Gadgetory

so the verge mobile show is kind of like an iphone launch you wait for you wait for it you're so excited and then it finally comes and it's pretty much what you expected but you know maybe that's not so bad because it's also everything that you hoped for stay tuned for the Virgin Mobile show hi I'm dieter bohn i'm dan seifert I'm pretty sigler and this is episode 17 for the week of September 17 2012 of the Virgin Mobile show it's our golden virgin mobile show golden yeah what makes it golden isn't that then that like your golden birthday is like when the birthday falls on the day of your age I thought golden would be like that if you show or something I think oh it's like a littler 30th 50th is diamond and Adam i'm looking it up now hold on everybody hang on ya know 50 is is golden 50 is gold okay there's a pun this is a hold on I'm gonna rage this is our this is our crystal know our 15th show was our crystal show and our 20th show will be our China show nice yeah 25th will be our silver show anyway so if you notice Vlad savov is not with us today unfortunately is at photokina uh taking amazing pictures of cameras that also take amazing pictures yes very meta at photokina very very jealous to be honest with you I am they've actually done a really excellent you haven't seen the coverage there's a there's a stream explaining all the stuff that's happened at photokina and you know I'm not a camera nerd but they've done a really good job of making all this camera news accessible and understandable so like I can actually read through the stream read our stories and not feel like I'm an idiot which is what most camera coverage makes me feel like like when I gotta be Peter view it just makes me thumb can I just say I am in the process of e being both my kidneys and selling a large amount of cocaine for a Leica M I will do a wide variety of legal things for like em I I had the opportunity to use an m9 for a couple weeks a couple years ago and was just like it's it's a really hard thing to explain in specs because it is not it doesn't compare very favorably to anything but it's there's something about the experience of using a leica that is just extremely appealing and it is it is hard to describe you just got to use it and then you understand what people pay upwards of ten or fifteen thousand dollars for leica bodies and lenses indeed I'm that has nothing to do with phones though so so uh here's the thing uh there was a big iphone event last week and um it's dominated the mobile news and we're gonna talk about the iphone 4 I think it's fair to say a very long time we have a lot of thoughts and feelings and things to say about the iphone there's a lot of details to dig into and just a lot of stuff to say and so if you're here looking for us to talk about the fact that there's an orange version of the Lumia 820 but not of the 920 and how angry that makes me um that rant is gonna have to wait until next week is that a direct shot at me deters I felt like like you were aiming that at me no I'm they're making an orange vs 8 20 but not of the 920 and it drives me crazy I guess we should also mention that like Nokia showed we gotta get into the iphone stuff anyway that Nokia showed like literally a like a quarter of a second blip of a cyan Lumia 920 who's won very much from Oh video that was one frame yeah like so I'm sorry about this I theory about I'm sorry to derail the conversation already but actually it's not my theory this is going around on Twitter apparently a previous version of the video that had been uploaded by Nokia showed more of that cyan phone and so I think what happened was they they realized their mistake and attempted to trim it out and miss that one for name was handsome middle of a shot that's ridiculous I don't know I don't know who knows what sort of weird editing tools they're using but I think that's what happened I love that we're like we're not gonna talk about anything but the iphone and we immediately start talking about the Lumia i would i would personally be game I would be totally fine with a 90-minute show about nokia phone colors i could do that everybody ad nauseam but a real question is eat what color phone would Paul Walker use if he had a Lumia phone oh that that is then that is a supernova of all my favorite things that you're I've literally about to pass out just thinking about let's talk all right is exact let's get let's first things last did you guys pre-order I did I did not what really this this blew my mind when Chris told me that he did not this is what happens i was i was telling dandus uh i think last week what i do and this happens every single year and has since the first at well since the second I've iphone 3g what happens to me is I swear up and down that I'm not going to get an iphone I don't pre-order and then the morning of the event comes and I wake up like at four a.m. and i'm like yeah shucks I'm gonna go get in line and then I go get in line at x 1 happened with the 4s happened with the four it's gonna happen again with the 5s so we'll see what happens on Friday but there's a very real chance that I will be standing in line at four in the morning well are you so with the 4s I rolled in for us and the the ipad 3 sorry the new ipad i rolled into an AT&T store for the 4s and a verizon store for the ipad at like eleven o'clock in the morning just like Walston 0 line bought the phone on the ipad and waltzed out no problem well I kind of think that that's going to happen this time around I don't think that there'll be no lines at the carrier stores I think it's a bigger I mean we know it's you know they pre sold twice as many is the story they broke all of their sales records well yeah and this time around you've got all the people with the iphone four coming off contract or have been off contract waiting for the five where you didn't have quite as many for the 4s so I have a feeling there's going to be some selling out and some lines oh yeah yeah yeah I know i pre-ordered a 32 gig black on AT&T I think the black copy and restyle hey man I think that the the fact that they they painted or they brushed over they darken the metal rail around it I think it looks awesome yeah I'm actually super excited for this hardware which I didn't think I would be but I really am I think it looks great I think we'll see how i feel about the the larger screen you know I've been using a 1x or a galaxy s3 for Indiana Galaxy Nexus and all these other big screen phones for so long that I think it's going to actually feel a little bit cramped but you know I think having a super thin phone and a reliable LTE phone I'm actually pretty excited about that I'm pretty excited about being able to tether off of this thing because being tethering off of Android works for the most part but USB tethering especially seems to be hit or miss especially after android 4.0 driver model a little bit and so it's often the case that like I'll plug in an android phone and it won't show up as a USB modem on my mac and it's a big hassle and dad phone 5 i'm excited to go back to like totally reliable USB tethering yeah I feel pretty strongly going back to the your color selection dieter and an I feel pretty strongly that with this generation white and black have flip-flopped and black is like the chic color and light is the ways like the standard like normal color do you guys agree so I totally agree like the last generation I was all about the white model i think the white model looks great it's the one I owned and etc but I usually go for the white phone but this time around just that you know haiti's this the murdered-out phrase but that that black really just kind of like grabbed me and that matte finish and I don't know I went black yeah yeah well let's let's stick with like talk about hardware specs here of course we know what the larger display we know about LTE and LTE bands like this is actually justing so with the 4s they had basically a single model with single radio set up for CDMA and GSM and it was basically the same thing worldwide with this one there's how many different there's because the verizon and the AT&T are different and the sprint one also I don't know how that ties in I believe there are three models in total so there's three there's three skews but I'm I'm