Gadgetory

from pocketnow.com this is PocketNow weekly hello and welcome to episode 01 four of the pocket now weekly the once-a-week podcast from pocketnow.com where we discuss what's hot and what's cool in the world of mobile technology smartphones tablets phablets everything in between I'm your host Michael Fisher senior editor at pocket now I'm joined as usual by our editor-in-chief Brandon minimum good morning to you sir hello and Anton Dena gia is off today we are joined by once again special guests recurring guest extraordinaire Jolie by the android guy good morning to you good morning I am very excited to get started here right up front guys we do want to tell you even though we might lose a couple of year we're not gonna be able to listener mail today we're on a tight schedule this morning because we're all very very very busy guys but so we're gonna jump right in a news we are going to get to listener mail next week I do apologize for that and before we jump right into the news want to give Brandon minimun his customary corner shorter though it may be Brandon can it be a rounded corner where does it have to be like a yeah it can be an arrow niggas rounded corner you can do whatever you like sir as long as it's not a skwerkel we're fine yeah no rhombuses in here wow that's about my favorite flavor well last last week we were talking about bridging analog and digital in terms of handwriting recognition with the note 2 and Michael I know you want to talk a little bit about about this in a minute but maybe maybe this can kick it off we were talking about two ways to to bridge analog and digital to have that sort of handwriting experience in a digital format one of the ways we talked about Tony came up with a really cool idea where the device would learn your handwriting and thus drastically improve its ability to convert it to digital because right now it's it's not that good and and the other thing that we came up with was have a screen texture change so that it felt more like high friction paper because right I'll sliding a stylist across the the screen of a galaxy note 2 is like ice skating it just doesn't it just doesn't feel that that good but then there's a third thing that I thought about and I I'm curious to what you guys think about this one of the things that you kind of can't replicate on a mobile device is the fact that when you write something down whether it's on a whiteboard or a piece of paper it's always there meaning you don't have to turn a screen on and it's really frustrating because if you're using your note 2 for a to-do list you have to keep turning your screen on you're not going to leave it on all the time or else your battery will be dead in like two hours so we've talked about this for years these hybrid screens that have the ability to do LCD and e ink but I would that that would be awesome if you could just flip a switch on the back of the phone or something and there's your to-do list that you've written out in an e-ink so that you don't have to keep turning on and off your phone that is fascinating it I have not seen the hybrid I ink and LCD display I hate that LCD display ATM machine but I've not seen those hybrid displays but it brought to mind like maybe something a Chinese manufacturer might do like one of the smaller guys like to kind of rip off this interesting idea where they can't do one of those hybrid displays so they do like an LCD on the front and then you put the phone over and on the back it's an e ink it's a touch-sensitive inked panel um gee Joe doesn't this like connect with what you wanted to Joe Levi was was incensed ladies and gentlemen last week when we discussed hand ready recognition without him so Joe would what is the what do you feel about this well let me throw in a couple couple thoughts on what Brandon was saying I mean uh first off yeah you know if I'm if I'm taking notes on on a device whether it's a tablet whether it's a smartphone and I've got to hit the power button and then unlock it and then navigate to my app and what was I doing I've forgotten now so that to-do list doesn't do me any good which might explain why i've got my to-do list on a blue sticky pad sitting on my desk um primitive primitive yeah so i think we've got a while to go there the whole e-ink concept with a hybrid I'd like to see that I think we have people complaining about pentile displays and now we're going to overlay something with an e ink that has to be completely transparent and not hurt our our existing display that's the color saturation that the resolution I think it's very very ambitious to say the least not say I wouldn't want something like that but wow that would be fabulous but the the thought that came to my mind is it may not be the the pure hybrid that Brandon was talking about but we've got these these awesome new pens now these stylee why not make the devices go into a sleep which we know our device isn't off when it's sleeping and when the pen gets close to the screen have it automatically open up and take you to your preferred ink recognizing app so it's not always on but next best acting so you're basically taking the idea taking what what is true right now which is you remove the stylist from the dock and usually the device knows it and just taking it one extra step you're making the s pen or the stylus even more intelligent or the device rather so right you don't necessarily have to bring up an app list like like you do with the stylus well doc but if the device is off and you approach it with the pen but you know it doesn't take a computer scientist to realize you're probably gonna want to do something with the pen on your tablet or on your phablet 40 you can go a few steps back and put an accelerometer in the stylist so that as soon as you pick it up if it's if it's not inserted into the device oh yeah yeah yeah if they if those packages become small enough that would be a they'll be amazingly cool I i I've got a pen sitting around here we just I just did a little sea pen video yesterday and compared it to the s pen and I also have this this other samsung bluetooth pen sitting around which is huge and i think you know it has it has a phone receiver in it you know you can easily yeah that that big hole thing it was a yeah and it got me thinking about how much you how much how many sensors we could pack in and how many features we could pack into a stylus but this other one that this one that i'm talking about is just so well it's thick and it's heavy and it's not very fun to carry around and you could never put it in a device so i think until we get to a point where we can miniaturize one of the stuff we're kind of in the midst of a pipe dream here well when we get to that point how about using that accelerometer that proximity sensor to not only unlock the device without touching the device or rather turn it on but also unlock it so you could literally scribble a gesture in the air or flip the pen in a certain way to to unlock your device so you can bypass everything all in one that would be awesome you could also have you know your friend have a similar stylus if you're both carrying the same phone and you could have virtual lightsaber battles if you got like you know a sightless with enough with an accelerometer energy I row in there that would be great I I never have a problem with the lock screen because on Android I always turn it off thanks to ice cream sandwich and above you can do that Joe what unless you're using pin unlock or some other security measure why do you have a lock screen I have faced on lock because I have a day job where people love to go in and mess with your device uh yeah and I have kids who love to go in and mess with your device so literally every single Android we have in the entire house has some form of pin or face unlock to to keep people from messing with it do you really do face unlock on a daily basis like I tried to do that for the first two days I had the Galaxy Nexus and I was like okay this is I'm tired of holding my phone up so it can see my face at the right angle and you know yeah the the first round of face unlock was an interesting concept it was fun it was novel that lasted a day and then I went back to to my pattern unlock when they improved it and I forget what it was it's early in the morning here so that you could go in and improve face unlock by taking multiple screen captures if you will of your face and they also added the liveliness check which I still haven't gotten to work a single time but at that point it became useful and it became something that I have on my Nexus 7 I have on my galaxy nexus works great for me maybe I'll have to go back and give them another give that another go I haven't tried it since I first snapped up the Galaxy Nexus and is that faster though than pin unlocker pattern unlock can't be uh it can be what it can be nah you just pick it up and you look at your device and by the time you're looking at your device it's already unlocked and you're good to go if it doesn't recognize you right away yeah you know pattern unlock is significantly faster I'm Joe the more you do the improvements the faster it gets I know you're you're a fellow guy who as a who has an ample allotment of hair and like when you when you when you wake up in the morning and that's in a different shape you know when that's all like goofed up and whatever like did you ever have any trouble with your phone recognizing you because I imagined I have not tried to fool my phone in that regard but my air gets pretty wild when I wake up no I've never had the problem with hair