Gadgetory

from pocketnow.com this is PocketNow weekly hello and welcome to episode 0 18 of the pocket now weekly the once-a-week podcast from pocketnow.com where we discuss what's hot and what's cool in the world of mobile technology Windows Android iPhone sometimes even blackberry sometimes even symbian we discuss everything that's mobile I'm your host Michael Fisher senior editor at pocket now I'm joined by our managing editor anton d Naja good afternoon to you sir greetings everybody and by our editor-in-chief Brandon minimun good morning to you hello hello hello we've been going over listeners and and fellow and co-host we've been going over on our target time by like half half an hour by like 40 minutes the last couple episodes of the weekly have been like like almost two hours long and yeah but I want to get one free bin ridiculous exactly so we're going to try and keep it a little bit tighter today I know we always say that but we we have a plan there's a somewhat shorter topic list and we're going to get in-depth but Before we jump into the real topics of the day just for our for our abbreviated podcast pre-show / thought thread I want to take a nostalgia trip this is episode 0 18 this is episode 18 of the pocket now weekly which coincidentally happens to be the age that I was when I bought my first mobile phone and listeners if you don't reside in America I know it's different in every country in America 18 is when you can do a lot of things you can you know you can vote who can serve in the military except drink you can't drink which is absurd but that's kind of a topic for a whole nother podcast but you you can you know could you start kind of taking control of your life in a legal sense and I was due to take a trip to Washington DC with my then girlfriend and I was going to borrow my mother's cell phone which is that which was this this thing and I was like well I don't want to really do that so I went to Radio Shack which is I got my first my first mobile phone and so I didn't have any credit and in in America if you want to be with one of the bigger wireless carriers of course you need you need a lot of credit history or you're gonna pay a five-hundred-dollar deposit or a two hundred dollar deposit or something but not with sprint in 2001 where you yeah that explains it does doesn't it where he there was no deposit no no special fees no nothing and I got a samsung SCH 3500 and readers might remember this from from our brief are short-lived series on where we're coming from from a couple months back but it was a one of those one of those analog and digital you know duel mode phones that was a flip phone but it wasn't a clamshell like the screen was always present but the you guys know what I'm talking about where the flip like goes over the screen and the screen is visible whether it's open or closed hmm it was the coolest thing to have in in two thousand and two thousand one and I my favorite feature of this phone of which I carried for even then even when was my first phone I didn't manage to carry more than a year i was i was bored of it in six months and i had to get something else but I adored it so much my favorite feature was the voice tiling which sprint was aggressively pushing back then and it had ten slots and you had to record you know you had to record the phrase it didn't recognize words he just recognized the sound so you were like you know call dad at home and it's like rerecord okay call dad at home and then you know and then it would recognize that and it worked well and for all of the 49 contacts that it stored I could I could die all 10 of them in a voice tiling fashion so that's that's my little nostalgia trip in the morning I want to hear I want I want to hear Brandon's first phone ever because I Tony's answer is gonna be more exotic to me as a Romanian answer so did Brandon tell us about your first is this is this for a smartphone ur right any phone your first mobile phone this is we're going a little a field of our normal area of expertise aha I had this kyocera joint um what I would do this is the days of smartphones well I guess it would be in the mid to early 2000s and I would go to the verizon store cuz my my mom was on verizon my dad too and I would go to the store and I would look for this display or the device with the most amount of pixels on the screen I kid you know no I even by then I have my love for pixels started i think when i got my speak n spell um when i noticed that the you know the little little digits would be crisp and clear it was great 20 found this it was like a kyocera phone it wasn't a smartphone it had probably a 64 x 300 AD gray matrix display and it really didn't do very much but i would i would spend hours flipping through the menu systems just because I cared about you know the deepest settings of the phone kind of like I would do with my GI 83 in high school and you know that's it that's another story but it had a retractable antenna and I remember I would chew on it kind of as a weird habit and my my mother didn't like that very much but I mean it was it was kind of boring but at the time you know I was like wow look at all these look at all these pixels I can almost see it group I couldn't see a graphic if I squint right are you like you can almost see a diagonal line that's not that's not terribly jagged I remember yeah I mean it was still like a staircase right diagonal lines okay what does that thing that your sketches like I just right right wow that's awesome that I can't but I can't believe your obsession with pixel density goes back it goes back that far um but that's that's crazy what about what about you telling coincidentally i was also 18 when I got my first mobile phone but that happened in 1998 so I got a I got to use the dinosaurs in the technology and my first very first phone was the Ericsson GA 628 it was this huge phone which basically I'm looking at the spec sheet right now the size of the display wasn't in pixels but it wasn't characters so it had one 12 charge so I'm looking at it right now as well that is a look at those yeah right you know that phone had interchangeable color plates so if you look at the stock images that blue thing you could change that out with yellow or red or green or whatever your color flavor was but I had the upgraded I think it was six months later than that to a Bosch 607 which had a display of 4 x 16 characters which had a orange backlight and it was it was awesome it had an extendable antenna and of course in nineteen ninety that was the year when the first cellular companies started off in in Romania the first two which were later acquired by Vodafone and orange respectively but one one thing just as the misc when my battery died in my initial Eric's on GA 628 my dad correct opened the battery case and replaced the batteries with normal eight a size batteries four of them and that gave me one we had that give me one week of battery life I wish I could do that now but awesome i remember reading a story about a guy trying to modify his palm SCH i 502 put a bluetooth module in or something back in the day and he I may have spoken about this before but he nicked to the battery bag while he was inside the casing and apparently this blue column of flame just shot up from the phone and like eight his kitchen ceiling I mean it's it's amazing what how much power is contained in these lithium-ion cells and how volatile they are if you screw with them thank you for for indulging me in this this kind of off-topic thought thread and gents because I it's it's so funny to like listeners and you guys like if you if you just have a nostalgia trip and you want to Google pictures of old phones that you were your friends might have done because I was googling your your answers guys and the internet was so low res back and you know the 2002 or 2001 like the pictures that I got particularly of your Bosch 607 Tony are like like they're blown up a little bit so it's like for 60 x 360 for 345 is the biggest image I can find and even that is like it's just tiny like that was the name of that internet service on feature phones it was like five dollars a minute and it was like not even close to the reel web what was that called something like coffee cup or Java or owed will Joab oh what ya like that would have been like when it was written in web standard and stuff like that yeah yeah yeah we had and we still have web access around here really yeah i mean that's that's for free for for normal prepaid phones aside from data connection yeah so web usually comes for free here you remember when water the wireless internet used to be charged on a permanent basis like like minutes there's like circus circuits which data ah nightmarish Minnie oh please right well let's let's jump back into into modern-day here with them we're gonna lead off the week with a bunch of android stuff and ran and i would like you to kick this off because you have the most experience with with this google opened up pre-orders for the nexus 4 and the nexus 10 and i think our headline probably says it best google's pre-order experience for the nexus 4 and 10 was horrible yeah let me let me start off from the very beginning so usually when a company has a new product up for sale that that is hot and desired that's a funny way to start it they give you a pre-order time like you know everyone knows that Apple pre-orders start at at midnight pacific or 383 a.m. eastern so Google up until the day of the nexus 4 and 10 pre-order had on their page it said pre-orders start on I think it was the 13th of November and so no one really knew when it was going to start so I i got up at 3am and i kept refreshing the page until 4am yes i am a little crazy in in that respect and so and so I thought to myself okay probably it's going to be later in the morning and by the time for aim for am came around I was checking some of the texts lights and they said you know it looks like it's going to be at noon um Pacific or actually noon noon eastern and and 9am Pacific's I said okay so I'll wait to the next day so I I I go to my computer after lunch and I sit down it's it's 1145 15 minutes before the pre-order I go to the nexus for pre-order page third add to cart button I'm like sweet I'm 15 minutes early I'm gonna get my my nexus 4 I click Add to Cart and then I go into my cart and it says your cart is empty I proceeded to do that exact thing about 15 to 20 times and that takes me about 15 or 20 minutes so then it's twelve o'clock and by that time the add to cart button had changed to a notify me button as if they were sold out within 15 minutes even though the pre-order didn't really start yet they turned it on 15 minutes early and so I SAT there frustrated I did get an order in for the nexus 10 but it was really the nexus 4 I was after so I kept hitting refresh and it just so happens that everyone out of 20 page loads the notify button would change to add to cart so I'm thinking sweet maybe you know they've got some more inventory it's only 12 10 10 minutes after the pre-order and so I click Add to Cart and I go to my cart and it's in the cart and I'm like yes I'm gonna do this so then I hit the proceed button and then this thing rotates and it times out and then I'm like that's okay I still have it in my cart I go back to my card it says your cart is empty so I start cursing profusely I go back to that page i refresh I keep doing that so that after a very long time it takes about two hours I successfully placed an order for an eight gigabyte model but I didn't want the 8 gigabyte model I kind of got it by accident so I thought to myself okay you know I'll get the 8 gigabyte model I'll send it to one of the other