of the feeling and I know a lot of other people in the industry are as well that there's really only two models and you know the extra skew is just kind of like with certain things disabled and certain things enabled on the same hardware as the other model so you've got your you're eighteen t LTE model which is the a14 28 I believe and so that supports your standard hspa+ on all of 80's bands standard GSM of course and then it supports 18t LTE bands and that model will be sold in Canada it works on the Canadian LT carriers and then after that you've got the a149 cdma version which is going to be offered by verizon and sprint and that has compatible LTE bands for both verizon and sprint as well as you're necessarily cdma cover band support and it also has hspa+ support on the same bands as the ett model so you can use it globally and just like you could with the 4s and then the third model is the a149 gsm model which has all the same things except it doesn't have the same things as a verizon and sprint model but it doesn't have the CDMA support which i feel is just it just turned off because the LTE bands support is pretty much the same and the other things are pretty much the same so you got three to choose from the gia the GSMA 149 is the unlocked model I guess you could say that that's probably going to be offered in various parts of europe etc and of course the other global markets that support LTE yet this is the first time in a really long time that I was to switch to verizon just for the global are roaming but I realized like I don't actually globally Rome all that often so I decided to take a risk on still they say so here's the thing you'll still be able to globally room with AT&T model you just won't be able to do it on LTE so right for you had gone with a verizon model you could roam LTE on the when when ee launches its LTE network you'll be able to roam on there and you can roam on the I think it's t-mobile's running the LG network in Germany but you won't be able to do that with the LT model or with AT&T model but you will be able to roam on hspa+ with the AT&T model so I'm sure that it killed Apple to have to roll multiple physical hardware devices for this launch because they you know that they went from two iphone 4s down to one for the 4s and I think that was a very purposeful move for them and that the LTE that you know the completely disjoint horrible mess of a global LTE brant a band structure has destroyed any hope in the near term of launching a global device with a single set of skews so until RF engineers do some amazing things that they obviously haven't done yet yeah it's it's it's kind of crazy like just I think this we saw it with the iPad the new iPad how there was separate models for eighteen t and verizon LTE but I think it just the iphone 5 really just speaks to the mess of the LTE bands at our global and our worldwide and how in not interoperable they are right running down some of the other specs the camera like what's different they'd still an 8 megapixel camera I guess they've got a sapphire thing so it's less likely to get scratched but they didn't really talk up other than the panorama mode they didn't really talk up the camera a whole lot and that panaroma panorama mode thing like I hope it's way better than what the third party apps are that are out there because if it's basically the same thing that you could have done before like don't get me wrong the camera on the iPhone 4 is best of class I think it only a bit only wasn't until the 1x and the galaxy s3 that any other phone even came close so it's not like they needed to sprint ahead there but it's not like you know if you're not going to want to upgrade to the five just for the camera right yeah I think that I think that all of these guys Apple included are running up against some physical limits about or over what they can do with cameras with the optic you know that the size of the optics that their that they're using and that's something that you're seeing devices like the 808 overcome by just including massive optics which isn't really isn't apples bag and I don't think that you're going to see them do that in the future right yeah I mean it at this point until the same thing with LTE until engineers create this you know crazy breakthrough that you know defies the laws of physics as we know them right now there is kind of like this this diminishing returns so we get with these with the phone cameras now as far as the differences between the 4s and the five camera that sapphire crystal makes it a little bit smaller so then that leads to the thinner design which I think we're going to speak to in a minute but it's also the cameras a bit faster and I think that's leaning on the new processor so the shot to chop time is faster the focusing all that fun stuff should be faster and I hope that the panoramic thing is is I expect it to be pretty simple and pretty easy but yeah like you said dieter I hope it's better than the third party apps yeah okay so you brought thinnest I mean we mean it's thinner right at seven point six millimeters Apple kept saying it's the thinnest smartphone on the planet which is not true right there like an aeros phone in Japan that's the this thin yeah there's yum like sharp models that are like under seven millimeters yeah yeah and there's that oppo and then depending on how you measure it of course the droid razr is 7.1 but it has the hump at the top right right so it doesn't come I'm just saying I flat out uh I don't know I'm excited for it to be thinner um it's it's weird I never thought of the iphone 4 and the for us as being like a chunk um I the other thing go ahead I I am NOT excited for it to be thinner I'm gonna let you finish but let me just say that what they should have done is kept it the same rate they should have pulled the razr maxx trick they should have kept it the you wanna iphone best no I don't want to know max I want there to be one model and I want them to say it's the same thickness as the 4s we didn't have to make it any thicker and but oh by the way you now have to freakin days of battery life that's more impressive than saying it's seven point six millimeters or whatever yeah I'm really curious to see the battery life is gonna be because they when they were talking about battery life specs they basically I think they only pointed out standby time but everything else is basically the same and I mean I have problems with a battery life on the LTE phones I've been using so far like it's it's a real struggle to get a full day and if you know with this new form factor and the new dock connector which we got to get to if I can't get a full day out of this thing it's gonna really suck to be constantly looking for a charger for the iphone right also I would love to see Apple release something called with 2 x's in it the iphone max like that would life-changing would be life-changing but I mean it's seriously like you know that's a trade-off that I'm definitely willing to make it I'm really fearful that all OEM zaple included are still pick up playing this this this pissing contest where they're trying to make the phones thinner and thinner and thinner with blatant disregard for the fact that a phone that can make it from say seven in the morning until five or six pm is not full day battery life and it is not acceptable i would say that at least once a week possibly twice on any phone that i use really right now i'm on the Galaxy Nexus but any phone I'm in a situation where I'm out and my phone dies and there's nothing I can do about it right yeah I totally agree with you Chris I think I think when the iphone 4 design came out a couple of years ago it kind of like mind blowing thin at the time and and you know I don't I've never in the two years since then or almost two and a half years since then I've never felt like that design was thick or cumbersome right or unwieldy or anything like that so if they could have had kept that same millimeter and added however much battery capacity that would afford yeah that would been pretty great now the other side okay so if they had added that battery capacity it would have added a ton of weight in this thing weighs what what is it so it's lighter yeah so it's significantly lighter i think the iphone 4s was like 