Gadgetory

everyone welcome to the ninth pocketnow pocket cast podcast that's a lot to say three words we should shorten it next time on the line is a guy you've been waiting to hear from on a pocket casts show Levi our Android experts say hi Joe hey everybody how you doing awesome and yeah so this is fun if I sound a little bit more clear today that's because I got one of those snowball microphones they're so big they're the size of like a softball and I know it's gonna stop him here but I say this but they also smell really weird Joe how does your microphone smell I'm lucky enough to have my microphone built into my laptop and honestly I've never had the urge to smell my lap we're good there but on the snow front yesterday we had like 60 70 degree weather out here and last night we got like two three inches of snow so hey welcome to Utah so why did you why did you move to Utah or did you boil it there I grew up here my whole life this is home I've got lots of places but i always keep coming back here very good um I wanted to elaborate on the smell of new electronics do you know that certain smell when you get a new laptop or a phone and it's got that smell yeah it's all the stuff they use the manufacturing process off gassing giving you cancer so is that anyway you may not want to smell stuff that closely really usually when they run a PCB through like the soldering process they it's really cool process to watch they kind of solder everything all at once they stick all the little components onto the board and then they run it through a big soldering bath and solder sticks where it's supposed to and doesn't where it's not supposed to and then they have to go through wash off all the extra stuff that might have stuck where it wasn't supposed to and when you start running into electronics that all gets nice and warm and evaporates off and that's the kind of ozone II smell that you you have when you first open a new product and start using it man I should stop sniffing uh phones phones and glue two things you shouldn't say well yeah anyway so let's talk about phones shall we um so we've got a lot of things to talk about here and we're gonna start off with something that we posted about on 28th of March about you know Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference is coming up on june six and there will be a keynote of some kind but it may not be for the iphone 5 it might be for iOS 5 that's something that everybody's kind of leaning towards uh it's gonna be a little bit of a letdown for a lot of the fanboys out there who always expect to see new hardware new components new whatever at these key notes but you know we've been seeing iOS updates go in just incremental points for 142 and whatnot to see a jump up to iOS 5 there's got to be some more magic inside that build than than in the four points that we've been seeing in the past so even if we don't see new hardware i think you know big jump in operating system version will likely include some some neat toys and hopefully some stuff that the apple guys out there have been waiting quite a while for yeah that's a that's a big that's a really good point that the jump to five point 0 is really leapfrogging a lot of the sort of interim versions that are usually reserved for small feature upgrades but going to five it kind of reinforces the idea that my head feels just got unplugged that will see a new kind of notification system and maybe some use of the home screens um which makes the question Joe you are not in an iphone fanboy however I'm sure you equally get very excited when this time of year comes around and the new iPhone comes out no absolutely you know i'm not a big apple fan at all and that comes across my writing and I kind of like to to make fun of the other side and I expect that the other side kind of makes fun of me too and it it's just a nice fun banter but the thing we've got to remember is Apple changed the game and they're really really good at doing that both with you know smartphones and tablets and desktop computers so even though I'm not a big fan of their solutions I'm a fan of what they do and that's pushed the entire playing field forward that's windows mobile that's windows phone 7 that's Android that's android tablet they're the ones that are doing the driving and making all of the rest of the players stand up and take notice and not rest on their laurels and then and then you've got android which has the most amount of market share right now so at what point do android phones start influencing the next generation of iphone or is that just thinking about it differently well i think and i kind of hope that we'll see this with iOS 5 android has really pushed the user interface we have widgets we have you know a lot of neat things on the smartphone version of android we've got an entirely new interface over on the tablet version of android and it kind of input that in comparison with what we have right now and where I OS came from and iOS is looking a little bit old it's looking a little tired and it needs a refresh so I'd kind of like to to hope that we're we're going to see some major UI changes and hopefully some widgets support in iOS 5 and I think that'll be a cue they're taking directly from Android and to a lesser extent the live tiles from windows phone 7 you know widget seems like a good evolution but I want to see them do something better than widgets I mean there are problems inherent to widgets which of course they sometimes don't load in time they use cpu cycles they wear down your battery life when you have a lot of them it wouldn't surprise me if Apple sort of leapfrog the concept of widgets but what do you have after that I think that's the perfect question widgets fill a hole that was left out in an apples big list or big grid of icons this kind of been become synonymous with what iOS is widgets fill that and yes there are some inherent drawbacks because essentially with the widget you're either running a full version a full app or at least a miniature version of that app that can tie into data and that does take up cpu cycles and that does take up you know some some screen real estate bigger than what just an icon does but what is there what's next I really don't know live wallpapers and widgets together maybe could have some kind of a love child that Apple has got