Gadgetory

two phablets battle it out trojan horses roll into Android and a facebook event impressed everyone or left everyone disappointed we're not sure all that and more in the hour ahead on the pocket now weekly the once-a-week podcast from pocket now where we discuss smartphones tablets and the state of mobile technology I'm Michael Fisher editorial director at pocket now and I'm joined today by Joe Levi the android guy good morning to you in Utah sir good morning to you and everyone else who's tuning in from wherever they are in the world yes including but not limited to super Carolina because we are also joined by our resident Carolinian Taylor Martin good morning to you good morning hmm good morning I understand that you are you're very recent addition to the waking world yeah you and I are both grog I think Joe is groggy headed to on account of in Utah it's like 2am over there or something it is it's it's 2 a.m. hawaii time i think ok no it's it's seven in the morning here oh that reminds me when I was getting hired at nextel the training officer like in charge of training us was demoing push to talk this is 2004 when push to talk was still like becoming a consumer thing and he he was like watch this its nationwide push to talk and we're in virginia and it's like 9am and it's training session and he chirps his friend and like two seconds later or no it was like 10 seconds later his friends like beauty what what man he's like oh man I I'm sorry did I wake you up he's like yeah I'm sorry go back to bed and we're like what just happened there and he's like my friend lives in Hawaii oh so yeah time differences are fun what I said about the facebook event in that intro is entirely true we're recording this episode it a stupid time slot and that's my fault we normally do record in the morning usually it's Thursday morning and that's what it is right now but normally there is not a event of newsworthy notable pneus in the afternoon and that's what's happening today so we have no idea what the facebook event how disappointing it was or wasn't we have a pretty good idea of what's going to happen at it but by the time this podcast goes up the world will know and we will with Europe we're already behind the behind the curve chance but shall we unless we speculate and then we're ahead that's what i wanted to i want it i want to speculate a little bit because we seem to have been presented with a whole lot of leaks and information that has found its way through the cracks to the public to the common world this event it seems at the very least poised to deliver us a new facebook app one that is deeply integrated with a phone and specifically speaking it looks like that phone might be it is very likely to be the HTC first which frankly I didn't bother looking up until I had to prepare for this podcast because I knew it wasn't going to be a terribly impressive phone and we're looking at kind of a mid-range Snapdragon s4 device coming in different colors but i think the real story here is a software so DS does anybody do either of you guys feel exceedingly passionate about this device one way or the other I mean men by this device I mean this new Facebook integration first of all what is facebook I'm like very clear on that oh dude it's like a mash-up between Twitter and Google+ but it's like with a bunch of people that you went to elementary school with that you don't care about right oh very similar to friendster calm and and my face might whatever that was oh yeah yeah did you see that the mark zuckerberg first like very first web site was was probably uncovered but didn't know that did yeah it's like an angel fire page yeah oh god it's amazing it's got some sweet sweet animated gif action on it yeah there was John Lutz step up from geo cities then right okay uh yeah well yeah definitely definitely um so but but what about this like I think the real story here is the software right there's this kind of Facebook it looks like a custom HTC Sense skin that doesn't look all that great I don't know it's like the the HTC salsa 2013 yes so there's not really a lot for us to get excited for our kind to get excited but there are a ton of people out there who obsess over Facebook and unfortunately I'm friends with a lot of those on facebook and they would eat this up it would eat it alive now I are kind you mean the cool kids right I'm talking about the people who obsess over specifications you know yeah yeah well and I so I don't I mean I we know that I don't care about specs very much and I really glaze over when we start talking chipsets and and stuff like that so um but even so I feel like HTC should have learned it's lesson from the chacha / salsa / status / haha oh yes right oh wait the cha-cha-cha was the big one with no keyboard right well I don't remember anymore yeah there were two there was like to try well anyway and I stuck up for the cha-cha actually I wrote an article sticking up for the cha-cha and that's what got me hired at pocket now over a year ago that article got you i'm tony to call me at least you should be proud thanks thanks i gotta ask tony if he remembers that I appreciated you taking a position that was ridiculous but so I feel like HTC probably should have learned it's lesson from from that device which was mid-range and which I appreciated because it was different and I admire when a company is brave enough to do something different but which didn't really impress anyone in terms of how well it did anything because I don't think it really did anything to well except have a facebook button that was the cool part about it it had I was a button that's all they had to do and in fact on this one all they've got to do is the the facebook today screen that's all they've got to get right everything else who cares it's the facebook today right and I'd like at the risk of bringing up a point that we've brought up in a billion other people have brought it before don't we all already have a facebook phone guys like yes the app integration and the app itself and the integration with the OS particularly on Android oh and iOS now is is such that and on Windows Phone you get the People Hub I mean like you have a bevy of options already for a facebook phone why would anyone want to buy a facebook phone if they research did any more than just watching a commercial because it's Totally Rad yo said um poor baby powder blue right right right uh but no I wrote an article about the cha-cha and salsa it was a one word article should anyone by the chacha or salsa if the answer that the whole entire body of the article no one word no is that along with Jo Doug I didn't do it I'll joke about it but I never got to I always wanted to do that just a one word post no in like 50 point nice curly letter some say and and no pictures of the device is a picture of me looking discontent what's your hands up in the air like why would anyone do this yes ok so to answer your question Michael I'm looking at this on my Nexus 4 right now which by the way is now screen protector lassan the front because it got like um big lint ball underneath it so I don't know how to clean it Joe we saw what happened last time you did that I've got something new to show you that's in the mail so no spoiler alerts there but it's bright yellow so yeah but late TC nokia action there so anyway i'm looking at my nexus 4 i've got my facebook plug in and i just added there are exactly two widgets that i could put on my screen one of them is the status which lets me post what's on my mind and a button that lets me scroll through the latest couple of bazillions of posts that i have in my wall and then another widget that lets me put a pencil in a square or take a picture or poke myself in the eye I think that's a map check I don't know yeah that's that's it that's all I have so as far as saying you know we've already got a facebook phone yeah but the widgets at least on Android or crap yeah the legends you have some air war yeah the way it's are the applications themselves aren't that great and then I I constantly deal with you know not being able to load new notifications or or even load a new feed or anything like that so it's i mean that's that's ios and android and if i'm correct they both have gone native right they're not html5 anymore yeah at the android version I know for sure is no longer html5 right and I pretty sure the went native but they didn't date they still have not even made an Android tablet application yeah oh my gosh that kills me why I don't even like Facebook and it makes me so so mad you know I my thing is this like I I don't want to talk about this too much because you by the time this post like I said this is all going to be old news and but I think that the best thing that happened on the hardware side with this was the was the button was the hardware button and not just because he was one tap to jump into Facebook it was you could long press it and check in somewhere it would glow context-sensitive Lee depending on whether yet if you had a photo on the screen the button would glow and it's like yeah yeah i will share that facebook i think that was impressive that was cool i hope we see something like that on this HTC first I don't think we will but we're really gonna have to talk about our next week because I just we just can't we have no we've the information we have which is less information than any listener has at this point so sorry for the scheduling snafu i emailed joe at 1am last night i was like you still awake and if Joe had answered I would have been like we have to record this in the afternoon but just donated his rest so uh so I don't blame you one bit oh my day oh let me back up my wife's day and my wife is my life starts at four thirty so bedtime for us is 830 or nine last night we stayed up real late to like 915 you wrote well cool so anyway we'll talk about this next week I want to just touch really quickly on a cool road trip I took yesterday while we're speaking about hardware to a certain extent I got to take a tour of the facility where sapphire is made artificial man-made sapphire which is relevant to smartphones in that you can make smartphone screens out of it that are as harder than any material except diamond which is awesome yes it's unless you're toting around a pocket full of diamonds and really who doesn't on a Friday you are going to do well you're not going to have a scratched-up smartphone screen it was so cool to see how they build this stuff this was if you haven't seen the video you should watch it it was the tour was given to us by Jeff Nestle Pat the Internet's most liked guy on a pocket now video do you guys catch those comments as they were coming up when that video posted from mwc know is that well Jeff's giving us the demo at mwc knees like using a concrete from the parking lot it or scratch up the screen and then look in the YouTube comments like inexplicably like like 20 to 30 people on YouTube it felt like maybe I was last night was like 10 or 15 people in YouTube the pit of comment despair the place where everyone goes to be hurtful and mean like 10 or 15 people roll up and they're like Jeff seems like a cool guy I like Jeff I was like you know I agree it was a cool guy to talk to but it was just so amazing to watch the internet just embrace Jeff Jeff of GT advanced technologies anyway he gave us a to give us a tour yesterday and it was just awesome to see all this high technology science building sapphire displays and I want to know from from you guys Joe see this this is a technology that wouldn't help Joe and this is asked in