141 grams so if they had just kept it the same weight I i would have been thrilled I never I mean the iphone 4s doesn't feel like a heavy phone it's not like 200 grams so i would much rather had the extended battery life and then i won't be using a silly like external battery case that I end up doing from time to time with my 4s because the battery doesn't get me through the day yeah I don't want to give Apple credit for bringing back the aluminum back I think that looks awesome and I'm not sad to see the glass back go um yeah I was never happy when they switched a plastic and then you know moving to glass was a nice fix but I feel like you know their original vision with the original iphone was aluminum now they finally gotten back to that I'm pretty pretty excited about that I hope it feels like that's one of my problems with the the HTC One S like it's got that that sweet micro are oxidized aluminum thing but I don't like the way it feels good feels like a chalkboard so I just hope this feels like just straight up good aluminum well there's one problem with the aluminum on the original iphone and and maybe they've kind of gotten around it with this one we don't know yet but with the original iphone you still see it occasionally today if you know everyone smell you see someone that's using an original iphone for god knows what reason but they they're they're scratched to hell and they're dented there physically dented yeah which is a phenomenon that's unique in the phone world because 99% of phones are plastic and which doesnt dent right yeah i mean you still see that unlike the ipod touch the most up up to the new ones that were just announced but the the other ipod touches from last year etc they get scratched extremely quickly and you frequently see them dented too so yeah be interesting to see the papal salt that nano SIM whatever it's a little tiny sim I've already ordered wait there's some sure that's gonna be the worst ya know I was going to ask you about that you you ordered you you took the plunge are you are you fearful for what your experience is going to be like with that adapter on Friday I am I now I think was seen at Asia put up a story where they they took a micro sim and like shaved it down to what they think that the size of the nano SIM is and it will it still worked and they were able to get it to continue to work on a HTC One X and so I'm assuming it'll be okay I hope it will I still want to be able to switch phones it's one of the main reasons I stuck with AT&T but if it's not I mean you know there's worse things in the world than being stuck on an iPhone 5 yeah I've always had problems with I mean you know that the problem with these adapters is that there's no way to lock a sim into the adapter right so like um you know I use I use an adapter on a micro sim in the galaxy nexus for instance and it's it's it's a sliding tray type and when you're when you're pulling it back out what happens sometimes is that the micro sim will kind of start to fall below the adapter a little bit and then it'll catch on either a pen or the indentation where the actual contacts are and then it gets stuck and then you you're sitting there trying to hold out and it takes ten minutes and i'm assuming those kinds of problems are only going to get worse with the nano sims because it's a physically smaller thing you basically need kearney hands to uh these things so what we'll see I'm uh I'm hopeful that this is going to be manageable but I suspect you're gonna hear a lot of four stories over the next few weeks of people trimming their micro sims or their standard sims down to nano SIM sighs and you know breaking the sim or doing something to the context where it shorts them or you know because you're you're your physic if I'm not mistaken you're physically cutting into the contact pat in order to get it down to nano nano sim sighs oh I don't gotta gotta Sam that's that's cruel you are I'm just right I'm gonna activate the phone and then hopefully I'll be able to put it in an adapter in size up from there I would write I have zero desire to tell anybody that it's a good idea to try and file down the sim to nano sim sighs I think that is a recipe for pain yeah especially since you eat with the iphone 5 it's going to have the tray you're gonna have to get it to to match in that tray perfectly and and and like Chris is saying the contacts footprint on a micro sim is like the whole size of the nano SIM itself so you're definitely cutting it close I guess you could say with the cops wah womp womp womp okay we got to talk about the hardware the lightning dock connector a all new connector it works you know it's reversible it's all digital and so that's why the adapter to the old dock adapter is so expensive because I actually have to have a digital to audio converter in there the feature that you lose is some of these ipod out features which to be clear is just like mirroring display on like a BMW car or something but it'll still work with audio docks with this big giant adapter and look why does Apple think it's too good for us be I don't know and it drives me absolutely nuts like I mean people complain about the micro USB connector but really it's not a bad connector it's it's hard to damage it's ubiquitous it's pretty straightforward to use like you have to really be trying too hard in order to put in an upside down I'll tell you exactly what what Apple's problem is with micro USB it's the fact that made for ipod is an extraordinary i phone is an extraordinarily lucrative a seal of approval for Apple that it charges accessory makers extraordinary amounts of money to use and if they switch to micro USB that only incentivizes companies to skirt the made for ipad or excuse me made for iphone seal and go rogue and as it stands these companies are gonna have to license to the Lightning port the the connector which is you know I mean that all adds up to dollar signs for Apple that's exactly what's going on it's still we are gonna have new features that that are capable that unless you do something crazy to extend the micro USB standard like you know audio out and video out and I mean whatever else I suppose but you know whatever I don't know I'm pretty bitter about this I just you know it's like there's apple exceptionalism for making money and you if you can make the case that this connector is better for consumers I haven't seen it that this does not seem like it's better for consumers and just going to micro USB right i mean i think you could have made that argument with the 30 pin connector nine years ago because micro you wasn't around mini USB might not have even really been around all that much so there wasn't a lot of great connectivity options and that kind of gave a standard connector that did a whole heck of a lot for the ipod at the time but today it's it's a different story and they're making a connector that to the layperson looks like a micro USB connector i think the average person will look at the port on an iphone 5 and be like oh it's the same plug as my galaxy s3 or whatever it is just because it looks almost the same it's almost the same size physically so you know it's it's a little little I mean chris has probably nailed it right on the head for the reason why but it's just like you said dieter not exactly consumer friendly and now I wonder how many how many stories you're gonna hear of a iphone 5 owners coming into genius bars with micro USB cables jammed into the Lightning port hahahaha that it's got to be just a little bit bigger than the micro USB plug so it just both crammed in there just fall out you ain't you would have it or lose that smart I don't know like and are they selling the micro USB 2 9 pin dock connector adapter in the US or is it still only the UK I believe it's only the UK I haven't heard that it's in the US that's good because like the only reason they're selling it in the UK or in the EU is to meet with regulations that require the compatibility right and that doesn't exist here in the US so apples not not offering it um so and I mean those relations are good they should have you know about anyway but to the other thing clear I available go ahead I was just gonna say to be clear they aren't they aren't laws they are a number of olean was agreed to