pocket now guys and so it's also scraps to the guys yeah go ahead yeah so I'm thinking okay it's two hours later I'm going to try for a 16 gig so I keep refreshing the page and then I get the add to cart button and after a very long time I finally successfully order a 16 gigabyte I nexus 4 at this point the Sun is up right yeah well I mean it were it were at like you know 3 p.m. at this point um so I'm feeling pretty confident and then I go into the google play store where they show you order status and um I am very curious about when I'm going to get the fee nexus 4 i'm thinking maybe i'll get it the next day on wednesday maybe i'll get the day after that on Thursday and so I see both of my orders listed before the eight gigabyte and the 16 gigabyte the eight gigabyte under status says complete which is weird with no shipping info the 16 gigabyte version says shipping estimate November 15th so I'm a little frustrated thinking you know okay if it ships on the 15 that probably won't get it till the 16th of the 19th and so then the 15th comes around and then Google sends out these emails to most people that pre ordered the nexus 4 and said and that says you know due to overwhelming demand we're not gonna be shipping these for three weeks oh but we're gonna give you free shipping for all of your troubles cuz that's the same as being awesome yeah and I've just gotta wonder number one how could the tech company with the most amount of servers in the world have such a screw-up with the pre order process how could their communication have failed so tremendously and why did it what was wrong with their system that had it had had so many people thinking that they successfully placed an order for a nexus 4 when really the stock was probably sold out within 3 or from its I mean how many units did they have 100 units yeah it was just it was the worst pre-order experience ever and if I was the if I was an average person I would probably say you know screw the nexus where I'm gonna get a galaxy s3 or a droid DNA or something because this is just ridiculous yeah and I'm looking for you know a mentions just googled you know like Google pre-order Fiasco Nexus 4 i'm kind of looking for for other reports on this and everyone's kind of reporting on the back order and stuff but it doesn't seem like Google has offered Google hasn't offered any comment on this right there just sorry here's some free shipping that's that's basically the extent of their involvement yeah and to be honest I don't even know if Google really owes anyone an apology I mean you know we're so used to companies like Apple anticipating the high demand and and so you can still place your pre-order write it right after they sell out it's just the shipping date changes there's a lot of transparency they tell you you know you're gonna have to wait a little what Google just was was completely non communicative about this whole entire process and it probably pissed off a lot of people it sounds like yeah it sounds like yet another kind of kind of fail on Google's end in the customer service department if you I feel like Google is um I feel like Google's like a giant version of us when we get really busy and in a whole bunch of comments come in and we can't answer them all like right away you know because we generally do make an effort to answer comments that ask questions and comments that pose interesting points of discussion but sometimes you know you're just so busy that you can't handle it I feel like Google is that way with orders yeah maybe but but you know if Google's trying to make a world-class device here that is better than anything else they need to provide world-class customer service a world-class that order experience agree I mean those are the bare minimums right ya know I I concur and I mean while we're talking about it to that the I went out to get some coffee today and there was a box on my porch that had a circular logo on it and I felt sure it was the samsung logo and I was really excited but it turned out to be an old navy package for my neighbor so screw you old navy and your branding but so I'm waiting on a nexus 10 today which listeners if you listen to this before it goes up have a have a keep refreshing pocket now because we're gonna have a ax and unboxing on that shortly it Brandon thank you for for you know soldiering on through all that those difficulties there it's it's unfortunate that that took place but um it's more concerning to me in in kind of a sense of what could come from google in the future because its customer service in particularly in the wireless industry particularly in the wireless carrier industry has typically gone by the wayside and Google there's a report from the wall street journal today that google is reportedly in talks to become a wireless carrier Tony you wrote the story didn't you yes I did what can you just give us a very quick rundown of this rumor and how it's how is this different from from rumors like this in the past well I can't tell you exactly but I can tell you this much this is that kind of news which he can boast under I don't know a huge question mark because the original source The Wall Street Journal cited some of course anonymous sources within the who are familiar with the matter to be specific that said that some said that Google might have but then again some other said the Google might have not discussed with a certain TV provider satellite TV provider dish network the name doesn't say anything to me here in Europe maybe you guys in the u.s. know it better they're pretty big here AMC hates them but yeah yes so that that's the entire thing that google might have or might not have discussed with DISH Network to use their part of the spectrum to start a network provider basically who would compete with the AT&T verizon sprint and the others I think that the best case scenario here if it comes to fruition is a dramatically changed wireless industry for the better because we know that when Google enters a new industry like this let's say with their fiber they offer it one at a very low cost and to an extremely fast advanced beads so if Google gets this right it's very possible they could offer plans that are half as is half as expensive they could launch lte-advanced right out of the bat with some compatible phones that go with it shot asked if they would go lte-advanced right out the gate that sounds like something they would do right it sounds like something they would do giving us 100 megabits per second down and so forth but of course you know there this is a highly regulated industry and you might see something like Google Fiber where they start off in like one city and then two cities and at this rate google fiber for example I think will be ubiquitous in a very long period of time in fact so far a way that this advantage that they have of one gigabit per second internet might be less of an advantage because Verizon and Comcast and all those from internet providers see it coming and the same thing could happen with the with the wireless thing but you know I they've been working on this or talking about it i'm assuming they've been working on for a very long time so I reason to believe that if they were to launch a wire a wireless carrier that it would be closer to the former scenario words in a lot of cities and it's it's advanced its LTE you know guys a couple of commenters were happy because allegedly there is some sort of monopoly in the form of not one carrier but more carriers in the states agreeing on rates and stuff like that and they basically applauded the idea of Google entering the market but here's one thing for you guys I'm google and you are the two biggest carriers AT&T and Verizon and I tell you guys okay starting January 1 2013 I'm gonna start my own network and my rates will be basically half of your rates what will you guys say and I don't know exactly but here's what i would say i would say you know what google get all your android phones off of my shelves and sell it yourself oh yeah right but then you gotta I mean if I'm verizon or AT&T I've got to like see what that's gonna do to my to my bottom line right because i can't just subsist on iphones and windows phones yeah but you know you'll kill google if you do that so it's basically bluffing right well the the wireless carriers who couldn't just pull their android phones i mean that's that's probably the majority of their business at this point yeah yeah so I don't think that's a I don't think that that's a reasonable threat if if Google came out with plans that were half as expensive I think they would probably be investigated by the antitrust people in suits because that would that would be sort of using Google's school and not you know scale or power to influence the market and it you know let's face it these carriers can't cut their plans in half they already um you know especially sprint and t-mobile they they need more revenue so that they can survive yeah right so this would be this would be terribly destructive that would be terribly destructive and Google probably knows that and they probably don't want to be investigated and so they probably would have lower lower rate plans but they wouldn't like come in at a dramatically lower price yeah and even if they did like I said I don't think carriers are gonna drop Android because they need android it's a very interesting thing to to think about a new carrier and I'll just this will be my last thought on it I I think that it's been a long time since those of us in the geek sector have really thought about carriers and that used to be you know those used to be the fanboy wars back when when dumb phones were were kind of they were never really quite the same but they were certainly there were much fewer differences between dumb phones as there are between smartphones and people would fight on the internet not over there manufacturer usually so though that happened to they would fight over the carrier like you know I would sit there and and and you know to watch people defend bell atlantic against you know mci or or whatever and it's just like okay you know it so I even thought about carriers in a long time except in the context of this is the pipe that allows my cool device to work but I think Google if they ever did this they would bring something a lot more interesting to the equation I don't think they will I mean I don't you don't know enter like enter yeah i think this this does smell like one of those rumors that just is kind of like a pipe dream right it'll never come to pass who's not who knows we'll see another thing they could do just letting my creativity run a little wild is that they can be the first carrier to do exclusively LTE / voice since they be i know all their felt a sort of live with LTE advanced and yeah they could just don't eat i don't think you need lte-advanced to do that but you need you need you need int volt owns to do it yeah well you just need to implement voice over LTE on the network side and then the phones need to be compatible with that are any are any phones out there right now volt vol 2 e compatible volte was wasn't the HTC Thunderbolt volte capable but they never flipped that on something which I feel like I wrote a piece on this and then immediately forgot everything I learned I don't know that will be interesting because as we've talked about a little bit like once or twice you know are we have these amazingly capable data devices in our hands but the minute we use to make a phone call it's going over this you know this network that only supports what is it's like 13 kilobits per second marable codex yeah which is you know which was implemented because they needed a lot of