Gadgetory

her eating's mobile accomplishes welcome to the verge mobile show this is episode 52 a full year if you count by weeks of the Virgin Mobile show it's the week of July first 2013 it's the holiday week is beautiful I'm dieter bohn i'm dan seifert and i'm chris sigler and we are sorry we missed last week I don't even remember what caused us to miss last week we were just all very busy it's just it was just life man like I was I was too busy schmoozing with steve wozniak is right yeah I just I just don't care about our listeners and watcher oh that's a lie I care about you the most so we've got two full weeks of news not all of which we're going to talk about because there's just too much but I think the biggest thing for us to talk about well one of the two biggest things for us to talk about is the google play editions of the HTC One and the samsung galaxy s4 and you know before we get into talking about like reviews of the phones what we think about it's like what it's like using stock what they mean for the Nexus program all that stuff can I just say that I really believed that the days of Android phones having 15 words in their branding was behind us right the HTC Thunderbolt LTE 4G with something something on Sprint's right I thought that was done but now we've got you know samsung galaxy s4 Google Play edition come on yeah but at least they're not you're not dealing with as many like codes and acronyms right like Google Play edition is more straightforward than 4g LTE yes d3d 4G LTE but just as just like 4G is this crappy branding that might not actually apply if the phone didn't actually have LTE like Google Play edition that phrase is so indicative of like midi that couldn't decide on what these phones are what they mean and what they should be called right if they called it a nexus edition and then that would be always come straight from google awesome if they had called it a gue comes with Google or something that would mean something else but instead we've got this thing that sort of is just like it comes from google play so it means you're just buying it from them but it has sort of stock android i know i don't care what google calls it i'm just gonna call it my nexus one but now i'm seeing like gpe like the acronym the HTC One GPE lower lower case e Oh God yeah that's the other thing is not edition caplets or Casey really it's just it's just style guide headaches for us so okay these phones they run great I got actually slightly better battery life on these phones that I got from the original skin versions which is crazy to me I wasn't expecting that at all and I don't know what else what else do you guys want to know I mean I really want to talk about what this means for the next program we'll come back to that but like let's just talk about the phones themselves I don't have them in hand anymore because I had to ship him off to New York sovereignty New York play with them but I do have my developer edition one that I've loaded the you know Rob from XDA on it so I'm sort of back on the stock well so my ultimate level of excitement for these devices absolutely hinges on how quickly they get 4.3 after 4.39 out we added never the answer that yet five-point oh and whatever it is right following with right right actually I was like writing that tweet today earlier after I'd had tweeted something else snarky about updates and I couldn't get it under 140 characters actually couldn't get it under like 200 characters so I ended up giving up but it was like like that update is going to be a litmus test for whether or not these devices matter for the Android ecosystem and it's also sort of a litmus test for the Android ecosystem in general and software updates because we've seen so many promises at i/o of you know we're going to fix this update issue we're going to fix this update issue so in 2011 it was the 18 month 2012 last year did they even address it at all I think they may have it may have been m.i.a pretty sure is m.i.a and then this year they're addressing it by saying well we're not going to talk about updates for all these other phones but we are going to give you the google play edition that is going to have prompt updates but the thing is these updates don't come directly from Google these roms you know on these phones the software these zones is still built by Samsung and HTC respectively and presumably Sony's coming fairly soon there's been rumors about that and they're putting in just like the lightest touch of customization so HTC is making sure it's beats EQ is compatible and Samsung I think has a custom lockscreen that's compatible with their flip cover but if they can't turn that stuff around quick that means or they don't care to turn around quick I think I mean they don't care or it means that this this is harder than we thought but I think they can turn around quick because I'm like I HTC made the decision to offer google play edition relatively late in the game because it wasn't announced I out right it was at dive into media at all things D which die votes dive into mobile was just dive into the 11 yeah tlm just do was just it was just so I'm hopeful but I'm really stupid to be hopeful that we'll see fast updates on these things mm-hmm so I was I was hopeful uh just like you are and because I was thinking you know Samsung and HTC are both pretty responsible with updating their own devices with their own skinned versions and things like that until like today's announcement from HTC about the HTC One S which is like totally deflated my confidence uh in that any that the one google edition is going to not be ignored by HTC which I guess we could just talk about that since it's it's it semi-related that the HTC announced today that the one s is not going to be updated past android 4.1 point one it's not going to get sense 5 and the one s being a 15 month old phone that had you know when it came out it ran top-of-the-line processor had loads of RAM really a very solid device a great device they're allowed certain to the One X right had smaller size cooler hardware I mean the screen wasn't as high resolution as the 1x but everything else is exactly the same uh and now it's orphaned 15 months after its riiii totally I totally reject your anger dan hi I push it back into your face look if if in your 2012 so there are two kinds of people that bought the 1s right there are there are the people in its new liner and those who do their there are the people