however when I wake up in the morning my face is not pretty right those who've seen my video know that my face isn't pretty to begin with but I look different when I wake up so it has a hard time recognizing me until I added a an extra hey i just woke up face to my my screen through my face recognition face recognition right yeah so i added that announced on a problem i just thought of a fantastic joke to play on someone who uses and relies on face unlock i know there's a secondary way to unlock your device but let's say you've a friend was a ton of hair and while they were sleeping you'd shave their head and when they wake up they cannot unlock their phone yes it's okay big tangent here everybody remembers the x-files right oh yeah and then you had the the funky guys that the lone gunman that Mulder liked visiting every once in a while hated them yeah well remember the writers strike and we lost x-files for forever they came out with a spin-off series called the lone gunman and one of the very last episodes of that series was them defeating a facial recognition system by painting their faces blue and putting like little orange sticky notes on their little orange stickers the round one's over their faces looks and capture stickers yeah yeah because you're just matching the points so if you blank out the face with you know all blue like a blue screen and then put those dots on there oh no feat the the face recognition I actually want to do I didn't know where you were going when you started talking lone gunman I gotta do it like a really irritated place not with you Joe just really don't like the lone gunman but uh no but that sounds that's that would be an amazing little video to whip up like you know trying to fool Google's facial recognition I'm sure somebody's already done it but if we get into a slow week in the next couple weeks I might like to try that yes look at all the news coming down the pike and yeah talk about there's not gonna be a slow week and four months speak so we want to segue into it i do want to jump in the news but before i do just a real quick announcement re announcement really we are listeners in week two of our nexus 7 giveaway meaning we still have to nexus 7 devices left to give away with our friends at amzer helping us out with that this is a combined give away with them read the entry reach scuze me read the the post it is called nexus 7 giveaway week to let it begin and all the rules are there it's not hard and don't let anybody tell you it is hard and we are just having a ball giving away these things for free so please please enter and and have fun with that and speaking of speaking of not that Joe Joe it before we keep jumping in the news here what what what did we have right before we wanted to leap into Android I know you wanted to talk a little more about yeah so I was incensed uh Tony and you guys talked about handwriting recognition without me through enough which you can never ever do again very insensitive so we do apologize well the thing that got me into it was Tony brought up something that I had forgotten about and that's back in the windows ce e days we had and probably even a little before that we had apps we call them programs back then that you could install and literally write down your own letters on on your device's screen and create your own true type font in the days prior to that people were perfecting that technology by four they would send you a sheet of paper that you could then do the same thing with an actual real pen and fill in the blanks capital a lowercase a capital B lowercase B all the way through the alphabet you send that off to them and in return you get back a disk with a true but I plot of your handwriting and I never could quite understand how that would be useful because my handwriting is terrible that's why I have a computer but it was cool you know you could type on your keyboard and turn it into handwritten text and make those letters that you were sending people look personal because look I actually wrote it for you didn't work what you didn't but it looked kind of funky because you're not you don't just have 1a or 1b that you write it depends on what comes before it in after it so it varies quite a bit but the point and this is what got me so enraged say i went from incense to enraged how um careful careful no you got a hollow points over there Joe did you notice i misspelled that hol oh it's android has the hollow anyway so tony was going at this saying you know we can train it and have it learn our handwriting so that when we write it's writing and recognizing and converting into our font just right there at least that was the concept that I thought he was trying to get across which is completely the opposite of what we want to be doing so taking a step back to Newton and I was a really really big Newton guy in the day I own three of them a message Isaac Newton's oh this is back in the day of gil amelio an apple when Apple was Apple and then they spun off Newton to be their own company Newton had it down they had shaped recognition in notes you could write a triangle it would convert it into a triangle a square align a circle a street intersection it it would do all of that for you Samsung is trying to do that and they have a long way to go before they catch up with Newton which is sad because Newton was so long ago wow I didn't know that the gestures Newton had real world gestures if you didn't like something you it out and poof there was a cloud animation and a sound and it was gone it it was very simple it was very intuitive and it was just like you do it on paper you just scrub it out and it's deleted Newton also had training exercises you had not really games but you could go through and write sentences and it would start to learn your handwriting recognition which was ultimately its downfall you had to do that with the early message pads so that it could recognize your text and convert on the fly as you were writing the later versions the message pad 2020 100 it was fast enough the processor in that was fast enough that you didn't have to do that and we're talking what 200 megahertz processors back then but it was fast enough that you didn't have to do that we shouldn't have a problem with it today come on quad-core 1.5 s so segue over to to Microsoft I also had a tablet pc that i use all through college the reason for that is I was taking mathematics I was taking statistics I was taking all of these things economics where I had to write equations and where I had to I had to graph things and write charts and and do all the stuff and I couldn't do that on a laptop because typing that stuff in on a laptop is just painful writing it on a screen with a stylus is a lot nicer and yes I know it doesn't feel like ink on paper but I had a digital copy that I could then email to myself or to my my study partners or whatever and I had it right there and I didn't have to carry around a separate handwritten note book but something that Microsoft did they released this phenomenal application called one note that hardly anybody knows about hardly anybody uses and it should have revolutionized computers the way we use them today and I'm disappointed that it hasn't yet but in OneNote it's literally your digital binder you have folders inside those folders who have subfolders you have sheets of paper that can go on forever and ever and ever it sounds on a laptop this is on straight windows is that correct yeah any Windows device windows phone but any Windows Windows Device right you can do this but the the strength behind it in addition to its organization was the way it recognized your writing you could literally right just a full-length letter or maybe even a novel on this screen and it would leave your handwriting intact and what i would do is go behind the scenes and recognize what it thought you wrote and it might come up with five or ten different things that it thought you were talking about and index that behind your note you wouldn't even see it but you could search on it and find it so it's like predictive text like way way in advance and and in the handwriting arena I mean yeah and it was useful predictive text I've heard and it was behind the scenes so your handwriting was still on the screen but you could you could literally do a search on your computer for the statistics or four keys Enix economics and find it because it would recognize I don't know if he wrote Keynesian it might have been Kenyan it might have been key bank but it would recognize what it fought and maybe put five or ten things behind that word behind the scenes and have it right there yeah 11 it's amazing and it's still used today it's still being updated its its multi-platform now except it's not on Android it's only on Windows and Windows Phone um I knew I'd heard the brand name somewhere yeah it's it's really powerful software it's it's funny because pen writing doesn't really have a place in Windows II like you know like it probably did in previous versions where that was going to be the future and then they were just like forget this touch input finger input there we go right that's what actually what I was thinking I was like why haven't any of these advancements actually come to fruition and come to change our landscape and it's because I think we had this big disruption in the market right of this capacitive touch sort of revolution which firm for most of which I'm not I want to be clear I'm not sad about I'm really glad that happened but it did you know completely like rip the rug out from under any kind of stylist