compression because voice calls take up a lot of bandwidth or they used to and so it makes sense but you sound terrible I hate talking on the phone one of the reasons I hate talking on the phones because you it's like what did you say you sound like you don't you guys have HD voice well the phones are launching with it but the networks aren't capable of handling it right now well the orange here in Romania has HD voice have you ever heard it Tony yeah really whatever it's it's like cd-quality voice whenever you are on a 3g coverage then it will switch automatically to HD voice and it's basically CD quality versus the old LP or cassette that's awesome it's this isn't putting me in mind of having old phone conversations back in the day when I would when I was selling a I den when I was selling nextel like they the voice quality was so good because I den was is different and weird and whatever but I used to you ever you ever talk to those people on the phone who don't have a good phone voice and i don't mean it's annoying i mean that their voice has a particular frequency range that they just they sound muddy all the time you can barely hear what they're said he used to date a over it was like I don't I love hanging out with you but I do not want to talk to you on the phone because I can't hear a word you're saying I have no idea what you're saying right now stop talking exactly yeah anyway I sort of know what you mean via the evo 4g LTE on sprint is HD Voice capable although I don't know if they've rolled that out d on the iPhone 5 is actually I think it has a competing high-definition thingy cuff like what are they it's like a what does it call it's like full spectrum or I remember hearing about that yeah and we were all very excited in the live chat we're like oh HD voice and then everyone's like yeah but nobody's gonna support it yeah yeah I don't think carriers care about it you know I don't think there are many people I mean everyone's so used to the 13 kilobit per second audio quality of a phone call then they care a little bit more about data speeds I'd that's called it's called wideband audio by the way ah yeah and they made a big deal about how it boosts the mid-range Phil Schiller is talking about it in an animated fashion on my screen I'm guys I'm just looking at my carrier and and I was looking at the carrier because I remembered having HD voice calls with lower phones too so I had an HD voice using my samsung Taylor developer windows phone 7 device from back in the day and so here's here's the page from Orange Romania it says phones with HD Voice apple iphone 5 LG optimus l7 HD HTC Desire see HTC one s HTC One X nokia asha 302 Lumia 610 Lumia 800 Lumia 900 galaxy s2 galaxy ace galaxy s3 that sends out of sums with HD voice yeah a lot of phones yeah geez I'm surprised to see this is when you get into that kind of differing network you know capacity thing where you're like whoa wait woman so where's this compatible and what's going and then I wonder if I did like some street test this would be fun to do in about a year when some carriers in America have it rolled out and just do some on the street sidewalk interviews like please let's just do this test phone call for 10 seconds and tell me which one sounds better and see if anybody can actually tell the difference on the street hmm you know I would want I wonder what skypes bitrate is because skype has such good audio quality i do too yeah i just searched google for skype iterate and i found it's probably variable based on based on speed the network speed and you know then we just like when you stream video and it said when it when you have a fast connection if you flip the HD and then if you your connection drops to lower speed then it will switch to SD yeah you used to be able to force to force your phone back in the day to to use a different codec excuse me if you wanted a higher voice quality but then the network would always override it it was this is like a whole nostalgia day for me of like ye olde howardforums talks anyway let's let's move on guys cuz there is there's actually big news that they will want to talk about this is kind of my my biggest news of the week because I was the one who was there i covered the HTC and Verizon announcement in New York City on Tuesday for their latest collaboration which ended up being the droid DNA this is HTC's if you've must have heard about it but if you have an it's HTC's newest device for Verizon Wireless yeah this device that they called about fifth hundred times at the presentation the ultimate droid that ultimate was their huge buzz word of the day that mean is the last one yeah final the only HTC omega ya know it's and it's the phone that the public is is kind of if you haven't handled it it's very tempting to call it a phablet and it's I think something we've talked about the podcast over and over again as as the butterfly J for Japan as the the the DI X the DLX but it's not it's not any of those things a butterfly J is out in Japan but this is our version in America it's the droid DNA and I think there's an unlocked version plant as well it is not at all a phablet in the hand it feels it almost identical to the one x it feels like a lengthened HTC One X with with cute design cues from Windows Phone 8 and of course a giant 10-8 a 5-inch 1080p panel but despite the fact that this panel is is so comparatively huge because of the way the phone is designed it just doesn't it doesn't feel any bigger in the hand really it feels a lot like the iphone 5 to be honest with you not in terms of like it's metal but you know it's it's it's materials but in its form factor it's just it's it's thin and it is lengthy in the hand and it's that's great I really really really like it and I know Brandon over there has been just amped to to hear about this because it's ask you about things away i was gonna say right i I do i do have some questions for you Mike yeah please please please because I've got it in my hand right now it is the black version the only one that is around at the moment and ask away man this thing is I'm smelling a Joe Levi tweet with you saying you have its new your hands I knew how I I just really i should say I've I was tempted to say that's what she said about seven times this is a very happy day for that's what she saids like it's like almost that's what she saids right yeah yes and good figure it's unprofessional um yeah so I I I guess for to put forth one observation in your comparison video with the optimus G I was amazed to see that despite all those pixels and with a similar processor the droid DNA keeps up and in some cases beats the optimus G right right so yeah it does the background on that as Joe leave I wrote an editorial on you know the basically saying the DNA is likely to be slower than the optimus G and why you shouldn't care and it's it's a good editorial and basically that's his argument right these phones run very similar hardware under the hood they've got the Qualcomm Snapdragon s4 pro two gigs of ram yada yada and the same GPU of course and but the DNA is driving like twice as many pixels and actually the math gets a little fuzzy on that we don't know if it's two million pictures or whatever but but it's like yeah there's a lot there's a lot more display to drive so wouldn't you think this would be a slower phone and it's not I tested him in a side-by-side video the optimus G was just alpha fresh factory reset and the DNA obviously was brand new and no I mean that it runs just smooth as silk even with HTC sense 4 plus on it which is something else so so you're using this phone and obviously the display is stunning and that's great if you want to show your friends at a party or if you want to watch a 1080p movie and get a magnifying glass out but when you're actually using the phone when you're emailing browsing the web on Twitter and Facebook do you think to yourself and stop and say this is this is better this is better than galaxy s3 this is better than the optimus G or is it just kind of fade away and it's it's you kind of forget about all those pixels I think that's gonna be the last question I have to answer to myself before I write the review because there's all these competing things happening in my brain right we're like I look at the thing and I'm like this is absolutely a beautiful display and you look at rounded corners on the sense clock and it's like there is not a hint obviously it's 440 PPI there's not a hint of any pixilation there but at the same time I'm like what I'm being conditioned right I I know this is a 1080p phone I understand that the display is a huge part of it am I seeing something am I making it up and you know as my brain seeing more of a difference than it's actually there between this and a 720p display I will tell you before I answer that question for myself which will be you know for the review this is absolutely one of the most beautiful displays I've I've ever encountered and it the viewing angles HTC was big to point out that the 80 that you can view it from like 80 degree offset you can actually probably do it amazing oh it's nuts I mean I'm looking at it almost edge-on right now and it's it's as it's as though I'm holding one of those cardboard screened demo models for like third-party retailers because like the print on paper it's like yeah it's like it's it's like it's paper right on the face of the thing it is just incredible I was about to ask yeah Michael you know when we're it shows and we're checking out new display panels or new phones the manufacturer usually embeds phones in the table and covers up the phones themselves and only leaves the screen so you can compare the screens between their flagship and the competition now imagine this if you would only see the screen of the HTC One X which was a great screen compared to the screen on the droid DNA would you would you find any difference would you say that okay this is hands down the best or this hands down better or this is obviously Detroit DNA and the other one is the 1x that that is a really good question I you know they're there is a shape difference here that the DNA screen is taller so of course that is whether whether that's good or bad it's up to you as far as resolution wise I just don't know I need to have a look at them both I unfortunately don't have a 1x on the Boston office anymore to compare it with but I tell you I think and this may be a software thing I I certainly think it is much more impressive than the display on the galaxy s3 but i need to do you know i need to do some comparisons here and see i would really like to do and speaking of on the street stuff something similar to the thing I just suggested with the display you know I'd like to just go up to the random person be like here's two phones and they're covered up wounds like which which display do you find more appealing you know we got to get you on the streets man sorry like a pansy yeah I want to do some investigative reporting get high my up here with a rig and I'll have a handheld microphone ya know and it yeah what's interesting about this though guys is that like there's a lot that HTC stole from itself you in the windows phone from the Windows Phone 8x like its did this kind of form factor which is very narrow on the edges and if you look at it edge on top or bottom it almost looks like at the Nokia smile even where it has like the you know the bulging back and the thin edges it is lightweight and the front facing camera is also that same ultra wide-angle thing yeah which HTC was very keen on showing us and by the way their whole presentation was really cool it was very brief they showed us a video they had the president of HTC America