who are you know just thought it was a cool phone and they're the the Android the people who are savvy about Android know what they were buying and if you fall into the latter category you bought a carrier branded 1s in particular you had no expectations about this phone supporting any future version of Android oh come on so you can say the same thing enemies yeah you can see the same thing about the 1x then you could say the same thing about the s3 and every single it yes absolutely if you buy any phone that is why that that is one of the most broken things about the Android echoes echoes to spread you today is that if you buy any phone that is not a nexus even the google play edition you buy any phone that is not a nexus you have zero right to have any expectations about future android support and then the screwed up well the hell that's like no no no you have the right that's where you're wrong chris you absolutely have the right you like like you that is something that you should demand you have the right uh whether you're going to get it or not is another story and and the problem isn't so much that oh it's like you're not going to get android 4.3 and its new camera interface or you're not going to get whatever new features come out it's you know you're not going to get security patches either so it's like that's you've bought a phone you signed a contract for more than likely you if you bought this the day came out that's 15 months into your two-year contract now and now your phone is not being supported with any sort of security or fixes or bugs or anything for the remaining well i don't know about forty percent ready fixes they could they could push that stuff out of things yeah they don't think they announced that well if there's a major security fix maybe not but we've seen to take a long time I'm for you know basic bug fixes to get fixed on Android devices because carriers drag their feet and the manufacturers drag the fee or whatever but like you know you at least have the expectation that's going to be supported for the life of your contract right no I don't you don't do that anymore I mean the thing that I tweeted that's I'm sorry two years ago Google promised that you'd get it you'd get updates for 18 months and now that one s totally failed like that I promise is dead from 2011 it's gone Ram like so look at the Android ecosystem as far as updates are concerned they're getting pantsed right now by blackberry and windows phone with Windows Phone 8 maybe not seven that was a whole fiasco but you look at windows phone blackberry iOS and Android like the four you know what else do you there anything else you want to put in that list what moves the lowest it just announcement okay well we'll see ya know those are the four that you know you can go out and into a store it was the only one that isn't that you can't rely on for updates on your phone android is the only one where you're like i just have to assume that the day i buy it that's what it's going to be like for the rest of it every other ecosystem has already proven that they can push out updates across multiple you know types of devices and like I this has been a perennial issue and they're fixed for it this year is just by a google play edition which isn't available on verizon isn't available on sprint has to be bought off contract and again like fool me once they have to prove h samsung and HTC have to prove to me that they'll put out updates promptly and they have a chat and so so Chris what are you saying you're not going to buy a google play edition until you know for a fact that they can actually hold that promise i'm definitely strongly considering waiting until 4.3 as announced to see what the leg time is um a you know hey I haven't ordered one yet I probably would have if they were shipping same day but the fact that there was that long shipping delay kind of like gave me the patience that I needed to not click on the pre order button so no I haven't ordered one yet and of course just like everybody else I'm having the the s4 vs 1 dilemma so I'm waiting for buddy probably at the verge because I'm having that as far as one dilemma I have a one developer edition but I really if the s4 is available in something other than white I would be decided i would i would tell somebody to buy the s4 and i will give them my one on my mode you like you like the blue better or pebble or whatev squirt it was like anything other than white white is played I'm tired of it it's stupid it also looks really cheap on a samsung sits cheap-looking plastic like the red would be hot any anything honestly it's the worst but the the battery life on the one is surprisingly better than I expected and like better than the AT&T version even which was slightly better than the the standard one I believe because the processor right or no why was why was the 18t 1lt the AT&T one the 818 t1 actually gave us right around the same battery life as the International Version I would've did it on LTE so right that was what I would not have um I don't know I mean we're supposed to be done complaining now we have top of the line android hardware available with stock Android and like this is this is the thing we've been waiting for four years it's very close it it's very close but we need what we need is no compromise Nexus device which i think is it's more than semantics it is a different philosophy and I'm sure you know google has said correct me if I'm wrong but I think Google said at i/o that they are not done with the Nexus program right right the Nexus brand is going to continue with it what that means we don't know that could mean more tablets for the Nexus line it might mean more smartphones might not it might mean a cue to you know but the Nexus brand itself is not gone yeah going to google so I think firstly I believe God is a nexus brand being like completely irrelevant in terms of like scale and mattering to the Android ecosystem well that's true that that's probably true with these google play editions too though right because it the number of people who are paying full price for these funds is probably relatively small and I think what looking back you know I was worried leading up to the GPE d-day so to speak that uh that Google store was going to go down just like it did for the nexus 4 but that was kind of a different ball game because what really set the nexus 4 apart was the price it was what 269 for the age to 299 for the gig and 