Gadgetory

from pocketnow.com this is PocketNow weekly hello and welcome to episode 02 three of the pocket not 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 from windows phone to android to iphone and sometimes even blackberry I'm your host Michael Fisher senior editor at pocket now and i'm joined possibly for the last time by our managing editor anton d Naja good day to use her good morning to you guys i hope you take a good look at the Sun because if the mains are right is gonna get ugly it's going to get really really brutal here on the last last pocket now weekly and it's not just add anton sharing the airwaves with us we also have a man who is closer possibly to the center of the destruction of the universe the man with the nexus collection Joe Levi the android guy happy last day on earth to you sir good morning good morning and remember the Mayans they left that they're not here anymore they took off when they knew the world was going to end that's true so they have nothing at stake anymore there's this is nothing to lose the thing is if you've tuned in at all to any of the news channels or news organizations that need to get desperately trying to fill column inches is all kinds of talk about the end of the end of the world do you guys remember where you were when you first heard this that's this Mayan myth we are going to tie this into smartphones in a second I just want to know no no no I just don't know where you I don't know it's been it's been circulating around here in Europe for like four or five six years I don't even remember yeah oh yeah what about you Joe at about the same time frame for you I want to say that I was standing on the top of a pyramid but no alas i think i saw out on twitter and if you saw it on twitter it must be true and if you saw them who else wants me in the past three years or so see I I watched a documentary on National Geographic or something like that in my eighth grade global studies class and I remember hearing like December 21st 2012 and I rotor town on a slip of paper so I wouldn't forget it and I was like this is when the world is ending it's very much like what I did a couple of weeks ago I was setting myself a reminder not to plan anything for today after tonight good idea don't you think that that given Tony those questions for you don't you think that given our impending demise then maybe we should have tomorrow off well but I have an old a calendar appointment it says busy and out of the office see as you see fit I'll tell you what it go ahead and invite me to that to that event and i'll go ahead and create here great that's excellent so I'm wondering why all these companies who run like extreme sports and whatnot have not been just advertising get your bucket list done and out of the way he they should be full this whole week leading until tomorrow they should be full with people just finishing off their bucket list yeah I feel like you know I feel like a lot of them have I bet like you know especially physical fitness companies like the guys who do tough mudder or whatever or like come to this apocalypse run you know and they've added a whole bunch of really horrible obstacles to it i don't know i'm not a not a physically physical fitness dude so the funny thing is that i think it was the beginning of this week so one of these days i was at a supermarket at a superstore and at the cashier and it was a queue of course a five or six or seven people and i was second in line and the third guy just stabs me on the shoulder and he's like are you also preparing for the end of days and i was like no I'm shopping for Christmas so that's awesome I I want to tie this in before we do an announcement here what Tony had a good suggestion for for making this somewhat relevant to our audience and I love your initial question Tony which was um what smartphone would you want to carry for the end of days if you could only carry one and then you kind of tried to talk about apps I don't want I wet unless you want to but I really want to hear what device you would want with you as the mall is ending around you I probably take my full-sized iPad because he's got huge battery life and even though it's a little bit heavy I think I can rely on it for two or three weeks would moderate day-to-day use Zev assess the radio energy of one of the preview and i don't think i will have anybody to call if this thing goes south that's a that's a solid point that's it that's a good call where I will be tweeting facebooking like an animal great good go that's right jus tony is going to go on a massive tweet rampage tomorrow so everyone get ready for that if the millions were right exactly if not then it's just gonna be really quiet girls are you I'm thinking we've got to have some some device that has the most bands possible because i can't see every cellular band going down and you still got to talk to people you still have can you imagine all the instagramming that's going on during this hail storm the zombies whatever it may be the sunset hashtag is just going to explode yeah literally literally explode oh yeah yeah I want all the bands I can and I'm probably going to use my little tip you know when you're in a crowded place and you just can't get a good LTE or hspa+ connection you drop it back to 2g and bam you are faster than everybody so you might want to drop that back to 27 megahertz am do I got my ham radio to fall back on so yeah there we go see it is abba solid answers the thing from me would be durability right because I'm gonna have to be running shock waves and like you know driving recklessly and all this kind of stuff and possibly falling into large bodies of water so i would i would take even though they're still I think all running like gingerbread or something I would take one of the the verizon wireless casio phones the really brutally like rug guys complain about Bill updates exactly yeah that's what I want to do for the energy i want to complain that i'm stuck on gingerbread but at least my phone still works because it's a brick and i still don't know how to pronounce it I'd the ghazan or the jizz one or their geez whatever the casio brand name is anyway that's that's where we're sitting for the end of the world be careful we're gonna lose our safe tag calling the casio phone I was bit about two minutes ago I was gonna make a joke about how I can't wait to live tweet yourself you know what go live tweet yourself go live tweet that's awesome that that's gonna be a live tweet just watch for that perfect I'm ready just do it right now announcements did Tony do we want to have we yet found the perfect match for pocket now or do we want to remind everyone that we are still hiring I don't know because honestly we had so many applications that I'm having a hard time going through all of them I have probably crunched through approximately fifty to sixty percent but the more the merrier as as I said in my post we are looking for somebody and we are picky so i might not be able to answer everybody that doesn't mean i don't thank you for your application but we are looking for quality and the sure why not please make him an announcement again and absolutely then with then in fact pocket now is is still hiring there is a post on this podcast post at pocket not accounting click on that link and or there's a link on this posted anyway you click on the link now so you'll forget to put it there anyway yeah exactly right now it's it's um looking at it right now it's in there here's the thing i think a lot of people kind of disqualify themselves from like they don't disqualify themselves from contests because i'm not that much of a jerk right we don't disqualify people just ferb randomly screw it up but if if all the details are in the post like if the hiring post has all the information you need but like you tweet at me or you send me an email asking a question that's answered in the pod in the in the post i'm kind of less inclined to to recommend you right i mean you guys you remember those in elementary school or like do they ever give you that trick test where the test is like 20 questions long and the directions at the top are like read all the directions before beginning the test and the last direction is like only answer question 20 you know what I'm talking about I get it but I never had the one of those yeah I'd want to be in fourth grade one of those fooled me and I was I felt like a dunce for the rest of my school career I said if they ever break out that test again I'm gonna beat it anyway the point is follow directions uh yeah it's pretty much like a RT f m.o.r.e yes yes really effing manual exactly it is is that the new tablet from Microsoft that has a radio tuner building that's what I thought initially I was like what are we talking about some kind of wide band instrument alright anyway we have we have some things to cover we've shuffled up the run down just a little bit today we want to start with Android because of our guest of honor on the airwaves today and Joe Levi has been running the cyanogenmod installing cm10 or variations of CM on various devices I think you were you have a video up from the past week where you're running it on the gs3 but you also you got cyanogenmod attend on one running on the HTC g2 is that correct yes the t-mobile g2 also known as the HTC vision that's kind of this successor to the nexus one that had a slide-out keyboard that everybody said the hinges were gonna break on yeah that was one with the special hinges right where they had a funny design that were both like swing arms yeah it was kind of a lift out and all right and just really weird design people thought it was flimsy well here we are in retrospect that design is rock solid there's no problems with the hinges so take that so this is like a two-year-old phone at least possibly a three year old phone yeah it's it's getting up there yeah i think it's it's only two years old i'm looking at the specs now and it's been announced / launched in october 2010 really ok yeah so just over two but still still an old phone and the specs are crappy yeah right and the benchmark show it so first of all this is not an official cyanogenmod 10.1 this is someone who took CM 10.1 from the you know the cyanogenmod repositories and applied a vendor overlay to it to make it work on the HTC g2 and it works on the HTC g2 it's beautiful it's fluid it it's every bit as fast as I remember gingerbread on it and wow just don't benchmark it and you'll probably be happy with it now do those poor benchmark scores affect its usability in terms and outside the UI like I mean if okay you've got the launcher be able to scroll and you've got you know you've got fluidity and the notification shade and stuff but can you play like anything more advanced than angry birds on it can you can use Netflix for example can you do that kind of stuff yeah yeah I didn't have any problem with videos and whatnot I didn't do an awful lot of intensive testing with gaming but the only thing that I really found as a detractor other than you know just rough around the edge of stuff that you'd expect from an alpha of a nightly was that apps took longer to open and close and to switch between then what I'm used to do and I'm running on the Nexus 4 so I'm used to that being almost before I even want to switch apps it switches apps so very very fast this it was just painfully slow but it worked and it did it and believe it or not jelly bean looks really really good on that hardware I was surprised you know what I'm not surprised because it takes it a lot of cues from the first next from the nexus one when it's closed mean I don't know when it's open i think it's a little bit kind of a cumbersome device but i bet a jelly bean derivative looks pretty good on that on that hardware i do want to say though that it completely irrelevant but i think an alpha of a nightly is probably one of my new favorite fake album titles so thank you for that that that's gonna be your band let's go now yes I want to ask you something Joe it's the plan for 2013 we're gonna make a band go ahead tell me I'm sorry if the CM 10.1 basically Android jelly bean runs smoothly on the g2 with its specifications then can you how should I say this can you explain maybe why is Sony not updating phones like the Xperia U which specifications whys are at least as good as the g2 nice just for the sake of the example the t-mobile g2 if you guys don't remember runs an 800 megahertz processor and the Xperia U for instance in this particular example runs a 1 gigahertz