development any kind of writing development because suddenly styluses were really really uncool and unless you're following the phablet space unless you carry a galaxy note or a similar product they still are I would venture to say pretty uncool you know people don't want them still I think in a broad sense yeah well if you look at all of your accessories that everybody who has a tablet is going to at some point in time consider getting a keyboard so they can really do rapid text input on that device sure when you get into I mean typing on a screen that's great for smartphones but tablets where you want to actually get work done an on-screen keyboard is still slow handwriting recognition through whatever mechanism we want to use has the potential to fix that the tablet with a stylist has the potential to fix that the challenges that we have or what we've talked about plus how do you fill out forms with a stylus oh if I'm if I'm creating a new new person and this is kind of another thing you mentioned in the last podcast Michael if I'm getting someone's contact information I want to open up my contacts app say I want a new contact get my stylist out and write the information into those fields and right now I can't do that not even on and super awesome galaxy note 2 I can't do that yeah it's only in specific apps that I even have any stylist capability other than just you know finger replacement right well let me let me let me say this i agree with you i think that would be a fun feature to have for people like us and in unless so for somebody like me because I even I I think we talked last last podcast about how like when you when you're writing for for more than a couple minutes now your hand cramps up because we're not used to writing anymore I mean can you imagine how much more true that is going to be for the four people who you know younger younger people how much true have a much truer it already is like I feel like when you say that that the stylist based input that writing input is going to somehow experience this this with this resurgence because it's somehow more efficient i don't know i think that people are being raised on keyboards now and i think that i think as i think more about that's in the middle of my sentence I'm like oh I think styluses are actually still going to be a niche thing I don't think they're going to come back in a big way the galaxy note 2 obviously is a an anomaly here because that's a core differentiator for it but I don't I don't see the stylus input method coming back because I see writing by hand as a whole no matter what you're using dying out over the next 50 to 75 years maybe I'm a radical maybe I'm just too too much of a two in love with the idea of the future but it's a dreamer yeah but won't you know they say they say I am a dreamer I'm still just a rat one this whole thing up I'm still looking for the point in time where the devices that we're carrying around with us are as functional as the Newton was that I was carrying around back in what 96 97 yeah i agree i can't i can't disagree with you Choko by Newton don't even all right let's uh let's let's jump into to Android news either there's a good there's a good talk show I'm glad you got to uh you got some you know reads passage for our mission more I'm glad you're not you're not incensed enraged or thinking about those hollow points anymore oh yeah I got all that out on the table and all right now I can't say hollow points without thinking of your Android misspelling a intentional misspelling Before we jump into the actual Android news as as listeners as you know I've got a we've got a couple couple instances of the LG optimus G here at the pocket now offices think to our friends at LG I am staring at the at the AT&T version right now which i unbox the other day Brandon I believe you have you have you received yours yours yet should be coming shortly that is outstanding and can I to kind of talk about the carrier of that town it's probably no big secret course that's on sprint so it's uh I just wanted you know obviously have to wait for the full review to hear my impressions on this but I am just above surprised at that LG has managed to keep me interested for this long because it's been a couple days and even right out the box i was like wow this actual feels a little bit more premium than I thought and then I'm thinking well the software's got to be a tripping point here as it is on a lot of LG devices and our weight it's uh it's not so far so there's your little very very vague and non detailed sneak preview this is very interesting it's a very interesting device and not in a bad way so I'm looks old word of trading notes with you Brennan go ahead room we talked about LG in a previous episode that I happen to be a part of and there was one of us who said something about LG oh who was that that said LG was really gonna do something to knock it out of the park you know I don't know but it sounds like maybe that's something I got from Utah might say it might be I don't count him out yet something like I go back and listen to the back episodes the bug my stash something the thing that the reason that this is relevant is not just because the optimus G is around but because the deed the nexus 4 is is kind of almost basically official that's point of view if you take like this massive mountain of leaks as official evidence of anything but the LG next for just got some hands-on time we got some benchmarks out of it i'm looking at a story that stephen shank posted on October twelfth so you know i don't know i'm still not terribly pleased that to be honest that the next nexus is being built by by LG I was kind of excited about something about something that Motorola was gonna bring to the table which will talk to talk about in a second but how do you guys feel about the nexus 4 in light of these these new benchmarks which don't look terribly all that impressive i was i was on LG's youtube channel trying to get a taste and understanding for all the features that the optimist she has and i started thinking you know this is really nice hardware it looks like it's pretty nice hardware and the s4 pro is a beast and you know it would be cool if this thing was running stock Android and well that is pretty much the nexus 4 so i am very very excited to try the nexus 4 yeah um I you know what I hope they retain and it's something that um is not related to the specs but they the notification light on this thing is actually built into the power standby button on the side so it's it's very much like if you ever used any of sprint's old Direct Connect hardware that when they were transitioning from nextel and they the big push to talk button on the side was backlit in this brilliant blue LED backlight that let you know the button was there letting you know somebody was trying to talk to you reminds me of that and it's just really really cool too I like when omm bind buttons and lights because I'm pretty easy to impress but if the phones if you're if you're sitting at the table and the phones facing away from you you won't see the light whereas unlike the galaxy s3 if as long as the phone is on its back you'll always see the notification on the galaxy s3 if the phone is in the room you'll see the get the notification haiyan yeah but i didn't know that is true and but you know what it doesn't it ultimately it doesn't matter Brennan if the LG optimus G is on a table it will not be on a table for very long unless the table has been laser angled so that it is perfectly even it'll just slide right off this is the slipperiest phone I have ever encountered that bad it was it good how does it feel my head I mean it feels it feels good in the hand but if if it's too dry outside of his to dry and cold it'll it'll slip out of your hands if it's too hot outside and your hands are sweaty it'll slip out of your hands like it's it's holding on to a piece of glass without the iphones without the iphone 4 is kind of thick metal band for for support and it's a little too wide so yeah it's it is beautiful to look at I wouldn't want to carry it around without a case and that's coming from a guy who hates cases so you see here yeah but anyway we I don't want to I want to kind of just very very briefly touch on this nexus issue cuz we talked about the nexus 4 and i think it was last it was just last week's podcast where I was like if our if Sony if Sony gets a nexus phone out before motorola does i will eat my hat and it looks like if it depends on if you believe this leaked image of this sunny Nexus device it looks like that might that might happen we kind of kind of don't know really i know i forgot to put this in the rundown guys I'm sorry the Nexus x yeah I don't really I really hope that I'm read that that is a fake I know that I'm in sensing a lot of Sony fans but I really really just I don't know I we've talked in the past about how sony has not really gotten a hold here but what kind of have to see about that I do want to jump right past it I just wanted to touch on it that yes i will i will have to extract my foot from my mouth if this turns out to be real so two points on that before we jump past it to pond look at this sweet i look at me getting my foot in there we have recently seen google and sony team up to release AOSP roms for a couple of the Xperia devices so that essentially brings the Nexus experience to some of the older devices so that could be a kind of a hint at where things are going and second just looking at that picture I haven't seen any other devices and if you guys can think of any that I'm