their creative minds wrapping all the the creative juices around to see what they can come up with but that's a question I really don't know I can't answer how would that look if you were to interplay live wallpapers of widgets well the the downside really to live wallpapers is you can have a live wallpaper that does one thing and that's it that's all a live wallpaper does it so it's a white it's a wallpaper that has some level of interaction interactivity to it if you take a wallpaper and whatever that is if that's a you know a picture of your kids or your dog or just a nice landscape picture and you add some type of context awareness to it so that then that that wallpaper that background and it doesn't really become a wallpaper it's it's more of another layer to the interface can then be aware of whatever you want it to be whether that's whether we're less traffic your friends who may or may not be an online or offline view of whatever type of chat or instant messaging method you want to use or somehow brings all of those together and kind of just subtly lets you know all of this information in a somewhat ambient kind of way rather than right in your face with a little notifier on your icon or overall widget you know doing that elegantly and simplistically so it's really something someone can pick up and get what it's doing that's the hard part and if they can if they can pull that one off I'd be really impressed I think you either just defined a really new and interesting way to think about a smart phone home screen or you just described widgets or a little bit of both you know which it is very very specific in what it does and a live wallpapers very specific in what it does but if you could combine those two into you know like I was to coin a phrase I guess would be an ambient aware background layer if you will I think that may be a natural evolution of where we're going this might be a good editorial to write by the way I'll put that on my list nice yeah that's an interesting idea um let's uh let's jump to the next topic so we're talking about the xperia play we reviewed it this week hopefully you all had a chance to see our review dan webster gave it a 4 out of 5 sort of to summarize he what he liked about it was a good battery life you could actually play real PlayStation games on it the stereo speakers were allowed which is rare for a phone of any kind the screen was big it was bright the software was stable but he didn't like about it it was the front-facing camera was kind of crappy the scream was plastic which is amazing um its large and heavy and game selection is limited at this time and then we ran a story on April first and this wasn't an april fools unlike most of the other things post on that day and with word that sony ericsson is going to launch 60 titles 60 playstation phone if you will specific titles and I mean it's pretty impressive the selection of games or at least the quality of the games because the selection is kind of bad right now but you can legitimately play playstation games on your phone I'm trying to look for the list that Dan has here we go crash bandicoot fifa 10 * battalion the sims 3 that's it's just really impressive stuff Joe do you think this device with its ability to play playstation games under a plastic screen is going to be it's going to be big well yeah absolutely a couple things we need to keep in mind we're coming from a PSP which was a relatively large relatively heavy device and a lot of that was because it would played optical discs Sony just they're trying and trying to get the mini disc to take off i renamed the UMD renamed the in whatever and that's what we had in the PSP well the PSP had a lot of features and a lot of capabilities and one of those was the ability to connect to Wi-Fi and in fact to run skype which then kind of opened the door if you can run skype over Wi-Fi on your really your portable media player then why not make a playstation phone so taking that in mind you know we've got the xperia play which is just that it's it's essentially a phone that has playstation but or PSP capabilities built into it now it's a first generation and i think they're still trying to figure out exactly where that the happy medium lies is this more phone than it is a portable portable media player and a game player or is it the other way around and for a first stab at it you know they have some some growing pains that they're obviously going to go through but I think they've got a very solid device up front I'm going to pull some words out of my my apple hat here it's a first offering and they don't want to give everybody everything in that first offering whether that's you know to try and sell more of the second generation device or whether that's to find out what to put into that second generation device do that that may just be semantics but for what they have now it's a very solid platform it's a good direction and whatever the second generation devices is going to build on that and I think all of these shortcomings that we see in this device are going to be gone away with the with the Xperia Play to or whatever it may be call yeah this was obviously somewhat of an experiment and you can tell by the sort of how it was leaked in the beginning and then it announced a lot much later and now it's got an identity crisis is it is it more so a gaming device or is it more cell phone I think where they got it right though was designing this to make to look kind of like a PlayStation a PSP I mean when you slide out that gamepad its character Harris what's that word characteristically uh-huh characteristically a PlayStation device I mean you see the triangle the X the zero or that should circle a square and I think they got it right with that and it really makes a compelling I mean picture you know going to a coffee shop seeing some some teenager or some 40 year old guy what have you playing with this thing I mean it's going to turn heads especially if you're a game well yeah there's a lot of brand recognition that centers around not only the playstation portable but also around just play station in general the control pad is the same just adapted for the platform for both the game console and the portable and they wanted to carry that trade dress over on to the xperia play as well it makes sense for them to do that and