processor ram is the same 512 internal storage the same gigabytes right so there are really two things you've got can the hardware handle the OS and do so in a manner that's going to be acceptable to the end users the end users are you and me and our listener might be the different end users than sony or HTC or Samsung has in mind when they're advertising their product and the number one thing that they don't want to do with a product is release something that then they have to spend more time to support that's more time that's more money for them they're not making any more money off of that product they already sold it so anything they do to it is just cutting into the the profit that they've already made on it it does take quite a bit of time to know to shoehorn new stuff with old drivers and get it all working together and there have been quite a few changes in in the driver architecture and whatnot from way back when to where we are right now so more than anything that the hardware can run it they just don't want to run it and possibly have a less than what they have right now user experience this is this is interesting because we all know that jelly bean has project butter and and my head project butter which which makes Android fluid would it will come down to this the same specifications one phone on the left running official supported Android two points on thing and on the right Android jelly bean with project butter one would say that project butter would make it smoother and the experience would be better than the official to point something build at least that's what happened in my head as long as you have a minimum threshold of hardware that's absolutely true and I think what Sony's doing is they're just evaluating it saying we don't think that this device meets that threshold to to have that same smooth and fluid user interface that other people may be used to and then their devices get a black guy and their brand would probably get a black eye too so go ahead and go to the open source community and route and have your project butter and Sony doesn't have to worry about it and the last question i promise now i'm reading my own post and didn't recall well so the Xperia U Xperia needle or my row and xperia tipo or type and of course Xperia Sola will not be upgraded beyond android 4.0 so that that leaves me to understand that android 4.0 be running these now why can't they run 4.1 or 4.2 I mean they are point releases or is it just that Sony is just this is a marketing bull and they don't want the latest on a one year old halliburtt hardware or a couple of months old hardware 4.1 and 4.2 the the different flavors of jelly bean are a little bit more than just a point release they're doing quite a bit more I would have expected that we would have started out you know with a 4.5 when we came along with project butter I felt that it was more than just a point one release 4.2 would have been just a point release up from that because there's not a lot that's different or changed so there's there's some behind-the-scenes technological stuff without going into terrible detail that that's quite a bit different from ice cream sandwich that said I think it's more just the money they don't they've already been working on a cream sandwich they've got sunk dollars over there they don't want to Reese pin that money over with 4.1 4.2 to quote unquote start the process all over again okay thank you i if you guys have similar questions head which would run answer just like me there's your answer four-point-oh jelly be a four-point-oh ice cream sandwich is i think it's just not worth for them to upgrade it to 4.1 and have respect case yeah you know this conversation has made me think of like the experiences I've had on jelly bean with my Nexus 7 and Jaime's Galaxy Nexus which he was kind enough to send me for a side project and you know it so bothersome to me that they spent all this time optimizing jelly bean and and implementing project butter and of course it was not wasted effort i mean really is buttery but after a couple weeks and once again this is why we have series like after the buzz after a couple weeks when that that kind of new hotness wears off and you've installed about 50 apps and you've used the thing and it's got like four days of uptime you can still get the thing to lag pretty easily and here specifically i'm talking about the nexus 7 joe i don't know if this is true in your neck says four but on the Galaxy Nexus in the nexus 7 I can do this and it so you know it's frustrating and I understand that that's going to happen to any device no matter how smooth and well optimized it is i mean i can get i can eat if i try really hard i can even get a windows phone tube to lag but it's just so frustrating when your expectations have been set so high with something even you know with something called project butter so I don't know it's just I guess I guess that's just my little moment to shed a little tear for the fact that you eyes are never going to be perfect you just have to do whatever I do every night I turn off my devices and power them on in the morning and there goes 2322 our up time no leg ooh that one way to do it isn't it that's a good idea I'm gonna do I mirror your sentiments with the Nexus 7 and this kind of goes back to to the concern that Tony was bringing up of the three current Nexus devices the nexus 7 the nexus 10 in the nexus 4 of those three all of them running the same version down to the sub point four point two point one the only one that I've ever seen noticeable annoying lag on is the nexus 7 so why do you suppose it is is there a hardware explanation for that I have to assume that it's just the the slightly lower spec of the hardware that we have in the nexus 7 compared to the other two devices that is somehow being slow and laggy i'm going to try Tony's trick and do a cold shutdown every morning or every night to see if that takes care of it to a nighttime shutdown yes pretty much the same i bet that you're muting your devices overnight so you're not reading emails overnight so why just not turn them off nighttime shutdown that's gonna be a band name nighttime shutdown and alpha what is it alpha of a nightly it's gonna be our first out okay glee survive tomorrow's if we survive tomorrow yes we're gonna play we're gonna play the ruins well that's awesome thank you for your free two thoughts on that joe is as i was telling the team i've been elbows deep in the TFS stuff all weeks i haven't had a chance to look at any of this it's good to hear your your first hand impressions of running cm on these various devices would you let me just before we have to the next thing would you would you either of you consider using a very old device with a with a new CM version as your daily driver for a little bit this just puts me in mind of all these these questions that we get from people who still want to hang onto physical keyboards who still have a favorite old device that they really miss and they wish they could carry it but it doesn't have the newest software like if you could flash a current CM build onto any older device what would it be for you guys do you mean Joey I don't imagine you would run around with the g2 by choice uh yeah you know I'm one of the people I started out with the g1 and loved it because of its physical keyboard and it's funky flip out screen and why do we always have to funky flip out screen android i went to the nexus one after that and really hated not having a physical keyboard which is why i went with the g2 after that now since then keyboards have in create a V improved the soft keyboards have improved screens have gotten bigger so my big meaty thumbs can type on them well but just met even just setting it up flip and open that keyboard having the screen auto rotate and I can type right there there's something nice about having that physical keyboard so yeah to answer your question if I had to go back in time and pick a phone to to use a daily driver it will probably be this g2 Wow alright well that's pretty cool I've told you have an old device you'd like to go back to not necessarily but to answer your question I think that it all depends on your use use it scenario if you're like me and all you do on your phone and tablet is browse the web basically work on your email calendar contacts tweet Facebook and do the light stuff without playing games or something which which would drain probably the last percentage of the CPU I don't see why not if you have an old device which you love and for which you probably cared until now if you don't do heavy stuff sure go on with the latest version of Android if you will not have problems with such lightweight utage if you are playing games then probably it's time to change your phone yeah I carry around a separate gaming device well and ironically that's what we were doing with those older devices because we didn't have these high-end high CPU games and apps it was all just it's a smart phone which means it's a phone that has email and web browsing and some other stuff with it now we kind of overlooked oh there's a phone in there too you know you it's a gaming console with a phone whenever we're doing a review and I'm like I'm like firing up the test notes I mean there has been more than one occasion where I'm finishing up the test notes portion I'm like wow there's a whole lot of text in there all right moving on to the next thing which I feel like I'm forgetting something and all of a sudden I'll be like oh crap I didn't talk a bit about phone calls like I didn't I didn't discuss the calling situation also I have to go back in and be like oh yeah by the way here's all my call notes on voice calling it's it's true have you ever gotten to that point in a review where you're just finishing it all up it's scripted it's it's it's ready to go and you you have that sinking feeling and you realize not only have you forgotten to mention any of the phone call notes and specs but you also forgot to even make a phone call on it because you're so busy using it as a typing device or it a mini tablet that happened very recently on yes out with the deity vests which we'll talk about in a little bit yeah I had to make a series of phone calls in different network conditions over the course of about a very short span of time it was like less than than than half a day because I yeah because I didn't I had started out with all the frankly the more important stuff yeah I think I think this is something specific to you guys in the u.s. you don't really necessarily love to talk on the phone your texting and messaging no well around here and especially in my case and people who are in my inner circle we are talking like 2-3 hours on the phone Wow daily so that means i'm having like 5 or 6 20 minutes conversation every day so i cannot miss something like that we prefer to talk on a fight it's of course it's free to talk with in the same operator you don't pay for calling you don't pay for being called so sure why not let's talk you know I gotta tell you about you know that's pretty common you know talking with the same operator you're like oh wait are you want sprint yeah I'm one sprint okay well let's let's talk and we won't use our minutes but sprint did something really interesting a couple years ago or where they were like hey unlimited mobile to mobile now doesn't just mean calling from a sprint phone to a sprint phone now anytime you call a cell phone you don't use your minutes it doesn't matter if it's verizon if it's AT&T any other carrier and we took it one step further and the blighted the landlines to you guys did yeah i mean not us but here we can we can talk to learn lines without using up your minutes you're you you're charging your bill so basically you're talking about unlimited calling aren't you yeah yeah okay well that's much simpler isn't it yeah let's talk about devices let's talk about some things that i don't frankly i'm just annoyed by and I I think saner heads will have better opinions to offer about these Samsung is about to drop to Android devices possibly with you there's a question mark on this headline Samsung is possibly going to unveil the galaxy frame and mwc and then Samsung has also announced the galaxy grand which we'll talk about in a second Tony what is this galaxy frame and why do I care I don't think you will care at all and as I don't think I don't think you care about the galaxy grand either but just for the sake of conversation it is rumored that mwc will bring a galaxy frame now the