the comments a lot because even though it is less scratch about it is more brittle because it's harder and so you know it's a harder substance so the Sapphire will likely not be any more resistant to shattering than gorilla glass and it might even be less resistant to shattering so I guess that's my question really quickly for you guys Joe first I get now now Taylor first cuz we know Joe's position on this what what's more important to you shatter resistance or scratch resistance and a smartphone screen um shadow resistance really yeah that's it sounds like a man who's shattered a screen before I have not I've actually never broken a phone shattered the display ever really yep I had dropped my galaxy note 2 I may or may not have had a couple drinks and I was uh in a bathroom at a bar and I just went to use the bathroom and somehow my phone's defy the laws of physics my phone shot out of my pocket right I have no no clue anyway it flies across a bathroom and hits the floor and just everything goes in opposite directions it was a note to so battery door one way battery the other way in the phone you know another way did the S pana pop out or that stay snowed and it stayed in good my battery door wouldn't fit my cone but everything else was perfect no scratches nothing so really yeah um yeah but I feel you know shadow resistance you can use a phone if it's scratched um you cannot really use a phone too well if it's shattered no sure glass shards and your thumb yeah that where the digitizer doesn't work anymore or the digitizer doesn't work anymore I mean there are a lot of things that that can happen with a shattered display something that's scratched it's going to look ugly but you can prevent that so if you have shattered protection you can get a screen protector for scratch protection but but the thing is like on my note 2 or even my HTC One X or even the nexus 4 none of them have scratches so I don't use scratch screen protectors but I don't have any scratches on any of them so at least on the display now I don't use cream projectors either and i buy only major display casualty has been my galaxy nexus on verizon greg it was in my pocket and one of the steel buttons and that closed my cargo pocket like I must have sat on the phone wrong and the button just went right through the screen boo no I was a big ol hug them print shatter but but Joe destroyed his phone yeah and so what does that make you feel about shadow resistance versus scratch resistance first it makes me feel sad mm but once I get past that I'm gonna go a route that do you you wouldn't imagine that I'd go I'm going to agree we need to have we need to have shadow resistance I think that can be accomplished many different ways but scratch protection can be done by very inexpensive very nice high performance screen protectors the one that I just took off my device due to an adhesive failure is what they use in the military to put on the leading edges of helicopters yes yes I know they're put through a whole bunch of abuse and if I do end up getting a scratch on it warranty notwithstanding I take it off and I put another ten twenty dollar piece of plastic on it and I'm back and I'm fine a side effect of that particular one was also fingerprint-resistant switch now that it is often i'm using a bear screen I have to keep wiping down the screen to get all the fingerprints off but but but that nexus 4 screen is so smooth it is it is it's pretty feel so smooth and now that i have that screen protector on the back to make it not as slippery its i hold it a lot better but we talked about this on the last talking out live that i was on a little bit regarding removable batteries and how they might help with keeping screens from shattering and phones from just committing ritual suicide by having that removable battery with the door that just pops off when you pay wrong energy yeah you're dissipating all that energy across the floor sometimes but it's it's not all trapped inside the device and finding the weakest point to escape through which happens to be your ridiculously brittle though ridiculously scratch-proof front screen or mac screen do you know we have to do we've given me an idea Joe like it all that energy banging around inside a phone as it falls to the ground would probably visually be very compelling if you capture it we need to get a hundred-thousand-dollar high-speed camera and just start doing like the best drop tests you've ever seen on phones at like ten thousand frames a second I think that would be amazing see how much the body warps exactly yeah yeah for the funny thing when I promise you no warp like like ripples on water before it shatters I'll be amazing I bet it does that'll be so cool I'll be awesome I love science we rather one of the requisition with Tony yeah I do yeah I'm just gonna go ahead and buy an all expense that I'm sure they'll understand ask forgiveness yeah guys we I'm sorry we have some breaking news I this is going to affect every single one of our listeners to his core the LG optimus G just got a jelly bean update on AT&T and you check your email slow shut up Taylor number of jelly bean Android for that one yeah yeah because I do that yeah they gotta do that Optimus cheese skin on it but the optimus G needed it cuz like yeah a lot of devices still need the ICS update to jelly bean but the optimus G is actually kind of a beautiful device and it was a shame that it wasn't running jellybean yet so that that's the the nexus for LG right um sort of yet except i like know better don't care yeah yeah anyway um blasphemy yeah I know right we can get a no hold a conversation with it before we get that's the nexus 4 LTE yes right something x is for that should have men let's jump in please to Windows Phone very quickly because there's not much there and we want to talk about Android and I want to get beaten topics not windows phone in general right let's jump right into Windows Phone everybody get your live tile suits on you know Joe I haven't been able to pay attention to anything in this podcast since you mentioned that you're receiving some secret package in the mail that's bright yellow are you kidding is it a secret what's going on it's a secret for me can you reveal it on the podcast can you share it with our listeners you hear the roar listen to the roar the whole I'm gonna do a disservice because I don't remember the names what are you getting what is it a device a phone no Taylor you've got the other Kevlar back to your nexus 4 right yeah and I uh I looked those dudes up and I am getting the bright yellow weather Wow hey it's bright yellow which I kind of dig from HTC nokia stuff and it's leather which it's gotta be gritty so i'm gonna take my invisible shield from the back of my next for when that gets here and i'm going to put on bright yellow leather whoa whoa it will be gorgeous and people will make fun of me I cannot wait and you go on the pocket now live with that I want to see it we go ahead 20 I was going to say I've got the leather from them too it's not terribly grippy but it's definitely more grippy than that than the glass is it more grippy than an invisible shield dad I don't know we were gonna make coming I'm we were talking I was at the microsoft store the other day to pick something up which I will discuss in a second and I brought my friend over to the phones and it was like hey have you seen the HTC have you seen the windows phone 8x and he's like yeah of course I've seen the 8x I'm like no not this one because at the far left extreme position of the microsoft store windows phone display they have an HTC windows phone 8x that is the awesome awesome highlighter yellow yes and wow if you've never seen it with your own eyes like I don't you you can't I don't ever want to shoot a video of this phone because it'll never read on camera like in person it actually hurts to look at like it's and I'm not saying like it hurts looking like oh it's so ugly no like it your eyeball doesn't really know to do with that with that color yeah well all your colors even the blues they're just so vibrant they've got some other janessa quad yeah move you bitch Jones Levi a blue ring in French to the podcast an episode 38 it was about half the French that I know right there so one hundred percent of the French so that it um remember anyway no no we can't talk about French anyway um the I that's why I thought you were getting I thought you're getting a windows phone 8x in in highlighter yellow and I was going to be so amped but we tried to change theme colors on it I was like Chris do you think that there's any do you think there's any Windows Phone theme color besides the the neon yellow that'll work on this and we cycled through about five of them and nothing works if you buy that phone you have to use it with the yellow thing so yeah I got to see it in in Las Vegas at CES I was at a HTC dinner and they broke out this suitcase it was a super-secret suitcase with like I think I showed you the picture this my head yeah yeah yeah there were like 30 HTC phones in the suitcase yeah and all just super bright colors I wish I had mine like real camera I would have taken some nice pictures but yeah it was like oh my gosh just it was a blinding box yeah it was it was Dane on the other side of it they had all these Rolexes yeah and they're just they're just a bunch of free cash in there and some guns to tell HTC roles to trade well it is what failure so um I want to get myself an HTC 8x and I have for a long time but I'm not going to and I hope they make a sequel that has better buttons moving on to the no theater Lumia family and maybe a little thing about no no keep keep the thickness we need some bulk we need somebody out there to say you don't need to be anorexic to be a good looking cell phone it's exactly right to say enough is enough it's okay the thing is is surprisingly thin I I didn't even like the way it felt in my hand when I picked it up the first time she's like so and yeah it's so thin and what's more on the edges yeah yeah do you think that the sequel to the HTC windows phone 8x because despite their disappointing sales you know they're going to make another window around windows phones considering their relationship with Microsoft do you think the next round of Windows Phone 8x type HTC devices will have an ultrapixel camera Jen's I'm a bet if it does it'll have a higher megapixel count mmm yeah it's got a there is no discovery Ilona yeah but it's interesting you say megapixels don't matter and then the backlash has been that hey it doesn't have enough megapixels well yet don't matter to an extent and then to a different extent they do matter I've been using the one with new camera software so I've been taking shots kind of left and right and very soon there will be a comparison video posted and by very soon I mean somewhat soon there will be a comparison video posted detailing some of these new shots and we're gonna we're going to talk more that conversations not over because the software update has done something nice to it but anyway whatever we you know the one got so much attention we're just not going to give it any more on this podcast actually we are later on but we're not gonna give it anymore not a little later let's talk right now just quickly about this phone that's probably fake it's a nokia lumia 950 is the rumor before we came on the air i tried to look for updates on this it taylor is this one confirmed fake yet or what I don't know but it just does not look like Nokia design whatsoever the Nokia logo on the top looks photoshopped it looks