again finding out how that how that works out you know obviously it's built on android so it's a phone first and a a game station second but that really is just in the details you can modify the interface and make adjustments as need be to to cater to whatever it is the audience wants all right so let's move on the next thing on our list Sprint is officially opposing the acquisition of t-mobile by AT&T duh you know if if this happens Sprint will be the smallest carrier right now their number three out of four what will happen to sprint do you think Joe if if this goes through well I think you hit it right on the head with the the hold da moment Sprint is in my opinion they're kind of backwards with technology sprint and verizon both they're both cdma which seems more like the history than the present and we know that there were some rumors that t-mobile and Sprint are in talks regarding a merger and we just kind of scratch their head and wondered how that might work out a GSM carrier and a cdma carry carrier and how that could possibly work out in in any stretch of the imagination but the question you know what's going to happen to sprint I think sprint being an underdog is really going to to excel you know they've had their their ups and downs they're going through some growing pains and some some political internal wrangling with wimax but their position to be the company to go to if you don't like one of the big 2 which is really all it's going to be you know down to you know you're going to have AT&T NT or AT&T mobile whatever we're going to call them and then verizon and if you don't like either one of those two who else is left you've got one of the little teeny tiny carriers or you've got sprint and sprint right now they've got really good devices I you know they've got that wimax that if they can get over the clearwire problems could really be the go-to place especially with their unlimited everything plans that they have lined up in fact I think I'll I'll see quite a few t-mobile people go over to sprint just because of that do they like going to the underdog and they like the the feeling that they have in dealing with a smaller company than just being lost in the crowd when you're with the nation's largest it's so funny how long perceptions last sprint used to be sort of a laggard they had no interesting devices and then they came around with this $99 everything plan they were first with that and then they started to do 4G first they had the evo 4g which was a big hit and all throughout 2010 they had some pretty cool devices and into 2011 they're gonna have the evo 3d which everyone is going crazy over there going to have the kyocera echo which we're going to laugh about in about 10 minutes they're going to have the the nexus s 4g a really great phone + 4g it's even better so sprint kind of has a has a bad rap and and you know well let's not forget will also see sprint coming out with a new iteration of push to talk over cdma I you know all of that what was it the next hell next technology yeah I mean we're gonna have that on Android devices coming out pretty soon which is something that hasn't been done before and really that's something that I don't see any of the other big carriers is having a me AT&T had a push-to-talk that really didn't go anywhere so if you want an instant connect sprint may be your only option did you do you know anyone that still uses push to talk do I have any friends that use it or have ever used it I'm not that I'm willing to admit but you know I've done quite a bit of work with all kinds of different contractors as far as you know wiring whether that's telephone when that's internet even electrical and all those guys seem to have push to talk on their phone it just seems to be the technology that guys who get their hands dirty actually hooking up all the stuff that us geeks use that seems to be the tech that they go to and they like well then they've got to be taken care of those are truly the ones that are hooking up our our lines I remember back in high school when my friends and I were starting to get cell phones most of them got nextel phones and that chirp sound was the most annoying thing and I never could understand why they wanted their conversation to be public I didn't care what they what they were talking about in the middle of class or its you know if they didn't have recess in high school they had lunch um but it was it was so annoying and I think since you know five years ago the push-to-talk has become a very niche product for people in the construction industry especially management and not so much you know the the teenagers the the people like you and I who can communicate quickly with other methods yeah I mean when you're talking about dispatching someone or a group of someone's to do a job uh when you have that bulk broadcast or it's very simple you push one button and you're talking to your entire team that was kind of a tongue twister but when you've got that functionality it that's what else does that you might be able to send a group text but for somebody who's working with their hands they can easily listen to their phone but they can't necessarily pull it out of a holster on their hip and and read a text message and then reply to it you know if they're in the middle of spice splicing a cable or hooking up a power line or whatnot so there's that niche and I don't think it's going to go away and we might see that continue to grow especially now that it's coming to cdma and it's coming to devices we presume that have operating systems that the rest of us use yeah I guess I guess it's one of those features we're kind of like video chat where it looks it can be cool on paper under the rice right use case scenarios but of course the other people that you're communicating with have to have that same capability on their phone well not only that but you have to have your hair done just right and for the female listeners they also have to have the makeup done before they answer the phone so that's something that not having a picture broadcast kind of helps out with do you use video chat by the way outside of the experimentation that that I've done for my videos the only time I have non video chat was over the Google Talk gmail plugin with my mother-in-law and that was more just to to get it up and running for her