fishy thing of about this is that the sources which are I think Sam mobile sources say that this phone will be serial or model number GT s6810 now I've done some research and the GE T s6810 is referenced as a galaxy ace variety so this will either be a follow-up to the Ace or it will be something completely unrelated now what I think we can play until tomorrow guessing what the galaxy frame will mean mm can be a bezel this phone maybe I don't think Samsung will introduce something like that on a mid-ranger but there's also theory now yeah that's true but I'm more inclined to agree with Jaime and that we have a galaxy camera now and this galaxy frame will probably be an android-powered photo frame on your desk I mean just imagine that so it's going to have a kickstand on the back up but and it's also going to have one of those little inverted keyhole things so you can hang it on the wall probably with Wi-Fi or USB attachments report or micro SD card support and why not but that's very close to tablet territory well and they're also gonna release it with an hspa+ variety so you don't have to look out setting up your your Wi-Fi with it and you just pay another you know what 30 40 bucks a month to stream your pick let's do it and when you go to verizon to ask for a contract for your Galaxy camera are you get an additional contract for a galaxy frame sure yeah well you exactly why not throw carrier contracts and everything and you know what what why am I surprised at this possibility I think you're spot on I think I'm is speculation is pretty cool there but you know it's it's it's just such a shame that the galaxy brand continues to be applied further and further afield from its original mark when you mention the galaxy ace and I remember I mean when I first heard about the galaxy ace I guess last year whenever it was it was kind of released I was excited because it was a smaller device and sometimes I like smaller smartphones but it had the galaxy brand which at the time wasn't so diluted so I was like oh well what is is Samsung making a smaller device you know that has really awesome specs I mean that's what I was excited about and of course no that wasn't the case at all it was just Samsung deciding that they were gonna throw the word galaxy on everything yeah well if this is going to be a frame will see it at NBC but you my friend have better chances at CES which is a consumer electronic show to see the galaxy jet maybe a jet water dish washer machine with in from the galaxy family running Android hey ya could definitely gotta find the the new the new galaxy shower head I do have a samsung natural gas dryer downstairs so em that's a thought Alexei they didn't call the galaxy but it's a little bit longer and then as well yeah the new version that's gonna send status updates and notifications to your Android device that's whenever you have some accounts dryer yeah exactly it's just letting you know that the permanent press cycle is complete yeah you saved 22 dekha therms today first use of deca terms on the podcast thank you Joe you win the prize let's get let's get the galaxy grand out of the way this the this is the same exact story I mean it's I'm looking at it right now it is it's a galaxy s3 body with really really underpowered specs it looks like but I mean they're not too bad we're looking at of what a 1.2 gigahertz processor a gig of ram and eight gigs of storage with an eight megapixel camera android for 10 12 and a 2100 mega milliamp hour battery I guess the big disappointment here is what is the display right oh it depends everybody said that this phone was targeted and aimed at senior citizens and I can totally see myself using this in 30 years from now holding the galaxy brand in my left hand and a paper bag in my right hands sitting on a bench and tweeting about stuff I shouldn't tweet at that age but seriously know if this is aimed at senior people es larger text they probably won't see pixels they'll probably won't see fonts which are below a certain threshold so yeah why not let them have their galaxy this is a 55 inch diagonal wvga display I mean it's gotta look terrible but but I guess you're right if it's targeted properly if it's if it is indeed the Jitterbug of the Samsung world then no bit or the knot of the galaxy world rather I don't and I'm not oh there goes the surface with some sorry team ok yeah I don't want to talk about the galaxy grand anymore can we just Jodi do you don't have any good food great feelings about that thing to do you want to revive I'm just wondering why they didn't call the Samsung Galaxy Grandma and Grandpa bazinga I have just one additional note if he ever since the galaxy s3 and through the galaxy note 2 and now with the galaxy grand and with the galaxy s3 mini Samsung is reusing the exact same outer aspect and design policies for its bones yeah so I'm inclined to say that Samsung is pulling on HTC when HTC back in 2011 you use the same exact design for all of its phones now I'm not sure how this how the market will react to this but people are already getting bored of this design which was a good design back in May when they introduced the S free but they have to change something for the s4 or for the 2013 lineup you know that is a really really solid point tell me and it's I want to touch on it with the with the achieve ass thing um that would be an awesome segue but I don't want I don't want to jump over this piece of news but thank you can I come back to that in like one minute I just want to make everyone aware that because I wasn't aware until is making the podcast outlined the Google Play is doing their calendar countdown right now and what is this is like a deal this is like a discount thing we've got titles marked down to like ten cents each and some in some cases and it's running from what is it December 17th a couple days ago through January one with one day deals going on and I guess like the first the first days thing was a $35 booking credit on a hotel tonight which I Joe I think you and I were just talking about via email yes yes we were stay tuned for some information about that particular app in an upcoming piece yeah I I think it's cool i like it when app stores run you know run promotions like this because HP did it with the web west to the kind of jumpstart that and I know Windows Phone had its own kind of discounted app days and stuff and does this happen often and I just don't notice it on the google play store it's happened a lot more frequently than a lot of people may have realized it seems to be getting more and more mired down with all the new offerings of different stuff you know your book your magazines your movies your TV and play right yeah apps you always knew hey I've got this free app grape or I've got this Chi bap great and now it's kind of it's not all ten cents is it free is it not as a it's getting kind of lost but I think Google is reacting to what Amazon is doing with their app store where you've got a free app a day that just entices you just go over to their store and so you hate what's on for free today and it hopefully will drive people to to get in there and peripheral e drive up other sales as well I don't know lemon Don on chicken and the egg story but the you guys probably know but there are probably people lots of people who don't know that Apple had this running for a couple of years now but here's the catch it's not running to my knowledge in the US Apple has a campaign which is called 12 days of Christmas or 12 days to Christmas which is valid in the UK and I think it starts the first or the second day of Christmas through January one where you can get basically free apps books movies you name it for free but this is in the UK and I haven't seen this in the US so this begs for a question one why not in the US and two heads up to google for beating Apple to the punch punch on that yeah I know yeah it's fun to see these big app stores doing it where you don't like you know it's like what why are you guys what do you feel the need to do this is it to keep the devs happy because it's not for increased mindshare everyone knows about the App Store on iOS and most people know about the google play store for I think it's marketing here because google / apple / amazon are one hundred percent in control of what titles they are pushing and in what they so say you have ten days that will be 10 software titles or maybe 5 to software titles and some other content now getting that inner circle getting on that list but i think it's it's it's it all comes down to getting to having a relationship between you as a developer and the application store because it will expose you to lots of user who'll probably either purchase yours other software titles or maybe even pay for an upgrade if they get the application on your phone for the first time that's it yeah that's a solid point I think there are a lot of layers to it that I that you don't really understand until you dig deeply into it and it's like okay but now that's a solid explanation i'll buy that by having talked to you having talked to some developers that have been in that situation where their app was featured free on the amazon appstore what not a lot of times that comes out just as a complete surprise to them sometimes they're sent an email saying hey we're going to do this but the people that I've talked to in the developer community that they think it's a two-edged sword yes it gets them noticed yes it gets there you know their product and their brand in front of a whole new set of eyes but those eyes then need support and you've got a whole bunch of new devices that you you may not have sold to before that now you've got to go in and bug fix and you didn't make any money to to to all that so it's a lot of extra work for hopefully some marketing that will carry you through so opinions are it's really mixed from the people who write the apps whether or not that kind of marketing pushes is worth it or not here's a question for you guys you are both developers for whatever platform and I'm running that platform and Joe you've got a 199 application and Michael you've got a point 99 application and your install base is about fifteen thousand users 15,000 devices I write an email to you guys and I'm saying this I want to feature your apps and I want to give them for free for one day the question is are you agreeing to this because I exposing your applications to more people or will you just reply to me to go somewhere else because you are losing money and you prefer to sell your application too much less people but still gain some money that's the thing right I feel like I would be totally on board with making a little less money if i get my app in front of a whole bunch of eyeballs you know I know it's not quite the same thing as a manufacturer brand name situation because I think a lot of people don't know development houses and a lot of people don't know individual developer names but there are a couple apps that i have on my android phones where it's like I've they've updated frequently enough for I have used them frequently enough for I've seen them in the place for frequently enough that it's like oh I know that developer name and what else has he done you know a couple apps have surpassed that threshold for me so I'm like oh yeah let me see more from that developer so if i can if i can get my title in front of more eyeballs and you play that stupid numbers game and even if point five percent of people only that's tiny sliver of the population learns my my name and looks at my other titles i think that's a good thing I think it's liked anything else that you have to build very slowly like you know audiences for for television shows or audiences for anything Joe that's a hard question for me to answer because I I'm in that situation I i haven't sold 15,000 copies of my app and my app yes you did and my example he did well I know but I'm talking for the real world I have a nap and I do sound like a buck 99 nobody's saying yeah telecoms name is Joe ojos application yeah let's primp Joe's app I've given the what's happened in the news recently I don't know if it's that good so I'll just will mention about Josette this is the new TV show that we're making in 2013 pimp jose app there there you go so just really short shout out to all of the families in connecticut that are going through pain and lost morning right now our thoughts and prayers are definitely with you my my app follows one of my side hobbies and that's firearms for self-defense and i have an app