these principles several years ago and Apple is just adhering to them but I don't think that there are any actual you laws that would prevent prevent them from selling the iphone in you countries if they weren't adhering to them I think that they're just they're doing it voluntarily I don't know why because they're really half-assing it but so the other thing that really bothers me with lightning and we were kind of talking about this in our chat room yesterday is the fact that it doesn't support USB 3 point of the box it's supports USB 2.0 even though all of apple's you know 2012 laptops have USB 3.0 ports plenty of Windows laptops have USB 3.0 ports and USB 3.0 is fully backwards compatible with USB 2.4 Singh us to use a cable to do a lot of heavy sinking and and interface with iTunes why can it be USB 3.1 it tries my there's no good answer that question not one that I'm happy with so sean hollister put up a really good report about the new connector and what it means for accessory makers and just accessories in general my personal complaint is like the doesn't i ordered an extra cable and it's not ready to ship right away so i'm gonna be down to just one cable to charge my phone and I'm not comfortable with that I carry literally like for micro USB cables in my bag all the time because I know I'm going to lose um dieter I'm really neater this is very easy just buy two iphone 5s take the cable on one and put the put the phone away um but no like this is article a really good point like that the big accessory makers they're excited about this right you know as long as you know apple lets them make new accessories they get to crank out new accessories and sell more stuff that's really exciting what but it it's a problem for this trend of you know smaller companies and guys launching products on kickstarter where like they had gone through this whole plan with the original dock connector and now they're there they just don't have the the resources to you know go back from scratch quickly and easily but you know the belkin's of the world they're super pumped about this they're going to be able to sell you all new stuff right yeah right it is interesting though if you go in and read Shawn's report it's interesting to hear basically all the big guys jawbone belkin and there was another logitech maybe that he talked to and all them sort of hinted at the fact that that you know the dock connectors days are numbered like eventually everything is just gonna be Wireless whether you like it or not and so that I mean yes they do in the short term they do get to profit by turning around all these new dock devices with lightning connectors but in a long term they think that it's just got all going to be you know this Wireless ecosystem of course you'll still need one of the advantages of these dock devices that they charge your phone while you're playing music or whatnot and you'll lose that advantage once you go completely wireless but maybe by then we'll have wireless charging to like over you know over-the-air wireless charging which has long been a dream of via of the industry how horrendously ugly and bulky are the first generation of battery packs going to be for this thing you remember like in the early days of the iphone battery packs they were super thick on the bottom because people hadn't figured out how to like minimize the amount of extra plastic they had to have next to the dock connector like they're going to start that whole process over again they're going to have to leave space for the headphone jack in addition to the microphone and the speakers I mean they're just going to be the worst they're gonna be terrible yep oh yeah I mean not to belabor this because I'm not really surprised but you know Apple chose not to go with wireless charging and they also chose not to put NFC on there and it's funny like I kind of I don't want the wireless charging because I do find that really convenient but the NFC thing I'm kind of on their side I feel like you know if it's not there it's not there and apples not going to try and force it and I'm totally okay with that decision I'm going to challenge you on the wireless charging thing because it wireless charging to me is one of those features that sounds really cool and you really think that you want it but then once you have your like well it only works on this one pad which I would be running a micro USB cable to anyway so what is actually the advantage of having it so I wrote a little three seconds of my life every day when I just go and set my phone down on the charger instead of reaching for a cable and plugging it in so I ve convenience of getting in my car and just setting it on you know at least with the you know webos days the the magnetic charger you just set it on your dash and you're done like it sounds really stupid but it is really convenient it's really nice it's an if they had if they had enabled wireless charging then and they had stuck to you know the cheese standard like like Nokia did then I wouldn't be looking at this a hellstorm of having only one cable for the next however long and you know losing it and not being able to charge my phone at all I'd at least be able to use the wireless charging fair enough yeah I think you brought up all the points that I intended just because I remember with my you know like my pre I had a I stuck one of the touchstone things to the dash of my car at the time and I just would like get in my car and plot my pre right on there and it was like the most convenient thing ever and if like a notification came in I could see it quickly and easily and it was charging up it is fantastic I don't think wireless charging is the answer for everything because if you want to use your phone while it's charging it's really inconvenient while it's sitting on a wireless charging dock but just having the option there would be nice also does anyone know what the maximum current is for Chi ooh that I don't know and that's not because things i'm curious about about what the current is gonna be on this connector if it'll be 2.1 or whatever you know the different the different amp urges are ya I the problem i mean i have this problem with basically every modern smartphone now where the the phone just in an idle state or certainly when you're using it is drawing enough power so that plugging it into a micro USB cable just barely keeps up with it like it doesn't really charge it just keeps the battery level stable right maybe a third hour if you're tethering you're just watching it slowly die or if you're using my PS services in your car and it just can't get out with it right and that problems only going to get worse and we've heard in fact i think we talked about it on the show before there's a there is an addendum to the USB 3 specification that increases the maximum current but that's still I don't even think it's approved yet so uh I don't have anything else to say about the hardware now that I've gotten my little rants out I despite everything I've complained about this connector I I'd still am actually pretty excited for the hardware I think it's gonna be impressive and I'm gonna feel really good that in my pocket and like I'm even excited about the the what's the phrase the chamfered edges the bezels that they made that angled instead of straight across I think that'll feel nicer today of the sandwich look is gone so it's it's a yeah it's smoother look I guess you could say um so we talked a little bit about AT&T and Verizon because you put together a report about you know our LTE networks gonna suddenly start sucking now that we're gonna have all these iphones on them and tell us that I screw up by staying with ATT uh well we'll find out right there's only one way to know for sure and that's that's to see what happens over the course of the next few weeks yeah so I mean I i think i've talked about it before i I've noticed that the that a TNT's network has gotten noticeably slower since the galaxy s3 launched and I don't think it's any coincidence that I see galaxy s3's on the street non-stop I think that it's been an enormous lee successful phone for AT&T and verizon and all the carriers that it's launched on so you take that level of success multiply it by two or three or four and and do it all over again and