers who have thrown several verticals but you know being both home theater and mobile so so no and they're one of their thoughts is that you know to push people into these multi-thousand dollar 3d tvs they first need to have content that they're going to want to see on them and what better way then then to put these stereoscopic stereoscopic cameras in their pockets as part of their phones it's a really good point I think a lot of people would be more client inclined to buy a 3d TV if they knew they could play their 3d videos taking on their smartphone on on the TV right exactly i mean right now you know most people are only going to have you know the phone itself to playback this content on yep and that brings up another point is that are these are these these self captured 3d videos and photos interoperable between cameras like if i take a 3d picture on my EVO 3d can i view it back in 3d on my thrill 4g hmm i think it should be because it's it should be an industry standard you know I'll definitely should be but but it should hmm vision we should look into that that's actually an extremely important thing to consider hmm we're gonna have to reach out to a distant Peaks get some good some man and I asked friend that the same question when I was at ctia and and I didn't have a good answer for room hmm well basically right at diving no I don't you know it's not the type of thing that that they're going to tell you in training I don't want to get ticking now but from what I know about 3d recording and stereoscopic cameras is that you basically have two cameras with two lenses the left camera captures the right image and the right camera captures the left image and then it's interlaces and puts it in one left one right one left one right and generates the 3d image and this should be the industry standard all 3d devices should use so I think I think from my point of view that they should be able to play back each other's content and even if you look at televisions I mean you get a 3d blu-ray you could plug it into a variety of 3d TVs and it'll work just fine so perhaps there's some standardization going on there alright well let us move on we were also talking about t-mobile's g2x the first time that the G brand phone of the G brand doesn't have a keyboard not really that big of a deal just kind of an interesting observation it's basically the optimus 2x another Tegra 2 phone not much to speak of in that respect so it's going to be a popular handset though um obviously because it's fast but also because like the Nexus S it's going it goes naked without you know any any UI on top of Android its naked and I think isn't this the first smartphone to do 42 megabits per second hspa+ that I'm not sure I mean it's definitely you know 4G or or you know t mobile's 4g hspa+ but i'm not sure if it's 40 20 or 21 um Joe wrote about this I'm gonna try to pull it up before the end of the call but that's what I remember which is pretty significant because in theory out of the gate it should be able to do faster data speeds than even the thunderbolt which is on LTE that would be getting back to your question just a little bit t-mobile's G brand moving away from keyboards I think it's normal with the g2x to drop a keyboard because t-mobile definitely does not want you to yank its own sidekick 4g which is new and which has a keyboard and which is a reborn sidekick so having another G device with a keyboard I think would be bad for sales for the sidekick 4G so this was something maybe they had in mind fair point fair point yes so here's the article yeah so the g2x can do 42 down compared to the g2 which can do 14.4 down real world testing you get about half of that around seven maybe ten megabits per second down so we're talking like 20 megabits per second down in optimum conditions on the on the g two x and the Thunderbolt can do about half that so that's uh that's some pretty compelling stuff there it's going to be pretty pretty popular as mm-hmm awesome all right so let us move on we saw this past the FCC ages ago but it was officially announced that AT&T is getting the hd7 with an S on it s seems to be the the hot letter to use yes yeah my prediction desire HD s coming up you heard it here first desire is that what you think the successors gonna be called I don't know like you said we had now we have the incredible s the Wildfire s desire s and the hd7 s that's for phones so you know what why would they want to mess things up with the desire HD I agree with you Evan ninety-nine percent that's that one percent which I don't agree with you is that the incredible s is different from the incredible and so are the other s devices while the hd7 s is not much different from the hd7 now give or take the the new the new screen okay well well three you know revised devices in one you know slightly not but still you know there's there's definitely a trend here that we're seeing yeah that's that's my 99 percent so I agree with you here we are status statistician yes so the big difference between the hd7 S&E she said is what you can achieve are just all around him I the most i was playing with the Thunder ball and it fell on the keyboard um the hd7 s has a super LCD screen which is a really good thing because if you ever have seen in HD 7 you know that the screen is in that that nice it's just a standard LCD and the colors are a little bit the washed-out contrast isn't great even motion looks strange when you flick through the program list so presumably the hd7 s on AT&T will will fix that problem I headphones fell off and i have a mess over here Jack Ebert survived the Thunderbolt yeah surprisingly i mean the Thunderbolts like seven pounds is huge here yeah so the hd7 s on AT&T is this is this an important device for for eighteen t do you guys think or is it kind of just a marginal thing that that a lot of people really don't care that much about I think that they are targeting the the segment of the market which is in 24 inch plus screens now I think AT&T has already two or three devices it's I think this around the focus and the LG quantum up the a quantum Optimus 7q and they are all 3.74 pointing to and 3.85 we go well they don't have anything beyond 4 inches and yeah here comes the hd7 s with 4.3 inches