come up and the verizon CMO and it was you know it was it was quick it was brief it was fun and they got us a review unit promptly which we really appreciate yes I gotta tell you though the responsiveness this is HTC Sense this is sense for plus running on top of jelly bean for not for that one dot one I think and it is it's just it's the way sense was supposed to be I mean it doesn't feel like it you know it feels like that's interesting it isn't that that I was gone I was going to frame my next question around sense because you know in the example of the One X you know you've got this gorgeous screen this great hardware and then this sense which just lags in places yeah so so what if you took the great things about sense the email client is amazing although I know you use gmail the widgets are beautiful and you made it really fast lag free and then you put it on a really awesome display is is that enough Michael for you to say in the future prefer a sense for plus phone with the same configuration you know what i mean i dunno tremaine and and I this is not a cop out it is just a function of the fact that I've had other phones to deal with in the DNA is still very new to me I don't know yet there are things that I miss from TouchWiz I certainly don't miss the TouchWiz nature UX like cartoony carnival you know stupid leaves floating on water tap ripple effect drop water thing you know but I do miss it's useful notification shade toggles i miss press and hold the power button for even more cool options i miss you know since is not as intuitive that way i don't think and also sense has these it's easy to forget that census really has its own unique design language that is not always good particularly an audio feedback I don't need my phone to sound like a typewriter and every time I tab on something at HTC Sense it's like clack clack clack like mine why are you doing this is not a is not a Smith Corona you know so i don't i'm not sure yet but i have a final question yeah Tony hit me so you guys remember when we blend the coverage for droid DNA and I was like guys I really hope the screen is not the only selling point of this phone now let me hit you with this question if the droid DNA would not have a 1080p screen but a HD screen like the others on the market would this be an interesting phone or would it be just a droid just another android does it have an escort proud to me yeah yeah yeah for me it would still be interesting because of its of its form factor Tony does the screen to have the same dimensions in your hypothetical I mean I know it doesn't have a same resolution but it's still a 5-inch screen yeah let's say yeah let's say everything is the same except word resolution you know I still think it would be yeah because i think the HTC has has brought their beautiful 2012 like kind of design revolution to this in a big way it's got these really nice perforated red strips on the left and right it's got that front facing camera that's ultra wide angle which is actually I could see being useful in a couple situations it's got a great feel in the hand it feels like a premium product and it's it senses run so well on top of this I would still be excited about this yes and now a question for both of you guys do you think this is too little too late with HTC continuing to grumble fifty sixty percent quarter-on-quarter I mean do you think it's enough for for HTC to save themselves with this unit let's see it will go global the HTC deluxe will hit global markets is this enough I don't think it's enough by itself personally but I think that it's definitely going to help them particularly since verizon seems very very dedicated to this launch in a way that other carriers are not necessarily as dedicated to their launch and we'll get to that in a second but yeah I think with verizon behind them this is going to sell pretty well in America because I think this is going to be the droid of the holiday season I think that this phone is of course the first 1080p phone and that's that's getting headlines you kind of look back historically at firsts and to see what effect its its head so we have HTC with the evo 4g with the first 4g phone in the US did does that matter today yeah not really we've got the the first 720p screen on the Galaxy Nexus by Samsung does that matter today uh sort of you know it it sort of paved the way for samsung to be a leader in these high res displays and and the 1080p thing could very well do that for HTC they could they could create variations of this form factor with that highly acclaimed screen I think it's it's tough to answer that question until Michael you you answered that that operative question and yeah it agree will be and and that's a good interesting way to look at it as from a perspective of first I tell you I did watch a nap Assad of Star Trek Enterprise last night in 1080p on this thing and I think they shot that in 1080 I hope they shot it in 1080 because anyway it was the is the only thing I could think of I was trying to get to sleep and God it was beautiful I mean it just is normally when I'm watching netflix on my phone i'm watching like SD episodes from 1997 of some old TV show right so i can't tell the difference but on this one I definitely wanted to fire up a full HD and it it's it is gorgeous and I'll tell you right up front the battery life doesn't seem to be a problem even with that relatively small 2011 our cell that is good yeah great have you tested out the camera uh yeah it doesn't sound like better than 1x is probably the same as the one x-ray well I asked I made sure to ask HTC about that and they said that the optics physically the camera module is identical but the tuning on the software side has been has been optimized so we'll have to see in different conditions i will tell you i took a that shot i took this morning of the the old navy box sitting on my in my front lobby was with the the DNA camera and the lighting was crappy but you zoom in on that thing and it's like it's it's it's a little like zooming in on a Nintendo game I mean there's some crazy pixelation it's wrong it's really bad lighting we'll have to see how it performs yeah those 31 x performed well in excellent lighting conditions but once the lighting is say normal or less than normal you just got pixels well this picture is terrible did you look at yeah yeah so don't zoom down it's terrible yeah I know it's well in like I said that is pretty much the worst lighting I could pick if I wanted to like put a phone through camera boot camp that's the lighting i would pick so we'll we'll see but i want to keep talking cameras i do want to switch platforms while we talk cameras we're gonna have a lot more chat on the DNA i'm sure next week because the review will be up at the next time we speak but let's let's talk let's talk lumia let's jump on over to the to the Windows Phone world and we've got a lot of news from this and it's so it it's so nice to have talked about this for months I mean ever since the podcast started even we've been talking pretty much every week about can't wait until the Lumias get here I can't wait to actually finally you know be be a member of the club and I just finished my Lumia 810 review where I gave it a seven out of ten and to make this segue for real just to talk about the camera real quick Adam Lane and I got to meet in person first of all one by one I'm meeting everyone from pocket now in person Adam Lane is a tall guy I didn't know this is he taller than me I he's a he's got to be as tall as you ooh sounds like he's fired he's good no it was it was great well we met we met I came in New York City for the HTC event and Adam and I had arranged to meet to do a shoot out of the same scene using like six or seven cameras and the results of that can be seen on my lumia 810 review and Adams Lumia 920 review Adam whipped that up because he's our resident awesome photographer and Windows Phone guy so anyway we shot the same scene with a bunch of cameras and we were surprised to find that the Lumia 810 which means the Lumia 820 because the Lumia 810 is just a t-mobile version of the 820 with some different externals and internals so it's just a different phone what a crappy sentence that was we were surprised to find that the Lumia 810 has essentially the same camera performance in at least some circumstances as the Lumia 920 there's no optical image stabilization obviously and it doesn't have the PureView brand but the resolution is almost the same and the cameras performance is almost the same and that means whether it depends SM full or half empty person is going to depend on whether that means the 920 has a crappy camera or the a-10 has an awesome camera I happen to have both units in my possession at the moment and i will say for a mid-range phone that 8-10 shoots a good picture is that so that's why it's as thick as it is because it's got the the optics that maybe they just didn't caught PureView to keep the sales down and well then the 920 sales up well remember no it doesn't have the same object cuz the 920 has that that optical image stabilization rig that mechanical image stabilization so the 920 I think the module on there has to be thicker I think I will have to see a teardown of each to confirm that but the Lumia 810 is definitely a thick phone until yes I'm looking at that pattern with the boot which you guys shot from several angles yes with several devices and I still think the nokia n8 is the best there in that point that Adam made as well yeah the nokia n8 was the oldest phone we had in that shootout and that Adam and brought that along it's still right there yeah it's striking to me how how much the colors vary between all these phones like some of them like the razr m is just atrocious they come in and not in general but compared to all the rest of these and it imparts this purple kind of haze on everything and not the purple haze that we've been hearing so much about and then the it windows phone 8x like kind of over sharpens everything um and puts kind of a maybe a greenish pallor on it and then the Lumias err on the side of pink as well it looks like with the 920 doing a little more in that regard but it's it's striking how similar the 810 in the 920 you know how similar their results are so I'm I happen to like the Galaxy Note 2 most out of all these to tell you the truth but you know you listeners you'll want to go on they and check out both reviews to see what what the thing is what your feelings are about which camera is the best and certainly I'm no photographer but if you look at the gallery from the 8-10 from the shots that i took including one that my friend my friend took of me looking rather rather mournful about something they you know it's it's excited camera for a mid-range phone and the 810 as a whole delivers a solid mid-range experience it's built like a just a big block of wood or something though I mean it's really intense I liked your job test in the video Michael mmm thank you yeah that's very bold of you I didn't want to I didn't want to beat up the review you in a too badly but I'm like yeah this is the kind of phone and I my favorite analogy in that review was that it's like the Nexus 7 of smartphones because when I'm carrying around the nexus 7 right it's not like I'm carry around an iPad it's not like I'm carrying around something that's like Oh gotta be delicate with it because it's you know it's it's fancy now you toss it around and it's fine that's what the a-10 feels like it feels like it'll take a beating you know it's not something you have to baby and I think that's going to be attractive to a lot of people I do not think that it's worth 149 99 on a two-year contract