that has articles that are regular everyday people who have used a firearm to stop a crime to save a life to to save someone from that that pain in agony i'm not advocating that we do anything in the light of what's happened in Connecticut but that that's my app so as as lightly as i can say that it's my app that's what it does let's so it's an aggregator basically and and yes how long ago did you write the app and what's what's it's like you know mmm a sales figures been like and I don't want to ask you for permission I excuse me for specifics and stuff like that but I if you haven't that's for this person I don't ask you for your permission or another no no I'm just curious as to how long it's been on the market and and how happy you've been with its organic growth the app has been out there about a year now it consumes articles that run on one of my websites so so it's not just aggregating from from new sources it's actually stuff I have to put time and effort into to to write the article cite the sources and whatnot I've got shy of a thousand installs on it I haven't spent a single cent to to advertise it I think people that are in that that are into that will just naturally organically find it and those who aren't won't those who aren't specifically looking for it won't and that way you know I realize it's a polarizing subject so I don't want to be in your face with it if if this is a topic that appeals to you then you'll find it and I'm happy making I think I've made like three hundred four hundred dollars off it so far which is that's great almost enough to cover for the development costs and she's gonna say you must be about ready to break even it just about yes d have you ever this is the last question I'll ask about this because we do have to jump into Windows Phone have you ever considered developing an app for a different platform because this is the question I always ask yes in fact I'm a Microsoft developer by profession and I have all of the tools that I need to write an app for both for Windows and Windows Phone I haven't done that yet because it's still kind of settling down they don't put a mortgage here that's cool on the other side I just have heartache about Apple taking thirty percent and charging what is it a hundred bucks a year for the privilege of having an account to publish stuff in their store think of all the iPads and the iphones yeah so so me with my particular app I don't think my demographic is going to be realized as well on iOS as it is on Android there's just a different mindset between the two user groups and I think android better better addresses that for the my target audience but yes I have considered it I would like to have it just so i can say go out and get the app it's available on the top three platforms and you know then i can retire but you know it's just a hobby and I don't see retirement fit from that coming anytime soon well it's it's it's good to hear what it's like on that side like Goldman things yes honey this is the time i ask you how is the samsung achieve s yes it is okay and i delete the script off now yes yes you can go ahead and take that off for you of your run are very cute the we're gonna jump into Windows Phone here and the ax t vas review just went up about 10 minutes before we started recording the podcast so this is new this is hot and fresh and awesome a commenter I think our first commenter said who's a frequent commenter I just can't see him right now because of the page won't load we said are you guys the first the first US side within a TV s review the truth is were not we were beaten up we were beaten by engadget by by a little while but as good open okie oh thank you we but we are one of the first certainly and it is it feels good to have a device in a timely fashion and I have to we have to thank samsung for that because they were really great about getting us the device very quickly and I'm coming off of maybe 72 to 96 hours of total just kind of intense time with the device i think i've left I've love lost some sleep as a result of just sitting in bed with the phone and and and traveling across Greater Boston with the device and oh my goodness it's amazing Tony sent me an e-mail this morning you know je and you know I don't you want to want to want to detail that I was I was I sent Michael an email after after reading the draft of the tv's review it was probably five minutes before it went live and I was like hey Michael why is the atif s can we okay spoiler alert the achieve s scored eight point five in our review and the Nokia Lumia 920 regardless if it's of a mtng or the international version scored 8.3 and I was like okay with all the PureView things and everything all the hype about nokia why is the Divas at 8.5 and the Lumia 920 at 8.3 exactly and and it's a totally valid question and actually when Tony sent me that message I was kind of half awake and so I was like wow why is that what's going on and then I kind of had myself away for 20 seconds I'm like what did you do did you mess up self and then I was like no no self I did not because despite the fact that i think the Lumia 920 has a more innovative design despite the fact that the 920 has a far superior camera specific particularly in night modes the atif s is a much better device for power users or anyone who wants added flexibility in usage and that is because of the thing that everyone groans about about the windows phone 8x from HTC about the Lumia 920 from from Nokia these high-end devices from two big-name manufacturers have excluded removable battery and expandable storage and Samsung has brought that with deity vests they've got an a micro SDXC card slot in there that can you know take I mean theoretically I think that that standard can go up to two terabytes on the card size but I'm sure that there's some is there a windows phone 8 limitation does anybody know there's some software limitation windows phone 8 that I think prevents it from going above a certain threshold but you can throw is probably a 64 gig card in there and be okay and 64 gigs on top of a 32 gig at yvettes internal storage mean that's a lot of storage you can carry around with you and you can swap cards on the fly and the same thing with the battery the battery is 2,300 milliamp hours which is great and the battery life to begin with is fantastic but you can also carry around a spare battery with you and swap it in if that one does die for your ready for your day to be over and these are things you can't do with either of the flagships from the other manufacturers so while I have great respect for the 8x and the 920 and while I love my own 920 the deity vests definitely I think deserves a higher score on those metrics because of this because of that and because of the larger display which is quite beautiful it's the same panel as on the galaxy s3 and you know the camera is the same module is on the galaxy s3 so all these kind of the people who said well this is like a galaxy s3 for windows phone that's pretty accurate it is that it is but you know and this is kind of it's a shame that this segue didn't work before because would've been great because Sony were talking about how Samsung is like if you like waiting they build right is like a variation on this theme and that's entirely true but on the achieve s they've managed to do it in a way that that is slightly different it's not I agree i think i wrote in the review it was like looked does it sort of look like samsung isn't really trying with this yes it's a variation it's nothing that's going to blow the doors off but looking at the Windows Phone landscape as a whole in 2012.the atif s is the most different of them by being the most conservative you know you don't have these kind of blown out crazy colors and then fun soft touch and like weird polycarbonate it's like now this is a phone that's pretty typical looking and it happens to run Windows Phone 8 the only thing that's really stand out about it is that the battery door which is incredible I mean I've never seen better fake metal it sounds like a backhanded compliment but it's totally not it's really amazing looking and I was showing it to my uh it's am I saying this I i think i am sorry i've recently i really i recently uh got myself a girl i'm seeing and i decided to sort of make it official so I guess I showed it to my girlfriend last night ah that's because of all those youtube comments you're getting it's exactly right no I I showed it to her and and she was didn't quite know what to make of it because it looks like metal and it looks so much like metal that battery door in the ax t vas I mean it's just it would fool my father who would was a materials guy like he would see that and he'd be like oh yeah no that's totally brushed aluminum and then you touch it and it has the feel of plastic I'm not cheap plastic necessarily but whatever I'm just kind of like having a love fest for the ax t VES over here I really like it is it the Samsung slimy plastic no it's not it's not the hyper glaze that you that is on the s3 that makes the s3 feel mm sort of cheap it so how does it feel does it feel slippery and slimy it doesn't feel like metal but does it feel good uh okay metal would feel better all right brushed aluminum would feel better and feel cool to the touch it would give the phone a more substantial feel because it's 135 grams just like the s3 and I think that's too light for me personally but it when you touch it it feels more like a semi-gloss finish it feels more like maybe a kitchen counter or like this is going to make it sound awful but like Formica you know how that bled laminate feels on fake wood like that's kind of how it feels it doesn't feel like hyper gloss or hyper blaze rather so not to spoil anything in the the review because everybody after listening to the podcast is going to go out and look at that by the way especially you android guys because just looking at the picture you're going to say holy crap what rom is that and how do I put it on my sgs3 yes it looks like the N android anyway so without spoiling the article does it feel good or is it just weird I will say it feels better to me than the galaxy s3 I've never been a fan of how the galaxy s3 feels in the hand it feels like a galaxy s3 that has been given a little bit more money in the development process you know I mean that that's about as close as far as I can go because the s3 has those kind of curved river stone pebble influences and while the 80s does have wide radius corners it has kind of softly curved corners it is not as soft visually as the s3 is it's a little harder it's a little more like an s2 and that somehow makes its it better in the hand I think I wanted to circle back just for one second to the idea that Samsung is recycling the design and we're being a little bit too and Samsung because if I come to think of it Apple's been doing the same with the iphone 4 and the iphone 4s and the iphone 5 and certainly the crowds favorite nokia is doing the same with the 800 to 900 a 920 so that's pretty true it's just yeah if we were too harsh then yeah we're sorry but that's just I think because of the fact that Samsung has managed to grow so much people are expecting something more from them and I personally wish that every phone they released would look differently and that's of course not possible yeah exactly at some point reality has to set in and you have to be like okay well this is your design identity company a and I understand and I may be sick of it but it's what you're doing you know and we have to make the point also that Samsung is not doing poorly with the galaxy note 2 and Galaxy s3 design I mean those things are moving in the millions and millions and it makes sense for them to extend that to the achieve s I'm just happy to see that that that what could have been a very boring phone is not and I was even a little surprised by how many titles there were in the Samsung's own the kind of custom software that Samsung makes now I need to be clear there are only like six but i think i was expecting even fewer than that and a couple of them pretty useful so if Samsung could get some really awesome custom apps in the windows phone 8 store that would be that would make this phone even more compelling hey Michael even though i'm ninety-nine point ninety-nine percent sure that the camera module on this particular phone is the same as the one on the s3 and the note to do you see any differences between camera performance on the achieve s and on the galaxy s3 is there may be a