so she could talk with her brother who's out of state so they could keep in touch it's not on their phone she doesn't have a phone that can do that but she can do it over a computer and that's that's really the only experience practical experience that I've had and you know outside of business trips where you're away from your family you know I don't see it as being a real big necessity for that you've got your laptop yeah um and this is certainly a digression from what we were going to talk about but it's interesting because they've had video chat in Europe for so long and Tony that who writes for pocket now of course has used video chat in the past and I've grilled him on this back in 2005 2004 I was fascinated so what happens when the other person wants to answer but they don't want to show their face and all these kinds of questions and at the end of the day he said he seldom seldom used it and it's just it's just a thing that doesn't it doesn't make sense it's the most probably inefficient way that we can communicate with a mobile phone unless you're traveling on business as you imply or as the Apple commercials try to try to create an experience around you know baby's first step or you know see the look on grandpa's face when he sees the baby being born it's just there's not many use case scenarios oh yeah absolutely and that was that was a sentiment was mirrored by a lot of our readers who are commenting on some of the articles that we ran this has been around in Europe and Singapore and in other places for quite some time and it really came into vogue for you know a month but two months six months maybe and then okay great the network can handle it the novelty's worn off let's move along but then over here in the US where we haven't had that our networks haven't been able to support it now all of a sudden it's it's new it's neat it's fantastic until we really get our hands on it and then you know it just isn't all that phones our phones and they're there to to talk on or to text on it's really not a video device and maybe we're in our infancy and will grow into it or maybe that's just something novel and unique but to your point about the the baby's first steps I've got a smartphone on my hip right now that has a 720p video camera on it why am I gonna do a video chat and not record that on a video that I can put on YouTube or Facebook and then keep that for forever why do I want to have that moment just lost that's a good call yeah you do kind of lose the moment I guess the idea is that you use it for four instances where the situation can be sort of recreated but that's not how it's really portrayed in the you know the facetime commercials what i got an iphone 4 back in i guess it was jus of 2010 I stood in line for 11 hours not that that's relevant to the story but it's just shows how crazy I am and yeah what's that Metro's devotion oh yeah devotions devotion of pocket now uh my friend and I got he was there with me that day he pre-ordered so he was out in two hours and we we facetimed a little bit in the beginning it was really cool it was so futuristic just like the Apple promo videos advertised but then then the awkwardness hidden I I would call him you know on a Monday morning with the facetime turned on and his face would pop up he'd be in like his pjs with his hair messed up doing he was doing work and you know he he looked awkwardly into the lens said uh you know it was just that it wasn't a good experience past the novelty so do you think that we are going to see cameras go away from the front of smartphones in the next few years I think that the front facing cameras going to be with us for the foreseeable future and I think that's gonna stick around primarily because right now we don't have video calling we have video chat whether that's FaceTime whether that's one of the other services i like to call it kick some people call it quick it's just video chat it's not it's not really video calling for example we're using skype right now and when you called me i was given the option to either answer you using keyboard or answering after using the microphone which is what we're doing now or answer with a video call so if you're presented that type of interface when someone calls you where you can answer with a video call or answer with a you know just an audio call i think and especially once it becomes ubiquitous so me on an android you on an iphone we can both talk across separate networks using this video technology as part of a telephone call i think that's really what it's going to take to make it become mainstream but we've got so much marketing hype around it now that's not panning out i wonder if that will ever become a reality yeah that's really key cross compatibility over network so do you remember when Steve Jobs said that facetime would become an open standard so other companies can use it absolutely and I thought this would be great for Google with their their video chat functionality to be able to tie into that like they tied in with AOL Instant Messenger and I don't the open standard I think means that you can use it on a mac too yeah I I feel like they actually truly intended to make it available to google motorola and all those other purveyors but something got in the way kind of like the white iphone for something that in a way it could be or they may not have had enough unicorn bones to grind up to make it work haha alright well let's move on to the next topic here I might actually jump to the kyocera echo um so the key is sec kyocera echo landing on April seventeenth it's my birthday and I turned 40 and haha just kidding and I I was really curious about whether anyone was excited about this device and I don't know if you saw Joe but wirefly did an unboxing of this a couple of days ago I haven't seen their unboxing yet but for those of us who aren't familiar with the the echo of course that's not including me um what makes the echo stand out above all the other devices oh you're asking I'm asking you so that our listeners can know as well the echo is the first okay let's let's do a couple first year it's the first smartphone from kyocera to run android and i'm ninety-five percent sure of that it is the first duel screened android phone um I think I'm running out of first so it's got these two screens we looked at this when we went