missing here that have those magic little gold dots those three or more little gold dots on the side that aren't a Nexus device alright that those two things paired together tell me a lot more that we're gonna have a sony Nexus device that's for letting dogs right for what's that I'm sorry those gold dots their connections for a landscape doc right they have a special acronym pogo pins pogo pins that's right right right right yeah so I've got the desktop dock and I've got the car dock and both of them make use of them on my galaxy nexus and they work very very nicely and the next best thing to wireless charging and you know nothing's as good as well no uh Brandon do you think it's real yeah this thing looks totally unique I've never seen hardware like this I like how it has a bulge on the bottom and it looks like at a soft touch on the top and brushed metal on the bottom and the front it we don't have a shot of it turned off but it's just gonna be like this badass looking very squarish looking slab and i can't wait for i think to be awesome yeah yeah I think that's probably gonna be my next Nexus well let's let's talk about you know what I maybe this is another opportunity for me to be surprised by a manufacturer that has never really impressed me so I I also shall look forward to it but let's talk it while we're talking about giant phones want to talk about what we use what we've been calling the HTC dicks the droid incredible ex is what it might be called once it lands on verizon so HTC has taken the wraps off this thing and called it the a variant of it and called it the the butterfly the butterfly J which is just a hilarious name for a massive phone I mean it's so strange it is you think butterfly you think like LG is gonna drop this 3.2 inch you know low-end phone that's maybe maybe colored carnation pink you know but no no it's not it's this massive thing for Japan it's a it's we don't know what the the chip is most probably the s4 pro says Tony and the story here with two gigs of ram 16 gauge storage etc etc and a full HD 1080p display with 440 pixels per inch this is just unbelievable this is amin Brendan have you ever you flown to Japan and got in one of these for yourself yet uh my ticket is purchased I don't know where to get one though add this this is this is this is actually kind of an easy thing to predict because HTC needed to do something first and no one's done a 1080p screen yet and it's probably crazy to do a 1080p screen because the pixel density is so high most people won't know the difference unless the software is really taking advantage of it i just wish HTC would realize the need they need to start over with sense no one likes sense HTC is doing a relatively good job with hardware the One X the one x+ and great then when you get into the operating system it's like come on we don't like this well it you know and they have been taking notes on that day if they've been slimming it down i remember you know since four was a big was a big step in that direction and this kind of like stepping back and getting their hands out of it and you know we get all the 3d stuff went away and stuff is this screengrab it's not a screen together this this press shot from HTC is showing am I right guys that this is showing a new version of sense we haven't seen before with these kind of like side anchored icons on the left there it's called fat sense for plus and it kind of looks like the HTC Rhyme doesn't it the is what the rhyme looked like there I'm had these other sliders on the left is that what their other sliders say I never used the rhyme on account of not you know owning a person not wanting an intense tentacle to come out of my phone so I don't know a technical yeah whatever those third thing was called what did they call that thing about the charm it's a charm I'm out of the charm oh wow okay so 1080p it sounds awesome Wow fabulous until you start looking at how many pixels are on that screen 720p is a lot of pixels and you've got to have a lot of processing power behind it to paint all of those on the screen going all the way up to 1080p pixel density aside that's a whole lot of pixels that your GPU has to figure out and has to paint on the screen that means you're if you get a four times faster GPU it's not going to behave any quicker because you got that many more pixels that you gotta babysit and then you've also got the battery implications because that's going to take a lot more power just to keep up with 720p so I'm really that as cool as it is I'm really worried that having that many pixels is going to either kill battery life or it's just going to be slower than what we've come to expect because they're just so many darn pixels and in exchange I mean we have to get something were of value we have to get something out of this 1080p display in a smartphone that is going to benefit more than people who just for some reason use their phones two inches from their eyes and and will be able to tell the difference because I think the vast majority of people won't be able to tell the difference and so why are we sacrificing that why are we you know forcing this device to have that much processing power and have that much extra battery life which it doesn't it has like a two thousand million power battery or two thousand 20 milliamp hour battery I mean it's a tough case to make because you know YouTube streams in 720p on your android phone the YouTube app movies that you download from Google Play is as far as i know are not going to scale to 1080p games were absolutely not scale to 1080p for another couple of years until this higher resolution becomes a standard right so there's gonna be very little content to take advantage of the higher res yes is this just a stunt is this just H 2 HDC saying yeah we need to do something first and here it is is this HTC bug doing the LG approach like first but who cares you know this this is the problem between Android users and Apple users Android users want specs we look at the specs what processor isn't how fast does it run how many courses have how much RAM how BIG's the screen how BIG's the battery and then Apple users it's taller it's faster it's got higher resolution screen the earpods now direct sound down the ear canal just very ambiguous saying this is better but we're not really telling you how or why it's better because then you could compare it to something else and pardon the pun it's comparing apples to oranges yeah so Android especially asked our users which if your pocket now I hope you're becoming an Android power user we all want specs we want to see what this thing is we want to push the envelope an HTC knows that this is just an extra line on the box to get people to say look here's my phone it's 1080p yours isn't even 720p haha I win and it's another way the HTC can say we are again on top where the first to do this and and try and become relevant again what I just don't think that ever works it hasn't worked for LG in any of their spec do you know any there there d measuring contests with it with the specs that was 2x and stuff yeah right exactly the first to 3d who cares first to first a quad cornell 2e you know consider maybe something maybe some of us care we don't know until the review comes out i mean this has a better chance this optimist she has a better chance of making me care about LG then most products from LG have in the past couple years but you know the that's been a couple years of LG saying hey here we're first and everyone else going like oh cool and then a week later being like what was that yeah i don't remember what they were loved it wasn't impressive I don't think I think it's what I don't think you can compare that with with this because LG's execution of dual core quad core in 3d all were relative poor and and unless this phone is slow in his poor battery life as Joe is suggesting uh it's going to matter because it's it's got its got the specs and and it's also don't forget people might consider this to be a little bit future proof maybe they want a phone for for a year and a half and or two years something that'll be that'll that'll live up to the standards of a future higher resolution content so not absolutely do not in the sense of it being a phablet because it's not it's it's a five inch device for whatever it's not a phablet I don't think it's not a phablet but but not in the sense of that but in the sense of power house future-proofing powerhouse this is this is HTC's galaxy note 2 it looks like I mean in like I say not not in the sense that it's a phablet but it's like hey check out these ridiculous specs and of course we haven't got our hands on it we don't know how it runs but I mean one of the big reasons i gave the Galaxy Note 2 and a 9 out of 10 or we gave it you know after much discussion was that like it just does everything you ask it to and it does it pretty well on account of its you know really powerful engine so if this device this butterfly / dick / whatever you want to call it can turn out that kind of performance and you know offer something as a first then yes I think that they've got something really awesome on their hands and I hope that that's true because I happen to like HTC so yeah I love HTC this device I think is really going to show us what that s4 pro chip can do and I i hope i hope that i will be very very pleasantly surprised with battery being fine performance being great on i really really want to have another HTC phone he has my daily driver again hi Justin yeah hey Michael I know this is a little bit this will be an easy question no role playing