yeah I think what it does I think it says more maybe about 18 tease intentions then than anything else in that you know clearly there you know AT&T seems to be in it to win it with with Windows Phone 7 to have four devices on you know in a lineup when when everyone else has one or zero right yeah what else to do it has to well I guess you could say that that t-mobile has to with the venue pro and HD 7 but the venue pro isn't really available in most people so yeah I mean 18t now seems to be like the de facto carrier to go to if you want a windows phone as Microsoft and I was the premium carrier yeah and there that's certainly showing 1 I wonder if they have a sort of different financial arrangement than then the other carriers perhaps 18d gets gets to keep more of the profits where they pay a lower licensing fee although and they it's the oems that are paying the licensing fees to Microsoft yeah I suspect that there that Microsoft sweetened it up um but I would imagine that after the first round after those first three phones that you know if they didn't do that well that the AT&T wouldn't have taken the hd7 you know no matter what the incentives were that's a good point this might be a testament to Windows Phone 7 sales right now or at least enthusiasm yeah I don't think we really hurt anywhere that that windows phone 7 sales are are bad right now maybe one report but the majority reports say you know it's it's doing okay you know some places it's they're moving pretty briskly some places there they're just moving a little bit but they seem to be you know at least moving everywhere indeed indeed and we're going to talk more about Windows Phone 7 and the updates in a few minutes we wanted to switch gears a little bit and talk about the 18t t-mobile merger that is sort of really big news for the industry but we're trying to figure out what this means for for you the consumer when you guys think that this is this a good thing bad thing or good and bad thing okay so here's what I think first of all if big if if it gets approved the merger because I've heard some rumors that it might not or at least not in its current form what I think of the merger is this taking into consideration the rules of free markets with free competition the more players and a market the better for the consumer the less players on the market the more chances are for for a company to take advantage of that and get into a monopoly position of course there's sprint and there's verizon but instead of having four players there will only be three players and we know for sure that sprint and verizon will not make a merger because neither of them is interested I think that from the point of view of those one 30 million or how many subscribers will be on AT&T NT this would be good on a short term but what if I'm just asking what if in two or three years AT&T subscribers will see some raised feet so it's a question yeah I I I can't really see all that many benefits for the consumer you know how much did that coming to the 18 teen singular merger gonna pick the average cell phone user no certainly you don't hear about a lot of 18 key customers you know Sam it to have the too much bandwidth that they never drop any calls because that's not true so yeah I I don't know III I kind of agree with Tony here that I I don't see all that many benefits to to only having one gsm carrier in the u.s. although as as verizon moves over more and more towards LTE verizon can sort of be considered a gsm carrier too but yeah in general i don't think that that that but that consumers are going to see the benefits of you know economies of scale or these all these synergies that they're talking about I don't really think that the average person on the ground is going to get to see a lot of those benefits unless you're an AT&T shareholder of course uh I mean maybe even not them if you know if if things bomb like so some other mergers have bombed and then everyone loses yeah what I was wondering about and I was writing about this in a little editorial this this seems like it would be possible but let's fast forward a year or two from now and you've got AT&T towers you've got t mobile towers AT&T operates on 850 1900 megahertz and t-mobile operates on 1720 100 megahertz so does this mean we're going to have quad band UMTS phones that can latch onto tmobile towers and each t towers no i don't think so i think they said that that t-mobile's 1700 bandwidth which i believe is their only 3g bandwidth it's going to be transitions over to LTE spectrum so so that means that that if anything t-mobile customers are going to have to be transitioned over to 3g devices that work on a 50 1900 so so Neil basically we know 1700 3g within you know X number of months after the murder should have you approved so we thought won't that impact people that whose phones rely on that frequency no because they're going to you know they're going to do it slowly enough so they say that that people won't be affected that you know it'll be over a number of years it's not going to happen you know within a couple months or year or wherever so so what they're telling us they seem pretty confident that that the the person the end user isn't going to see isn't going to see any effect to this are they going to peel the 20 100 megahertz band um I didn't know that they were using that now for uh for for anything any of it you know they do 1700 for 3g and then 850 1904 for 2g I think it's kind of like 18 key has it where you can be on the 850 or the 1900 I think the 2100 is probably list utilized but it's there for certain situations where for some reason the AWS 1700 band isn't available yeah I will say that the devices that I see going through the FCC for tmobile do not have 2100 dot that's being tested it's only 850 nineteen hundred and seventeen hundred there we go very good let us move on to the next bit here so Amazon this week launched their app store and I'm trying to load it now but it doesn't seem to be working have you guys had a chance to play with the amazon appstore no not really me neither so it's got buttons and apps well actually now I mean it's it's all right I still I'm not going to use it over only the the App Store and Android the regular have main does