like it's not it's ask you oh yeah it's not even see honor it is it doesn't look centered and it doesn't look I guess parallel to the top of the display yeah that's what I meant by ask you just as easily as they photoshopped Lumia 950 on the front they flopped that Nokia logo in there so this is a device if you're not looking at it listeners that whatever it's a rectangular smartphone blah blah blah that gets the most distinctive feature about it is this kind of square windows phone button on the bottom below what appears to be a somewhat under sized display and it's one of the uglier leaked photos I've seen I think it's probably a 3d model photographed from a monitor or something I don't know it looks fake I think it's bogus there are rumors i I'm just bait we're just basically waiting for the fake confirmation on this right now why do you think the display is small why do you not think those buttons are extremely large you think why do i not think i'm looking at a windows phone phablet from now kid yeah this is their tablet this is their first windows from the windows tablet it's the nokia 7 you know how will it button all the size of a coaster i will gladly do a windows phone challenge when they come out with a phablet yeah i will do you think it's gonna be windows phone or do you think we're gonna go with surface what Artie on there yeah that would be rough or Windows 8 pro even oh gosh no I wrote an article about this it does not along folks so that's that's what I'm alluding to you've got such similarity and user interface but such disparity and I'll everything else is there experience yeah yeah it's it's a hodgepodge jumble of chaos so I got so fed up with dealing with Windows RT and not be you know I feel like when we complain about Windows RT people immediately assume that maybe there are some performance issues or things like know it runs very smoothly but it is less capable once you get into the the old or Windows environment so I got so fed up with it that i had the opportunity to secure a an HP Envy x2 for myself and i did just that that's why i was at the microsoft store i was picking it up and so I have an ID now I'm a proud owner of an HP Envy x2 which I had this was like two days ago and I've been so busy that I haven't even been able to take it out of the box I tried to vine my unboxing last night on Twitter but I didn't have an iOS device so i couldn't find it was like come on but i'm going to have some more thoughts about windows 8 pro on an atom powered device soon i don't know if i'm going to write about it i might just talked about on the podcast but in any in any case the windows 8 and windows RT comparisons are not over at all Joe you're still so fed up with windows 8 as I before the podcast you were trying to figure out some skype settings right yeah it there's two ways to do everything in windows 8 pro I mean it's and you never know which way is the right way or which way isn't you've got to update things in two places they're very different but sometimes are the same most of the time they're not ah yeah I plugged in a hard drive to my I had windows 8 running through parallels on my macbook and I needed to find out how to clear the defaults because I accidentally told it to load to windows 8 by default so every time I plugged it in oh no it would try to search for windows 8 all my gosh it was awful all I almost wiped my computer or wiped parallels and and reloaded windows just to clear the default it was that bad i searched for three or four hours trying to figure out how to do that I could do it him like I could do it in two seconds own so windows seven but windows 8 it took me forever to things is awful first of all I understand your pain about a dual-boot about a boot default problem because the same thing happens on my touchpad ever since i put android on my touchpad it defaults to loading android when it boots I don't take out my touchpad so I can have an Android tablet i use my touchpad to use webos so that's annoying I haven't written out how to fix that I'm sure it's a very easy fix but the second thing is I also run into the problems that you Joe and you tailor have experience with Windows RT and Windows 8 and I feel badly about it sometimes because I do get I will say this i do get more wrong on a first pass on Windows Phone or Windows RT or Windows 8 then I do on an Android device because sometimes it's because I'm I'm rushing and then I have to go back and correct it but more often it's because while I find the windows design language beautiful and while I find the UI compelling and good-looking and it well it feels good it's not terribly intuitive is it yes counterintuitive if you don't know how it works there's no way for you to figure out how it works other than by stumbling on something by mistake right yes and that's where skeuomorphism comes into play and we don't need that either so but we need something that's kind of halfway between the two maybe you got to have hints on what something is and how to do something but to mirror your rent there Michael when I take windows 8 off of this not if but when i take windows 8 off of this computer i am so tempted to go to a boon to rather than try and dig up one of my licenses for windows 7 yeah i mean that that's how bad Windows 8 is yes I'm I'm willing to go to open to and I'll learn that cuz I gotta learn this so I may as well learn something new but anyway this isn't a bash on windows 8 podcast this is pocket house so look if you're moving to China then that'll help you to write yes that was awesome news kind of scare you but awesome what is what is the news lubuntu is the official operating system of china wow that is direct and I think TI basic is the official operating system of korea korea super cool super korea so all this is to say that HTC is going to bring a Windows 8 tablet this year and I am not sure whether to be excited about it or not I'm excited to maybe I'm very excited about it in the sense that i'm sure it will be beautiful hardware if it happens and i hope that windows blue makes windows 8 a little bit more ullu yeah a little more blood everything should be a little more blue I watched enterprise forgot to wish for that yeah our own Adam line he uh he never lets us forget when HTC made Windows tablets before yeah every time any any mention of Windows tablet an HTC or mentioned in the same article well he said they're my HTC shift and I love that thing when I was uh when I was in high school I wanted the HTC shift so bad so bad and he's so sweet looking what the hell was the HTC shift it was like a I don't know what size maybe seven or eight inch tablet that ran windows and it has a like a possible I don't like like the tilt though so yeah probably so it was like a big smartphone like a really big slide-out keyboard on it yeah nothing was also pocket now review it doing it I don't know if Adams talking about we'd probably did pocket now HTC how to run OS 10 on the HTC shift pocket now 20 whole yes are you kidding me oh this is awesome that's a Brandon article from 2010 it's an HTC you can do pretty much anything with it I mean these are the same people that brought us the the HT too Wow yeah yeah not to mention the the HTC arrived but it's not the one I'm thinking of the touch pro 2 with the full debt it she loves doing this pop-up screen when it does the side sliding QWERTYs and when i was a college kid i was really amped on that yeah it was like wow i could put this on like you know the desk in front of me and like not type like it's a computer but at least hide my IM conversations from the professor i really wanted one of those but they were like 600 bucks on contract anyway let's move on i was a really quickly but that was my friend he passed away but that was his favorite thing about any smartphone ever was that tilting screen really I we would get in these heated debates over my phone's better we were you know 16 17 and and he he just pulled his out and he'd flip his screen up and I'm just like yeah whatever moving parts trumps everything that's why I will still if you put if you have a flip phone with a button with a push to flip button you win it doesn't matter what I know there it's awesome let's talk about Android please because we we need to move away from windows phone for the moment so we can get more done Taylor compared two phablets on video the LG optimus g pro which we saw at mwc and the samsung galaxy note 2 the incumbent the entrenched incumbent my new favorite compound word of the week um very curious I I watched the video just before we came on the air taylor was i will say this i feel like Taylor took a took a page from the from the michael fisher school a book of being too generous because i always do that I I frequently will go back and watch my reviews or whatever like that I'm like wow you could have docked this another point-five and that would have been a lot more accurate but Taylor was very very fair to the to the optimus g pro and i guess that's why it's good that you were in charge of this yeah so yeah uh I am I momentarily distracted I've received a text message about our bandwidth so sorry it's like we run the podcast and I'm like oh this is great this is rich sound and stuff and then all of a sudden we have a bandwidth constraint but the point is what the hell's a time oh the point is taylor you were very generous to the to the optimus g pro I don't think you were wrong but I want to I want to hear your thoughts on this Jeff in general how well it holds up against the gay to a 10 minute video doesn't do it justice um and and you know having the phone for four or five hours before I start writing the script it doesn't give me the time to really really you know get into the meat of it this is basically a comparison of just you know almost like first impressions how the stacks up yeah s and at first I you know I it's sitting in the box and I pull it out I'm like ooh like that's all I think it's hard to imagine a device that feels lighter cheaper and and made more poorly than you know a Samsung device it's not that they're made poorly but they're made of pretty cheap materials and it's hard to imagine something that could be made more cheaply and the only way to imagine something like that is getting a phone like a one of those et easing along with prepaid phones right and that's kind of how this thing feels in the hand and at first it's really off-putting it's really nasty um because it's it's all plastic and it's about 10 grams lighter than the note 2 and you've the white one yeah yeah yeah yeahs tennis later in the no.2 and and this is the one with the battery door which I described at mwc as as looking like a bathroom tile bathroom floor in a budget hotel yeah yeah yeah um yeah and it's got the same plastic fake metal trim just it's basically a note to LG style and the thing is that they didn't do it like optimus G they did it like they're older like the g2x like that l9 or something like that yeah like a cheap plastic remake and I don't know it's hard to not like it because they did such a good job on everything else but it's also hard to look past that can I talk before we I'm sorry Taylor before you go on about that I don't want to lose the thread this is important you mentioned that you had had the device for what would you say like five hours before you wrote the script yeah if that yeah so when we do comparisons I want to make this clear when we do a review we're actually getting much more in-depth than that the comparison videos could generally come first and when they do come first when we are time