um oh my god so you've been messing around with the s4 pro and the optimus G and it's it's it's interesting when people don't realize I don't really think about is that Qualcomm was kind of late to the quad core game the Tegra 3 was out like a year ago and they waited and they perfected and the benchmarks it say that the s4 pro is awesome I'm in comparison to the exodus quad a newer of course newer than the Tegra 3 would you be able to say that the s4 so far feels faster then the the Exynos quad on the on the note 2 where's to too early to lap god I man it's so hard I'm still right in the in the fuzz right I mean I'm in this point where I'm like still surprised that I'm holding an LG device that's responding this well so I can't judge it you know adequately against against the Sampson the last Samsung device I handled which with the ex no squad which was the galaxy note 2 so um I don't know I would say right now if you were pressed me for an answer I would say that they are on par although the the repeatable lag instances I had with the galaxy note 2 though they were very few I have not run into on the Optimus G hmm I've been pleasantly surprised at almost every turn with the software on the Optimus trees so yeah I it's really very impressive so far so that's that's the best answer I can give you let's uh let's let's keep moving on the list here because we've got a couple more things to touch on before we jump into iOS and just very very briefly while we're talking about kind of skins and software and things like that Motorola has actually come out and talk to reporters I love this headline motorola likes stock android blames carriers for customization which is awesome because we've been you know motorola has been one of the companies that kind of the press has loved to rip on for its skins and those skins have really become a lot lighter to the point where you can almost its almost tough to distinguish motorola's android builds from stock android builds if you're not a real efficient auto so I like hearing from a company though that he says you know ya know I like stock Android too it's the carriers that want to buy the way he declined to name any carrier specifically but I think we kind of right that's good I think we all know who he's talking about here he claims that Motorola tries to resist such demands but what we end up with is ultimately a compromise between the two positions it's just nice to see that as as some manufacturers become more emboldened in their skin design like Samsung is just never gonna give up the TouchWiz torch because they bring a lot of usefulness to the to the product I think but while while some companies go that way other companies are like yeah and it might be because they're owned by Google but who knows but motor oil is just like yeah we get where you're coming from the carriers want us to do this and it's like okay well I have believed you I don't know do you guys have a brief thought on that it's refreshing to hear that they're thinking that that Android is good enough to be unadulterated question for you guys if if you were running HTC and and knowing that Android keeps getting better and better as a stock operating system in fact 4.1 point2 fixes that annoying issue where you need to take two fingers to the notifications and expand them that way now you do it with one finger would you would you move your investment in rd and software out of software and put it all into hardware and focus exclusively on hardware and specs and high quality hardware and just say from now on we're lot we're just shipping straight stock android would you do that if your HTC well then you're then your Windows Phone you know then you're then you then you're using that that approach I think tactically I don't think that's terribly wise my gut instinct was to respond yes absolutely but that's because I like stock Android and I don't think hardware gets different enough but then you look at a company like Samsung who's not doing that at all is doing the exact opposite who's saying screw you guys we're gonna keep building this skin because look at all the cool stuff we can do when we skin Android and look at how like you know soundly Samsung is beating the competition so I I don't think it's a winning strategy Brandon to do that no I think if I ran a hardware company yes I probably would say we're not doing Sant skins we're doing awesome hardware but you know my company probably wouldn't do well I'd take a different approach to that say instead of skins instead of sense UI being the interface let's make sense UI just be sense and make it a theme and you can if you want to you can switch that theme to something else but will include our widgets will include some of our apps will include all of these other things oh and by the way let's also sell those for like five bucks a pop in the Play Store so people who don't have an HTC device we're still going to make money off of those people who really really want this was your that widget or this after that app let's let's keep doing the software development but let's monetize it and let's leverage everything that Android can do and make it look our own rather than reinventing the wheel to make it look around I love that and they could probably even create a new company for just software and it could be a new business for them I don't know if that is viable from a business perspective it sounds it sounds awesome to me but i will tell you just personally if Motorola like released their circles widget for five bucks to to anybody I know it's it's free you can get it you can get it but if they sold it I would buy that ish straight up I would buy upper 20 bucks absolutely cuz it's the coolest widget there yes it's an awesome widget anyway well we'll get into why that widget is awesome on on future to our installation of it but my 2 bits on this this whole Motorola topic um way back when I was reviewing the droid I think it was the droid bionic I started seeing in motoblur some really cool really kind of interesting new ways to align icons to the screen with you know that kind of plus grid that's there but it's not the swype side to side had the little shadow outlines of where the page was going to be and then all of a sudden we got honeycomb and I know that's a four-letter word on the motorola xoom and what did we have we had that same blue plus grid where the icons layout we had the same page outline so motorola i think was working really really closely with google with honeycomb and putting that on to the zoom and was taking those ideas and maybe even that code and putting it into motoblur on their own devices before we had honeycomb so we kind of had a hint that what honeycomb was going to be it which has evolved into ice cream sandwich and jellybean now before the OS was released so Motorola's doing that they're looking at android and they're saying what can we do to put tomorrow's tech in today's operating systems and do it but they're still going motoblur which I hate well I mean you know they're there they're the motoblur is thinner than it's ever been before so yes that's something to celebrate Before we jump into to iOS we want to just briefly touch on this piece from from Joe with this hilarious leader image there are there are there was a projection made by Eric Schmidt that that more than 1 billion Android devices will have been activated by this time next year billion with Abby with Abby that's that's crazy so Joe jazz this has this kind of nice piece where he talks about well what what is an activation me night how can we qualify the statement you know a gay what is the actual core of this I mean but just just really briefly guys this is um this a huge milestone I'm not big on milestones like app stores get to whatever gets of 5,000 and then it's like I hey we got 25 thousands like okay whatever but a billion active you know a billion android activations that some that is significant that's huge its massive and it's you know I think it's being reflected in in certain parts of the world and certain parts of the country certainly my part of the country where a year ago you could still ask for out of my five friends you know if they'd heard of an android phone and they'd be like what and it's not necessarily the case if I asked him if they knew what a droid was they knew what that was but now I ask people with android phone then there's this was a sea of confusion yes it's like oh the droid what the new galaxy the what Detroit know at what the Nexus names are they okay whatever still get a lot of work to do android but people know that it's the competing OS to the predominantly understood competing OS to the to the iphone and i think that's that's huge but this it's only going to increase as as milestones like this keep getting passed a billion phones on the market what do you think this is this is crazy I'm I'm so blown away I'm just rambling someone stopped so let's stop me immediate so so first of all a big big shout out to how awesome our readers are in that I posed the question what is an activation what does it mean there's some ambiguity to that well poon yes that's his screen name quoted Andy Rubin and cited his source which right there that means pocket now readers are just tremendously higher class than anybody else on any other forum or new site I've ever seen he cited his source I digress he says and I quote for those wondering we count each device only once ie we don't count resold devices and activations means you go into a store buy a device and put it on a network by subscribing to a wireless service