difference in how Windows Phone handles the camera compared to android or is just the end product the same you know iiii think the software does does a little something to it i didn't really mention this in review because i wasn't sure and I wasn't able to do any side by side testing of the two but it I I think that images could that come from the achieve s maybe are a hair softer the color saturation might be a hair less I'm looking at the sample photos in the review right now and I mean though they look quite good but really the bigger difference for me was in the video where and this is not a Windows Phone problem I think because other devices have handled this better the autofocus is a little slow on the atif s like we're before you go from a long shot to a macro shot when I bring the phone from the horizon down to my coffee cup like the 822 in the 810 the Lumias will would adjust kind of like that whereas the etfs takes a second it's like oh you've changed something ah yes what I mean so that yeah that's the a yes I see so anyway at any rate that's that's the achieve SI please do see the review I think I put a note to listen to the podcast at the end of the review so if you came here from the review thank you and feel free to go back to the review will just keep on that keep this loop going on before we leave the ativa I just have to throw in samsung absolutely has to team up with Jamie Lee Curtis or I don't know her doppelganger Sigourney Weaver and do some kind of a co-branding tie-in with Danny yeah and an advertising campaign for the activia yogurt because it sounds so much the same every time I hear a t vas I think I'm about to start listening to an activia yogurt commercial buy a samsung atty vests and get 6 free cases of activia you active cultures for better colon help take care of your smartphone needs while taking care of your digestive system yeah I think that could work Joe what's little citizen since we use our smartphones well never necessarily Tony saw that coming for about 40 miles away it was like no Oh God um let's let's talk about something else let's talk about the just briefly i also got an update while I was polishing off the Samsung at Eve s review last night the Lumia 920 and 820 have received updates to what is this version 10 to 11 of Windows Phone yes 10 to 11 yeah and that means that they are getting what is it now mine came in and then I was like oh great thank you update and then I went back to the TV so I haven't even played with it but apparently this is giving us finally the ability to keep the Wi-Fi radio on while the phone is in standby which by the way is probably the most overdue feature ever right now and some some other tweaks data saving internet explorer tweaks it looks like but there's there's another big one that I'm missing guys what is it well then there are improvements on nokia side and there are improvements on the OS Microsoft side yeah the Nokia side is Wi-Fi in camera and stuff like that and the Microsoft side has messaging improvements with the multiple risks when it ends yeah you can reject calls with text message now and that yeah okay so listen but while we're talking about updates so nokia did update a slew of their nokia collection in advance of an following this update so I've but just been doing app updates for like two days and one of those is the most awesome thing ever I've been going nuts with the cinemagraph app on nokia and i've been trying to figure out a way Tony to like pitch this editorial idea and I just can't figure out a way to do it but I want to I really well I don't think about an angle oh my I I have been if you are listeners if you have a windows phone or an iOS device or an Android device and you can get a cinemagraph half but the if you have a nokia windows phone the cinemagraph app from nokia is so much fun I've been busting it out at parties I mean this is one of those things that I haven't one of those feelings I haven't had in awhile with a smartphone where you take it out at a party and people are kind like oh that's cool you got a new phone what's that you let's talk about it but when you show them when you show people who aren't familiar with cinemagraphs the cinemagraph application it just blows their minds and if you haven't heard of it it's all it is really is just selective animation it's it's it's not a video and it's not a photograph it's a photograph with moving components and what you've called an animated gif right back in the good ole days yeah but but you know where an animated gif is a jiff as Adam Lane was kind enough to correct me on in when I saw him in the city and animated gif is typically a direct transposition from video so the whole frame is moving all the time with a cinemagraph you can select what element you want to move but the rest of the photo is static so that's the best way I can explain it it is still packaged in an animated gif though but so you can basically have the candle static and only the flame would be moving exactly or in one of my first cinemagraphs i have three cameras three candles burning in the shot but only one of them is flickering and I've got another one of anyway they're amazing and you break this out at a party and you just start you just start snapping away but the problem up until now was that you couldn't share the cinemagraph like in order to even get the damn thing off the phone you had to connect a cable to your computer and pull it off the phone but now you can with this update you can share the cinemagraph a nokia will host it for you and it'll just send a link to whoever you want to see do you know what the format of the file is or whether you can export it maybe as a gift and the uploaded somewhere you can but something happens on the phone software when you try and get it off the phone like when you try and send it as an email from the phone it'll send it and it'll arrive as a jiff but when the user when the recipient opens it up it's just a single frame oh so it sucks yeah but it's great now I mean that problem is solved you just let know it you nokia host at nokia sends a link for you it's it's great anyway it please check out the cinemagraph have if you if you have not i have just been having a ball with it and I think you know it's an easy way to impress people but it while we're talking about Windows Phone and kind of an abroad in a broad sense did it seems like for every kind of like awesome piece of great news that puts me in a high about Windows Phone there's another one that like just grabs me from the basement it just Yanks me back down on the ground because we've had this whole google crap that that's happened this week google has announced that they are going to terminate what is a Exchange ActiveSync support for 44 gmail yeah yeah for Gmail within this affects Windows Phone in that it uses that protocol to sing now I fully admit the either of you guys can jump in here anytime because I'm not too great with email protocols stuffin all I know is that this is going to severely impair gmail functionality on Windows Phone if you use that sync method and I am a heavy heavy heavy google user well you'll still receive emails just that you won't have exchanged functionality meaning that whatever changes you make in your calendar your contact and on the fly in your email will not reflect almost in real time on your phone I'm not sure whether he can still set up as a pop or IMA p account but the activesync exchange basically means just what I said right if Joe I'm right right as far as I know in the context of what we're talking about i think you're spot-on in what you're saying about exchange and activesync you're absolutely right I just don't I've read the stories and I don't understand if it's just setting up accounts or if it's all sinking across it it's confusing to me I just don't understand it fully yet I think it's nice out I think so too and it's really really expensive to to pay for that that exchange and activesync license from Microsoft because that is their tech google has to pay that right and it's tens of thousands of dollars every year and hey they could save some money and not support an enemy at the same time yeah well anyways i'm not sure i'm when i'm running windows phone i'm using hotmail or outlook so if you have a let me put it this way if you have a preferred platform with a preferred maker you're most likely to have all the services from that maker if you're an Android user you have gmail calendar voice yeah and so on so there are exceptions of course when when you have a gmail account and you're like us you're working in the business and you switch phones like other switching sucks and you still need to have access to your accounts but on a typical end user level a windows phone user will most likely beat an outlook / hotmail / live com email user see I disagree and here's why downturn that makes all the sense in the world to me and I like that argument logic but i think i think this i think windows phone 8 is the coolest thing to come out of Microsoft in a very long time and it's way cooler than Windows 8 because frankly it works better so in and and also we are in a world where mobile is driving the push now it's no longer desktop OS is driving the d innovation its mobile and I think a lot more people are going to notice Windows Phone 8 and a lot more people going to be willing to try it but these are people like me who have been using Gmail for six years or have been using other stuff who think that alive first of all who think that a hotmail.com email account is like almost as bad as a yahoo.com email account no offense to anyone who has those I don't care I'm gonna get a ton of mail I'm sorry but no no I'll back yet hotmail is worse than yahoo that's why they changed it to outlook come right Alan calm and then you've got and you know live com is a little bit better sort of because nobody really knows what it is but you know there's so much that's still dorky about Microsoft there's so much that's still unappealing that's still in whatever and then you know it whatever I think the commenters were yelling at me yesterday for a piece I wrote about the surface not talking to the phone but like it was like you can use SkyDrive and you can use all this and yes some of this stuff works really well but there's still so much of Microsoft's old DNA in this when I used when I was trying to share these cinemagraph gifs through my SkyDrive account it was working well because the SkyDrive account would host it but instead of just making it simple instead of just be like here friend i'm sending you this link to my SkyDrive account you can look they would open up the link and then here's this image and it wouldnt animate and in order to get the thing to animate that like check a checkbox and go up to like view original or something like something really nerdy something really adored you something really not desert friendly you know that's and there's so much of that that's still in the Microsoft DNA so when you ask me and I can't speak for anyone but I think this is probably true of other people who are not in the Microsoft ecosystem already when you asked me to give up all these tools that work for me you know like all the entire Google ecosystem the gmail that drive the calendar all that sink which I'm perfectly willing to sync via windows phone 8 because I prefer a windows phone as my daily driver he asked me to give that up in favor of hotmail you know in favor of this this kind of gross environment that I don't like working on in the desktop like I don't to do that you know and I don't want to I don't know and I'm sure there are alternatives there are we've we've seen a couple articles Adam Lane has a very compelling case for moving to outlook.com which is not the right fit for me but he has a good piece about it and I don't know I just don't know what I will do and I don't know what Microsoft will do because apparently it was a surprise to them this whole google coming up and saying we're not doing this anymore thing so I don't know tactically speaking there's that conversation personally speaking I'm just very scared because I don't want to have to rely on a whole bunch of third-party apps to like do this sinking and it looks like that's what I'm gonna have to do so even got my google I think that if if you would switch from an android phone to Windows Phone I think that you'd eventually board all your services to Microsoft services because I think that that's just psychology than bits basic brand not necessarily recognition