that that begs the obvious question are the LTE networks going to be able to survive in their current configurations what we we talked to an ATT spokesman about it and he emphasized the fact that you know they've learned lessons since since the HSPA days and they're implementing new technologies like small cells and self optimizing networks that that kind of account for that sort of heavy usage but at the end of the day your physical limit your ultimate limit is that the fact that you have a certain amount of spectrum available and if you run out of spectrum and if everybody's trying to tweet at the same time you're gonna run into problem so we generally don't we need to be the problem 24 bring LTE networks to their knees oh my point really saying though I that you know uh it will actually have to sleep the Twitter new twitter app is really inefficient that's actually it's not just limited to 140 characters every single one of those characters is a megabyte and so when you send a tweet out takes up a huge chunk every character is an emoji icon and yeah I would not doubt it I would not doubt it the way twitter is going um so yeah I mean we'll have to see what happens but but if it does bring the network's to their knees that that's but I mean that is a very very damning conclusion and a damning statement about that the state of wireless in the US so we have to hope we all have to collect if we hope that that these networks stay operational and that there's fast enough to actually use so Chris I gotta ask you which of the networks do you think is going to be the less of the least hit by the iphone i have my own theory i know the answer i know the answer i got it in the US you want the answer is sprint team old sprint t-mobile yeah yeah I mean yeah I mean you have to look at what to answer that question you need to look at what carriers are you know shouting from the highest hill tops that they're still offering unlimited data and the reason there doing that is because their networks are underutilized nover engineered and and so yeah those are t-mobile and Sprint I that also means of course that if those networks rapidly load up for whatever reason then they're probably at greater risk of ultimate failure that's just and I'm not I'm not saying that out of any knowledge that I have I just have to assume that would be the case so uh but yeah I I do agree it's gonna be other t-mobile or sprint that's that's at you know in the best position also that that that question is you have to take it on a market by market basis maybe a prime example AT&T only has five megahertz up and down for its LTE network in Chicago whereas in most markets it has 10 by 10 so that Chicago is more likely to have major LTE proms on 18t brought about by the launch of the iphone 5 then say uh Dallas you know Chris we need to move you to like Atlanta or Memphis or Seattle to any other city other than Chicago because you and your your the depth of knowledge that you have about 80 epic failures in Chicago second to none we really really spread that knowledge around we need to embed you in other cities so that you can complain about their wireless just like you do about Chicago well Seattle uh you know Seattle has still does not have AT&T LTE they're supposed to launch soon but I think that they are you know if you look at at the major cities in the u.s. that haven't launched with AT&T LTE at seattle's probably the biggest at this point and I do get into complaints almost weekly from people saying why the heck don't we have LTE yet and it's a great question because you know AT&T has a bit a smartphone office in Seattle course you know Microsoft is there you would you would just think that it would behoove AT&T to launch LTE there as quickly as possible right well okay we gotta we gotta start talking about other stuff by other stuff I mean other iphones stuff let's talk about iOS I guess I mean there's a bunch of a bunch of little things but they showed off everything and it was all the same stuff that we'd seen before I mean genuinely the only new feature that we hadn't already seen from WWDC that I can think of is that it has you know a different aspect ratio and we have another great report from Ellis right yeah about what what app developers think and what kills me about this okay they're gonna letterbox apps that's fine but you know most of the developers that he spoke to were like yeah we figured this was coming and yeah you know it's not like the end of the world and what it blows my mind is we have spent the past five years hearing this cuddle about fragmentation based on screen size and what a huge profit is for Android developers have to target all these different screen sizes and my feeling has always been that the screen size difference wasn't the real problem here it was other fragmentation issues and sort of the fact that most of these developers have responded to this with kind of a collective shrug like it doesn't surprise me and it shouldn't surprise anybody it's just so funny that we've spent so much like so much of our collective psychic angst about the screen size was wasted when really I think at the end of the day it's not that big of a deal that was a lot of preamble for me to stay shrug but there you go well so follow I have a few i have a few thoughts on this first off i think that the letter boxing is a correct me if i'm wrong i think that the apps appear in the middle is that right yeah yeah you're going to get black bars on the top and bottom if you're holding in portrait or left and right if you're holding it lands yeah this so the app should appear at the bottom not in the middle and that's so that you're maintaining the the relationship between the thumb of the user's dominant hand and the bottom of the application and that is that is the most you I everything that I think I've ever said if the software keyboard like on a litter box tap if the software keyboard pops up above the letterbox and not from the bottom of the screen like that will drive me completely insane yeah Nani notes because like this is one of the things that really bothered me about the original implementation of Android 4 on the HTC One X with that big black menu bar I mean I was I wasn't that angry about losing those pixels but what I was angry about was that the keyboard wouldn't be in the exact same spot on the screen every time you'd open it up it sometimes in beauty up above the menu and sometimes we you know flush to the bottom of the screen and so I really hope that when you pop open the keyboard on these letterbox taps that it'll be flush the bottom of the screen right right but but I also think that that that Apple's expectation is that and is I think it's very fair expectation is that that the developers event of any apps that matter in the App Store are going to be updated to support the new resolution very quickly in fact that the major guys have probably spent the past yeah we've already seen some updates to be honest with you that I yeah I was ya 6 and iphone 5 compatible I think trite not just updated today actually right yep and that's just going to continue and it's going to happen very fast so you'll just have this you know you'll have the long tail of apps that are abandoned where and and think that are sort of longer cycle apps that I'm sure will be a problem for the next year but those aren't really apples concern it's that it you know it's the the major apps and those are just going to get refreshed very very fast right so the rest is six I mean it's coming out on the 19th for other phones which is tomorrow if you're listening to this live or today if you're listening to it today it's released or last week if you're just catching up on virgin mobile show podcast which really you should be listening to these the moment are out I mean I don't know I so the this story went around the day of the event and I put up a piece day after this idea that iOS 6 is boring and I mean the truth is it's a little boring all right there's there's not anything here other than maps which we got to talk about maps oh my god um that like is completely wildly different than iOS right and you know apple always iterates small bits you know os/2 OS on these updates but there's usually one big tentpole feature that you'd be like this