this is a quote from Annie Rubin and again the source is cited thank you poon that to me says if that's really the number that Eric Schmidt is referring to we have a lot more androids out there than just that because that's one device being activated the first time right that's not me flashing 27 different versions of cyanogenmod nightly on my galaxy nexus every day that that's huge but to put that hugeness in perspective that means this time next year if the activations continue we will literally have one android device for every seven people in the world on the planet yeah on the planet and right now with 480 million activations that's one in 14 of us now cut that in half again because everybody who has an android has a tablet right so one in 28 but that's still a big number that's huge yeah no its massive i the implications are stunning I'll never forget it was a day in 2007 when this news came about and I don't remember the exact headline but it was something like open handset alliance uh you know with with partners like Samsung and HTC and and Google to release open source platform blah blah blah and it was such it was such a strange day for me because pocket now at that point was only windows mobile we weren't gonna go to iPhone we weren't going to be a smartphone and tablet general mobile site and I remember discussions with pocket now guys and I don't think either of you were around back then definitely not no Michael um we were just having these discussions I'm like will this ever do anything will this ever take off can this exists does this need to exist and and like reading about 1 billion activations I mean it's just it's a it's amazing how this has come full circle and this thing is just this is massive it's so big it would be akin to like sitting here today and and just kind of bantering about Jala or you know the or whatever the new the new webos thing is or whatever the new like me go thing is and like five years later all of a sudden waking up to find that it had taken over the market right yes I guess it worked yeah yeah it works it's a crazy crazy thing just to cap the android stuff we do have some news more news coming around the corner google has done that thing that companies do when other companies have big announcements they've come along and just kind of peed all over the the existing announced ease google has announced an android event for october 29th in new york city we will be there is that right Brandon you'll be there you'll be there we don't know which I Rivera whipped up a quick piece on what we can expect from this event you will have to stay tuned and find out it's going to be some probably some Nexus 7 News probably some Nexus 4 News blah blah blah do we think this is the official nexus event really quickly did I do the nexus 4 event rather yeah Joe only the Nexus everything event yeah I I do I think we're probably going to have our doubts or our hopes confirmed or smashed about the multi NEX I for yeah at this event well we will see I want to I we will have to to touch on that next week because we do it moving to the other platforms if I'm wrong Michael will eat his hat yeah that's right I have by the way I have about four or five baseball hats and on the dinner table at this point wait so let's jump into iOS because that is there's the other huge news from from Apple's platform no it's Wohlers wow you make a joke and it's family and then speaking of which the cover of the invite i believe says we've got a little more to show you keyword little obviously this is coming true we have this new do new ipad coming out where we're all kind of devising our takes on the on the subject if they're not all solidified this is what does this launch event would take place October 23rd is that right yes yes yes I see ya soon so that's that's coming up in less than a week here are we expecting to have our socks blown off because i'm not i'm expecting to see a miniature ipad that will contain one or two new features that are not to mind blowing but i think the presentation will be very bombastic and it will get a lot of people excited but for me i'll just say it and until something new and exciting happens with ios6 i I just I'm having difficulty caring from a personal standpoint of course is going to shake the market up but go ahead let's try to figure out something it's a puzzle that I cannot figure out so the ipad 3 the new ipad has a resolution of 2048 x 1536 the ipad 2 and the ipad one had a resolution of half that 1024 x 768 i think that the ipad mini cannot have either resolution it can't have that the bigger resolution cuz you that's just do them yeah he's just insane you just you're not it that would be like someone making a 5-inch 1080p display on a phone and by the same token it cannot have the 1024 x 768 resolution because there are 7 inch tablets and the ipad mini will be a seven point eight inch tablet that have higher resolution than that 1280 by eight and the nook the new nook tablet thing he has 1440 x 900 so they can't go with either resolution and yet if they introduce another new resolution like they did with the iphone 5 they're gonna really start pissing people off or maybe they don't care about that so what's the resolution of the screen on the ipad mini going to be guys what do you think Joe it's gonna be good it's going to be it's gonna be optimized for a perfect tablet experience yeah you see how I'm doing that Brandon apple doesn't have to release how big it is when the dimensions artist said they just need to say this is all of the power of the new iPad all of the beauty of the screen in a smaller tablet form factor that fits easily in a purse in a briefcase in a backpack or they may be and they will be they will be correct they will be saying exactly exactly what normal people are you don't want to hear normal people here it wasn't until it maybe a year and a half two years ago where you know we I was listening to you know reading articles listening to podcasts people started throwing around actual resolution like figures you know when I'm just used to like talking about display technology like TFT I thought that made me a nerd and then all of a sudden there's like 1024 x 768 I'm like oh god I'm tuning out and it took me a long time to actually get to a point where I actually cared about those numbers and really I just care about them because I'm you know I I man i'm a geek like you throw around those numbers to anything approaching an average person and they're like what ever what does it do for me so Apple we know has the market cornered on marketing things right I think the iPad Mini is going to be a smash hit I think if you think it's not I I would love to hear your your argument but it's you know a regardless of the display resolution it's gonna be huge you guys can answer my question you dodged a bullet dodged yeah yeah what's good we're putting our enemies together we're gonna apply it I don't care and I don't think anyone else does well yet you have to care because in the case of when the eye at the new iPad launched most apps weren't up to date with the high res screen so they were grainy and crappy piece of the iphone 5 there are so many apps that do not spam the full screen so this is a this is an issue that ipad mini customers are gonna care about me and sounds like hot though because look at what the i look at the iphone 5 selling you know what I mean it's the iphone 5s it's suffering in sales because of this some apps have black bars on the screen no but it's frustrating bad piggies I want bad thing used to stand all 11 36 x 640 pixel I really do and the missed opportunity there maps as well or you know all the apps that have not been optimized that that need to be really quickly I agree but I mean between the lines it sounds like you guys think that they will probably come up with a new screen resolution they don't care the developers will have to change their apps that's just what I am going to take away from this I'm expecting I'm hoping that they're going to do something very similar to the iphone 5 if not the same resolution that it's going to be the same proportions and then they will just scale if you want higher even higher resolution you can do that but it things will just work yeah yeah I'm probably wrong but I can't see Apple making that gap again because we just came out with the iphone 5 it just had this new thing that developers have to adjust for they've got to have done something to address that I don't think that's gonna be an issue I don't know how they're gonna do it but I don't think it's going to be an issue well we've got to go on is this this picture of this powered off display next to the next to the battery of the of the device so you know I don't know I look forward to seeing I know that this is a significant thing particularly for developers but you know I don't know I don't know how much it's going to take for iOS developers to become disenfranchised with the platform but I will tell you it's going to be more than then these kind of variable screen resolutions because yeah they can go to Android wear that is where that has been true for years and years but then they can also make about what eighty percent less money on Android I don't know what the actual figure is but you know so I don't think this is 1,000,000,000 masturbation that's a billion well in a week from now we'll we'll be talking about more specifics we will yeah yeah and if I'm wrong Michael will eat another we eat another hat just so sad well let's talk while we're on tablets and what we have just over 10 minutes left