constrained when we do want to get a comparison video out more quickly than usual listeners what we will do is if we don't have information on how a device compares say as in terms of battery life you won't see it in the review you'll see welcome pair of specs will compare milliamp hours basically we'll compare every that we are able to compare with the time that we've spent already and then we'll follow up with other stuff in the review so I just want to make it clear we're not just throwing stuff out willy-nilly because you know after after a couple hours with the device we're uh we ain't doing no early galaxy has full review or nothing like that yeah so go ahead no I'm you probably need to ask me like specific questions because I could go on all day mmm what do you think to look I've left dog nerd I don't know what I am now what is it one of my nicknames oh oh that's right yes the talk and talk and talk or fight right I'm already what do you want to know Jim I just want to know when I'm gonna get my hands on it I want one yeah yeah I've you know i like i like the note 2 i've seen the note to the note 2 is a big galaxy s3 i wanted i really want to see the LG i know it is it is ooh is not a big galaxy s3 it pretty much is it's very physically yes it is not in terms of software and not in terms of the s-pen I mean well in software it is now oh my peak updates multi-pane on the s3 now yeah they added pretty much all the software that the note 2 has except for the s-pen stuff like the double tap for us I'm s note and long press with the s pen for a screenshot so so let me revise that just to make you have on power my own it's just a big galaxy s3 with an S Pen you go alright and a huge battery and yeah all right all right that's a big astray that's all it is we're going to circle back to this in the in Alien listener mail because you you're making a good point Joe and with those updates to software on the galaxy s3 that really does dilute the difference between these two as it should that's exactly what Samsung's trying to do but give me something different even if they screw it up give me something different so I can see how they're screwing it up and then we can learn from those mistakes and go forward I don't know that LG screwing it up I just want to see something different because I don't need to have a note too because i had a galaxy s3 for a few months I know what it is I know exactly what it is but without the s pen which I am a fan of the stylist by the way so yeah now while we're talking about the s-pen Taylor will ask you something specific I guess I mean you know you touched on it a little bit in the video but I feel like the S Pen is is a big value add of the galaxy note 2 when compared to this LG competitor it is it definitely is um you don't have a nest or you don't have an S Pen you don't have a stylus on the lg optimus G a pro um it's just you you get at large antenna which is so used which is only useful for television in Korea so there are rumors that the international version and the US version will have a stylist in lieu of the large antenna but there yeah that's what I've heard interesting but while i can while i'm reviewing this thing i'm totally going to pull out the antenna before our place calls in public because it's like it is literally like a foot long will you please do that in the coffee shop that you routinely word from you just you have fake phone call so at the antenna okay so i've got some observations on that yeah first of all i have a couple different stylee stylized stylist asi's what how r you pronounce that diversity is yes that's a yes stylist to seize huh um there is you can use a stylus on on the LG not a problem it's just samsung has built in so much extra stuff to take advantage and to really make use of that stylus of their stylist but that just saying i can buy a stylus for my device doesn't do it justice so samsung is getting it right there it's a totally different stylist that's been is inductive and it that gives you a lot more capabilities when you're using it like to write handwriting or draw or anything it cuts off capacitive input so you don't get you don't get like these marks from your hand and mark from the stylus Reza normal stylus is just capacitive it's an extension of your finger not to mention the digitizer from wacom yeah go ahead yeah the apps and the the user interface editions exactly it's that ecosystem that's the best way to put it to Michael that we're talking about that's not there on really anything else right now Samsung's got the market and that's fabulous moving over to that antenna most people don't know that the majority I'm not going to say the majority a good deal of GPS receivers have FM receivers built into them and as long as you've got headphones plugged in you can listen to the radio because that that antenna that you need for the radio is the headphones that wire is your antenna why they didn't do something like that for the this LG we're talking about I have no idea I mean wait are you saying you want it you want a terrestrial radio antenna for your for their for the LG fabulous I'm saying the opposite of that I want to have a TV tuner that uses my headphone jack and a plugged into it as the antenna so I don't look stupid with a big honking foot long antennae sticking out the top no I know that there's probably somebody out there who's much smarter than I am who's going to say well you can't have that because it's the propagation of the the radio waves and the signals for TV requires a broadband such that half radios on the back of hurts big wave subspace propagation John I need some chocolate pudding yeah but that was anything that's what I would expect to see here and really that's kind of cool as long as you've got the right bands to be able to watch it in the right places now of course this is a Korean phone so it makes sense that it's got the Korean TV stuff in it but bring it stateside and let us watch you know digital TV here that'll be cool and that would be cool but the reason I kind of gave the optimus g pro leg up on the the note 2 is in at least form factor in design is because it's so much narrower it's only four point four millimeters but it it makes a difference when you're holding the device this feels more like the droid DNA then the in size than the note 2 it's just a lot smaller but it's the same thickness but it's just narrower and it's easier to hold one hand so so that that that's one reason that gave it you know kind of a plus one in InDesign okay and it looks like a truer sixteen by nine letter box layout yeah there is a very little bezel on the sides very little less than half on each side than what the note 2 has that the downside to this hardware is like LG just does not do buttons well at all I'm going to click this you might be able to hear it oh yeah oh yeah it it's mushy but it clicks and it's hollow sounding it feels like okay the only way I can really explain this is say you get like a mcdonalds toy yeah with your happy meal and it has like a push button that lights something up like I click like it yeah it just I don't know it feels like a hollow like mushy like hollow toy click I will say this i think that there are a few things more annoying than bad physical response on a physical and a hardware button but i will put up with it if that physical button also includes a built-in LED yeah and that's one thing this button does right and has a sweet multicolor LED below it makes it like the button right lights up the whole button all the outside of the name of the but yeah and can you use light flow to control that or have you not tried that yet um they've got built-in settings for control awaiting who is it is it like five color or what oh you can get this see I gotta do just do besides red and green and so I guess that's what I wanted yeah yeah it does um does it do besides ready it was an awesome sentence does it Davis a thread um yellow blue white green red think it's pretty much everything I would buy that phone just for that I'll of LEDs I love status lights yeah the button is sweet software it's pretty bad it's heavy and and very customized the settings page the settings app is tabulated yet tabbed and stabbed yeah that's hella do it house but it but the responsiveness has got to be amazing though I mean response but the screen I swear it picks up my finger before I touch it oh it might because the Lumia 920 does it yeah I don't touch it sometimes and it selects things so you adjust the screen sensitivity here now I don't know I haven't been able to look that up yet mm so did they fix the problem that some people reported with the nexus 4 where you touch the screen and it's off by a dozen pixels or so I haven't I haven't had that problem on mine for my eye for eye I've only run into it very very infrequently and usually when playing ingress but I just some people note it more than others not to mention any names brandon but which brandon was on the podcast yeah nothing on here for adjusting sensitivity okay what we do have to move on from this at some point so I want to say that we are we do have a review coming from you on this but not until next week is that correct oh that's pending I don't know when but you actually yeah I might know I don't want to pin you down to next week not until later it's going to be monday in the morning and everyone can set their watches there will be something monday in the morning maybe I don't know it's know it is there it won't be monday morning it'll be tuesday oh I mean well I mean well there will also be something monday oh yeah it's gonna be like skulls and stuff not from you to it yet though there's gonna be some it's gonna be a very busy week next week not from you back in your cage jacket you Wow oh go ahead I was just gonna say last thing I'm performing wise and synthetic benchmarks the optimus g pro blows the note 2 out of the water but in side-by-side performance they are neck and neck so there's that we've hit our plateau gentlemen yes yes welcome to the deepest benchmark era it hit 20,000 n22 and 12,000 in quadrant standard quack Wow geekbench on it or have it written all of them I just kind of did you know a couple more the comparison the note to got 6,000 in quadrant standard so half that of the optimus g pro and and 22 i think it get like 15 or 16 thousand so it's a big difference in benchmarks but in day-to-day performance you don't see any sort of difference whatsoever but neither of them lag i have recently found a game that makes me care about benchmarks all of a sudden because it is very graphically intensive it's called like sky defenders it's only for iOS it's an aerial combat game and it's amazing I gamblers sky gamblers that's what it is doing us do you like sky cam blurs you do you play it I have yes oh man let's play cuz it allows multiplayer it's it's like the most in-depth ipad-based or ios-based flight simulator I've ever seen you can play it from your macbook to why are you serious waiting can you plug into USB joystick I play it I don't know oh my god if that is the case you will not see me again I'll just glue recede into my game cave which I don't even have but I will build a game he will make a gift if I can use a joystick with a flight simulator you've got my god all right listen we are all right so thanks for joining us for the podcast Michael's gonna go phillies an example whatever understand really nice all of you Joe you got the ship let's talk about or do Rosen's please cuz you know i do want to have you talk for a second row because I Joe wrote a piece which