but staying true to the brand mmm what do you mean you like you talking about the general you well talking about the average user yes if an average user for instance has a two-year-old android phone and under the Christmas tree he or she will find the Lumia 920 chances are that by by spring he or she will switch all services to Microsoft services because it's just the way things things go or that's just the way I see things as normal from my perspective I think that is I think that's common yes I don't disagree but I don't think the experience yet I don't think they did Microsoft kind of cloud experience matches what Google can offer yet as far as functionality or usability that's debatable but yeah I get your point you know I don't know I it's frustrating to have to do that i I've had this idea in my head percolating for a couple months you know about this editorial idea where the headline has a piece of profanity in it in my head right now so I have to kind of pair that down but like you know basically it's what if all this stuff played nice wouldn't it be nice because i think my ideal situation would be having a desktop running a mac an apple based OS and a phone running windows phone and a tablet running android that's my michael nobody wants you except you and me and the users I mean if you're a company and your ear cut up in this competition game right on this capitalist market and nobody would want that and it comes down to the same thing I think Google doesn't really want you to switch to Windows Phone that's why they don't give you the opportunity to take your your google accounts to Windows Phone so if people are like you they're probably stay away from windows home because they cannot use their Google services so this is probably just another speed bump or hurdle but on the throne yeah yeah no I agree I mean it's definitely a competitive moving as Steven points out in his editorial you know both Apple and Google caught a huge break when windows when Microsoft failed to innovate on Windows Mobile fast enough and I think they don't want to give Microsoft the room to come in there and fix its normal I mean it's always easier to kill or to get rid of the the weakest one and we have a saying kill it at birth oh god yeah yeah I know you're right it'sit's just get in there early and exterminated before it becomes a real threat right yeah that is true well I like what you're saying about playing nicely together that's something that I advocated for for all my life ironically my day job we have apple products we have macbook airs macbook pros that we run windows 7 and all of the all the phones are the windows phones or iPhones and all the tablets are iPads no Android has made it in there as an officially sanctioned device yet but we are doing the the mixing and running into those problems with you know people who are trying and to make facetime calls with someone who is on a windows phone versus someone who's on a you know a macbook running Windows 7 vs somebody who's got an iPad so we need to all play and get along and it's long overdue there i think there is still opportunities for cross-platform apps to come in like you know skype is a good example and even though it doesn't skype and facebook Messenger and all the rest exactly exactly yeah that's why facebook Messenger is the only thing I can use to communicate effectively with them with my friends who I talked to online all day because there are desk jobs and they can't be seen texting so they have to use something on the phone and they'll want to chat me up on google talk I'm like that's great until i leave the house with my windows phone which doesn't have a Google solution or maybe it does fine now I have to check anyway that's that's a whole big conversation I'd love to get into it but we don't don't have much time we have to close out windows phone and um thanks for thanks for going with me on that thread for a second but there's a rumor here Antonio's whipped up a an alternately awesome and terrifying render of Nokia to show a 10 inch Windows Phone or Windows RT tablet at mwc ? this is what's up Tony too I just don't know what to believe anymore either we it was so much back and forth with the nokia tablet it was first it was agreeing then it wasn't red then it was a green and there and now apparently it's a green again I can totally understand if Nokia would want to sit back and see how the market reacts to Windows RT and to windows 8 tablets I'm also 75 75 percent sure that Nokia doesn't have such a great relationship with Microsoft when it comes to Windows RT and Windows 8 like it has with Windows Phone so it will not be probably the preferred OEM so maybe maybe they're just sitting back looking at what the surface does what Samsung and the other OEMs are doing and if the time comes and if the platforms are taking off then probably yes we will probably see a nakia tablet but my money isn't necessarily on that I have two questions one would this be Nokia's first real tablet and nothing putting aside the 770 those little five entries from back in the day I think yes yeah from what I know yes this will be the first tablet and that would be real TT it would be very interesting to say that my second question is does anybody really want it at this point I mean Windows RT is not taking the market by storm at the moment the it users of Nokia Lumia when those phones will want it just like users of iphones want iPads and just like users nexus Force One Nexus tent well I think yeah okay I think dammit tell me I've I thought I thought for a second this was gonna be a really quick thing but no I don't think nothing's quick honest I guess I no no my you know I think users who have an excess for have reason to wonder Nexus 7 because they interact really well seven or ten yes or yeah or a ten um and certainly there are cloud based options where and third-party options and Microsoft hosted options that make a Microsoft slate tablet and a Microsoft smartphone interact to a small degree but I think just like just like almost anything else in the smartphone and tablet world L Lumia 920 is not going to talk to this nokia windows RT tablet really as much as it should or you know a Windows Phone it's not going to talk to the surface for these much it's like is it going is its existence going to make me want to buy it as a Lumia owner like I mean is that true or is this thing just gonna sit on the shelves and kind of collect dust cuz what's it gonna do differently it's gonna be polycarbonate well we don't know the better the single fact that it's made by nokia and at the moment i think in the windows phone market nokia has more better street rep than samsung because Samsung has been completely neglecting windows phone so I'd say that if somebody is in the market for a Windows RT because it's it's an RT but maybe a Windows 8 tablet made by nokia they probably look at nokia first before looking at samsung acer and all the others that's a probably a solid theory what do you do Joe what would you be more likely to buy a samsung product or a nokia product when we're talking tablet when we're talking tablets specifically when we're talking windows nokia stands out in the window sphere more than samsung does so i would go especially looking at this render if I've got a nice-looking nokia phone that looks like that i'm going to have a matching nokia tablet that looks like that and i'm also going to wonder when I'm get the inch and a half version you know that the Nokia nano that I can run my miss my windows pad right well yeah you know so I can have my music collection on that it looks like that and that's kind of the direction i see it going but it's got across that hurdle that you're mentioning Michael where it's just got to work together apple just works together android just works together right now Windows Phone Windows RT Windows 8 they they're all kind of separate entities that are still trying to work together they're the same thing from a look and feel until you start trying to to make them interoperate and then they're not well and and I think so my point is it's sometimes some of the commenters who have responded to the piece obviously I read half the piece before jumping down to the comments section this is usually they did make some good points like yes the messaging sinks yes when you when I have messages message conversations on my lumia 920 of the show up on my surface and that's nice contacts get updated across the fly and that you know and that's nice and there is stuff that syncs on the back and just like there is on Google devices and an iOS devices so you know that stuff with that stuff windows is surprisingly on par I think the whole landscape is just not phones and tablets aren't talking to each other enough and we don't have the the special Bluetooth tunnel and the you know the text message passing and stuff that that well but one would say that you can easily use SkyDrive for instance just to switch or to upload the photo or any piece of content from your phone and then access it on your know right no yeah that's what that's the point of making the cloud-based solutions work fine but until you've come home like Tony I used it for a couple weeks there I was like on the cusp of Nirvana where I would come home and I would put my my fear my HPV r on that over here I know and listen this isn't me just being a web West fanboy like this is really cool and just tell me if I'm wrong tell me if this isn't the most compelling thing ever I took came home I'm having a conversation on my beer at via text message I put the thing down on the touchstone and I pick up my touchpad welcome to the other room I'm still having the text conversation on my touchpad through that Bluetooth connection and then if I get a phone call on my fear which is in the the room I pick it up on my touchpad and I can take it on my touchpad meanwhile all the cloud stuff is all sinking in the background and all that stuff like that is a continuous client that is the dream not this kind of like yeah data sinks because the cloud does it you know I don't know these that's a whole different thing and I think yeah i wrote a rotor piece on it but the point is I I don't know i don't see a compelling case for a nokia tablet because i don't see a compelling case for Windows RT in its current form it needs to be better before I get excited about new hardware because the hardware is not the surfaces problem if you ask me it's not a hardware issue I love the so the surface so in our current windows ecosystem would you say that windows 8 whether it's Windows Phone 8 Windows RT which is eight windows 8 pro would you say that windows 8 as an ecosystem is one iteration away from being what it's supposed to be and catching up with everybody else and that windows 9 windows RT 9 Windows Phone 9 are going to give us everything that we have as an ecosystem on the other platforms finally on a Windows platform careful Tony yes I I actually really think I think windows RT is the embryonic state of what windows of what a successful windows looks like on the mobile space I do think the next iteration the next major iteration will bring it up to speed with the rest of with the rest of the landscape yes somebody I know the race go ahead somebody I no hint me said that Windows RT is for tablets what Windows Phone 7 was for windows phones back in the day of its launch would you agree with that say it again windows RT is for tablets what the initial version of Windows Phone 7 was for phones oh we oh I see yes yes I think that's exactly right Tony did you set it on the podcaster you said yeah yeah I'm saying lots of smart things on the bus you should listen well let's let's let's put windows to bed if that's okay Joe that's a solid question I I mean what do you think Joe do you're the only one who hasn't weighed in on this I hope so and going to the direction that Tony was going seven was really Windows Phone one and it it took a while to evolve we're they're probably right now with Windows Phone to which is they're calling eight the tablets if they were to name in the same way you know windows RT which is eight is really one so when everybody gets all together in this we're all up to the second revision of whatever that is or that even from the third whatever maybe that's when everybody's going to play together nicely it's just kind of confusing the naming and whatnot because it is iteration 1 iteration 2 of this new platform and they don't line up one hundred percent yet I'm hoping not n is where everybody