to the launch event I went with Adam in February or something like that and the device was interesting in concept but very poor in execution the build quality is poor the thing was unreasonably large thick heavy hard edges the phone now he was clunky they're going to open up a some sort of software developer kit so that developers can take advantage of the split screen functionality anyway it's it's a cool concept that makes headlines for sprint and for kyocera and for Google and Android but I was curious if anyone's gonna actually buy this thing and so I sent out a tweet recently I said is anybody you know pre-orders start on April seventeenth is anyone going to pre-order these are the answers I got the first one was hell no second one was now um the next was no why have two screens um next one nope does not look promising next one is nope nope nope and here's a here's one plan on picking this HD split this then you make sense Oh plan on ditching the HTC hero for the echo so that's one yes um somebody just replied with the word sprint which could mean many things here's one I got my echo reserved I'm not in 4G land and I think the phone is going to be what I need the echo is not not 4g so overall the consensus in our unscientific survey of pocket now Twitter followers is that it's not going to be that popular of a device and it kind of makes sense well what do you think of the the echo based on what you've seen Joe well other than desktop computers dual monitor or multi monitors really haven't picked up you know if I'm sitting at work and I have code on one side and an article on the other side having two screens really make sense and it it's nice it's logical it's easy to split my work up across the two when you talk about on a laptop with an auxiliary display I know Microsoft tried to do that it really never picked up they built the API it's in windows vista and windows seven but nobody has really used in fact outside of the launch event i don't think i've seen a single device that uses that auxiliary monitor thank you madam light show right I or side shine show yeah which all kinds of cool stuff that you could do that nobody does we even have an Android device that has a secondary little screen down at the bottom that you know nobody's really picked up and the reason is it's not standard on a smartphone it's not standard on a laptop up until very recently it wasn't standard on a desktop in fact still at work I'm on one screen because corporate can understand why I would possibly need to have more than one screen to do my job so now you talk about the echo which is a smartphone that has two screens that they can do some cool stuff first of all you can flip that thing open and have a soft keyboard that's kind of like a physical keyboard but not which kind of negates the utility of it in my opinion the reason I like having that physical slide out keyboard is for the tactile experience which this isn't gonna have it's still going to have a nice big screen to be able to type on but it's not going to have that tactile response so that's one potential that they could really hit but I don't think they're gonna do well which leads me to the the last really Pro that I have for it and that's this could potentially be a tablet in a smartphone form factor when you fold that thing open you have two screens that are essentially you know about the same size as a small tablet so you can start getting more of a tablet based interface and possibly even a honeycomb-like interface where you have one screen devoted to say a list of items and like Gmail for example where you have all of your inbox listed and then the other screen devoted to just showing the one selected item the current email for example so there's some potential there but again the API isn't part of Android it's something proprietary and you have to code specifically for it to be able to use it which is something you've got to get buy-in from developers and speaking as a developer you know I really unless I'm being subsidized by the cell phone manufacturer sprint I kind of question whether I'm going to get any paid act for the time that it takes for me to figure out how to do that do it elegantly and then actually coded into to my app that hardly anybody is going to use because that's just one phone out of a sea of many yeah this the API situation or SDK whichever is the right terminology it's a very fun PR thing to do for a company and if you look back in history a lot of technology companies have offered an API or whatever so so that the the third party developers of the world could you know deploy their resources and everyone could contribute and it would be great but I think developers are smarter than that and they realize that this is one device on one carrier with a company that has no track record on a on a device that looks half baked and so they're not really going to spend much time working on it that said I think that if you fast-forward two years and you task HTC with making a device like this so two screens four inches each maybe super LCD qHD resolution so if you combine both displays you get doing math you get 1920 by history ridiculous 1920 x 1080 resolution I hope my math was right ah you've got dual-core 1.5 gigahertz processor with a dedicated GPU a really thin form factor perhaps the displays are even flexible who knows and they've they've modified the software so deeply to where you can literally run one app simultaneously with another the echo sort of does this it puts one of the apps in hibernation mode unless it's a a special kyocera app so i think given the right circumstances which we don't have really the capability for 2011 a dual screen android phone could be awesome imagine Joe looking at your email on the bottom screen while browsing the web on the top screen I mean it's it's that same dual screen paradigm that that makes desktop computing with two displays so highly productive absolutely or even look at two different communication media where you might be looking up an email and chatting with someone else or if you want to take things over to the scientific realm of the xda-developers hey you've got two cores here you can partition awesome space why not run android on one screen and Windows Phone 7 on the other hey what would be the advantage to that can you imagine side-by-side