was really cool and really aptly titled called what you need to know about Android Trojans and it wasn't until just now that I thought of the concept of an Android Trojan horse which would be really interesting and not like a computer code but like you know it an actual robot horse but I want to know about this because I've been running naked on all my android devices for a long time IIIi don't use a virus scan or anything like that and I find a lot of a lot to be suspicious about in terms of those security programs that often come pre-installed on Android devices from carriers and blah blah blah blah blah and I want to know how much danger you think I'm in Joe and I want you to talk about your piece and I want you to talk about how you got an animated graphic in the middle of you peace which is pretty cool but so to answer that one really quick that's called a gif some people pronounce it jiff and you can animate those oh and it's huge it's just so animated so it's like a bitmap then yes but it moves do you know what movie that came from by the way what the too many secrets let's see tech is strongly too many secrets cooties rat no but I love that you're like throwing in random jokes that nobody gets like i like i do i was a Robert Redford movie how can you not know it I don't know ever seen a Robert Redford film in my life oh my goodness I know I know right she owns the city here in Utah so I guess I have to know him yes Sundance Utah folks if you've never been there it's a beautiful place with the honey what this is sneakers where they are and see how you know word of sneakers I haven't yes I'm so bad pop culture so they're trying to figure out what this c-tec astronomy means and they get the what does that scrabble letters out there's badly arranging out and they have the cooties rat something else we want to keep this PG so we won't go there and too many secrets is that's what it turns out to be that's what anyway uh obscure movie references aside yes back on point yes there are viruses yes there are Odin's yes there's malware adware ransomware all kinds of stuff that exists everywhere including Windows Phone and iOS and yes even Android we are not alone then the article kind of goes into that a little bit it goes into some ways that you know what a what a Trojan horse is could including history we talked about the Trojan War the Greek and Trojan War it's the first time I've ever written about that outside of like junior high so that was fun but very very short Trojan horses are when we're talking computers all the way back to the very early days of computers it's basically a program that you invite into your your environment your operating system whatever it may be whether that's through a document a disk USB Drive a program whatever maybe that has an unintended payload and that payload can do any number of things it gets kind of confusing when you're talking about you know computer malware that's kind of the generic term these days or in law they are calling that a computer contaminant now whoa yeah I that this might be the first contaminant ever had the words payload and contaminants on the air that was awesome let's talk about space and subspace distortions yes facial torsion facial distortions but essentially what happens is there's something inside this program that you think you want that does something that you didn't really want today that usually is stealing information and reporting it back to a third party over the internet because we're always connected today which we weren't in the past or making text messages to premium services using your number which cost you lots of money very fast and probably the most insidious one is being able to steal enough information from the hardware of your device to clone your sim and then intercept your your text messages your mms make phone calls as if it were you just anywhere in the world which can then of course incur some significant costs in international roaming and whatnot so not good the article goes into how how you can protect yourself that's number one that's probably the most important thing to do but also some things that Google is trying to do that their competitors aren't and how the fact that apps that are in Google's Play Store that aren't quote-unquote reviewed before that there before they're submitted and added to the catalog aren't a problem or that that's not a big deal most people think that the review process for both windows phone and iOS apps will cover them and will make sure that all of the apps are nice and clean and aren't doing anything they shouldn't be doing that's not a case at all of us false sense of security it is it is exactly a false sense of security they are not doing a code review at all they're doing a does this fit within our style guidelines review is this causing undue taxes on the the processor on the RAM by slowing things down and it is this a nudity and most importantly is this doing anything that we should be getting money for like being able to buy stuff inside the app so they're protecting them not you when they're doing it to your point sorry you're saying that when I whenever I ignore whenever ignored these permissions and I'm just want to install an app real quick and it's like this happens the following permissions and I'm like yeah whatever whatever whatever right I'm putting myself in danger yes in fact i'm not aware that the Windows Phone or iOS does that I mean correct me if I'm wrong here guys do they expose what permissions that app needs not beyond run not on Windows Phone as far as I am recalling I don't have my lumia next to me so I can't confirm that right now but I've never been presented with a permissions list I don't think you know so chuckling those either so something android does that the other guys either don't do or don't do well enough because nobody knows about it is they tell you every single thing that that app is getting permissions to keep that who gives them the permissions the person who's installing it if you don't like it if you are editing about it don't install it keep talking I'm going to get my lumia keep talking guys because I'm gonna figure this i'm not i'm not gonna incur the wrath you just went on Immunization in the comments yeah I thought I happened I thought I had fallen victim to some sort of hack or something at one point it was a few weeks ago everyone who was calling me was getting answers from some other random guy across the United States I don't know where he lived but they were getting there when they called me he was answering and if I would send a text message when they replied he would text them back and it took me forever I just they were getting random stuff from this guy and I had no idea who he was and if i texted him or anything all the texts just came to me he wouldn't answer and I'm just thinking when the war like how how is this possible and it took me months to figure out that I had actually logged into google voice from a review device and somehow added that number to my account so all of my text messages and calls were being forwarded forwarded to his number which was a recycled PR number yes I've had that as well as if I was on the opposite end of that someone else had that that review number before I had and so I was getting all of their stuff I may have been that guy so it was awkward i was getting this lady's kids trying to get ahold of her for whatever else she was like a mommy blogger so i was able to track her down and actually call her have a nice conversation with her you know here's this strange guy calling out of the blue from many states away and we just had a nice little conversation it was kind of fun okay yeah Mike like that numbers yeah I code numbers are a terrible terrible thing yeah and there's really no way around that until we get to the the post phone number world well not even that but if we can get to a personal phone number and that's what i think google voice going way off topic here google voice is a very good thing just for that because i have complete control over that number until google says i don't and it's one number if i change to a different provider if i move to a different country I just update my google voice and it done I don't win used to know using google voice since 2009 and you are absolutely right about that it is very convenient as long as you don't want to get picture messages but that is even further off topic that's what emails were and that can do that if they're being sent to or from sprint you know yet no no it is technically possible it is in practice it completely unreliable I routinely get picture messages like two weeks later i get i get non it anyway let's not talk about google voice when you guys are tightly when you are on a yeah keep right first of all just realized that my sim tray is out of my lumia which is annoying i should go find that now that would be a good thing yeah lose that and you're gonna add a lot and screwed so i have found the windows phone store on my device i have loaded an app called TOS calm which is pretty cool looks like communicator Star Trek communicator for windows phone you should look at my communicator review that much play it was awesome thank you so on the detail screen we have the size of the app the rating one screenshot a small description from the from the dev you can report our concern to Microsoft you can learn the publisher when it was last updated the version number and you can see more from that publisher there are supported languages English okay and then right under that it says requires data services movement and directional sensor so I guess it does tell you to a degree it doesn't break it down like android does in a bulleted list of like what the app can do it just has a small little line of text there that just requires its it it probably should be called out a little bit more because I was already to say it doesn't say that at all but yeah it's it's oh yeah i don't think i was now that underscores the point if even if it is there if it's not if it's not prominent yeah if it's not advertised as it were and this it doesn't do anything small you're talking about before it was regard to the modern design language like it's beautiful and i love it and it's minimalistic and that's what all the reasons i love it but it also is not terribly conducive to getting you information quickly you know yeah because the minute you bold something or italicized something or whatever you're basically a lot of the time you're breaking the rules of that design language because it looks worse but it also looks different and that's what your eyeball is drawn to yeah own on iOS the only thing even remotely similar to that you get requires and then it tells you system requirements and that's it there's nothing that tells you what what it needs to what needs control of so to contrast that for Android when you're looking at something in the Play Store you're not told when you're looking at the app what it requires so you have to instead download it and as soon as it's downloaded in on your machine not installed yet it will then tell you what permissions you need to grant that app before you install it sometimes people just overlooked it but the the newer versions of jelly bean and I forget if it was in original jelly bean or jelly bean The Revenge if but they're now exposing that even more to let you know which ones could cost you money so if right you know if it has permission to send text messages it'll tell you that and you then as an end user decide whether or not you want to install it so going to my