the microsoft surface price has leaked the microsoft originated tablet this is legit right I'm not behind on this this is not I'm not seeing an update where this has been debunked or anything like that this was via TechCrunch well it's up for pre-order so well now it's a review oh that's right I'm sorry that was I got those stories mixed up in the rundown yes it is up for pre-order and by the way that pre-order window opened what was it 22 a day ago two days ago uh I think GDS go okay Tuesday page isn't loading for some reason so based on that alone it sounds like none of us have pre-ordered a surface I furniture just gonna say don't jump the gun there see if Brennan hadn't I would have given serious thought to it and then would have looked at my eight dollars in my bank account been like well maybe maybe next time I was all over surface until I loaded windows 8 on my work computer the one that I do all of my pocket now articles and videos on and oh my incensed no explain what's up what's going on there is no more start menu and I know that doesn't really apply to Windows RT as much as it does to you know windows 8 tablet what are we calling that now um windows 8 pro there is no start menu it is that access big Metro you go down to where the Start menu was and you get this little block that says start that shows you a picture of your Start screen and it takes over the whole screen and that the stuff that you want isn't there and as soon as you get it all loaded up there's too much stuff there and then you have to go through and clean it it is the ultimate cluttered desk top where I can't find anything and I can't go back to it man I know the great isn't it where you want right yes yes you can and after about two weeks I finally got that done but it's it's trying to convince it to do what you want now RT is different art she is tablet RT doesn't have the traditional desktop experience are sometimes well no it does it doesn't it doesn't everyone has no something different there's so much misinformation about Windows it's amazing there really is Brandon when we were in New York City I was confused at the at the one of the asuste lady I think because I was like so wait this runs RT but but wait oh it has desktop mode so what does anyone know yeah she had no idea what we were talking about so but so I've run you know RT tablets in desktop mode but what they can't run certain apps like they don't have windows media player they don't have the whole office suite that's good I've yeah yeah to have a special app for it a special version of the app and it's supposed to be you know written in JavaScript and html5 and so much more web based in yada yada yada and you know what that's fine but doing this whole hybrid thing between here's this brand new operating system that you have to have special apps for that you download from Microsoft's walled garden and here is your other computer that's running the same operating system but it's not our tea and you have that pseudo desktop experience and you can run all of those other apps including the ones from the walled garden there's a huge disconnect there and you have people now that not to point any fingers right back at Microsoft that are making an RT or a touch type interface a metro or an MX or whatever we're calling that now that interface on a desktop application that's not going to run on the RT platform because it's an x86 or whatever it is version it looks like it should run but it won't there's also like the the hardware difference consideration right because company and it is yeah but and that translates also to the casing that translates to the thing not just the chipsets that people won't see until they get home or we'll never see and never care about but the actual casing like design like on the windows pro tablets by and large the one we've we've held on to the windows 8 pro the non RT devices are thicker they have fan ports they're much more like the you know kind of old windows slate pc expiry it's right Harry gotta be and yeah right so it but i think you know that's going to be that's going to set expectations right at the retail counter so i think it's going to force salespeople if you're buying these in a retail environment just say like all right we need to quickly classify this for customers because that's what happens in retail the RT tablets these are for your consumer stuff if you want to be a pro or you want to be a baller or whatever then you get the pro device you know with it which is heavier and thicker yeah but you can do more so I I don't see this as being a giant problem as long as the expectations are set properly but i don't know maybe maybe i'm wrong on that as a problem is confusion and it comes down to apple when faced with this same dilemma years ago instead of saying let's make mac OS 10 right I'm sorry OS X I'm not in the lingo but instead of saying let's make that you're on a train eh did i ah crap you had a right and then you got where you got rocked I'm sorry that's what I do I'm an Android guy instead of them saying let's port this operating system that runs on our desktops that runs on our servers that runs on our laptops let sport that and kind of miniaturize it and make it run on a tablet instead they kicked it to the curb and they made a new OS with new apps and a new environment and a new everything around that platform and am I used a person fixed yeah they did the ugly thing and and it's funny because they could have gone really one of two ways I guess they could have gone to three ways off all three ways and in a cliff that just there's there's just blood and after that Oh way number one is what they did what they did with Windows 8 is they kind of made it into a tablet operating system and I'm there's articles all over the place about how people in business are just not going to upgrade to Windows 8 because Joe like you said in your scenario you go to the start menu and you get these these colorful tiles and you're like where the heck is my excel so so they messed it up there and then or they could have gone with they could have gone with a glorified Windows 7 operating system where it's just the desktop paradigm business work and then people would have said this is in the past no one wants this people want touch interfaces so that doesn't work or they could have gone this third even more confusing route which is they could have created almost like a windows phone 8 tablet operating system in addition to an enhancement to a 7 desktop operating system but that would be way too confusing so any of these roads Microsoft could have gone down with windows 8 ends in in the cliff of death I I think well you know I I don't know I think that they've probably I you know I understand why they went with the almost entirely new fresh start from a UI perspective and from an architecture perspective windows seven right I'm writing both of those things the underlying architecture was very different than it was on Windows Mobile wasn't it the oh yeah absolutely yeah so I get why they had to do that on mobile and I get why they're now trying to have it both ways because they kind of maybe they kind of have to I don't know i think the writing is on the wall right now just the fact that we have we have windows RT and then we have windows everything else whether that's windows 8 on a desktop or laptop like i'm doing now or windows 8 pro whatever on a slate i type device we now know things are going towards this whole metro this whole MX this whole pretty colorful tiles and separate apps new apps rewritten apps that are distributed through the walled garden and i'm going to start calling it that on every platform now sure the walled garden so the days of all of your normal stuff your your desktop experience that you're familiar with your photoshop that you're familiar with the video editing stuff that we use on a daily basis of pocket now that is it's limited it's going to be gone and it's probably not going to be one maybe two it patients down the road when we're not going to have that and it's all going to be metro and whatever Metro evolves into but we can see that with our tea instead of cutting it off saying this is completely separate they did this hybrid thing realize they couldn't do this hybrid thing so they have the mobile tablet the thin one that can't do all of this other desktop stuff that we're familiar with them that we're used to from years and years and decades of windows sure and we it doesn't need it's gone it's gone it doesn't need to do it you know I mean I it's funny it's I will say it again I said almost every podcast it's so awesome that we have such a diverse team because we have such such different perspectives because you know you're talking to Joe but about using you know pcs in your daily life and stuff like that and my pc died you know a year ago and i had been a pc guy for for 10 years and and i've been in a kind of an apple only desktop users since then and you know i see this thing i see the surface and i think oh wow a peripheral that runs you know a portable device that runs an OS that i find you know fresh from a UI perspective and that can probably do all the things i need it to do and i wonder how many people are looking at it from each perspective you know I for some reason I want to say that Microsoft is not targeting their existing user base with with surface and with similar new particularly Windows RT products you know but it's it's the windows 8 metaphor we're seeing where they're going with surface they've tipped their hand we can see their cards this is where they're