it have an app yet for android yeah yeah definitely and you use that yeah yeah we actually posted a video about it so it's what just happened something weird popped up yeah it's a there's an actual app that is the app store the only really cool part about it is that it has angry birds rio and I mean everything else seems to be sort of redundant but lesser quantity there's maybe five thousand apps in the amazon appstore and there's of course 150,000 plus in the market sure but you know we know better than anyone that that numbers really don't mean anything I mean you know those thousand fart apps and radiation apps and you know there's there's so many bad apps out there that that I don't that I think at this point numbers me nothing you know I mean the difference between an app store with a hundred thousand and 200,000 apps I wouldn't say that that one's going to be better by the other one by all means right or do you think that that if you have more apps overall that's indicative of that you also more good apps I think people want quality apps and I think what Amazon is doing is providing a level of filtration that the current appstore for android just doesn't have so i'm looking through these apps and i don't see these like these crappy apps that that just clog the search results in the amazon app are not the amazon appstore the android app store so i think that's that's one of the major benefits so the overall number long term will be smaller in terms of available apps but presumably though there will be higher quality apps how do they do the filtering I mean is there a team who is reviewing any application submission and they decide no fart app no good Angry Birds good or are they based on reviews from the google markets or plums this i think that they probably have their own team no just like any other and the other product being sold amazon i would imagine that that each software title needs to get vetted you're right i have a colleague who submitted an app and it takes several days they think amazon team tests it they make sure it's appropriate whereas on the android app store the android market you know right now in 10 minutes I could have an appt up in the market without any filtration which is also good well which is good and in a way it's good for the developers Oh crazy ringing going on here uh-huh bet you're great brington that's hilarious my god oh man summer training oh I would cut this part out I don't know if I want everyone to know that that's your ringtone brand which ranked oh there were three phones ringing in here whatever like that sort of the pop was you know yeah you know yeah i was hoping to listen to that ring tone of yours with the interference of gsm which is great by the way annoying but great actually uh let me digress for one woman I got it I got it we were talking about this last week you guys should listen to this the Nexus S has these crazy ringtones that sound like gsm interference listen okay so he's got that and then this one awesome have any bonus yet it best yeah so I was going to say something before before we went off in this digression it I think that the the timing of the release of or the debut of the amazon appstore is interesting and I sure they didn't time it this way but this it's coming just you know week or two after there was quite a bit of malware in the market that you know Google had to actually go and move off people's phones right and so so I think you know now now here's the Amazon with the you know I'm presumably much more secure system where where that wouldn't happen because those types of apps would would never make it through the the vetting process indeed ah okay so here's a question for you we know that there's the nvidia tegra zone which is the filtering application which filters applications from the google market based on the requirements of smartphones and tablets if you have a Tegra 2 powered smartphone or tablets use the TegraZone and there you have all the applications which are for your device filtered now say we have an application on the google market which is 499 and you have the same application on the amazon market which is 399 or 299 where will the TegraZone point you to buy the application will tigra zone have let's say a deal with the amazon appstore or not so this is just a question or maybe something to think of hmm it's possible that sort of like when you let's see if you have two programs on your android phone to do the same thing like an adobe reader and also quickoffice or something and you go to read a PDF it says choose which program you want to use so maybe it'll it'll operate like that we got to get a Tegra 2 phone to test that with but it's possible it would happen on the device level where it would give you the choice well that will be the smart thing to do because it will bring up results from both markets and you can see where it's the better offer was where it is cheaper and you can buy from the other market totally and there's another good thing to 2d amazon appstore and i think they are giving away a free paid application i mean they're giving away for free a paid application every day a different application which is good that is pretty cool that is a cool and here's a yet a third question is how long do you think it's going to be important has to change the name of the app store haha well I think they already changed it because it's app store in one word and it's not app store as Apple trade market I think they gave our App Store are gonna fly yeah you're right about that they put the words together it's so funny for like two years if you go to amazon.com you'd see the kindle as the top feature thing but now they're really pushing the amazon appstore for android and they're showing it with a really weird looking old HTC phone they should probably put something nicer there well maybe it's on purpose to see that do more to make customers see that it's compatible with the older phones Oh could be it but maybe it's a I think it's actually not a real phone Evan can you take a look at that if you go to amazon.com yes you're pretty good at identifying phones I hear it's my favorite game iphone it's it looks like an HTC magic but it's got a front facing camera and it's very oh you