349 for the 16 okay and the fact that you couldn't buy the nexus 4 anywhere else like it's not like you could go into a carrier store and get a nexus for it i think google play edition right it's called the google play edition but you could still go into a store buy an s4 or a 10 contract and get the same exact hardware right and that's a nuance that you probably won't be able to explain to some people so yeah it's an open question how many of these these phones are actually selling who knows um I know what else you guys want to say about it i mean i wrote it big so i should have plenty of thoughts but I I don't think the new camera interface I know that there's some people are really into it and they're like oh it was this muted running 4.3 no it's just the new camera interface and I didn't actually write that much about it other than I don't really like it I think that this the idea of like you hold down your finger on it and radial menu pops up and then you slide over to it it's the words theory it's cool but in practice it's like you lose your place and like oh I don't mean to do that and it just it's the problem that i have with the camera interface the stock Android camera interface is if my finger like brushes against the screen suddenly my camera flips around to the front or my my flash gets turned on or my white balance gets thrown off and like no other camera interface for a mobile phone that I've ever used has been that like trigger happy to change settings on me which I find really annoying especially for the fact that I don't see I'm doing it because this the settings are hidden until my finger touches the screen um so I if there's one thing that you know I actually think Samsung and HTC do far better than Google with is the camera interface it's on both Samsung and HTC's customizations are far better easier to use better access to settings and things like that so that that is the one thing i miss on stock android is i can't stand the camera interface yeah it was really bad on stock android until four-point-oh wasn't it it was like in a very singly bed yeah but like even then even as simple ugly as that was it I liked it better than the current one because the current one has that thing where like I just accidentally brush it and all of a sudden everything's like changed it's it's infuriating and it's not and everything is like hidden like it's there but it's hidden like with iOS it's just not there except for your Flash settings are there and you're each dr's there one of the things that surprised me is the the quality of the images and I know that we can get really nitpicky here in fact we did when I was showing you guys that the sample pictures from all four stock and skin versus you know HTC and Samsung but i would say that by and large the image quality out of of both cameras was off by maybe at the most like five percent from there from like the the skin counterparts I really was super close and there are only a few edge cases like super low light where you could see a really significant difference and I don't know how much of that we put on the samsung and HTC actually putting their image processing into this google play edition rom or how much of it is that like there's their marketing around how amazing their camera stuff is really is just kind of fluff I imagine it's the former well I the at least on on let's see if I can articulate won't try say at least with HTC it's named various components of its camera like the ultrapixel and image sense and whatever it's and it's saying that this is custom or special Hardware obviously in order to use the camera at all the google play edition rom has to work with that hardware and talk to that hardware so I'm sure it's using very similar processing as the sense edition and that's why we're seeing very similar is I think even with a you know that five percent difference that you mentioned i think that's that could easily be attributed to just varying circumstances from shot to shot like that's that's a margin of error in pictures like you know i tried to like stand there and hold the camera in the exact same spot and click click click yeah i mean it's it's it's like unless you're in a lab it's it's it's in rien real-world use that's just that's an acceptable margin of error so it's either way can I just say that walking around uh the not the best neighborhood not the worst neighborhood but not the best best neighborhood in San Francisco with four top of the line android phones on me plus plus my iphone i had five phones on me like it didn't occur to me till I got back you know got back up out from walking around taking sample photos like oh I had like three thousand dollars worth of gear just like in my pockets that's gonna that's freaky anyway um what else you guys want to know about I want to know why I can't get the google play edition in in red the red I want I want it in black but I bought a silver ones i wanted it not quite oh the one yeah i wanted but she can't get colors on the HTC One working like at all like it there they're kind of unicorny at this point well the black one you can go to 18 teen by the black 10 is that they have the black one now at eighteen t finally yeah I took a while okay alright so the other big news and this actually kind of broke over the past couple of days is we've got a look at Motorola's new logo and they've put a new ad out I guess it's running an ad age tomorrow but we've got it today the adage put it up today about the Moto X true so what is this logo tell us it's colorful it's bad the logo tell so they've made it very clear that the quote unquote that you know the so-called batwing isn't going anywhere the classic like stylized em in the circle that isn't going anywhere but what they're doing is they're they're applying a bunch of different treatments to it which is something that AOL made a lot of noise a few years ago like when they redid their logo like it wasn't just like a single logo they had like they oh well text and then like a bunch of different backgrounds for it and motorola's doing something similar where like a tech week fruit for instance they had a treatment where the the batwing was above like a circuit board and then the one that we posted on the site the original one we saw was purple which came off of tech week site which is a conference they were sponsoring last week in Chicago but then they also sent us one that was white with like a rainbow a line around