going and you're looking at it from from that perspective I can take virtually any software that I've gotten if I can find a floppy drive anywhere and plug it in I can load up any software that I've had years and years and years ago and make it run on windows 7 and on my current version of Windows 8 but that the map is now pointed to that going away if you want to run software in the future with Microsoft you're going to have to buy it through that walled garden or you're going to have to root it unlock it and circumvent the process and which we all know will happen but right you don't have to do that now with Microsoft and that is its strength it will run anything that you throw at it it's its strength it that way it's its strength of people know about it and I I don't think enough people network or care about it because people have already Apple already did this you know like you said before Joe I think you know like Apple came along was like here's here's this new walled garden and this is the way it's going to be and people you know far from people being cautious and saying well no I just don't know about that people ate it up yes because they float meal they went all in with that yeah and you still have your mac you still have OS 10 they did you get rid of that I see okay so you're a problem I i see i see which means yeah yeah they're unifying everything and windows as we know it is dead this it doesn't it doesn't know it yet I wanted like I on another I feel like when surface actually launches we we need to revisit this conversation because this is really really interesting I want to have a discussion between all of us platform guys and just kind of talk about this because I love the idea that maybe the future is changing and it's not changing in the bright beautiful way that Microsoft wants wants us to think it is um would you blow job at these prices no no I would buy a Mac you'd buy a mac noises you know now see the prices for listeners it's at 499 for a 32 gig 599 for a why the what are the capacity is uh different here 64 gig is running at 699 what's the difference between okay what's the difference between the two 32 gigs on the pre-order screen that we've got here is one RT in one pro no now they haven't haven't published the pro prices the middle ones out of stock the other stock one is a hot I can't see differentiation yeah I don't know whatever it the price is arranging for 499 to 2 699 so you know they're basically paralleling the ipad costs do you think that's a mistake or do you think that that is exactly where these devices need to be because i remember a tablet launching called the HP touchpad that tried to launch at the iPads price point and it was a vastly inferior device so it couldn't command those prices and then discounts you know kind of happened very quickly do you think the softener their their top feature for this thing if you look on the surface pre-order page I'm bringing it up the number one feature is the vapor magnesium casing and so the quality the form factor the craftsmanship mm-hmm to take a page out of apples book is the main feature and so they can charge as much as the ipad on that alone they could have they could have made it cheaper and then it the perceived value be lower like kind of nexus 7 style or they could have pressed it higher and then people are like why don't I just get a laptop this is a tablet like an iPad iPads or less expense so he had to put the price right where the ipad is agreed and it seems that the black touch cover with or without is making that hundred dollar difference on the 32 gig version that's interesting isn't it yeah it is I want that on my Nexus 7 what I want microsoft to come out with a Bluetooth cover that's that's your keyboard and it looks slick and as smooth as that and it'll work on any device I think Microsoft could sell that to Apple people just don't let the windows logo too big on it see I don't think I don't think they could because I you know you're talking about a unless they made one specifically for the nexus 7 you're talking about a really big design disconnect there from a physical from a view you know a visual standpoint I think what you were saying before Brandon like the did that they're selling this thing on its craftsmanship and on its you know high build quality I I completely agree also they're doing that they kind of lifted this color thing from Nokia right where they're like look at these giant eye catching bright colors I was at the the Downtown Crossing t stop in Boston here the other day and the entire thing is just paper din surface of ads I hadn't seen it push that big since the samsung galaxy s3 like launched the entire subway stations is covered in surface heads and they're all so brightly colored you cannot help but look at them this is a very very good help but I couldn't I mean I I could say I kept taking photos but by the way I played with Microsoft Surface back at the mixx conference years and years ago it was a table though the table yeah yeah yeah I had hands-on with that before I was so close to buying one I saved up 9999 dollars i'm ready to buy put in my living room but then they they stopped up they changed the name sometimes a name it's got and then they resurrected the name for something different now it's a skateboard no its escape I thought that was a really cool PRS town microsoft real quick just put some wheels on the bottom of a surface and and skated around on who was that for microsoft do we now that's one thing one of the guys this is sorry they're gonna sell that in the store as an accessory with the skateboard bolt on yeah or was it just suction Don I don't know how they did it I didn't I didn't look at the mechanics of Microsoft demonstrate service durability with surface skateboard and you know it's not like it's anything special it's just Gorilla Glass too but apparently it it withstood some abuse talk about Stephenson ahaha president of the Windows Phone of Windows and Windows Live division that's what he that's what he did wow they think it with your shoes off so you could operate the device with your toes with your job yeah you guys ever just and this will be the last irrelevant question i asked you guys ever use that your device with your nose like if you're if you if you're like carrying groceries and you've got like a text that you want to you know reply to it you don't have a hand free ever you ever touch your capacitive touchscreen with your nose i can honestly say that has never crossed my mind brandon i'm glad you bring it up because i've got an extra long meaty nose and it would make a perfect touch input device okay you know what I well you're welcome for the suggestion now you can stop going to buy those mini sausages to use this capacitor style I you thought fingerprints were bad on your screen and now we got no snow just prints yes good oh my god well I think that's an outstanding place to end the podcast what do you guys think we are we are over time on our on our hard stop time and we do have to to wrap it up here so Brandon anything before we before we head up I am holding my iphone to my nose and it's amazing how precise my nose is because your eyeballs are right there you can somebody try to i'm gonna try to type no that doesn't work oh you give it some practice man it'll work for you all right i'll report back uh Joe any closing remarks it was great to have you back on the show as always I wish this could happen happen more often and you know maybe when we all live in the same city well well I just want our users know how much how much behind the scenes goes into this stuff just in coordinating schedules we worked on this for hours to try and get all together yeah because we all love it we love we love doing that second thing I want to mention is pleased in the comments down below tell us how many of you picked up your phone or tablet navigated with your with your nose I want to know that Rick Fox on that and don't leave a comment on youtube no no don't go to youtube go to hockey now calm where things are civil and people cite their sources well I don't know about civil Joe now well you ever comparatively written a piece on one windows phone anyway and then just my last traditional outro looking at all of the news from right now whether it's Android whether its iOS or whether it's Windows Phone or Windows RT every week I'm just amazed it's it's a beautiful time to be alive it is indeed yes it is guys that's heartwarming with that with that heartwarming sentiment no I know I do love it in in Joe Levi is absolutely correct that's going to wrap it up for us for this episode of the pocket now weekly podcast throw a tweet our way Joe Levi is about to blow up Twitter as he always does every week with it with a live live tweet I love that this tradition has sprouted Joe you are the man to follow him he is at Joe Levi follow Brandon minimun he is at Brandon minimun follow me I'm at captain two phones captain the number two phones follow Pacquiao's official twitter account at at pocket now tweets which is currently tweeting about that contest I talked about at the top of the show do not forget about that it's awesome follow us on facebook and google+ leave us a review on iTunes or zune if you like the podcast if you have a topic suggestion or you just want to say hi please email us podcast at pocketnow.com once again very sorry we didn't get to listener mail this time we were too short on time we will get to it next week that is a promise or I will eat another hat thanks for listening everyone and we'll see you next week we'll see