is the thing that changes the way you use your phone and the thing that changes the way you use your phone in iOS 6 is like a nap and as great as iOS is and I think it's great i really i really do it's it's not like it's not a location OS like its it has it does a better job of providing location services to third-party developers but for most consumers mapping and navigation is an app it's not a core OS experience and so i mean that's that's why you know we went with this angle that you know it's always a 73 degrees and sunny on the iPhones home screen because like it hasn't changed and that's okay for a lot of people but on the other hand like there's a sense of like forward-moving innovation and thinking about the future of computing that like Apple hasn't changed their vision for years and years on it and you know that seems a little bit I don't I'm not like freaking out about trouble but you know I don't know I feel like I say it every year they like man next next version they got to really shake it up because this is the same and like we're just saying it again with iOS 6 like we said with iOS 5 you know Neela I said something very interesting the other day and and I think that I agree with them which is that iOS 6 feels like lion it's it's sort of this weird hodgepodge of features that nobody necessarily asked for and their note there is no single compelling uh you know there's there's no must have feature that sets it apart and I I do think it like looking at the holistic picture of the iphone 5 I do think that the story is about the hardware on unbalanced not not about iOS 6 and but but here you you know to your point dieter I i think that we might be in for a long haul here like if you look at you look at OS X you go back over the the past decade how much has the platform really changed go back and look at screenshots from you know 10 dot 0 10 dot 1 it we you know this might just be the the UX that Apple has settled on and they're going to continue to to put chrome on it until it's impossibly stale and I don't even know a family as has a game plan for OS X much less iOS at this point yeah I mean if you were to dump into like a you know OS X 10.8 whatever you wouldn't feel terribly uh in you wouldn't feel like you're in a different world even if you've been using mountain lion for the past few months whereas right you know other other platforms if you were to jump back 10 years it definitely feels like a different operating system right and and windows 8 is the perfect example of that right like Windows 8 is like a is is a clean oh I mean you still have the desktop mode right but if you look at the the the UX that Microsoft is pushing for Windows 8 it is a clean break from everything you know about windows and that's something that I mean Apple is eventually going to have to cross that that you know that very scary gap and i think that the probably was this on Twitter the other day I think the problem for companies like Apple and Nokia and rim and Microsoft they have they've all had this problem where they at some point even in the face of overwhelming success they need to feel this invisible inflection point where they need to make a clean break and find the next big thing and and it's it's it becomes almost impossible difficult to do that when you're experiencing this massive overwhelming success like like apples yeah well the way I put this is the faster you go the harder it is to turn their going real fast right now they're selling a ton of phones right right so I don't think any of us can reasonably say when that point is going to come for that what you know when do they need to make that clean break I don't think anybody really knows are they planning for that clean break at this point I don't think anybody knows but but yeah in the meantime they're selling just bucket loads of iphones yeah okay so let's I mean so I mean you know face time works over 3g or 4g that's great except unless you're an AT&T and no one to switch plans series got sports scores male has this thing called VIP where you can have you know emails from certain people give you different notifications a feature that was introduced on Windows Mobile you can reply to a text from a missed phone call the feature that was introduced on Windows Mobile um there's I'm just saying man they're shared photo streams that's like I'm interesting but it's like this weird like not quite a social network kind of I don't know it's weird but a the thing I'm working up to you like the big change is maps maps all Apple it's all new they've kicked Google to the curb and for everything that I've seen like it looks very pretty and it seems run pretty well and they're flyover feature it's you know not as useful to me a street view but it is pretty cool and there is turn-by-turn navigation which is really important and you know you don't have to keep hunting for third party apps that have weird subscription models and blah blah blah the third party navigation apps on iOS I've never been fond of it all especially compared to android so you get all that and all the third party apps should still work fine and everything should be great unless you live in a city and you need to use public transit right yeah that seems to be the big divide between iOS 6 we'll have to see how kind of how it plays out or maps i should say in iOS 6 we'll have to see how it plays out but like there's a lot of features that say someone who lives in a rural or suburban area would really appreciate like that turn-by-turn navigation that a lot of i think a lot of users have been wanting on iOS since android introduced it a few years ago but at the flip side there's the you know urban user who might rely on those transit directions that are going to be no longer available directly and you'll have to go to a third party app option yeah yeah this feels like change that was driven solely on political and and you know a snap political decisions between Apple and Google and not any desire to actually improve the user experience because I you know I don't think there's any there's anything when you can make some arguments about the flyover mode but there is nothing with actual material benefit to the user in iOS 6 maps not to say that the that Google or excuse me that that apple's version of google maps was very good either right bed dead essentially google maps had a sense remain unchanged in iOS since the start and you know a google maps on android has lapped that product several times over so i think that you know if you're upgrading from iOS 5 to 6 that jump is probably less of a of a shock to the system than if you're moving from an android device to iOS 6 unless you need transit directions price unless you pick which I'm totally dependent on by the way the other do all the other thing is that you know that these new map features that are the headline features apple says won't be coming to the older devices so if you are on an iphone 4 or an older ipod touch or an older ipad you won't get the turn-by-turn navigation and you won't get the 3d flyover so in it for especially for iphone 4 users this really feels like they're losing features more than they're gaining anything you know we'll have to see how the final product is and and and once we run some tests on it and see how how well it performs but at least if you're an iphone 4s or an iphone 5 user you gain that turn-by-turn feature if you're losing the transit directions you're gaining the turn-by-turn features so it can be kind of like a net zero whereas on the iphone 4 you lose the transit directions and you don't get in the turn-by-turn feature all right you guys think that Google is going to go all out and release a new app for iOS Maps app they don't they I think they did a really good job at the YouTube app and the Google+ app is good like they've figured out how to code decent native iOS apps except for the gmail app yeah every other one is great except for the gmail app so I hope that there they do release a Maps app a Google maps app but I hope that the team that built the YouTube app and the Google+ app work on it and not the team that built the gmail app see I really like I'm a big fan of conspiracy theories and I really like the notion that Google goes out of its way to either a make iOS apps crappy