it and that's the one that we put in the top of that post so they're going to be doing a bunch of different things with it so it's kind of a little more playful the now going Logan which was just read which is a very you know hard masculine logo and I think this is kind of this kind of softens damage a little bit makes them a little bit more fun which is probably the direction they needed to go and certainly is more aligned with Google's right vision as I think we're seeing from this ad to they don't just look like a verizon company now the right a and Motorola isn't the same as the a and a google company but some of the letter forms look identical and some are a little bit different and like oh what's up that's annoying that's annoying in exactly the same way that comcast new logos is annoying we're like like that the letter is rounded on one end and like squared on the other yeah and you can never unsee that yeah you can never unsee it so yeah I don't know what I they do I mean I think I dunno why they did that which is that the the motorola text is a it's like a brand it is a logo you're not just text where as a google company is like the font that they use is the basis for creating the logo so from you're trying to put my mind into the mind of a designer I guess I kind of get it but it's so weird so let's talk about this this ad it's a big full page thing there's some beautiful text / blue and then there's a bunch of couple of people jumping into the water yeah we're so excited and they confirmed Moto X which we knew and the tagline is designed by you assembled in the USA and tell me that designed by you isn't a shot across about Apple because they're they're all new big push is designed by Apple in California and this is designed by you assembled in the USA is that a thing am I reading too much into that I think you are reading how much you like I feel like I see that that I mean right Apple kind of started that but that's on every single product in the world now designed by blah blah blah manufactured in China like that it was like thats thats everywhere so i think that if they wanted to go after Apple they would probably do it a little differently than that and I also think that it's very from from Google's perspective I think that it's very important that Motorola and just like I'll google products motorola plays its own game it doesn't go on the offensive with this first round of ads I think that would be a very weird and bad look for them so okay what do we know like do we really know what the first smartphone that you can design yourself means like I what is like do we do we do we know I think that's a very overreaching way of saying that the phone is response like personalizes and is responsive to the the person that's using it which is you like you can customize the widgets exact right like like that's exactly what it's going to be and and it's particularly confusing because I think there's some rumors going around then already got phones with custom back plates you know we've already got phones that you can customize the wallpaper you can customize you know which is all that crap it isn't Sam already got religious that that even Motorola's own phones that you know their little active what's it called the Smart Actions Smart Actions right so like are they just sort of like rejiggering that stuff it's like Taco Bell and they just take the same ingredients and rearrangement present them in a different way this is a burrito it's always delicious right so is are they doing something genuinely new when it comes to customization I think that I think the short answer is no they aren't doing anything new with customization but I so I talked briefly with iqbal Arshad at Tech Week last week who's the head of the head of product engineering at Motorola actually really can you explain Tech Week don't know if you did it earlier because I don't listen so tech week is this it's basically like a startup it's almost like I would roughly equate it to like a techcrunch disrupt uh but in Chicago I is the closest I can kind of relate it to it was very strangely run in that I want to check in at the front I don't know why I'm relaying this story I'm sure our listeners don't care and I apologize to our listeners in advance I want to hear the amazing story about you getting your badge I'm sure it's completely engrossing and compelling no so so I walk outta line back up I walk up a black I think uh but I walk up to the desk and I'm like and I had my eventbrite ticket that I printed out and I I gave it to the person at the counter and said um you know I'm media I'm here for the motorola keynote and she said uh what company are you are you doing press for I'm like Wilton I'm just I'm here to cover a tech week and she's like right but like all right like are you with motorola or like who are you like do you not know how media like have you not worked with press before is this a new concept so once we got so soon as she was asking if you were a paid shill for motorola it's basically i think i couldn't tell for sure but i think so um but then she she pulls out a droid xyboard and and proceeds to scan my eventbrite ticket and then this i just heard the zai boards not getting a update actually we heard that last week anyway continue well it turns out you don't need the update to scan eventbrite tickets apparently uh but then after after she scanned and she's like oh i don't know like I don't really know to do with you so then like she wandered away and then some other guy came up and went to scan my ticket and he was like oh you've already checked in yeah with his I board and he he scanned he's like oh you someone has already used your ticket I'm like yeah she just gave my ticket like two seconds ago so there was a little bit of a fiasco getting into this keynote um i have no idea where boy is going moto drama you're talking about tech week later dr. yes it's male something Nick ball Arshad hick well who who is the head of I believe his his title is he's an engineer fights president of global product development that's a title and he said kind of the same thing that dennis woodside said at d11 about this product which is that he really drove home the point that this phone is going to rely very heavily on an array of of in-house designed and built sensors and that are like really customized for this phone and are like really important to the experience but wouldn't going to any details I'm like