comparisons on the same device that was oh it's one of those white because we could I devote one operating system to one core and the other to the other one and you know you're gonna have some problems getting to the cell phone radio or the Wi-Fi radio or whatnot you know but we figured out GPS sharing so maybe we could figure out some some type of sharing between those but just one of those cool things that maybe you could do it or maybe even iOS on I'm one of the screens wow you really go and fire out there oh I'm curious as to why iOS hasn't been ported to anything really as it Apple has really good lawyers I mean that's that's the big thing you have mac OS that has been out available on some non apple hardware but every time you get somebody that does that they get shot down I this recent turn it took quite a bit quite a bit of time before they finally had to pull I forget the name of the company you remember off the top of your head hmm I just yeah just some generic desktop computer company who was buying legitimately licensed copies of Mac OS and installing them on their generic hardware and Apple eventually shut them down because to make it work they had to bypass a copy protection scheme so why haven't we seen iOS port it to anything else i I'm pretty sure it can be done but the people that are doing all these ports and all this hacking really are anti apple and i don't mean any offense by that but you know the only reason that they'd want to do that is just to tuck under their belt that they had it all done that they did it that they could be the one that that accomplish that and I think those types of people are more interested in all the various jailbreaking apps and utilities to to unlock the iOS devices and make them do what their competition can pretty much do out of the box hmm that makes sense it's just it's curious that we have seen you know windows phone 7 on an hd2 and no one's selling this stuff obviously it's just it's provided in the community and yet no one's ventured to do iOS on an hd2 for example granted it might be because as you imply there's not that much love for for apple products in the hard core developer community but we can fund it fuzzy I think that's a challenge to anybody out there listening see if they can do it that's right that's right all right let's move on um there was news on 30 March like to read the date backwards sometimes that the the HTC Thunderbolt had been overclocked to 1.8 giga hertz now Thunderbolt has a single core Qualcomm Snapdragon MSM 8655 and I've got a I've been using the inspire 4G a lot and I know that that can be overclocked what is your experience with overclocking and what's the fine line between gaining performance and killing your battery all right so let's get some mod some history overclocking with desktop computers which one we're talking smartphones today's smartphones are pretty much desktop computers that fit in your pocket when you overclock the desktop computer in days gone by you have to do an awful lot of deep down nuts and bolts heavy hacking you had to adjust voltages and frequencies you usually have to do that with jumpers or with switches on the motherboard I remember with some AMD's who even had to draw a pencil line between two two little dots on the top of the the chip itself and that graphite trace was just enough to bridge those two connections to unlock extra voltages that's me not yeah it just blows you away but the reason we did that is you had a processor that ran at a specific speed and that was what the manufacturer released its new but we started to learn that manufacturers were putting out generic processors generic cores that could handle other stuff they could handle other frequencies they could handle other voltages and run significantly faster than than the one you bought so essentially you could buy a new one 88 hundreds processor and run it at a gigahertz or or even twelve hundred megahertz without a problem I'm just a little bit more heat and of course she ran the risk of a frying components if you did it wrong so if you fast forward it to today talking about this in smartphones these cores these processors are not just a CPU like you think about in a desktop machine it's not just one chip that you're overclocking whether that's with frequency or voltage of both it's more of a system-on-a-chip where you have these one or two chips that handle everything on on the device and they're really made to be extensible so when we talk overclocking on a smartphone generally speaking these these components are designed to do that they're designed to have a wide variety of frequencies at which they operate and to operate it a relatively wide variety of voltages and by doing that you can sell one component to a dozen different manufacturers who stick them into their phone and do radically different things with them and that's not necessarily overclocking when the manufacturer puts that chip in their device and another manufacturer puts the same chip in their device but they both have different speeds and different capabilities and in specifications but now they're running the same chip but when we talk about overclocking what I think about is more you've got your device you want it to run faster and that gets back to the core of your question first of all I overclock almost every device that I own every smartphone at least my g2 sitting over here is running at 1.5 right now and it came stock at 800 on I'll come back to some trade-offs that has in just a minute but my wife is running a nexus one and that came out at one gigahertz and she's running it a little bit shy of 1.2 so not that big of a clock difference but you know it's enough to make a noticeable difference in performance so getting back to the question performance is increased obviously the faster you run something and I'm going to put a little asterisk after that battery life is generally decreased when you run something faster especially if you're over voltage something you're putting in more volts to get more speed you're going to chew up your battery life faster now coming back to the asterisk when you are running something faster generally speaking it takes less time to do whatever you're trying to do so it has to spend less cycles running it and theoretically you could have a performance savings there as long as