or be nerf them in some tragic way and of course to your point Dan the gmail app is absolutely terrible the chrome app for iOS of course is still bit you know built on Safari it's not actually using well that's but the important chrome features are there you get the sinking you get the omnibox you get the cool tab management so that's like the only thing that's really different when you jump from iOS to Android and chrome is the rendering engine behind it like that the experiment reveals a prominent Google can't put the chrome right on jdate right scan yeah right yeah no you're right they can't but but the fact remains I just a lot you have my fantasy world where I think it was right it's a nerve iOS products specifically gmail yeah well which I mean theoretically that's what they bought Sparrow for but that remains to be seen we don't know how that's gonna play out yet yeah hopefully it plays out fast well one of the other nerfed if you will if I can steal your term Chris the iOS apps from google recently was the drive app which was virtually useless when it came out it was just a viewer and you couldn't create new files and you couldn't upload anything but that recently got updated with the ability to create files and to upload files and stuff like that so that yeah that got unnerved I guess so hopefully you know Google can do the same with the gmail app and hopefully if it if Google does decide to release a Google Maps app it's good from the beginning yeah we don't talk about the iphone 5 we could talk about pricing yeah okay so the iphone 4s is down to 99 bucks on cash back the iphone 4 is free and the 3gs is finally at long last gone which took forever yeah so I think stuck around for so did well I mean nowadays the iphone 4 is the same age as e 3gs was when it was moved to the free price point but I think we talked about this a little bit last week and you know having an iphone for class device at free is is kind of a wild thing to think about I mean the iphone 4 in 2010 was introduced a crazy display that we had not seen before you know great hardware obviously in a really solid camera and now you can get that for free on contract and if you compare it to the other phones that are available for free on contract it's like not even a contest yeah yeah even close even even though it's two and a half years old it's still not even a contest right now Apple I have to say Apple has figured out how to create a range of products and that's just to take it it's amazing excellent old products and and keep them on the market and continue to lower the prices and i think that the you know the brand strength of the iphone name carries all these products more or less equally as the you don't have these random names for the low end products it's a beautiful model and it's obviously working extremely well for them however i do think that they would have been very well served and the world would have been well served if they had if they had continued to sell 3gs as a just a dirty prepaid device both in the US and abroad you imagine if you could get the 3gs for say 79 or $99 contract-free it's it would still be a great product even now as a prepaid phone right like that would be the go-to unlocked roaming phone to bring me right if you traveled your up or whatever right uh well the march of progress continues the iphone is coming on friday uh but tomorrow 19th no day after tomorrow no tomorrow there's gonna be an HTC event we're expecting windows phone 8 devices i think from them there's the zenith the Accord and the Rio there's also been this 5 inch android phone that's been floating around and I mean I hope I mean we've talked about this a lot that the 1-series in the 1x in particular hasn't helped revitalize HTC much and so I'm hoping that whatever they're bringing to the table here will be awesome first of all but we'll get serious support from carriers or partners either Google or Microsoft depending on what it is they're announcing because I would hate to see HTC just you know fade into you know irrelevance I don't think that they deserve that as a company yeah I so you know we've seen we've we've seen a few leaks from this pose and windows phone line up from HTC and they uh I mean it's hard to get a sense it's really hard to get a sense without actually seeing the devices in person and and you know being at the event or what not to feel out how they actually compared to what nokia has on offer for windows phone 8 and so you know I did I don't feel comfortable really making any sort of definitive comment on these things but in general I do feel more bullish again i know i say this with every new release of Windows Phone but I feel more bullish about the hardware and the software going into this release than ever before it's just a question of whether you know they get that like he said date or would it you know they need the carrier support they need they need to get their story straight with with updates and upgrades going forward they just need to present I mean you know I phone just keeps getting stronger and stronger and am you know if they want to compete in that and the market they just need to deliver an extremely powerful message going into the holiday season so hopefully I mean I think that what the current rumors are tracking for an early November launch right for for most of these windows phone 8 devices including the 920 yeah I don't know I said you know so we've we've held you know I think that all three of us have held the 920 and it is a very beefy and heavy phone that i think is already for a strike against it for people for anyone who's considering but if you walk into a in 18 key store and you want to compare a 922 to an iphone 5 that's already a pretty powerful strike against it but it does have the the color range going for it and and I think that that the windows phone 8 home screen just looks really cool I like the fact that you've got these multiple box sizes going on now and yeah I mean we'll see i'm definitely going to there's no question about it that i'm going to own and use a windows phone 8 device of some sort for some period of time I don't that's going to be one of these htcs or 920 or what but I said that with the 900 and I did I used it for several weeks and and and like I said before the you know the Achilles heel would ultimately killed it for me was the lack of any sort of reasonable gmail support so we'll see if I mean seriously all Google needs to do is enable its iOS webview on I on mobile I eat n that is all they need to do and my prayers will be answered so we'll see if they can pull that off earth google feels the need to pull that off I don't know that's a pretty junky fix if you ask me because you still have to go to the web view to you know deal with you know you you do yeah so you don't get you don't get proper notifications but you kind of do because so here's what I always do on iOS which is this was before the sparrow days but well what i would do is I'd set um I'd set up an exchange account point in my gmail so I still get notifications and then i would i would put i would replace mail in the the fixed bar of icons at the bottom with a web icon pointing to the mobile gmail view so that you know and between the two I kind of made it work and that's what I if theoretically if if mobile gmail work properly on Windows Phone that's what I would do on windows phone but you get the the web view which is completely worthless so we either need something that is the equivalent of Sparrow for Windows Phone or we need Google to fix the way the very least the minimum effort fix is for Google to fix the the web view but we need something because the the mail client I mean I get that it's great for like pop email or whatever it does not work well when you have some as rich and advances gmail is especially if you actually put the time and effort into organizing it the way that you you can do if you you know if you take advantage of all the features i use priority inbox i use labels up the wazoo and it's just it's completely unmanageable with a standard email client yep i agree there's there's the the standard email client looks really great and it's fun to use at least on window 7.5 it was and it was very fast but it really lacked the robust gmail support that