article and the section how can you stay safe Michael read the permissions hmm look at them that is what you are telling it oh no it's okay if you do that so really if if you get a you know cell phone bill for a thousand dollars because you didn't read the permissions if I'm working for that carrier I'm going to tell you too bad you said that it could do that you should have known better this is your this is your learning cost you know you go to college you pay for a course in college it's going to cost you a lot of money well here's your education it just cost you a thousand dollars right and that's probably taking to heart of a stance but you know you said it was okay be aware coming from a father who I've actually been on the other side of that conversation and had a kid by two hundred dollars worth of stuff for his virtual aquarium before so yeah put a pin on if you're going to let your kids borrow your device's anyway next is check the reviews so before you download it before in a while you're looking at it saying hey that's a really cool-looking app what do other people say about it how many stars do they have absolutely do that either you've got people saying this is bad it does icky stuff you probably don't want to install it and then avoid shady apps all together and a self explanatory like you have to have a certain degree of like of of what's the word you know not panache but like a world you know world sensitive street smarts you need to be able to look at a nap I Connor be like that is either ripped off or it's lame or why is this a pixelated version of what it should be yeah yeah yeah shady apps are pretty easy to spot if you're not Leslie what why is this facebook app read right you know yeah yeah even that you know that's that's kind of a clone of a nap or a fake app or whatever you want to call in fact I talked about one of those called fake Netflix I don't know a nice alysha's copy of the netflix app this was just used to steal your netflix account information I don't know so that these could watch sneakers I guess I don't know what that's available for streaming or not anyway the shady apps that I'm talking about is hey you want to be able to break into your neighbor's Wi-Fi so you're going out trying to find a a Wi-Fi network hacker whatnot first of all that's not going to be in the market very long you're going to have to get it elsewhere but the same permission screen that you get from apps installed from the market you're going to get from apps installed from a third-party market or side loaded on your device as well one major advantage to Android there but I go into and I'm just going to read this it's very short there's no such thing as a free lunch and an app that seems too good to be true probably is apps that imply they can enable you to do illegal immoral or unethical things should be avoided not because the type of activity that they allegedly enable after all who might have step on your values or your belief systems but because the quote-unquote bad guys often prey on the type of user that installs this sort of software by including malicious code in them that's right do not be a dirtbag because you will get dirt bags taken advantage of you exactly so that goes back to our pre podcast conversation Michael that's my libertarian views Who am I to step on your values or belief systems just be aware those kind of people might put in something that you don't want in there so just be smart like your Wi-Fi kill up yeah just skeptical that thing to close this out to do i need a virus scanner on my phone Joe long story short no great so there you go now let's go expand on that most virus scanners include stuff that will give you heads up about weird stuff that's happening look out as one of my favorite I'm not so for endorsing them but I have it installed on all of my devices it lets me find my devices when they're lost it lets me send out a signal flare when the battery's running dead so it can tell me the last place that I was before I died was here combined me that's cool it'll take pictures of whoever's trying to unlock your device and email them to you so you can know maybe that's the maybe just record them but yeah so if you've got somebody trying to hack into your device whether it's a kid or whether it's you know roommate or some guy at a bar you'll have pictures taken of them so you'll know who it is and then you can turn them in to authorities the parts on device they're sent off the device so all kinds of cool one thing that linkedin linkedin one thing that look out does that others don't is they will monitor phone calls from apps and from websites and let you send them through instead of the dialer it'll let you send them through look out to make sure that that number isn't on their list of known malicious numbers and it will allow you to intercept them before it goes to the dialer app itself so neat features and functionalities there look out cool AB you know it's it's great now that one is free and remember what I just said about a free app there's no such thing as a free lunch exactly this one is freemium meaning they give you the base set for free but then there are additional features and functionalities that you can enable through purchasing a subscription so and whether or not you want to do that it's up to you i haven't the base version does everything that i needed to i got some i got some advice at my college graduation party from a family friend is this kind of older guy who's really cool but he was you know trying to give me some advice he was like now remember you know there's you know you're grown up now this is no more free lunch not not that you were not that you were getting a free lunch but you know what i mean like yet yes i think I'd know i don't but thank you I get that just because I don't want to hear you try and explain it in right anyway um let's let's let's move on a little bit Joe I love it when you write pieces like that there are I I think frequently we users have very straightforward questions that are like how afraid should I be to do this and you're instructive articles help us answer those questions so I'm glad if I help just one person not get infected then I my job is done I've and your job is done well we'll see you we'll see you next year all right i want to say briefly that there's been an HTC one spotted with a removable back cover and microsd support oh my god that is for china so that click on food yeah oh my grub worms yet there is a little bit like you get really amped on this then you look at the picture of it and you're like oh wait the battery is still integrated so this is only half cool but the microsd support is the important part the other important part is dual sim support which leads to the third important part which i already said this is for china so if you're in china get excited if you're not sad face then salivate over here Chinese friends exactly yeah you know it doesn't matter i know we were not going to talk too much about the one right now but i want to say that in my time with the one I have found the lack of a removable battery to be acceptable micro sd's of a little bit harder a pill to swallow but but yeah 32 gigabytes 32 gigawatts yeah no it's enough for me this is running Android yes no no an iOS device no alive well HTC has some ones or I don't know some numbers that run Windows Phone so and this kind of has the windows phony look to it so right I'm wondering the article doesn't really I assume it's Android because I don't think you can add so i massaged I'm sorry I didn't mean I thought you were talking about the one other your time the HTC one is an android phone yes it's an android phone I don't know though the 180 to w8 o2w yes I'm sorry um the W kind of implies windows I don't know or maybe it implies wcdma that's a good question that my I'm not seeing anything in the article I would assume that this is a an android-powered device just because of the supplemental stitch but yeah plus and plus it is it is like an HTC One like I mean them you know there's the noise cancelling mic there's that yeah I like it the hardware is identical so it's ya know I think that w is for wcdma but that's a cool piece of speculation you had their first right I removable storage on any OS is a good thing if that were up windows for iftar Wow HTC one with Windows Phone new yeah mmm oh I'm sorry I'm just saying it's between HTC and a bunch of numbers at the end no no no how do I rushed the premium the initial like I say I didn't know I should have even said the number when I announced it to ya 8 or 2w yeah yeah yeah good good thing in there Joe can we break from years of qwerty typing I don't know just Taylor Martin no um using 8 pin in its current form no Taylor there I watched your video to two nights ago listeners if you haven't watched this video you owe it to yourself to watch this weird weird experiment eight pin is the weirdest keyboard I've ever seen in my life and using it you know normally you see something like that you're like wow that's got to be so intuitive like no one would ever use that so it's got to be so good but like watching you write the letter A by like moving your finger in a convoluted looping pattern crossing three sectors of that keyboard I was like forget it I'm done never again house what good what's going on with this big okay you're relieved to be done yes what you relieved to be done you use this for what a week yeah well about a week and a half um yeah it was done I had decided to do it after writing her after making a video about Android keyboards mm-hmm and it's I wasn't new to this keyboard I'd used it before but they changed the layout and it's actually not so bad now I'm now typing long word and long sentences long paragraphs are kind of annoying but it's not so bad it's a it's annoying but you have to learn the layout that's yes yes learn where every letter is and having to do that is like I don't know pulling teeth for some people but I sat down and I learned the layout within a few hours and there are some letters that you don't use often those I would stumble on still even now but after you figure it out you can kind of just loop your finger around and type pretty quickly it's hard to do it on this video because one i didn't know what i was typing and to you know reaching around a camera or reaching over and up over a table so it was a little awkward to shoot the video that I struggled with it but um there's a science behind it and the guys who created a pin they said basically if you give someone a sheet of paper small square and say draw a continuous line most people will make figure eights and it all comes back to the center which is the reason that there's a circle in the middle they said that's a hot spot where people will always come back and then you have loops stemming from that Circle Circle in every direction okay they said the most natural way to write anything is with a pen and paper and you can't really do that so if you were given a pen and paper about the size of where you would be writing on a smartphone and told to draw a continuous line that's basically what you come up with and the old layout was a beast was just straight through the alphabet ABCD efg hijk you know all the way around and doing that you would end up having to stop and go backwards it was like it was like using a rotary dial phone um people keep saying that about this one and it's not so much the same it's learning different loops so the a is you come out from the middle to the right go up cross a line come back to the middle and what you