you're not throwing more power into doing it than that then what your payback is so the other little sub note there is we're getting to the point where our processors are fast enough that we're outpacing the operating system or the apps that we're running so even overclocking almost double what came with that g2 originally I'm not seeing that much practical use you know we've got a lot of very vocal readers out there who who either like or dislike running benchmarks utilities for a variety of reasons but in practical use I don't see that much performance difference between 800 and 1500 even though that's almost double in speed so coming back around to battery life what I've done is I've got my phones both the nexus one and the g2 set up so that they are dynamically scaled they will clock up or down depending on demand which adds a little bit of overhead there because you have to wait for that demand hit before it scales up and scales back down but I've got my device over here set to run at 256 megahertz at the low so when it's just sitting there idle it's running really really really slow and that extends my battery life out significantly but then when I need the extra boom out of it when I'm loading an app or when I've got a very resource-intensive app it can scale all the way up to 1500 and go from there so if you're smart about overclocking especially now that there are apps the app that I use is called setcpu for root users and I think it was what three or four bucks so not not much at all when you're using an app like that you can set it up intelligently to mitigate any battery loss that you'd have by running that processor faster than it was designed to do with running it slower than it was designed to do as well in fact you can also go in and set up profiles and this is the other half of overclocking it usually generates more heat than stock you can set up profiles that will monitor how hot your device is getting and scale back the speed as it gets hotter and hotter and hotter it will start running slower and slower and slower which is actually something that I believe they took from Intel pending force who will dynamically scale the speed of the processor down when they start to get hot yeah I was gonna say don't the the modern chips for smartphones of today the snapdragons and the ARM processors don't they already scale on the flight I they don't scale so much on the fly as far as I know and I'm sure if I'm wrong one of our listeners is going to let us know from what I understand it's something that's configured by the manufacturer and they kind of lock that into place traditionally inside the colonel that's why we do so many articles on when a manufacturer releases their kernel source code into open source so that custom developers can go out there get into that kernel and they can start messing with those voltages and frequencies to to start either overclocking underclocking or open up the ability to do it dynamically through an app like sex you can you write all this is making me want to really see at what point my device starts to melt you know I like I said I've been running this g2 all day long what from about six seven o'clock this morning and here we are in mid-afternoon and I've streamed some pandora I've listened to some apps or some apps some music over the amazon cloud player app you know I used ways on the way to and from work and on the way to and from lunch and I still have 36 odd percent of my battery life left the phone itself is a little warm but you know it usually is after you've been running GPS anyway so overall overclocking Fermi's worked out really really well and and on a cold night you can snuggle up with your warm smartphone yeah you just launched a really resource-intensive app a game or whatnot and you can just tuck that thing into your shirt pocket and it's great interesting well we should remind everyone that in order to overclock you need to root your device which is slightly risky but if you've got a little bit of patience i'm sure you could figure it out quite quite easily not only that but overclocking if done wrong or even done a little bit too aggressively can literally burn out your components not just your processor but it can overheat your battery which theoretically could lead to explosive results so this is one of those use it your own risk and kind of be smart about it not that I'm trying to pimp the app but setcpu for you root users has a set of built-in profiles it will actually detect what device you're using and if it's got that in its database it will automatically set up the the minimum and maximum scaling for you just so you're going to be less likely to cause physical damage either to the device or to yourself so a good idea would be to use the avoid explosion profile and set-piece cpu they don't have that just yet but I think we're gonna send an email to the developer to to include that as a profile would be great very good well that's very interesting stuff let's move on to Firefox four-point-oh for Android Joe do you remember the early days of fennec absolutely I remember fennec on windows mobile and yeah that's how far back it goes and how excited I was to finally not have pie pocket internet explorer on my windows mobile device in fact I think back then it was a an AO 7 or in a 701 by some company I don't even remember anymore but they sure have come a long way haven't they yeah it's it's so funny because how often is it that a company releases a new product and starts at at version four point oh not one well yeah they have to fit in with everybody else really when you look at at Chrome desktop Chrome is up to version 10 in fact they were at version 9 just a little while ago and we did some math and it was just ridiculous in the next two years I think they should be up to like version 27 if they keep this development cycle going I can't wait before yeah version numbers are just ridiculous anymore but coming out with Firefox 4 for the desktop browser and Firefox 4 for mobile browsers was kind of coincided so that they could have some co-branding there you know you're running Firefox 4 on your desktop or laptop you love it it's great and by the way there's also a lighter version of that that you can run on your mobile device too it's like Windows Phone 7 and Windows 7 yes absolutely it really should have