so does that mean that you're working like really closely with like TI or qualcomm or whoever is providing your your apps processor he says no that we're doing this all ourselves so I don't like I have no idea what this means yet but they are apparently working on some pretty hardcore circuitry for this phone so there will be some differentiator that we haven't seen I hope as a hardcore battery to go with a hardcore serger circuitry well didn't dennis woodside or somebody said maybe but like there being an extra processor or something yeah what can put a companion core maybe it could've been a medical companion core but also known as as David no but but somebody said that like they're they're extremely low power or something to that effect right so it's still unclear what these sensors are and what they do like I don't know what what can there be like we already have like in the gs4 there's a barometric pressure sensor there's a I mean who knows maybe it has like a maybe can detect like a pulse or something I don't know they could do pulse they could do thing kind of like a um like a Fitbit style step counter they can have a breathalyzer like if you if you're drunk like before you text you've got to breathe on the microphone and then you look out and up sorry you couldn't take bed rest next right now it could detect bad breath it'd be like a dual function man my my twitter uh feed would be so barren if if I had a breathalyzer on my phone I was not allowed to tweet when drinking her just me nothing never tweet one drunk that's where's the live I yeah I mean it could so yeah it could be a lot of biometric types of sensors because in terms of like environmental sensors existing phones got kind of have that maximize I think temperature very much pressure you know 8-way gyroscopes and accelerometers a you know proximity sensors what more can you do yeah I don't know I guess a lot of health stuff yeah right which-- like the cops call to bloomberg phone now sorry you don't need that that soda um so this has got to be coming pretty soon right i mean they're starting to ramp up yeah yeah i mean this ad is going to be in like every major newspaper New York Times Washington Post nice day today Wall Street Journal it tomorrow's newspaper I mean they're trying to get this message out there obviously they want people thinking about and talking about motorola and uh look God knows if we know anything from past companies if people if companies do that and that don't deliver within at least a couple weeks that might as well not have done anything to begin with well I think we can give them a month or a month yet will say like three three to six weeks and that's it it once you go beyond that like they'd lost their window right now which actually puts them right in the timing for back to school and if I remember correctly motorola did actually have an event in early September last year to announce the razr m and the razr HD s and things like that so yes ya know I went to that in New York and there was a band and they were very attractive men playing the drums and guitar and then they came into the crowd and tried to get me to sing along with her hey remember that yes yeah cuz on the live stream we could see you everybody in the crowd was like like like clapping because they were all working from Motorola and then like in the front on the right there's one guy's his head down and you got good to see steam coming out of my ears because I'm so no I'm not playing this game make it stop um okay so that's motorola i don't know what else photos i got a samsung galaxy s4 active its galaxy s4 that you can get wet I am sure cool a dirty every so everybody seems pretty impressed with well it's it's there why it's a galaxy s4 that you can get wet like that there's there's one compromise with it and that's what the camera is 8 megapixels instead of 13 megapixels but otherwise it's the same screen same processor it's really thin you know it's more about just for you can get wet who was it that said I think Neil I said that he wishes there was a galaxy s4 active google play edition sure which I mean more bucks man you know I think I want the s4 Google Play edition so the one as soon as you get it you're gonna wish you got the one I'm if you get the one you're gonna wish you got that sound I don't one with like the the logo menu button hack so I can hit the logo to bring up the menu button so i don't even have the problem of missing that extra button or having to deal with that three men you like so so just give the s4 also and then you you have both very unhappy there's no yeah all I do know is that I'm gonna buy the hell out of a sony smartwatch 2 now you're not no you aren't I am no you're not art and this is why can I tell you exactly why oh my god guys it now definitely just to piss you off you guys wasn't gonna do what I didn't really mean it but now I do oh you guys well I mean it's all I have I have dropping with yeah I want to hear what you think about this because this looks like it's a step in the wrong direction as far as I'm concerned but good night no you're absolutely right like why does the front look like a tiny android phone like liar their water three capacitive touch buttons on the front of this thing yeah it's a comparison or menu button like yes it's it might as well have a stylist like that old fossil palm watch yes exactly exact opposite of buttons on the front I think the design itself is a step in the right direction compared to the older ones I think it looks nice and you know you could put a nice looking watch face on it when you're dressed up and then you can you know when you're not trusting up you can nerd it up with you know your emails and text message notifications but it's it's metal and thin and I think it looks nice does it is it a if it works nice yes like they've already dropped the ball fits the touchscreen what what version of Android isn't running it's not running Android but it's made to it's me to have you similar user experience to it just stop right there it's not running Android fine great good you need to have an RT run real-time operating system so that you can have good battery life and communication and make it fast and it's not bloated great that is the right decision and I applaud you for it but if you're not running Android why on earth do you have a back home and menu button because they want it I could tie I'm gonna play the devil's advocate here I wanted to