think about it as all I need across two lines three 9s and then you memorize all these loops it gets to be pretty easy to use I could I get to the point where I could type with one thumb and not look I could type right that's that's a pretty yeah that is in garrison now granted that was after a week of just me using this and and I had to really really try and learn it but that was kind of the point we've all used QWERTY keyboards from birth every single one is we i mean every keyboard now the qwerty the courts all of those are based on typewriters which are from 1860 i believe ya think i looked it up so it's an old technology and i still have a hard time believing that nothing could be better than something that was designed in 1860 okay I have to stop right there and throw in some completely random but relevant information yeah the qwerty layout that we use today that we've used for the last hundred plus years was not the initial layout on typewriters yeah the initial layout was closer to what we now know as Dvorak I've heard people say that it was Dvorak I've heard people say that it was similar to Dvorak so go to your own research on that to find out a lot of research went into that initial keyboard layout to find out what would be the most efficient layout so that you could type words quickly and it was so unusual and sonu of a concept to be able to push buttons to make text appear on a page that it took a while for people who get really fast at it but eventually people did especially the the office workers who were predominantly female they got so fast at typing on these typewriters of the day that they were faster than the mechanical mechanisms inside them all right and would cause that cause all the keys to jam up and all kinds of stuff and they'd have to stop have down time while they brought somebody out to fix it and put the keys and all the mechanisms back in place so the qwerty layout was designed and all the keys were relayed out to deliberately slow down these people by making the layout of the keys inefficient so that they wouldn't break past the speed at which the mechanism could actually work to fire that that letter onto the page which asked forward to today we don't have that problem anymore but we're still using that that known and proven in efficient layout for all of our typing if we were to go back to a more efficient layout like Dvorak or like whatever they had in the olden days we'd be significantly faster at typing but we don't use that and it's interesting to me that we don't have that even on our smartphones yeah we would have to relearn it that we've letting it and that relearn it and that's what you're doing have them that's what I was trying to do is to get out of the concept of the mindset of typing on a qwerty keyboard and and I'm not saying that qwerty was designed way back then in 1860s or whatever that's not what I was saying I'm talking about you know the alphabet on a square pattern that you have to you know what I'm saying the actual keys on a on a plane Ford keys on a board yeah I mean yeah but the point was you know can we type on something that is not the standard typical traditional layout and it was tough there was a really steep learning curve but you know I could use 8 pin and not pull my hair out after a week you know so anyways be going to be crazy and and most people probably wouldn't get the whole gist of it why would he even care but you know I kind of wanted to do it to give 8-pin a chance talked to the CEO and he said there's a big update coming out and two things that this keyboard would need for me to actually want to use it full time is prediction software like you haven't slike a swipe or swiftkey or even the stock android keyboard keyboard yep um and a shift key there is no shift key so you can't capitalize stuff you have to make an entire loop around the keyboard and then pick your letter I'll bullying shift and I ya know so first like if I wanted to type I don't know in all caps every letter you have to make a loop around the keyboard and they pick your letter so some like if you into type of W I had to make two loops around the keyboard to type of your one letter one letter might know this is you know there's enough in efficiencies that yeah but if you had word prediction in there you would type one or two letters and it would go being ordered yeah and that's how I type with swiftkey I type one or two letters and it generally pics my next word for me are you kids in your swiftkey I like my old crusty inefficient stock keyboard but yet the idea is not for me to say hey will 8pm be the keyboard of the future now I think so probably not but the fact that these guys are thinking outside the box is what drew me to the keyboard in the first place it is it's impressive and in the science behind the read about the science behind if you go to their website is bizarre it's crazy bum I mean they beheld a chili it's 8-pin calm 8 pin number 8 PP en or p.i.m.p and utah we pronounce a 10 yeah I know I've got a lot of flak of that no no its work we live in different parts at Tony would pronounce it differently because he lives way over there yeah so eight pen is how its airliner and super carolina p en and he IM are pronounced exactly this is exactly the same do it dude you gotta get that ate panda yeah yeah but there are lastly there are a couple other keyboards and some people in the comments brought some out to me and I may do another one of these experiments with different keyboards one I will most definitely do is minimum it's not out yet it's they're seeking backing on IndieGoGo and they've already exceeded their their goal it's it shrinks the qwerty layout into a single line that's what I told you about yeah yeah minimum and you don't have to be accurate you're just gonna tap around the letter you want and it'll they'll oughta grow out what you want yeah and then there's another called snap keys I think yeah evolve like snap peas is the really well-known one yeah and I tried to type on that for a few minutes and wanted to punch myself in the face is that who blackberry partnered with to make their keyboard I don't know but good no because they did they partnered with a width and with a keyboard maker to make their new software keyboard no I'm probably asking stupid cuz it's probably somebody else and I can't look it up right now we are we are we are really short on time yeah and the last one is message ease which I use that in the past and it's okay but yeah I plan on keeping my eye on a pen and other keyboard makers we appreciate your sacrifice yeah and if you guys come across a you guys meeting our audience if you come across a keyboard that we haven't talked about or just got a major update let us know we love doing these kinds of experiments and putting ourselves through this pain so you don't have to send that to Joe Joe Joe at Joe at pocket I was thinking Baylor in this maybe I'll use swiftkey tilt for a week next no I want to use well in as joe and i know on the on the starships of the 24th century people can type entire phrases with just like eight keys that all have numbers on them so you know there's infinite diversity that the learning curve for that keyboard is amazing yeah I find just while we're on this I find myself using the google voice keyboard more than almost any kinds of his voice to text dictation yeah so I just I hit that microphone button on my keyboard and I just dictate it out and I sense it's right nine out of ten times Oh hooray ! I've been looking forward to getting lunch there comma but I ever had the opportunity period smiley face yeah Michael and I both did a week-long challenge oh that's right yeah I was a phone dog and I did a week-long challenge where I use nothing but dictation on all of my phones yeah I think I did it over a weekend I think you had me beat in the duration on and the timing no I did and the time I shut up alright listeners Apple has talked about really quickly iOS 7 is running late is the rumor Apple is using and there's another rumor in the same article from Jaime from yesterday apples using OS 10 9 developers to speed it this is not unprecedented apple has cannibalized from itself before to get OS out the door specifically the first time they released the iphone in 2007 I wouldn't be surprised if everything we're hearing about iOS 7 is the truth that it is a kind of a different animal I wouldn't be surprised that Apple was kind of you know cannibalizing internal resources to to get it done and a commenter has a really oppression thing and says this supports my long-held theory that Apple well no longer cares about OS 10 I wouldn't go that far but I think that the the future of Apple is definitely more in iOS than OS 10 what do you guys think you think this is likely to be true or what well wasn't there another rumor saying that the production was scheduled to start this summer or before the summer like in the next month or so for the next devices hardware production yeah yeah probably was it part of that Steve Jobs article that the iphones donna is still yeah yeah yeah yeah no I mean don't know this this particular thing the software I mean makes all the sense in the world to me yeah they need something major they really do and I hope that this is indication that they're doing something major yeah I'm not holding my breath though it well and the fact that it's allegedly delayed and they're pulling in resources from another development team that that lends to the theory that it's getting a major overhaul and that overhaul they're going to invest more time in getting it right so anybody who's upset that it's being delayed don't they're they're taking the time that they need you're going to get a better product because of it so keep that in mind it's hard to be patient but keep that in mind the second thing with with cannibalizing desktop OS developers to help them with their mobile OS from me being a developer for my day job that I think is a very very good thing because you get a fresh perspective you get people who are coming from an entirely different user interface metaphor over into this this very mobile-centric thing and a lot of their bias and Prejudice is going to come along with them which means we're going to potentially have more abilities for our mobile devices to act like to behave like to mimic desktop and laptop type functionality yeah so you you it's a two-edged sword because they could screw everything up that they've already established and done right in mobile but on the other side they could push this mobile OS out of the mobile ecosystem into more of desktop stuff and open that up to some of the desktop apps that haven't made it over to to iOS yet to make them easier to to run and to use on mobile devices and once we get up to 2 iPad sighs come on that's a tablet without a keyboard so right or a laptop without a keyboard so it's fun makes sense it's funny we condemn windows for potentially making a Windows 8 Phone you know converging totally converging mobile in and PC but yet that's what we asked for an iOS well it's kind of a slider all right well no the points the points well made but Apple is kind of doing this from the let's take a OS and make it our omnipresent operating system let's make it do everything whereas Microsoft is kind of approaching it the other way they're saying let's take the mobile UI and put it on everything but take the desktop OS and eventually get that down to everything so they're approaching it from both sides and it is sloppy it's there's lots of weird stuff going on and it's not consistent between