not with the Lumia 920 at one hundred dollars right now I mean they are in different carriers and I started thinking about that as i was writing the conclusion I kind of put it in there where I was like yeah if you're on t-mobile if you're married to t-mobile USA and you really like what they give you then you should this is the closest you can get to to a high-end Lumia device right unless you buy an unlocked 920 which isn't gonna support t-mobile's bands right I was also on the Prophet surprised I was intrigued to hear that your results on tmobile were very similar to mine with the the subpar indoor performance on the inconsistent data speeds and oh yeah I and then I I wonder to myself you know you know team will want some good phones and in optimum conditions they have a fast Network and so forth but oh if that's true for you know at taking an average sampling of the population you and me in in pretty pretty big highly populated areas in some areas that are not and we have this experience then what about the rest of the people do t mobile users just contend with poor poor indoor performance in exchange for the unlimited data and so forth I just I start to you know I was wondering you won't whoa and one of these people about that's a good question this goes back to the carrier discussion you know where some people you know the carriers it generate loyalty and you know based on a lot of apocryphal is giving a lot of anecdotal stuff it's like whoa where I live and work this works well for me and I I used to be that guy with sprint like sprint always worked well for me almost wherever I lived and worked it was always a solid solid provider and then I'd here literally thousands of people on the internet and in person people just telling me off sprint jousters terrible i can't get service with them anywhere and so you know i understand what it's like to have those inconsistent results and I know that t-mobile provides good service somewhere I think it's Miriam mirror and you are over at Engadget is like the biggest t-mobile fan ever and you know so I mean it works some places it works and you know wherever it doesn't work Ryan it's a it's kind of like I guess AT&T where you don't tease my carrier of choice because around here it works extremely well yeah but if I lived in New York City or if I lived in san fran or Las Vegas I couldn't possibly use AT&T at least last I checked maybe it's changing now with LTE but there are times when you cannot make a call just because there are too many people on the phone at the same time so I I think you're right that it just matters where you live and what works in your area it does yeah and I really hope that that that everyone like you know I know it not everyone reads these monster reviews that we whip up like mine I think this one's 4,000 words I mean it's huge but if you're gonna read any part of it it's like you know read the part that says your mileage may vary you know you need to go to use your 14-day or 30 day exchange period to your advantage go by the phone use it where you live and work make sure that the coverage will work for you because it doesn't matter what we say you know and it certainly doesn't matter what verizon says for example just because I'm still bitter about my time in the Northeast Corridor where I'm like I'm zooming past on the train i'm zooming past banners for AT&T s 4g LTE network and I've got 4g LTE service on my on my lumia 920 and meanwhile my verizon phone which i'm tethering off of is like 1 x 1 x RT t like 20 kilobits down like for real guys it's like America's largest network it's like no stop it Monty kilobits yeah anyway so that's the t-mobile story and just just to wrap up the d810 story my biggest disappointment wasn't on the network side it was in maps I'm Brandon you talked about this a little bit and Tony wind when you had a windows phone what was your last windows from this the 610 to review and I I used 7.5 so I have never touched windows phone 8 and back and then the day it was Bing Maps it was bring it right and now it's kind of now in Windows Phone 8 its nokia maps which I was so looking forward to I was like all right good we're getting rid of the bing maps which I was disappointed with on the under my focus my personal daily driver last year baby nokia drama nokia maps will be awesome no it's it's just horrible it's it's it's embarrassing it's what it is it's it's I'd like the thing is there's like a there's a sorry was like outside Brandon's rolling thunder from his keyboard coming in from from that I'm not I'm not moving I'm doing jumping jacks pic oh okay um no the thing is like you can go into Nokia Maps and you can do what I did yesterday which is well i'm hungry i want to go to Boston burger company my favorite place ever for dinner and then I'll just let me just search for it here on on my 8 10 or my 920 it doesn't matter and it does dutifully report where Boston burger company is located the location that's three miles away meanwhile literally six blocks down the road is another Boston burger company as a matter of fact it's the original one that doesn't even show up in the results list this similar thing happened when I was on a train ride I was on an amtrak train i was looking at the terminal for the cross sound ferry in new london connecticut i did a search for cross on ferry with local results it returned results for the crosstown ferry terminal on Long Island in New York said know it now I have a question and is sorry for interrupting you know is this happening with the online maps or is this also happening with the maps you download as of Nokia Maps and you can use them offline too it's not the downloadable ones the experience I've had with the downloadable ones has been on nokia drive not i have not downloaded maps on the on nokia maps on the bing maps like you know plus so I this is all online this is I would just do a comparison between I did I also didn't download them when I was on my android phone when I'm doing that straight comparison you know I'm like okay what do you have to say about this Android Oh what do you know Google Maps is the best mapping solution ever and it gets the job done and it does it ten times better than then it happens on Windows Phone so but he was just such a disappointment to me I wouldn't be so irritated about it if I haven't if I hadn't expected it to be so much better as a result of the transition to Nokia Maps but I don't see how I could use this and these are the two examples I site in the review but there are many more and if I'm going to be using this you know 920 is my daily driver I need to use a third-party mapping solution that interfaces with Google Maps or I need to just go to like maps google com in the browser I don't want to do that you know it's not a good mapping solution and it's um it's it's it's embarrassing it shouldn't be at this level right now you know this this platforms been out for two years it should be better so it's funny that you say that because nokia is so proud of their mapping service and now with the microsoft collaboration they not only destroy in their marketing and all their ad campaigns the iphone maps but they also put themselves at the same level with google maps I mean they regard themselves as the alternative and you know that may be the case in Europe it may be the case in other parts of America I will tell you that between boston and new york city at least in the past week that has not been my experience and and it's very disappointing so i think i want to go a little more in depth with this and maybe maybe write a piece on it and so this is not the last you'll hear about about this listeners but um you know we'll see how it goes i really hope it improves very quickly Brandon you didn't mention this too much in your thoughts on Windows Phone two years later but brandon has a great video which I just watched this morning about his experience you know with Windows Phone 8 after two years with Windows Phone do you want to elaborate on some more of what you thought about coming on to the new platform yeah sure briefly so you know about two years ago I was using the Samsung Focus as my daily driver for a while because I really liked it you know it had yeah this new operating system and and at the time it was kind of Android which was laggy and had some problems and it just iOS which had its own problems with being too tied down and too limited and so the samsung focus was an interesting departure from both of those because it was kind of the middle ground between not having enough control like an iOS and having tons and tons of control like you have an Android with Windows Phone you can kind of customize the look of your main screen you have live information and yet also static icons that link to programs and it was just totally different it was fluid it was fast but the problem two years ago was that the app story was poor most major apps were accounted for but the vast majority of second and third-tier apps were just not there because developers were kind of kind of like the windows RT problem they're thinking should I spend time and resources to develop on this new platform or should I spend more time on Android iOS and the other platforms that are already making me money so so I I got an 8x and I was very curious to see if the experience had changed two years later so I used it for a full week and you know it was very familiar and yet a little bit different and I mean that in a good I mean that in a good and a bad way I mean in the good way because that fluidity was there that that interestingness of something new and fast something that just worked and was well thought out i mean Windows Phone 8 is a really good operating system from end to end um in terms of the UI and the responsiveness and that was great and it was cool to see windows phone 8 with a high res display it was quota see windows phone 8 with you know is powered by a dual-core processor although it didn't feel that much faster than the focus I've got to be honest well yeah and I think you say in the video because windows phone 7 was so fluid there was exactly no room for improvement yeah yeah yeah but that it's kind of disappointing to me because I remember talking to some of the Microsoft guys back in two thousand ten and eleven i think it was 11 when I when I when I asked why isn't windows phone 7.5 optimized for for dual core support and while all those these androids were coming out with dual core and they said but we want to do it right we we don't want to rush it out and I and I thought to myself that must mean that they're going to do something with dual core support that Noah that the other platforms just aren't doing and well that turned out not to be the case right um so so in terms of the good like I said everything was fast and fluid high resolution display it was it was that feeling that I had two years ago but then I also had that bad feeling when I went into the App Store and I searched for a wide variety of apps that weren't there partly because I and correct me on this if I'm wrong apps have to be rewritten for windows phone 8 thank you for bringing this up i don't i don't know right because I I was so excited when i got my lumia i was like how great i know that it has spotify so i don't really need anything else no it doesn't cuz spotify has to be rewritten for windows phone 8 or something i guess some it wasn't some apps don't I I don't also don't know I feel very under educated about this it's very possible that the really high end apps i guess you could say like Spotify the developer has decidedly has chosen to rewrite the app to take advantage of some of the new things in Windows Phone 8 and so