you unify their experience between their Xperia phones and the SmartWatch 2 it's a similar icon no matter which tony the mother use axe really shitty and it's not fun and it's slow and buggy no matter what we want to make sure it's consistently terrible they wanted it to be a sony yeah i really liked my md discman for what it's worth yeah i like my my sony phone with a little flip down microphone i liked my sony Sony Sigma cassette walkman zoom that I had in like elementary school um but the problems that I have with it is uh you know Sony's problem with the first smartwatch and the one whatever it called the the live watch or whatever it was called before the SmartWatch where the pairing and the connectivity things were like totally unreliable super buggy super frustrating and so many solution to this is to make this NSC compatible so you can just tap two pair and that will allegedly does not solve anything no exactly comparing experience a good yeah it doesn't sound bad and then the other problem is that this is only going to work with android phones it will work with more than just sony android phone so you can use it with other brands I mean mostly ignoring I off the market yeah you're going half the market but like the the hooks aren't there in iOS to make it a good experience I've used a pebble with an iphone and it's it's fun it's not great and so I it makes sense for Sony not to try and put a round peg in a square hole until Apple makes you know public API is that everybody can use and I don't know if iOS 7 is that or not I'd like to believe it is I think it's supposed to be I think there's some stuff there that people were excited about yeah I think I think they've exposed the hooks for notifications now that were previously like hockey like they exist they were happy yeah that's that's good I mean look at the end of the day I still think I still maintain and I will go to my grave saying this nobody will believe me that this innovation and smart watches will come not from independent players like pebble and well is not invent but from it will not come from technology players like pebble and Sony it will come from the watch industry finally admitting that the only way they can they can stop their hemorrhaging is by adopting smartphone receiving SmartWatch platforms like the citizen proximity which sucks but it's a great-looking watch and it actually looks like a watch and they need to evolve that concept I mean what's easier an electronics company designing a good watch or a watch company learning how to like make a smartphone it's a hybrid approach they need they there needs to be a standard mob module that can be easily adopted to a variety of different watches that are made by watch companies okay so i think i think both both of those kinds of companies need to come to the table but sony making I don't trust sony to put something on my wrist that doesn't make me look like a complete idiot and and and the same goes for pebble like I'm sorry I like god bless bubble for getting as far as they have and for getting into bettin I that's awesome but the watch looks awful and every time I see someone wearing a pebble I'm like you realize you're wearing a piece of plastic at the wrist I don't know the red one looks kind of cool it looks like red plastic because it is red plastic exactly I mean it's not it's not like they're saying is this is this coming from a guy wearing beats headphones I believe it is okay would ignore that ignore that little move on character Cariad look all right there there I don't want to go over and get my sonís they work for me yeah I'm wearing the headphones that like came in the box with a random phone so I have I'm in no position to judge on quality of headphones just on how they make you look which is you know look also they're not they're not they're not the pros or whatever they call their their beef DJ's so the less ostentatious looking right fair enough do you guys care about the Xperia Z ultra I've got a six point four inch display so the only thing I want to say about that is if you look at our posts our hands on post at Vlad wrote and he's got a picture of it next to the Xperia Z which is already itself a 5-inch phone ah and the Z ultra like literally Dwarfs it it's so insanely massive so that's all I have to say about that the doc can let you put you can put six icons on the dock it's pretty sweet so it's like a nexus 7 and not much smaller than a nexus 7 rankin you can tell from our hands on pictures though that sony has not completely adapted the UI to a screen of this size because like for instance the like the clock widget is hilariously small it's like the size of an icon and then let's know it's small in relation to like the size of screen but in real life it's like three inches across because there's a realistic own are we I think Sony selling it as a phone it's got a dialer it makes phone calls and just so with no I guess that is that is the down feeling like a little bluetooth handset thing to go with it apparent right right but I think that's the differentiation you have to make and the way to do that is what how will it run apps will it run the tablet version of apps or will it run the phone version of apps right and that's that's where you make that distinction of is this a stupidly large phone or is this kind of like a sleek and slightly smaller tablet depending on how the ass behave if they if you open up gmail on you've got the to pain interface that's you know got your list of labels on one side and then your inbox on the other then you know I'm comfortable calling it a tablet but if you're seeing the same interface that I see on a three inch smartphone on this 6.4 inch one it's just a big stupid phone my god this bluetooth handset accessory yeah is the dumbest thing so it looks like it doesn't look like a like a phone like you'd hold it looks like a giant bluetooth earpiece yeah this is getting Sony what are you doing man so here's my thing can we get a phone that's resistant the elements that doesn't have stupid little flaps over all the ports does he does a does a galaxy s4 active have stupid flaps on all the ports it does on the micro USB port at least I thought that we were in a place where like we could cope this stuff with magic you know nano-polymer guys I think the Nano polymer technology stuff is okay for like a splashing like if you if you if you spill your coke on it you're okay but if it gets submerged at all