the three and it's it somewhat argue nor should it be but the way the way Apple is doing it they're they're starting from one platform and they're building out a Microsoft is starting from two and building in and we're yeah it's weird that's the best way to put it it's just the definition of weird I like that I like that headline but it takes a lot of work to take all the shanty 3d effects off all the interface elements on iOS apparently she is it that's pretty much what i'm expecting is i'm expecting that to a flatter just a flatter interface and no more good no more water skeuomorphism takes a backseat to you know you type in it's like a good thing great thing i bet they they introduce a doc like a different doc paradigm to like a bit more of a desktop thing i would really love the ability to say hover a finger or perform a gesture that would reveal the doc on the home screen like I do on OS 10 or just bring the mouse pointer down and and the doc reveals itself all I'm thinking when i hear that is the webos sure i wouldn't wanna yeah now you can get that get that on android by the way yeah i know i was just thinking about that last night like when when everyone started poaching webos features after the after the big collapse and i was everyone's like you should be excited you got cards on your HTC android phones down like yeah it's not the same dude no way to work homework for all of our listeners out of the wave launcher to you have seen that yeah yeah what go ahead you so the name of the article that we're talking about is iOS 7 running late comma Apple using OS 10.9 developers to speed it by Jaime published this morning is that right nay prepare yesterday morning so your homework is to go out to that article it's still relevant it's got relatively few comments on it right now what I want to hear from you our listeners is what could a pelu in iOS to bring in some of the gestures and some of the other things that we're seeing in sailfish in ubuntu phone and what not what should they do it and how could they do it to make it uniquely Apple to expose whatever you think it should be the dock or running apps or notifications or what could they do to change it using gestures that's your homework go nice mr. Levi has spoken I like it he's given us some parenting tips and now homework from the from the classroom I like it let's let's jump at a listener mail so we can go this is robert hansen has written to us with a really cool thing jumping back in android very briefly with something we've talked about before hi everyone he sells recently read about the samsung galaxy mega 5.8 and 6.3 and i do not know if i should laugh or cry this is a madness but not because i don't like big phones i own a note to myself but because there's no clear distinction between samsung devices anymore they all have the same design and all have the same functionality why do you think Samsung is trying to fulfill everyone's wishes because this is just confusing and it's getting problematic do you think there's a strategy or do you think Samsung is trying too hard yes I is my answer because I'm speechless he says love your podcast look forward listening to it every thursday give the good work regards Robert Robert thank you for listening this is a solid question we have talked about the dilution of the galaxy brand before we talked about it a little earlier in the podcast in my I will answer first very briefly and I'll let you guys go to it I think Samsung is absolutely does have a strategy but they are very very concerned with uniformity across their galaxy lineup and we can see this in the forthcoming note 8 and the galaxy s3 all the galaxy products goes you know they all look the same I think Samsung sees this as an advantage because they are for some reason still thinking like they're a young small company trying to break in when in fact they're already dominating so I cannot understand the strategy but I think it does exist I think it's also very boring and very confusing so I agree with you Roberts what do you guys think Taylor um I think it's kind of the mantra that if you throw enough things at the wall something is going to stick but on a higher level you know if we throw 50 different phones at a wall which ones are going to stick and then they just keep producing those you know this galaxy mega will probably never see anything else from it again you know if it comes out if the 5.8 and 6.3 come out okay so 5.8 sticks and 6.3 doesn't we'll see maybe a galaxy mega 5.8 too but we won't see the 6.3 or something i don't know but um it's kind of ridiculous but i think there implementing a kind of a more PC centric mindset laptops or they make a 14-inch 15-inch 16-inch you know all these different ones just for everyone I don't think it's necessary for devices so small especially when you're talking about a point three inch difference in screen size between the galaxy mega 5.8 and galaxy note 2 55 yeah yeah it I don't know I think they're just that they want a competitor out there for every phone like there is the 6.3 it would be I guess 6.1 mate would be its its competitor they want something out there they want something out there to compete with every other device out there they want to own the market and I don't necessarily agree with it but it's working for them and if I was making as much money as anyone who worked as an executive in samsung I would be doing the exact same thing so hmmm different perspective your thoughts Joe so that the word in that email that stuck out to me it was strategy and I'm going to bias my response with my developer background again I see Samsung rolling out a lot of different devices but all of them are starting to have the same set of tools utilities user interfaces and features that aren't on their competitor devices whether that's the s-pen whether that's their smart stay and other stuff that they're doing with the camera all of these things it's it's a suite of functions and functionality that Samsung is using to differentiate their products they're not ubiquitous across all of their product offering yet but it is becoming so once they have thoroughly vetted out all of the features to find out what people like what people don't and then they can invest their time in the ones that people really want and kind of let the other ones just stagnate at that point they will have made their own separate niche their own separate branch of Android that at that point they can start improving that core and all they've got to do is write drivers and whatnot for new hardware that that will then fit upon and the the different sizes the different specifications could be their way of vetting out what the requirements are what the system requirements are to run those features and functionalities properly and how to scale them to two different sized screens different resolutions and whatnot so I'm thinking they've got kind of a cyanogenmod thing going on where there is one core set of features that is cyanogenmod and then all you need is this vendor overlay to support all kinds of different devices as soon as a new feature is added or changed or updated or whatnot to the core it gets pushed out to you know to github and everybody can check it out and apply their vendor overlay and bam there's a new update for the device it's fast it's smooth its fluid it's efficient Samsung's not there yet but something to give that Falana to me makes sense I don't know about you guys but to me that makes sense something that gives that credence and credibility is cyanogen himself works for samsung not anymore not oft okay worked perhaps on end and maybe left some of that vision behind where did he go he quit a few weeks ago really wow I just hadn't I just had to oh wow moments because I never knew that the guy behind cyanogen worked for samsung and I also never knew he quit Steve Kondik he's an amazing guy if you ever get a chance to talk to him I've only had like two minutes of conversation time with him but wow that guy he's beyond words I think I got to install cyanogenmod on a device more than once before I do that well the nice thing is it's if you if you're running cyanogenmod 10.1 on any one device yeah you know exactly what it is how it does what the features and functionalities are on any other device running cyanogenmod 10.1 regard the manufacturer it's kinda like a match and very much so but Rana CLE but imagine being able to do that across your entire product offering if your Samsung yeah so now everything is the same it doesn't matter if you've got a you know a mini galaxy or a maxi galaxy or a mega galaxies they're all the same they just scale to to take advantage of the real estate and what's on that device and they don't have to cook up new versions of the entire rom all they got to do is cook up new versions of the top layer and new versions of the bottom layer and then they can just intermix and intermingle and push updates much faster oh yeah hopefully I like it that's a theory we haven't seen faster oh yes it enables that that metaphor right but whether or not they take advantage of it remains to be seen they probably didn't even realize that right now just throwing things at a wall man hey Sam's into the wall if you need a consultant I think Brandon would be okay with me providing some consulting hours to you to help bootstraps happen there it is one of the offers miele million dollars right in there you got all the Terry years where we're pushing the longest podcast ever so let's think we're gonna close it out and we all have to get to this face circuit event that all our listeners already know what the outcome was about and might get to I mean find it on the internet because we're not we're not flying to it before we jet out can I ask you Joe your thoughts just taking off for my article stay safe out there there are bad guys around us make sure you're making good choices keep your device is clean and make sure that you keep all of your money in your account instead of going to some guy across the pond love it Taylor Instagram is still terrible and I will always think that it always that man I ain't forgetting to fire you from this and everyone um have a great week every week and stay tuned for more optimus g pro coverage yes the other things coming from Michael and myself and everyone else yeah make sure and keep a close eye on as this with this week of course but but next week especially it's going to be very busy and I'm tired just thinking about it again next week is going to be insane that for there now though as we have to go finish this week before we get to that week that is going to do it for this episode of the weekly find us on twitter com Joe is that Jolie by Taylor is at casper tech CA sper tek and as always you can find me of Captain two phones you can also follow pocket now officially at pocket now on twitter as pocket now on facebook and google+ you can leave us a comment on itunes or xbox music if you prefer and we prefer it and if you have a topic question or suggestion for the podcast you or you just want to say hello do it email us podcast pocketnow.com thanks for listening see you next week you yeah I was there soon as we hear the joke Jim we'll see you later till next time awkward paws bye bye I all right I gotta get more coffee cuz I'm frakkin I'm running sands caffeine right now so my god yeah I know is I'm being a freak I'm sans food Lisa let's all get stuff in our faces all right I'll talking about all we do this is thank you and remember oh carolina by shaggy that's the theme for today absolutely will sweet caroline papa you