know what it might be that that I Oh device let me go and look on HTC there was uh or maybe it's the first pyramid render oh ho better not be the pyramid it already had a google i/o device looks pretty claw I think it's the this google i/o device stare out i'll drop this in chat here oh this that see well I can't see because if i go to amazon.com I still have kindle on the front page so it basically offers me kindle because of my IP address and the app store is us only is you know ah yeah i think that's what it looks a little bit different but whatever it's a kind of funny to see let's uh let's move on we've got a couple of other things to talk about so you guys might have seen the video with a Joe Belfiore talking about the windows phone 7 updates did you guys see that yeah I love the guy uh okay well so he was talking about the updates and I was listening very closely to understand what the delay is and he made it sound like it's the carrier's fault and to add insult to injury and maybe there's no injury here maybe I'm just mistaken Microsoft put up a little phone grid that says where's my phone update and it shows you a column for the februari update for the March update and there's a big difference between the international grid and the US grid the u.s. grid the februari update hasn't been deployed at all and it's already the end of March the March update obviously hasn't been deployed at all but if you go to the international version of the of the grid there's the februari update is pretty much out there on every phone except for like France and Spain and then the March update the no no update one that brings copy and paste is actually starting to roll out which makes me think that he's telling the truth that in the US it's more difficult to get these updates out for some reason than it is in Europe could be because let's take any country from Europe the biggest carrier and let's say France Spain Italy UK or Germany big countries I think has approximately a quarter or a half of the biggest US carrier they have less phones they have less subscribers so it's easier for carriers to test and take a device on a run and real life situations than it is in the US number one number two it's easier to roll out to to update processes on a European carrier than it is in the US and since carriers can skip one update but must deliver these skipped updates with the occasion of the second update we might see both updates coming up at the same time on US carriers and what are you getting with these update together for that so the pre noto actually the februari update there's your device for the node 0 update we don't know something else in that light basically I mean all this is just for copy and paste more or less right yep yep so it's just funny that this is so much for for you know I definitely needed functionality but you know for basically one feature you know this is this whole hullabaloo I don't think it's about the feature I think it's about the process itself it's about delivering updates over the air or testing and delivering the notifications over the year which is something completely new to Microsoft completely new to carriers and we might see it as a proof of concept rather than delivering copy and paste yeah copy and paste will be there because it should have been there from the very beginning we won't get into why it wasn't included but once this whole update thing gets ironed out we can hopefully see some smoother updating processes for the mango and maybe in between with smaller updates oh gosh mango is going to change so much about Windows Phone 7 and if copy and paste is taking this long right it's going to make people's head explode that these people that test the phones I don't even really know what they're now they're making sure that the the apps that they add still work and that the phone snow makes calls and all these things but oh by the way updates I think we have a good chance of seeing the first over the year delivered windows phone 7 update sometime in the near future windows 17 updates deliver in two ways smaller updates deliver over the air and bigger updates delivered by a cable via your zune software on your PC and there was a bit last week where Microsoft acknowledged the security flaw and it's internet explorer on PCs and they say they were working on a fix to bring that fix and patch to Windows Phone 7 in order to cover cover it's let's say one ability so being a smaller update it might be pushed over here which will be the first ever windows phone 7 updates to be pushed via air and not by a cable that's that's what I think everybody was right they don't want to have to wait for carriers to update they just wanna say everyone loves getting that pop-up notification that says you know you you have new software ready for your phone and yeah yes but one thing is to patch certain files inside the ROM and the other thing is to build another rom from scratch because it's microsoft that it's building these roms as Joe Belfiore said the difference between Windows 17 and Android is that in case of Android its manufacturers and OEMs that build the Rams and distribute them with Windows Phone 7 Microsoft is building the ROM they are building the code they inject the manufacturer drivers and optimizations and they deliver of the runs so it's a little bit more steps involved interesting this is all very interesting we shall we should probably move on and hopefully those februari updates happen close to the end of March and hopefully the March update happen soon uh all right it was it was a bit by the way just want one more thing it was a bit I think I'm a German carrier said that the March update will be the river delivered end of April which is so bad for Microsoft and so bad for the career if this thing turns out to be true yeah I the first mistake was calling it the March update you know at what the heck it shouldn't just called it like up deep obtained numero uno and then you know without putting a timetable on it then one would expect it yep I agree all right come all their things we want to talk about so there's not much news with with iOS right now with with the iphone you know there's a there's an event coming up presumably in a couple of months or a few