you'd be looking for yeah so i think the last thing i want to talk about today is this insane thing that happened with acer they were going to launch a phone based on the alley eun oh s am I even pronouncing that right and so they had like reporters going to this event and they just canceled it and then like google says we can't do this so we're not going to do it and like what the heck happened and so then google comes out and says yet no we said they can't do it they can't launch this phone because it's based on android and then the guys behind al you are like no it's not based on android and there's been this back and forth between 80 Rubin and the guys behind this is lu NOS about whether or not it's a fork of android and whether or not acer is allowed to launch a phone based on it and if they do that google would you know kick them out and stop giving them support of you know of like google apps and you know kick all the open handset alone it's a really weird story yeah so I think the the damning I think that the the nail in the coffin of a sarist story here was when Ruben i think it was Rubin who pointed out that aliens App Store has pirated versions google apps in it google android apps so I mean like come on like what what what's your defense at that point I mean theoretically I guess you could build a platform that that is binary compatible with Android but first of all odds are you did and second of all that doesn't change the fact that you have he's pirated apps chillin in your App Store so right yeah so I mean the story from out from from alien is that it they built this thing that they're not using the dalvik engine which is the engine that runs you know much android apps they're using their own custom thing that like mirrors its functionality which is ironic because dalvik whole point was to do the same thing to Java right yeah anyway Google saying no that's not true you're actually using our technology you know somewhere in here this is technically a fork and as a member of the open handset alliance azer has agreed not to launch stuff that is you know based on android but not Android compatible what's funny about that is you know Amazon's totally for you to do that it's just not part of the open handset alliance so there's been a lot of joke running around about oh yeah so haha Google's not so open anymore hahaha and I don't know how I feel about that like part of me wants to like I don't be sympathetic to this you know hating on Google for being evil about this and limiting what other partners and telling them what they can and can't do but on the other hand like I guess I'm kind of happy to see the open handset alliance finally actually mean something because today it seemed to me like it was just this you know PR shell and it didn't actually like have any teeth or you know there wasn't actually real contributions from the other members but this and even like you know Sony putting its stuff into this experimental project to launch a USP stock Android on Sony's handsets recently like it's starting to feel a little bit more like an ecosystem and a little bit less like just googles bag which is a totally ironic thing to say after Google just you know swung the hammer at a sir I have a different view I think that you know this this hammer that Google swung is something that people have been wanting Google to do for a long time I think it went the way it happened was not how everybody wanted it to happen but people have been complaining about how you know you pick up one android device and it doesn't feel like another android device and you move to another android device and it's a totally different experience and and i know a lot of people just wanted google this put its foot down and say like you know you can conform to these standards where you don't get gmail and that's kind of like what happened here you know it google said that Ali Ali Yoon is is not you know or acer is not you know conforming to our standards with the open handset alliance with this alley you know s and you know if you could do that but you're not going to get the open handset privileges and I think that would a lot of people have been asking for Google to do that but it's just kind of went about the wrong way here so let's be clear I think that two years ago good there's no way that Google would have done this they wouldn't have cared but I think that that what what Amazon undid to Android is something that that Google never anticipated and I think that they are more anxious than ever to keep Android keep the spirit of Android close and we're seeing that bear out with this I I think that you know you you you put this exact story two years ago not Ruben not anybody else inside Google would have cared that this was happening but it's a different google now and they have different priorities and a different understanding for what they need to do to advance the platform in light of how successful amazon was it forking Android in a meaningful way and you know went on to build successful products on top of it i don't think that Ruben ever anticipated that happening with with with android yeah well is it you know the other thing about this that roses people the wrong way and I think rightly so is that it was a sir I mean it feels like picking on the little guy if Samsung had gotten to the point where they were launching an OS that claim to have Android compatibility do you really think that Google would have done this to Samsung answer true yeah yeah the autumn but I mean you know it's also like I'm sure that there just wasn't proper communication between acer and Google in the first place right you know earlier on this right but I take your point about about Amazon what it's done with the kindle fire I think Google is finally drawn a line of this is where you know Android compatibility asks this past to be and the question now is are they going to move that line to try and create more consistency across different manufacturers or is this where this line is going to stay right right I mean we know there's still that that Wall Street Journal rumor from several months ago hanging over our heads that we haven't heard a peep about ever since about there being a line of Nexus phones supposedly announced right about now I'm expecting this to happen anytime now if the rumor actually comes to fruition so you know if Google wants to expand the meaning of Nexus into something that's truly useful to consumers than me you know that that gives them more leeway to kind of ignore the rest of the noise but if they don't do that if they continue with the existing Nexus model which isn't very commercially successful in any meaningful way then yeah then they might need to say okay well we need to rein in all of our OEM and sort of create more consistency across entire Android range which might actually be the more desirable you know as much as I would like to have a selection of Nexus phones to choose from that are you know true Nexus devices at the end of the day it might be more meaningful for Android or exceed me for Google to to put more you know to exert more control over their their main OEM partners it's actually not a bad note to end on now that the iphone rumors have wrapped up and we actually know what the iphone 5 looks like definitively it's time for us to get some sweet sweet brand new nexus action whether it's these multiple devices or just a brand new Nexus device from whoever it's going to be it there's still no option of me to get stock Nexus stock Android on ATT with LTE without hacking and I'm tired of that part of that situation I'm tired of the flagship android nexus phone being on boring crappy hardware at the terrible screen and even worse camera I'm ready for ya good Nexus phone yeah and yeah it's I mean the Galaxy Nexus wasn't the most cutting-edge phone when it was released in at this point it's pretty long in the tooth yeah well everybody thank you so much for watching the Virgin Mobile show if you want to follow us you can comment on this post when it goes up you can follow us on Twitter as well we are all at verge I am at back lawn dan is at DCC fridge Chris's NZ power of lad you will hopefully see you next week is at blatts a bob and like I just said we'll be back next week so tune in then thanks