been windows phone one shouldn't it it should have been yes so that the browser is interesting that I like the tabbed interface the way you swipe to the right to get your tabs a big problem I think with um mobile browsers is that they have yet to capture the ease of tabbed browsing on a desktop what I like about the inspire 4G and any HTC Sense device is that you've got that really cool pinch gesture that will zoom you out to the the tab view but performance in that tab view is really bad so they've got half of the equation right but here in firefox four point oh very easy tab management you can add plugins it's not the fastest browser even though they're claiming it to be I you know we did test and it wasn't not that you know they were the most scientific test ever but it's a reasonable choice what what browser do you use Joan you know I've used almost every browser available for Android out there and they all have benefits and they all have their advantages and specific use scenarios I keep going back to the default built-in browser which is a chrome variant and in my video of browser browser which is chrome versus I forget which build of Firefox for it was but you know I compared the two and as a web developer I look at browsers that are very very standards compliant and usually trend toward those for my personal use and Firefox was beating chrome hands down in some cases Safari beat chrome hands down but I keep going back to the ease the simplicity and really the elegance that is built into the stock browser and you know HTC Sense devices use kind of an HTC modified version of that stock browser they're trying to improve upon it whereas Firefox doesn't use that that rendering engine at all they have their own so it adds quite a bit of weight to to the application it adds quite a bit of weight to the what you have to install on your device but they've done phenomenally well and I'm glad that there's competition out there at the very least it's going to put Google on report and let them know that there is a more standards compliant browser available for their device that is kind of pushing the the user interface envelope if you will they're handling things a little bit differently whether it's right or not whether you like it or not they're doing things differently and that has to be sending a message back to Google letting them know hey you've got to continue to innovate or you're going to get passed up just like Microsoft got passed up in the browser wars and eventually Firefox being passed up with low Safari and chrome as well and now they're playing catch-up with firefox for for desktop it's interesting that you say that you you tend to use the most standard compliant browser for me it's all about speed I really can't tell much of a difference between how you know internet explorer and chrome displays a page I can't tell much of a difference between how firefox four point oh four mobilen and chrome for mobile display a page I'm just curious to to know what other people think about that whether its speed for you or maybe it's tab management or maybe it's flash everyone seems to you know care a good bit about flash although I find in using a mobile browser it's easy for me to avoid flash content and not to have a worse experience because of that avoidance well yeah absolutely um flash you know again I'm a web developer and I think flash needs to die a quick and painful death however there's an awful lot of Flash content out there so before everybody gets all upset with me saying that flash is with us and it's going to remain I agree entirely and there is definitely a place for it that current technologies are trying to replace and adobe is in all honesty doing a very very good job trying to keep up with those new technologies but like you I like speed I couldn't tell much difference between the two browsers when I was running the benchmarks yes there's a difference absolutely and that's going to get us back into our benchmark debate but it's for me as long as I have a student significantly fast enough browsing experience and as long as that browsing experience is friendly enough to me is the way that I think that it's supposed to be I'm not going to know the difference between one browser and another and I really shouldn't it's the same internet it should look the same it should feel the same it should function the shame but going back to flash I like going into my browser and setting it to prompt me if I want to play the flash that way I have a placeholder I can get into I can look at the flash if I want to but I don't have to because flash is really a desktop or a laptop experience it's not a mobile friendly experienced and Adobe still working on that and I have to give them credit for it and their latest versions that the 10.1 and 10.2 have made some significant advances they still have a ways to go and by the time they get there I think that a lot of other technologies will come out that that make flash less relevant but for the time being you're absolutely correct we have to have flash and any browser that doesn't support it even if flashes in the part of your regular daily diet surfing the web you're going to miss it if it's not there and they're going to go to a browser that does support it or dare I even say a platform that supports it don't use such words Joe very very interesting we need to wrap it up because we're pretty much at the 60 minute mark we try to keep these around 60 minutes but thank you so much Joe for joining us and we'll have to have you back on the podcast in the in the near future absolutely it's been wonderfully fun and to everybody out there who's been asking for me to be on the podcast thank you for your words of support they're very appreciated we just had some scheduling issues that kept me away from before and we're going to continue to work through those and hopefully we'll have half a dozen of us sooner or later on the podcast all with a whole bunch of different and varying opinions and we'll all be talking at the exact same time you so you won't be able to hear anything but we can split up into multi channels and then you can just listen to whoever you want to are you volunteering to do that way I'm willing to listen to all the voices at once uh fine all right well thanks everyone for listening and we'll see you soon bye bye