months and the iphone 5 is going to be announced which you'll have a 4-inch screen and maybe NFC or maybe not NFC so there's there's not that much to talk about in respect to the iphone except that Apple has unleashed new ad campaign and people really like Apple advertisements they're very clever there sometimes emotional but this new one is a little bit a little bit arrogant it's the if you don't have an iphone campaign previously their ads showed you stuff that you could do with your phone like read books like find the nearest sushi joint but the problem is that you can now do all of those cool things on lots of other phones so they needed a new angle and now they show you a this thing where you know you don't have the if you don't have the app store if you don't have game center if you don't have I books you know these very specific brands then you don't have an iphone um what do you guys think about this campaign I think that's true if you don't if you don't have an iphone you don't have all sorts of great stuff well I tend to agree here because Apple obviously and the yes i have an iphone and no I've not become an iphone fanatic so this is for the readers and listeners but I certainly appreciate the iphone the iphones quality and Apple services qualities and of course if you don't have an iphone you don't have the retina display we had an post this weekend and there were so many comments saying that I'm alleging Super AMOLED czar better than than the retina display no guys they are not the only screen which is better than the retina display in terms of the lighting and the brightness is LG's know by display yeah or Super AMOLED brings super contrast deep blacks but it doesn't deliver natural colors it tends to shade in blue purple or pink with IPS you get true colors and with a dots per inch that high as in with the retina display I don't think it will be matched in the next couple of months and it's already been a year since that one is out so I think if you don't have an iphone yeah you don't have an iphone and you're missing out on the App Store and I books on retina display and so on I have ADD some some comments about that I'm somewhat of a screen fanatic so I tend to obsess about screens I agree with you in a lot of ways that the retina display is the best display in terms of I think really two things pixel density ergo screen clarity reading text on a Retina display on the retina retina displays unlike anything else I mean it's it's like it's painted not actually pixels and to color reproduction I think the retina display provides the best realistic colors that isn't to say though that i personally prefer it over over say super amoled plus which does an insane job of contrast I think that if you couple the contrast of a super amoled plus with a higher pixel density of like a qhd screen and you've got a you've got a true winner might be might be yeah so this this this Apple campaign might be true it seems to me that they're running out of creative juices here and they're trying to bridge the gap from the iphone 4 which is beaten in a lot of ways by other devices in certain respects to the iphone 5 which will of course bring a new wave of innovation hopefully with dual core processor bigger screen but whatever it will have um good well let's move on to our final bit for today so AT&T has has announced sort of casually that the Atrix 4G and the the inspire 4G will get updates in April to allow for 4G just kidding that was a joke actually atrix 3 4g and inspire 4G owners will get hsupa turned on which means simply that no longer will your 4g phone feel like a 2g phone haha it'll it'll actually be as fast as a 3g phone now they still haven't addressed the 4g issue i'm not going to talk about it this time I got it I got to take a you just gotta did by your cone I know I know I did I know but I mean that's so that's a step in the right direction you know it's a AT&T 3g speeds can be very good at times and it's just a shame that you can't even get that on the inspire 4G matrix 4G but soon next month you'll be able to simply skip those speeds so I thought I was going to get by without a rant on 18 th s rebus but no chance no chance not not this time a very good so uh fellas do we have any phone releases this week this would be the week of March the 28th anything that you can think of your blindsiding this year I didn't know that we're gonna have to answer questions like this this is a pop quiz I I think the answer is no phones are coming out this week yeah I've heard that the optimus 2x is starting to ship in Europe it has less week of March yes last week of March so so then there are some news and I've also heard that the is it the desire s desire s is right around the corner you know it's interesting a lot of people are very very very interested in the desire s which is basically are interested yeah you know I'm getting a lot of emails about it well sure the desire was a very popular phone wasn't here the original desire was a very popular phone is a very good phone but the desire s is just over the phones announced at Mobile World Congress I think it's the least impressive i mean the incredible s has an interesting form factor it's very thin the Wildfire s is an updated budget phone but the desire s is like you know in a little bit better but but compared to the desire it's a lot more attractive or anything I mean just physically it will also depend on the pricing it depends on the pricing yeah I mean it's a nicer looking phone the desire headed asymmetrical design which is kind of yeah kind of off-putting I think to some people I don't want people you know just to think that I'm all about looks but in this case that's important Evan looks beneath skin to to see beauty that's that's good by it beneath the plastic to see the silicon haha smooth boom as food well done um very good well this shall conclude the eighth pocket now pocket casts thank you everybody for listening those of you that tuned in we really really appreciate it we do this for you and leave us a comment or send us an email if you have an idea or if you want to perhaps call in next time we haven't done that yet so uh thanks Evan and Tony for for joining thanks thanks for having a frame yeah see ya bye