you it's not okay I think that's where that state is it's less of an issue if the phone supports Chi I guess right have cheap ads all right yeah that's true um okay uh what else what else have we got for news man we're just blowing through stuff we could complain about androids consumer now let's talk about Windows Phone so they're very proud of themselves because they're like guys were solidly in third place and we're not afraid of blackberry anymore mm-hmm which is and then well Ram did not have a great quarter either I'm sorry did not have a great quarter yeah they got slammed is I mean did anybody not see that coming though like I know Wall Street was very bullish on it and of course blackberry was very aggressive and saying you know that you're you're they were doing great everything but like anybody that's been watching the industry with like an actual critical I not see that coming like they're trying to sell the vices at the same price point as current cutting-edge high-end devices that are running uh on the as all the running specifications from last year it's green so last year the processors from last year or whatever and then it's a brand new platform with virtually no compelling apps that's the issue yeah the the specs are not the problem with the z10 may make me maybe but like you know if you compare it if you go into a store and you compare it ok so the z10 versus the iphone 5 the iPhone 5 has much better build quality its first feel impression is hand south winds or if you compared to like ps4 or the one they've got bigger screens better cameras everything else is better so it's like yeah and your your cost is the same to the customer you guys jelly you jelly I'm trying yeah that is yours actually I'm bad whatever I gotta keep down here but but like but like you said dieter that I mean the real problem is that you know they don't have the compelling app support yet even though they say that they have like tens of thousands or 100,000 apps or whatever the latest number is none of those apps are the ones that are people are looking for you don't obviously the names like vine and Instagram don't exist on blackberry and you know I think I've said this like a million times already but you know Starbucks doesn't exist and are do doesn't exist and Spotify doesn't exist and all these other apps that everyone talks about so so it makes the maps and rants is terrible too yeah it so basically Jim Balsillie was right they should have like just gone full services and given up on hardware so what you're saying yeah what are we supposed to see bbm on Android and iPhone it doesn't this summer it literally doesn't matter it man I want I want yet another messaging platform to defragment the space that's that's my favorite thing in the world that you never know what messaging platform people use three years ago that would have been the biggest news in the world okay all right nobody uses BBM and nobody remembers their stupid a digit hex code that they use to communicate on BBM did you guys know that cyanogen mod is working on a secure android messaging plan yeah I read that that was kind of weird yeah and it's like making its encrypted on both ends right or something like that yeah is it an assay proof uh that i don't know i mean you realize there's some like lower level NSA agent right now who's assigned to listen to the Virgin Mobile show I got a job no he's actually just paging through our emails right now yeah yeah he's scrolling through I feel so bad for that guy it's just nothing but me complaining about little stupid crap Oh sprint got the yeah so we were going to talk about Windows Phone yes so the HTC 8xt and they look fine is that terrible that like I don't have anything else to say about it other than they look fine well sprint got up got caught up with the time yeah I can't picture anyone actually buying them though I'm not sure what you mean by why can't I maybe they look fine no the the 8xt looks pretty cool and it deleted that dual speaker or something the 8xt has yeah it's got the boom sound design speakers on the front of it but it's also got a WVGA display and right it's a hundred dollars on a contract well so that's the thing the xt despite the fact that the name is similar to 8x actually resembles the 8's more right right right it's much closer to the 8's yeah right it looks like the 8's and which was an entry-level model in September of last year right and then the ax t VES me Oh looks like a first-generation galaxy s I mean so okay when I say they look fine what I really mean is it's sprints so we don't really anyway and so for sprint whatever wee wee wee pad sprint on the back and say oh you tried man like good job amen they turned off i did this weekend yet it that was true well of course i went out from where you at so uh Sam sheffer on the verge team he's a killer dots player on iOS he plays him some dots and he's really good and I got a pretty high score on it uh you know a couple weeks ago and I said hey Sam anything my high score and he just is like silent and ignores me for five minutes I'm like Sam my high score look and all he replies with is the important thing is you tried yeah my knees do using that's lovely thirty dollars on in-app purchases on that stupid frickin game so i can try and attention i'm never going to and i ought to give up so that's that's what sprint is like it's even tried yes that's exactly right uh oh man this neo actually it does look terrible doesn't it yeah 150 bucks well i mean so the samsung is obviously another example of samsung not giving uh yeah not giving anything about Windows Phone right like it's just like oh yeah oh you wanted a windows phone fine we'll slap this OS on some leftover hardware will throw your name on the back and be done I don't know what HTC using investing in designing this phone and but so does gap does nokia and sprint do they just they have like a blood feud or something uh when is last time in nokia was sold on sprint I can't think of one um but so so with verizon obviously we just got the 928 and I think that was the result of Nokia doing a heck of a lot of begging to verizon pleading and begging and and and just just anything it could to get his phone on verizon but before that it was like the nokia twist which was like a PCD device with a nokia brand which is like that x square twisting phone oh I hit I can't think of a sprint I can't think of a scene look awesome it had like a loop like its