they but it's unfortunate because they pulled you can't get spotify for windows phone 8 right now there are two aspects guys first of all is the shared core the kernel with desktop operating system and then again is the variety of resolutions for which have to be coded within the application itself with Windows Phone 7 + 7.5 it was wvga and that was all ah so it's just so spot if I probably pull their app thinking that you know if someone downloads this they're gonna get a low res experience and that's gonna make people pretty upset and you know I guess it's I mean if they release it in the next few weeks that's fine because you know windows phone 8 devices are just now hitting store shelves so it's not like there's millions and millions of people that are crying cuz spotify is not out there right and yeah well and then you could speaking of spotify we have to touch on pandora as well which you know Lumia buyers or Windows Phone 8 buyers I forgot what it is are gonna get a full year of pandora one for free which is great let's meet the pandora app won't even be available until 2013 so it's this is not a i guess i guess this is not a negligible amount of work that needs to be done like there has to be there's some core level and Tony as you just said there's there's there's a lot of leg work that needs to be done to make most probably apps right yeah so but that's so frustrating you know you see Microsoft baked in the announcement doing all this this kind of bluster and being like yeah we got 120,000 apps and we're gonna have we're going to have 46 of the top 50 it's like great when I think this comes back to a point that Tony made in a previous podcast about Windows Phone being the story of like not being done in time and yeah waiting and and and and I think in this case you know windows phone 8 was rushed out you know there's there's talk of a notification center that didn't make it in you know it the first version of Windows Phone 7 was rushed out so quickly that they didn't have copy and paste which is strange coming from the company that invented copy and he's got a mobile device right so so to wrap to wrap this up drop this up my conclusion and using Windows Phone 8 for a week was that at the end I decided to go back to android / iOS depending on the device of the day and that is because my experience is the same as it was two years ago which is good and it's also bad so both to wrap it up and to put words in your mouth Windows Phone 9 great operating system yeah so what I'm waiting for yeah I will say that you know it just to give my final thoughts on Windows Phone 8 as well as a whole I kind of disparaged the talk about how Microsoft was so big on demoing resizable live tiles because frankly I was tired of seeing it right I was bored it was like stop showing me that then I put resizable live tiles as like a 10-second little segment in my Lumia 810 review because it's really cool you can make a really cool-looking home screen and I've kind of struggled over the past couple days to to make my home screen look like you know look like something I want to look good and also feel good using and I think I've gotten to a good point with that anyway it's it's a lot of fun and I am surprised by how much that little tweak just introducing that other live tile size by how much that has changed the the daily experience and really liked it particularly under Lumia go ahead Oh dead continue say don't particularly on the Lumia 920 is what I was going to say which last week when we podcast to did was before the Lumia 920 official launch day and I just if you haven't seen the video listeners I up a video of my my own Lumia 920 unboxing and that's my own unit that's not a review that's paid for that one and I also shot of just a little bit of footage of my in-store experience and we talked a little bit before about carriers and they're supportive device launches and you know I I don't want to crap over all over eighteen t here because they were just busting their butts to to correct these reports as they came out of kind of lackluster launches and stores across the country and really I mean you know we work closely with the PR people at 18 teen it was very clear to see on twitter and on email and all that stuff how how hard they were working to try and address issues that cropped up but in the store like i was surprised the people were the ATT store reps were wearing Windows Phone 8 t shirts and that's about where it stopped like there were no demo devices on the store this is it my this is my experience at the cambridge massachusetts store there were no demo devices out running Windows Phone 8 all the windows phone demo devices on the floor were windows phone 7 devices and yes this is an official AT&T retail store not a retailer not a third-party dealer the retail stores were only stocked with three colors of the Lumia 920 because the cyan version was apparently an online exclusive in the gray version is apparently internet international exclusives stop with the exclusives like it wouldn't it be great if you could walk into a store and and get any one of the five available Michael I am so with you since most of the exclusives are us only gonna say yeah you actually get screws and right and I don't yeah of course I sound like the first world problem American right I'm like come on you know but no I understand Tony like now I get it I understand what it's like to be shut out of something when they tell me I can't get the cyan cuz I'm not online and I can't get the gray because it's an international and like what okay that's how we feel about the droid DNA and all the other good stuff you guys get is you know what I know that's a that's a recent occurrence I mean near be Europe got everything that's crew 2008 exact outward now i think i think the LTE thing really helped the u.s. to get in the forefront of these mobile device for these releases he agreed and i just wish but i think i feel the pain of windows phone you know fans because they see these kind of lackluster carrier launched and I I wouldn't even bring this up but other outlets have reported on this like people have you know run with headlines saying like a tease launch of the Lumia 920 was really weird you know and it's true and I remember their launch of the the veer back in the webos days and you know this isn't an 18 teen thing all carriers do this and they you know they fawn over who they like and they they kind of ignore who they don't and you know sometimes mistakes are made or whatever but it just felt so half-baked yeah but don't forget and this is this through the I'm remembering this exactly quote that Steve Ballmer said back in the day that AT&T is the premier windows phone carrier and this just doesn't sound like that exactly yeah no it doesn't but of course you know what here when you have no competition in that space then I guess you can do what you want right because verizon I'd one windows phone that they cared anything about and then they now they're making a big noise about carrying all the new ones sure but for windows phone 7 they didn't do anything really you have to imagine old carriers had Lumia 920 now imagine that 80s you know exactly yeah now that's that's very true so you know and then there's t-mobile whose small that they they have the 8x and they have the 810 so it's a very interesting landscape today I think maybe some carriers may have been burned by the by maybe buying into the buzz on windows phone 7 and then just having a whole lot of inventory i don't know i will see if i'm not very half-baked go ahead i'm fascinated michael to hear about you know for listeners that don't understa sui bounced around from phones all the time but we always come back to sort of our home carrier that we're married to that we have a two-year contracts on or we have a pre plate prepaid plan on and devices that we we own and we don't have to send back and Michael made a very bold move of changing his home carrier I think from verizon to 218 tea and buying his own dough Lumia 920 um and he has yet to have time to I think really settled down with that because his plates of late has been full with other devices but I drew I'm fascinated to hear in a similar way that I went through the process how you like Windows Phone 8 on the on the Lumia 920 after week or two of usage i I'm I'm very excited I will be very excited to share those thoughts and you're absolutely right I i bought the 920 last Friday and then this entire week has been taught at home last Friday I did the unboxing video he used this for five minutes a user for five minutes and i also bought as listeners my know the JBL powerup speaker dock which i also unboxed on video and showed you and I was like well this is great I put the JBL box on my desk I plugged it in I put the 920 on top of it it charged and then it like I haven't used it saying I haven't been able to because I've been using the cool stuff man exactly DNA what a wonderful problem I have I mean it is true and I will say this just to wrap up my thoughts on that even though eighty didn't have the best launch they did they didn't have the wireless the free wireless charging plate in stock you know because Lumia 920 buyers are supposed to get the the wireless charging plate for free as a limited time promotion for launch day and so forth they didn't have it in the store and I was like come on guys really another thing you don't have but you know what 18 TMI info they shipped it the same day I think and it came to me on on the following monday so it's sitting next time no it is great also it charges the droid DNA as we were discussing off the air before the podcast started speaking of making good on promises my nexus 4 just shipped the the eight gigabyte the first one hi ho shirt hey congratulations did you get did you order a wireless charging orb as well I don't think they're for sale yet are they oh maybe they're not I really want one I want a nexus 4 just to use the charging orb and then I'll send it anyway um do you guys I got a question yeah where do you charge your your your phone's when you when you go to sleep at night oh now I've got the JBL powerup doc next to my bed and so I put the phone on top of that but normally they live on my bed stand ah Within Reach what about you Tony on my desk my office setup has also a bed so my room is my bed as my computer has my basically it's all in one for me I live and work here so oh my devices are being charged on the best in arms reach from from my bed okay so you so you both have it close to your to your bed um I've got this weird phobia and I hope you can talk me down from it I I'm afraid I really want to put my phone on the nightstand so it's in within easy reach but I'd put it like across the room because I'm like paranoid that the radio waves the Wi-Fi the LTE are gonna like harm my my brain give me some sort of like illness it sounds like you're not surrounded with temperatures beside yeah Plus like even if the phone's not nearby you you know you're getting bathed in Wi-Fi all day anyway and LTE I mean you know FM radio waves and all that kind of don't know who knows what you don't know about yeah yeah I think I don't think you need to worry about that Brandon because I what what is the there's an FCC mandated distance from the body that your phone should be like you they have to include this warning in the manual and if you ever read any of the safety and product information any of the phone that they're like nobody no nobody does but but a lot of them like he's motor oil especially is big on saying like don't we don't recommend you carry your phone in your chest pocket like put it in a holster and make sure each sneaker yeah you