will be straight across the board and the experience you know the data not data sharing through the cloud but the data just being there being completely ambiguous it's it's just there you pick up your phone it's there you pick up your tablet it's there you sit down at your computer it's there that experience I think us to come in the next major iteration you know the wait till you see windows RT's no dough and mando yeah it will those will be the end of the interim steps to know I the equivalence probably windows RT points something like Windows Phone was seven point something and 7.5 and now 7.8 they probably iterate and we'll probably see some updates the Windows Phone and Windows RT summer in February March April just to match that cycle when they're updating bring bringing you Steve Ballmer will see that we have 500 new features so right yeah so on that I I wanted to mention it earlier on Stephens piece about the the 10 to 21 build the way i read that was holy app they really have 10,000 221 new features or fixes yeah so they gotta do something about their version numbers here I do love portico though that's a nice that's a nice word for it for the next version I've windows phone um but tony has been saying a lot of smart things I want to jump into that real quickly just want to let you know that we have I've just received a tweet 25 minutes ago from a user named airburst who's asking what I love I love that user name it's great isn't it I'm a bit super leaner it's a I think so he's asking when will this week's PocketNow podcast go online have to wrap some presents and need something to listen to in that time Bobby we are recording it right now so Tony the smart thing you said on another podcast seems to have come to pass Apple is reportedly in talks with the fun social networking app team from foursquare about improving its Maps data this is crazy now you said we talked about this in a previous podcast I have a crappy memory apparently said I mentioned this as a possible solution and I came to this realization when I was out two or three or four weeks ago I can't remember and I fired up Apple maps back in the day we didn't have google maps like we have now so there were no points of interest nothing Apple maps was blank so I just had the streets the roads and that's it and then I fired up for square and now because Apple maps is the main mapping application and mapping source for iOS four square is using iOS Apple maps and the Apple maps with in foursquare were full of points of interest and I was like okay why don't they just team up and import all the points of interest into apple's database and everybody is happy Apple fixes their maps for square root probably yet lots of money and the users will be happy now we're happy with google maps but still Apple needs to improve its mapping service agree now I I it'll be interesting to see what they do and we don't have time to really speculate about it today but I'm very interested in a future conversation where we talk about what what the future of Apple maps is now that google google is on the store it's a difficult future I can tell you right now yeah even with foursquare POS improving the map status yes not all the lens on integrations that that's the only way apple maps can come back is be tightly integrated with partners with apps with everything you do it needs to default over to Apple maps and they need to they need to knock it out of the ballpark to be frank right but then you I think we're going to end up with a fragmented situation like we have on some nokia windows phones were you sometimes you can you jump into maps and you go to Nokia Maps but sometimes you're in a nap and you click on a location link and it jumps you into bing maps which you can't access via it's not preferable yeah right you know what i mean so yeah ideally you want a unified mapping solution well yes maybe at the OS level you're able to select like what do you want to use for your default mapping thing like the thing that pops up in android when you click exams time yeah like just once or always like that kind of thing so points of interest i wanna i know we're running real short on time but i want to diverge just a little bit and kind of tease into something points of interest are the bread and butter of of maps I mean yeah you have streets yes you have directions but if you don't have places to go if you can't search for stuff and find them it becomes not as useful so foursquare has this little game thing going where you wherever you go you check in and you can become the mayor of that location Dawson which it was funny going to city council meetings I I somehow became the mayor of Syracuse City the major and I don't get along but anyway that's neither you're there but they're incentivizing use through this this game and through coupons and through other stuff that you can do through foursquare and I don't have to tell anybody about four squares any everybody knows what it is the google doesn't have that at least not in that sense yeah instead they have something and I think this is what they're doing I don't know none of us really know they have this thing called the Niantic project where they have this niantic labs that's released two apps so far it is a wing of google so they're google apps one of them is called field trip that helps you become aware of points of interest that you were interested in as you're just walking around so first thing that's kind of scary they know where you are and can alert you with a you know a vibration on your hip or a tone to let you know hey here's this museum right next door that you might not have known about here's this piece of art right here around the corner it's 300 feet away go check it out grant it it's what you're interested in but how do you get those points of interest in there how do you get walking directions how do you get driving directions time of day information about them photographs of them and that's the yeah that's the other app that they've done they've got this other app which is a game called ingress which right now is closed beta you have to have an invite and it is the most ridiculously addicting game i have ever played you're in your I'm it I'm in I I don't know how I got an invite but I got an invite and they are they just released a new set of portals these portals are the points of interest and that's literally what they're doing they're having you go around with your camera take pictures of things and use the sharing and geotagging features of Android to send that to niantic super ops on what you think this portal should be in a portal is just a point of interest and you send the picture that has the GPS and tell them what it is and why and they evaluate that for inclusion and then they get a whole bunch of people to come around again and again and again via different routes walking routes car routes to try and get that portal and do all of the cool gaming stuff to it have you written a piece on this yet I feel what it has only one oh it's it's on the list and oh don't email do it because I want to read about this now well now that I'm into it more in seeing how it can be used and applied and how Google could Trump foursquare with points of interest and this by doing this true crowdsourcing not only four points of interest but how to get there via multi modes of transportation right then in different times of day that that crowdsourcing data is going to be infinitely more valuable than what foursquare is collecting and then of course it's going to be available on all of googles products from Heather Dion so it might come up as a an editorial in the future with that slant everything okay I got here I was going to say here's the thing listeners if you want if you want if you want more on this if you want more on said Haley lights and antonette para nada I'm kidding do not email Tony email the podcast and and leave a comment on the cotton podcast post say it's not the beats fool anyways after tomorrow silver white well that's right what about you know what that's right all of our last stories right the real thing I wanted to say is that whoever invited in invented crowdsourcing was was a damn intelligent person I mean just regardless if it's incentivized or not having literally millions of people work for you and improving and adding to your offerings for free it is huntin I mean whether it's Google Apps it's four square roots facebook its ways it's anything which requires you to quote help others right it's it's just awesome it is i mean it's it's a genius way of getting the customers to getting your customers good to kind of do to kind of make your product better I mean that's one of the definitions of crowdsourcing but it's a great idea I'm good I'm glad that you guys talked about this cuz I had no idea that that was going on I had no idea about any of that and I will look forward to reading about it um we have to tell clarify just before we get inundated we do not have any invites to the game oh god do I have any contacts with google that and give us invites to the game Joe already gave me his invite that's that's the deal that might not be true that might not be true didn't even give you an invite oh I have a way to invite people but I have zero invites to hand out just like everybody else well I already claimed I'm claiming I'm preemptively claiming your beta invite when you get it so there any girls can have it mr. windows phone gets the first interested that's Adam Lane I don't know what you mean i'm in every man um anyway we've got it i really want Adam to come on the podcast so I can talk to him about a lot of this test I feel like you could learn a lot so but he doesn't want to be on the podcast that's all right anyway the point is my fragmented brain is able to wrap up this rundown the Apple has sold two million Chinese iphone 5s Wow cool think of it it is well really I mean it no it is you know it's in a weekend exactly that's I wasn't being sarcastic that was a real wow I know it's that's yeah that's Friday Saturday and Sunday it's the world's largest mobile market on the planet it's it's hugely significant and but the thing is I think it the numbers themselves don't excite me as much as what it means for the other players who typically the underdogs like blackberry like Windows Phone who have Windows Phone actually Windows Phone as some pointed out trying to make a point which which they did not really in my head the Lumia 920 T which is the Chinese carrier variety of the Lumia 920 is number one best selling on Amazon okay that is on amazon but I'm sure it didn't sell a quarter of what the iphone sold exactly and that's why this headline is significant to me because you have these underdogs kind of kind of the same as when when these underdogs say you know we're targeting the dumb phone users we're targeting than the non smartphone adopted yet you know with their first smartphone kind of thing they kind of rely on China as their other crutch where they're like yeah you know we're not doing so great the United States but look at China we're gonna try and get ourselves installed in China you know and then it's now the android is the same boom yeah sure I mean whoever it is I I just find it interesting I I'm interested in I would love to be a fly on the wall at some meetings in some boardrooms at these companies as they look at the the iphone sales metrics in china and they're like and i would like to ask you guys something yeah um we are seeing that the iphone 5 as expected is the best selling iphone ever we are seeing that the computer business if Apple is of course going up and up and up I've recently read a report that the ipad mini apple will probably sell 12 million iPad minis by the end of this year so everything is going up why on earth is Apple stock going down I mean really really down it isn't it down on wasn't it down on like reports of Luke it was I don't know it which is what does lukewarm demand mean because when I when I read like 10 million 15 millions and millions and millions and millions I just can't think of lukewarm the vent yeah well I think I mean yeah taken in a vacuum those millions are very impressive but what do they mean sequentially like year-over-year like how do they compare to previous growth and I think android is no I don't have the metrics back this up but I do think that Android is making significant inroads against iphone the iOS ecosystem you know at least in the smartphone side so well I can give you similar iphone as if as of either today or