hinge with a circle oh they have it it twisted out and you had your keyboard on there you know it was no key Brenda but Nokia literally had nothing to do with it did we just lose your video Dan um did I I don't know chris is frozen for me but you're moving or I let your back it's alright it's good times good times on the Virgin Mobile show getting excited about sprint nokia phones that don't exist or ever will i reduced my bandwidth i would I reduce my dad can you guys see me now we are so this is professional dinner you know he doesn't know how to get of podcasts I just oh boy no do not add Google effects to your face this has to stop you guys want to talk about Firefox OS not really a lie yes yeah good yes hey I can't let you two go ahead Chris our crib because you're insane uh why would just like to point out the obvious which is so Sean did a report went up yesterday I think right I am a launch and and in it Mozilla CTO is basically like basically like champ like sucker-punching Android it's saying that that Android is unable to compete on the same specs that Firefox OS can and the problem is not that Android can't compete in that segment it's that Mozilla is going into the low end of the market guns blazing and totally willing to accept the fact that it's going to be a really really crappy user experience well is so it felt like to me like that statement was made by somebody who's never actually touched a Mozilla phone um okay um I know any web and what is this is the word Oh dad so apparently I'm so sick a creature from another hand I'm so some so sedentary that the motion detector in this room that I'm in thought I hadn't been moving for long enough and shut the lights out on me and one of our Evan who's producing assured I had to come in at wave his hand in front of the motion saves the day and I've totally lost my train of thought oh well yeah I was saying like it it sounds like this was tilts pokin by somebody who's never actually touched her using Mozilla phone because he says that Android can't compete on this lower end hardware because it doesn't run well it's like well neither does your mozilla OS so what is your point right that's exactly right yeah I mean the story hasn't changed since we saw these phones at at mwc and in terms of higher-end hardware I think they want to get their sprint has committed to selling them in 2014 we'll see but right now it's not anything that is particularly interesting in the smartphone world unfortunately good enough man um yeah this this show is going by really fast but that's okay because we need to go and do other things but there is one last thing Apple apparently they've signed up with TSMC chip manufacturers so Samsung might be making fewer iOS device chips so I haven't we been waitin hearing about this story 40 three years now it's finally seems to seems to finally be happening and then more leaks so that the 5s leak apparently it's got a xenon flash have we talked about that on the show yet I don't think we have it's got this like these leaked components show this weird dual LED flash right on flash excuse me dual LED flash and it's and it's surmised that the one normal-looking LED will be like your typical flash but then it'll have a special low light LED that'll come on when you're in really low light situations and and produce much better color on your your flash photos I guess is what the guess is i guess we're guess it'd be also if that Lola LED was invisible to the human eye so that you could not destroy people's retinas when you're taking their photo yeah I really I was like that doesn't sound like a plausible mean who knows it could be spot on but it just doesn't seem like it seems like a waste of extremely valuable real estate in the chassis of the phone to install a second LED dedicated to light use well yeah I mean I would rather do they I would rather see you know optical image stabilization and other improvements to the camera for all I use now that the iPhone 5 is bad at low light it's just not quite up to what you can pull off in those crazy edge situations on the HTC One or the Lumia 925 although I have issues with those cameras as well so yeah trade-offs and then we've also I don't think we actually didn't write about these on the verge but a bunch of sites macrumors 9to5 mac there's some back plates that have appeared that look like they're for a low-cost iPhone different colors they you know they seem plausible but maybe not but I mean I'm really not looking forward to lime green iPhones everywhere if they do turn out to be legitimate not if they look like these photos that have leaked at least the lime green ipod mini was pretty hot but oh really okay these photos are pretty ugly however dan did you buy a google play edition phone are you high or dUrd i ordered a one I can't bring myself to use the Samsung like just as soon as I pick it up I'm unhappy so it's like I could deal with the other concessions I have to make with the one I really really like the hardware and I really like the speakers on the on the sense one I spent a lot of time sitting on my couch watching animal on the google play edition isn't as good as the sound on the sense one like I actually thought it's on a better with beats off than with on like with beats on it there was more bass but it got really muddy um in a way that didn't on the sense version boom but they're still super loud so yeah just the fact that they're super loud in there facing me so like I don't have to cut my hand around the phone if I'm watching a video so yeah all right I'll probably keep mine probably I'll grumble about it the whole time this is a serious debate amongst the verge staff if you guys aren't aware like this has been an ongoing debate between not only among us but also josh is like super undecided a lot of other editors are super undecided because they want one of these and they just talk about which one of my that ladies and gentlemen I'm calling it is the end of the virginal show for this week we really appreciate you watching or listening we may or may not be back next week the only way to know is to follow us on twitter i am at back lawn dan is at DC seifert me I chris is at z power we are all at verge and you can leave a comment on this post right now this is a very moment and we will read them you can also email us I believe its mobile show at the verge calm and happy fourth of July if you're listening to this before the fourth of July good night