guys remember back in the day we I was like boasting almost every week or every second week something about SAR ratings as a re s yeah those things just died out we don't see any more post like that right it's if the listeners don't know what's our is a specific absorption rate and it's a measurement of how much radiation is absorbed by your tissues and I think there's some something to do with everybody cared about those either but it was nice to see for instance the brand new HTC being lower lower SAR ated than I don't know the iphone and just making up something now that's it you don't see that nowadays I mean they they all have radiations we just don't know to which extent you know what I think and I think this is a symptom of voice calling dying out to a degree because the big deal about this whole flap was that you know the more radiation of phone put out the more dosage you were getting right out against your skull and they showed like you know the cat scan images of like you know the brain localized brain heating or something like that and it was like wow that's crazy but nobody talks on the phone anymore so I mean we're all texting or they're all down by our you know they're all in our hands down except in Nebraska and sick accepted breske nicely done anyway let's let's move on just just briefly so we can get iOS in the conversation even though it's been a slow week for iOS Google's reportedly testing its Google Maps app for App Store submission which I'm sure is making apple fans Apple users everywhere just salivate as someone who very briefly had to deal with a crappy Maps in my case Bing or Nokia Maps I feel your pain in a different sense so um you know I really hope that Google Maps gets launched on iOS soon because we all know that would be a good thing for everybody but Apple I guess I have a different opinion I don't think so so far so far listen I'm not hating on google or or stuff like that but so far Google's been all talk no action they were all like we're working or we would work if apple approved and all that mad love specific plans you know what Google get the application out let Apple reject you and then just kill them for that just don't come with with ideas like we would work if we knew that apple would approve but we don't know that just get the application out send it for approval and if they disapprove which I think they will because they they got out of bed with google for a specific reason which is iOS maps then just do your best to bash apple if i can till then just make make the I if Apple turns them down if Apple rejects Google's mapping application that would be the ballsiest move that way of the time eater I don't think it would be ballsy are done removing google maps from iOS well no no I think it would because look they removed google maps from iOS and they thought you know maybe a lot of people in the company thought they had a competing product that would work well but ebuddy but launching a product that is inferior having a giant public uproar over how crappy it is and then when your white knight comes back to say hey you want it you want to use it you want your customers to be happy being like no no it's uh that would be intense I still think that they will not approve this application or they will make some probably make up some conditions that Google will not approve I think the entire reason for for this move beyond the thermonuclear war between Apple and Google was for Apple to finally start off their mapping project good or bad as it is it will improve but if they made the first if we have a saying here if you say a also say be mmm-hmm before we leave iOS may I make a comment well you do I've got one short one as well in iOS before go but please do you okay I'd like to suggest that now is a terrible time to buy either iPad and here is why we are obviously between generations the ipad 5 will the big version will clearly have the in cell touch technology it's gonna be thinner and lighter because Apple knows that we really we really are all tired of the size on the weight and the ipad 4 is like an iPad 3 it's entirely too heavy and thick um and so the next generation iPad 9.7 inch is the one again then the ipad mini on the other hand is also a product with compromise and we could argue about this all day but the low pixel resolution does matter and you can do things like hold it at arm's length away from your face or you could say to yourself well the cop you know the compromise years that I get a low resolution screen but I get this incredible hardware with very very thin and light form factor that's that's even thinner and lighter than the nexus 7 but the iPad Mini is a first gen product the ipad mini 2 is most likely gonna retina display and i think that if people are thinking about buying an ipad they should wait on they should wait on both till the next generation so you're suggesting they should wait until october two thousand thirteen do you think that's when the ipad fire yeah no I think they now settle for a yearly cycle with bringing the ipad 2 october the ipad mini 2 october the iphone to september's so i think there will be no more march q1 or q2 releases yeah that sounds right they did that with the iphone right yeah yeah i think i think you don't get a weight yeah I you know uh yeah i would say i would say your tree or your wisdom is sound your logic is sound i don't think people are going to because the thing I was gonna say was that I was waiting on the 18 th or to open and I went in to get my lumia 920 I went into the apple store awaited and um yeah I didn't realize guys you guys didn't tell me this you guys did not tell me that the ipad mini was um was like it so light that you feel like you're on a planet with less gravity I don't you told me but I don't think it really hit my brain right because I you you have to listeners if you have to feel it it yet I don't care what you what you feel about iOS cuz heaven knows I find iOS to be very very dull and it's certainly not the OS for me but man you go into an apple store right now drop what you're doing it's Friday go into an apple store and find yourself an ipad mini and just hold it it feels like it once again a cardboard like it feels like a dummy device it feels like something that a third party retailer would put on the shelf so it doesn't get stolen like it doesn't it's incredible I I don't even know if I like it it's so light I like a little heft but man oh man anyway so do you think it's too thin um no I don't I don't think it's too thin no I I do think that they bezel a thumb rejection on the sides is a little inconsistent but I don't think it's too thin though did you think Tony do you think a piece of paper is too thin it depends on what you're comparing it with yes yeah this uh no one's talking about i think people are starting to talk about this this in cell touch that Apple has on the iphone 5 and the iPad Mini significantly reduces touch responsiveness and I'm hearing some of my friends being like my my iphone 5 the keyboard it it doesn't peop feel as good as the 4s and I and you know it's because it's a different touch technology and it's it's worse for touch responsiveness really did you experience that and I didn't on the iPad yeah I did to it to a degree um it's it's just it feels a little bit more numb uh some people might note it but people coming from like the I the ipad 3 or the the iphone 4s will notice it but people peeking over the first time won't but it's subtle but i think it's a problem well that's interesting it'll be interesting to see how that how that looks going forward maybe once everyone gets tired of talking about purple haze that'll be the next thing i want to jump into reader mail before we close out the the day guys we have the reader mail today is all from or the rear mail we're reading is all from people who've written us before so this is the the reader mail returning writers hour and by our i mean five minutes wishful thinking yes I know right but these are all really good questions they're really cool so guys everyone thank you for writing in again and everyone who wrote in whose letters we won't get you thank you please please writing in Kenneth Meadows the second says hey guys I was wondering with all these Nexus rumors going around do you think that we will ever see manufacturers offer customers the option to pick their own phone hardware and I'm like wait what what do you mean and the sentence continues like alienware does or did with PCs also thanks for the advice in my phone color you're welcome Kenneth meadows um that's an intriguing question do you think manufacturers will ever let let us as customers custom order our own phone hardware and like just plugins like yeah you know what I want to go for the two gigs around now put four gigs of RAM in there and go ahead and put the the flaming skull LEDs on the back and you know we're gonna give me the neon green paint job on the sides like what do you think i see i can see this happening oh yeah i actually looked into this because i was so I was sort of messing with the idea of creating I don't know who take years and years creating a website that would allow you to do that but after looking into it it occurred to me that yes you could do that if you're willing to charge two thousand dollars for a phone mmm mmm because the complexities involved in having to change the firmware on each different configure or like three or four or five or six preset configurations but if you get dell or alienware style where you could probably have hundreds or thousands of different combinations you can create that many different kinds of firmware and you have to support all those different kinds of firmware and and and and not only that but don't don't think don't forget about the engineering if you want to have 16 gigs of ram in your phone you're gonna have to move around to other things you're gonna have to create different cases it's probably gonna be thick and the people that are getting the really high spec phones to fit in a certain case it's going to be the same case that the people with the the bottom line phones are because you're not gonna have five thousand different cases it's so complex yeah tonight I don't think it will ever happen because of the reason the second reason Brandon told you it's just I think the reason because H let's take HTC for instance HTC has the flagship one x+ has the desire c so you have several different models and you can basically choose the hardware configuration by choosing a different model but what I would pretty much like to see and this is something we were discussing almost weekly with the guys on the pocket now team would be an experience when I will take my phone out of the box I would boot it for the first time and it would ask me do you want the HTC experience if yes then I would have all the HTC Sense four points whatever experience or do you want the Android vanilla experience and then I would have a nexus like phone that's what I want you know and I think that well then that's doable that is totally doing on this doable today I think that will be an element look at you know I think that proves that goes away stored proving my point which is I think I disagree with you guys I think we will see this happen because we're starting to see these really crazy software customizations we're not seeing that Tony yet and I hope we do at some point that we see the option to go to go raw or to go skin but you know we did phones are smartphones are more and more I mean people are becoming more and more aware that smartphones are are the computers of today and tomorrow like smartphones and tablets are it and I think as it continues