yesterday I think Stephen wrote about it samsung accounts for twenty-eight percent of global smartphone sales Apple is second at twenty percent and then the rest Nokia and the HTC on the rest come with percentages below ten percent so apples are running low even five so 28 the Samsung 22 Apple okay well I think it all depends on Apple's growth rate and where the company also Apple has also had this big maps fiasco and they've just fired some executives like you know it's not it's it's not that Apple's an unstable place to be i don't think in i don't think anybody's worried about apple's long-term viability but that gives investors pause i think i think investors are very easy to rattle you know i mean this is this is my view of oven yeah sure i just wanted to know because i don't know and i know nothing about stocks in about how the stock market works and reacts because once you see a report the stock market immediately reacts yeah and i just don't think it's normal but it's just the way the stock market works works yeah let's Joe I know we're bumping up against your heart stopped and I would really like to get to this one piece of compelling listener mail have you got another minute or two for us well let me let me finish up on this one yeah we can bump a little past my stop today I just want to come in on if I'm doing my math right in the first weekend that the iphone 5 was available in China they sold one iphone for every 1,000 people in the country am i doing my math right on that I don't know wonder at one point 1.2 billion how many are they but if we assume that they've got two billion people in China just making numbers well just for easy numbers what one in a thousand if it's one point to that makes it one in 500 600 ish i don't i don't know i remember saying around so fast dear what a boy my father but i don't know hold on i'm making the calculation right now because it sounds Italian is a million divided by pi we get android's they get 1.3 billion / 2 1 2 3 1 2 3 that means that Oh 673 yes so the very first weekend that the iphone 5 was available one out of every 673 people got one yeah that's correct that's that's impressed it's incredible and you have to consider also the the wages in China and right the conditions in which they are living death day today yes very very impressive yeah anyway that's my piece go ahead on to your reader email that Tony and I have no knowledge of so we absolutely before right so yeah as I was as I spoke about earlier my my head has been all the t VES all week and I haven't really had time to do anything else so this podcast outline came very late in the morning but this is an email that I will have to cut down this rid of the inbox I'll read it so that Joe and Tony and listeners know what's going on this is from a new listener and I love emails from everyone but new listeners are great too is from Sri can't holla from India I listen to your podcast for the first time in episode 22 and liked it a lot from now on I'll be listening every week we love hearing that thank you look at that in that great I'm a person who gets bored with things very fast like few weeks or a month i have a galaxy s2 from almost a year and I've tried many things from downloading many apps and themes to rooting and installing third-party roms currently I'm on cm10 nightly for galaxy s2 so I think says shrikant manufacturers should make phones with standard hardware the OS is left as a choice to the you user can buy OS of choice and switch to another OS when bored with the current one then he goes on to suggest that if not that then maybe dual booting is a possibility my question is how far are we from getting such phones that come with standard hardware but an OS of jealous okay let me go first on this one because that's something that I have championed for forever go for it ah grant I want to go so I wanted to just say it's also we also talked about this at length yeah I have talked about this at length and I just wanted to bring it up again with Joe go so the first thing that I want to talk about is back rewind the podcast back to where we're talking about the atif s which is the galaxy s3 Windows Phone right we're coming down to where we're getting very very similar hardware platforms sitting under my desk right now I have a desktop computer that has a standard form factor and i can plug components into an upgrade and do whatever i'm not saying that we can or even should do that with our smartphones but if we have that one common platform where it's the same screen it's the same hardware inside it's just different drivers and you know a different silkscreen on the button for a little windows logo versus nothing for android or whatever why can't we do that we've got the hardware it's awesome hardware why can't we well it's complicated in their subsidies and there's all kinds of other stuff in there but that's why we have the open source community that's why we have hacking to allow us to be able to do that with our own hardware once we've purchased it and ultimately whether you whether you buy into that or not say you can or can't or should or should not able to hack your own hardware to do what you want with it I know Tony and I disagree on this it makes everybody have more choice and it makes everybody safer as the only way we can find out how to get these hacks to allow us to do this is by finding vulnerabilities that can be exploited to let us do this which you know we're we're in the white hats over here we just want to run our own OS our own way but their people want to put malware on and steal your information and steal your money and whatever they're doing it the bad way this this concept of letting us have it and being open with it and it kind of embracing us to hack it even lets those manufacturers know and we got a security hole here we need to fix that and it makes everybody safer whether or not we're going to be able to get to that Nirvana of pick your hardware and then load your OS will probably never get there but oh I want that day to come I would love for that day to come as well in it Joe that's well said you that I completely agree but I do think that there will be there will come a time because as you say we are getting closer and closer to this to this ability anyway I mean the hardware is so similar across platforms right now that there's going to be a small company that shows up I think a small firm that says we're making standard hardware and you can load android or you can load that's the problem there's really nothing else you can kind of like load without breaking some laws right you can't like to compile your own version of Windows Phone right you can't like taste rip iOS off and offer it so that's tough so maybe there will be a firm that comes along and says hey here's our hardware you can run android or webos or me go or oya or whatever the hell are calling it on this and then maybe if that sells well if that gets enough headlines then maybe another a larger somewhat larger company will try it and then maybe a larger company still will try it but I think that that it's not impossible but I think we are a long ways off from a major big OEM actually offering it I think probably we won't see this from Samsung until you know 2020 that's my view well and to take that view and just expand on a little bit we might there is a small possibility that there could be a Windows Phone variant available on that platform because it's it's available to OEMs to license and install on their hardware so theoretically contract could be negotiated that says here's our hardware we're letting users put whatever OS of these that they want on it we would like yours to be in there too we realize that if we do that we have to pay you X number of dollars per license and it's probably going to be a premium over samsung or nokia because it's not going to be co-branded in yada yada yada so even if it's you know an extra 50 bucks an extra hundred bucks whatever that figure is to load that on why can't they do it just as a licensee and make it legal and legitimate I think it could be legal and legitimate and I don't think it would sell and enough to I think it would have to be a hobby project by a larger company maybe Google would do it but they have no incentive to sleep baby Google would do it let's take out activesync in exchange of once I'm sorry new you're right that was my 2007 spit self speaking this is something Google would have done five years ago before they had too much invested in the mobiles maybe HP would do it they don't know what they're doing they have no direction on the mobile side you Tony what's your what's your take on this I'm sorry I was muted for a second because there's a psychotic little dog outside which I would do things to I I think that okay it just did shut up I I don't think it will ever happen because the world is going to end tomorrow all right no seriously now if not in advance timeline we gotta meet it it's gotta be done today little bit today that seriously I don't think it will ever happen because of multiple reasons maybe there will be one or two small companies which will try to somehow do it it is doable but it will never go mainstream because of multiple reasons number one in many many cases it is still the platform driving smartphone sales samsung would have not ever gotten to the first spot if it would have only sold bata phones or windows phones Android is driving samsung just like windows phone is driving nokia so having a phone to which you have a liberty to install either platform will probably not drive sales for that phone that plus all the other implications encoding and boot loaders and drivers and optimizations multiple teams working on software development and it's just basically simply put nobody wants this except some guys who send us emails for a podcast which is the serious our reader and Michael and me and everybody who wants this raise your hand yeah exactly okay that's the majority who the earth just moved crap that's what starts the Mayan apocalypse well it was a great great piece of email shrikanth I wish we lived in that world already I think it's gonna be a while until we do but great great email thank you for the thank you for listening and thank you for the question um we have to get Joe off to as to his job I have to get to writing some more stuff and Tony I think has to get ready get his escape vehicle ready to escape the world ending shockwave yeah it's gonna be 20 first before before you guys get to 21st yeah that's true don't ya utonis come not gonna text you guys I'm gonna tweet you guys remember Tony animals are more sensitive so that dog yeah honey yeah by the with just a lame question guys did the man say exactly which time zone it will happen on or at what time in which time zone because yeah that would be the blame they only told me though so lions were really smart and they didn't have time zones nothing Zulu time but that said they most of their major cities are in plus one or two hours of where I am so let's let's just all standardized and say it's it's mountain time is gmt minus sex you it's gonna be the 22nd here guys so okay already yeah Tony's already gonna be gone anyways been a pleasure guys yeah I know it has been an honor podcasting with you both I think way and I think privilege and an honor thank you to all of our listeners to we hope that this will survive and be found by historians in the future when they come to visit our planet from another planet thank you find out what destroyed gotta be on the very optimistic I think yeah we have to be optimistic we all have to come together in trying times like these from the end of the timeline optimism springs eternal from the well of Stroh Levi it's a beautiful day to be alive I think but we need a half that's that's a Chinese you get her suffer music here we do we need some really awesome laid out music well from the end of time that is going to wrap it up for this episode of the pocket now we claim it's a last day on planet earth let's spend it tweeting to Levi is at your leave I Tony over there's have aunt aunty nadjem amto and DNA gy and you can find me a tad captain two phones follow pocketknives official twitter account in pocket mount tweets you can follow us on facebook and google+ please leave us a review on iTunes or xbox music if you like the podcast and if you have a topic question or suggestion for the podcast or you just want to say goodbye forever you can email us at podcast at pocketnow.com thanks for listening and good luck that's next