to mature as the world continues to mature you're going to find manufacturers who are willing to say hey this worked in computers let's see if we can bring it to smartphones and some of them will fail miserably and but but some of them may find this market and there were people I know virtue isn't doing very well in Nokia's selling them off or whatever but there were people who would pay thousands of dollars for a phone that ran like you know did crappy dumb wear stuff and like it there were diamond-encrusted and that was their big thing but I think there are people who would pay a premium price for a phone that is custom-made and Ida you know I don't think that the software is the main problem opposed to laptops and desktop computers when you can basically throw in any hardware component you want a smartphone has limited space and it would take a huge standardization across manufacturers of internal components like CPUs GPUs memories they would have to have the same socket sizes they would have to have the same dimensions because basically in a bland I have never been in a plant producing smartphones but I've been another plans it just robots who take the internals and put it in their specific place so you have to have compatibility issues and this is something which I don't think anybody wants at the moment so you'd have to like a company would have to offer like five different configurations like you didn't really really custom build your very own but you could be like here accompanied be like here's five or six versions of the same thing it'll be like like an HP approach to two smartphones yeah and and you kind of look historically at of course Dell was first to do build built to order computers and at the time at the time you know there was gateway 2000 there was IBM their own all of those other huge industry players and then Adele came in and made a brand for itself based on the fact that it was going to do something different and it and yet they I don't remember what happened in the 90s but I think that if you went to the dell website you go to archive.org to see this your configurations were relatively limited I mean it wasn't nearly as extensive as it is today with you know 78 cpu options I think he had like three CPU options right two different kinds of rams would say were the first to do it so they they had that room because nobody else was doing anything like it so five choices is better than one yeah and I think that will I I think we'll see it i I just I agree I think you guys bring up really great points but I i think this industry moves is so obsessed with the future and it is still resistant to becoming stagnant as much as we complain about things like form factors and stuff it's just moving so quickly forward that I think we're gonna see a many a bold manufacturer do this at some point hey and let's not forget the people are slowly thinking about the idea of their phone replacing their laptop and their desktop through the external keyboards and monitors and such so having someone pay 1500 or 2000 bucks for a really high-end phone that replaces all your machines is not totally ridiculous right so let's uh we're gonna we're gonna jump to the piece of listener mail here this is from our friends sibin Zetlin I know who tells me I got his name right last times I think so from from Serbia right uh I don't remember he actually didn't say in this piece of listener mail and I don't want to I don't want to get it wrong by guessing this time but um he asks an interesting question which I have been thinking about 2 he says android has routing which enables it to be fully customized and tampered with iOS and iPhone have jailbreaking which is pretty similar to Android's routing with all that in mind I would like to ask a question what does Windows Phone have what kind of hack is there for windows phone I've been wondering this question for a long time well yeah but there's I specifically looked up windows phone 8 right and if you like Google like Windows Phone 8 custom mods or Windows Phone 8 modding or whatever it's amazing because it looks like this kind of this frontier town that's that's empty and not yet really built yet and waiting for people to move into it because no one like there's a bunch of fan sites and a bunch of URL squatters who have you know reserved you know crap like you know whatever windows phone 8 racks axe oars net or whatever but like there's not really a lot of talk about this because it's been out for like two weeks exactly but and it's built on an entirely different kernel than seven was so it has to be an entirely different approach and I remember what did windows phone 7 have what was the name of their like jailbreak thing was a chevron yeah everyone w yes yes yes but even that what that didn't allow you to do much right could you even put an image behind your home styles no no you can basically just side load applications and if you have a head the proper boot loaders and the proper files you could flash Iran which already was jailbroken right yeah so that like that's and that's it I mean inside loading apps is a big deal I don't mean to diminish it but this is a good point you know with iOS you can jailbreak it and make it look like kind of however you want even though it runs poorly with android of course you can do whatever you want to so like do you guys think we're gonna see with the windows phone 8 kind of cracking community take take shape or what I mean I think we've got to see it at some point right I think we will see more of the and then we have seen with Windows Phone 7 and Windows Phone 7.5 because exactly of the fact that it has a shared kernel with windows 8 yes agreed this is also this is a question that's kind of also addressed by our third piece of listener mail which I won't read butter Phillip from Cardiff in the UK thank you again for writing in but he's saying you know and the pictures up you can choose the background image and that image is displayed is the app icon and in xbox music the background changes to the current music you're playing so Phillips making the argument that windows phone is actually in some ways more customizable than than Android you know I if we're talking aspect customization yeah but if we're talking like to performance tweaks and stuff like that now then right yeah and it's just like performance tuning versus visual tuning yeah I think it calls to mind you know it the difference is between all these platforms again and how awesome the differences are how cool even though we have three only of three major players in the landscape there really is something for everybody but I would love to see the windows phone 8 hacking community kind of take off and deliver functionality that we don't have because for for as much as I love the modern UI and the Windows Phone experience as a whole there's so much about it that just still feels so bare bones you know what i want what i would like if Joe Belfiore is listening to this podcast I know he is because he commented recently on one of our boats and pocket now Joe if you're listening to this I would like to see this the ability to have a wallpaper on Windows Phone 8 and the live tiles to be 25 30 35 percent transparent so I can see the wallpaper behind it will still see that sells just like a glass style and that will be the ultimate customization for me oh man that sounds like something I would just hate but you know what options are good right i mean do you know I don't know I guess we'll have to see going forward I think what I'm excited guys just to kind of wrap up my thoughts on the day I'm excited that that Windows Phone 8 is finally here for all the things that I that I would change about it there's also a lot I really love about it i'm glad that we're going to kind of watch it grow and that'll be the way we close how 2012 with this kind of resurgent platform that is finally getting its day in the Sun it looks like and we'll see how that works out so quick windows phone 8 question for both of you guys yeah windows phone 8 according to gartner is okay windows phone according to gartner is at two-point-four percent market share clubwear DC windows phone and six months from now it's 2.4% globally yeah in six months from now I think it'll be at I think it'll be no less than eight percent and to whose agenda whose loss uh well there's still some blackberry share to eat up right and symbian and of course symbian yeah I think I think it's gonna be mainly blackberry and Symbian I don't think iOS I don't think android users are going anywhere i think uh iOS there might be some ports from iOS but yeah I would say reventon I I don't know about the market share number but there's there's one thing that's for sure which is that we talked about the the surface RT on a previous podcast and and there there it always be there have been rumors of a surface phone by Microsoft and that could be an extremely awesome amazing piece of technology that that Microsoft could spend all of their cash advertising to increase market share of Windows Phone but the problem is guess what they say scarred when the surface brand a little bit with this RT right so that'll that you know so that card if they play it and dare they play it because they're gonna you know really piss off a new Kia and some other OEMs what will be far less impactful now because of that the problems associated with the surface RT the diminished surface brand right but you know yeah I I don't know I just think that working in concert with windows 8 which of course has its own problems as far as like you know popularity and adoption desire and all that I think that it's such a big thing it's such a big unified push from Microsoft and they're so dedicated to making it work I if in six months the windows phone market share is less than eight percent I would be really really surprised I don't forget that iOS is at thirteen percent so that'll mean it will catch up to iOS quickly hmm yeah well you know I'm being a being uncharacteristically optimistic this morning so anyway um guys any final thoughts before we wrap it up cuz i think we are about ready to go get the work day started there goes our one hour podcast even when we try to be sure you know it's just but you know it's a good problem to have because we had listener mail and it's always great to hear from you listener so thank you for it will never make one we're both guess now it's never gonna happen okies do it guys thank you for uh thanks for joining me on the air today as usual listeners we're not sure what's going to happen next week which is a holiday week here in the United States we we may well return to the airwaves again but we will let you know either way and you should follow us on Twitter so you know whether or not we will be doing a show next week the official account is at pocket now tweets you can follow Tony over there at Anton d Naja int 0 ND na gy follow brandon minimun at brandon minimun you can follow me Michael Fisher at captain two phones you can follow us on Facebook and Google+ as well that's pocketnow not our personal accounts I don't know about you guys I do not generally friend anyone I don't actually know in real life sorry yeah that's the same with me too okay good just to clear that up but there's public yeah but Twitter totally yeah I'd anybody called me understand same here good please continually being us reviews on iTunes or zune if you like the podcast we really love hearing from you and if you have a topic question or suggestion for the podcast or you just want to say hi we love that too please email us podcast at pocketnow.com thanks so much for listening everybody will see you next week thank you you you