Gadgetory

hi welcome to the verge bubble show we are we're trying something new it's exciting it is episode 24 we can remember fifth I am dieter bohn i'm dan seifert and i'm chris sigler and here we are on hang out and it's yeah we're chillin we uh we heard your complaints and your we heard your love for that making a complaint seems we buffering for some people yeah we figured we would give you something else to add to your complaint list we're live sure we're live if we're not live whatever will be live eventually so yeah so we're trying the new thing and it worked well for us once before and hopefully it'll work well again and we are alive and so we're just going to spend the next 20 minutes or so talking about the fact that we're using hang out and stuff I would like to say that hangouts is making it much easier to interject and interrupt whatever your train of thought was dieter so so plus one for that and apparently I'm fully an HD and no longer grainy and fuzzy which is amazing can I before we start talking phones can I just make an important point so kylie minogue has a new album out and I was just sampling it a few minutes ago and I have to say it is not very good it's called the Abbey Road sessions which first of all invoking the Beatles when you're kylie minogue is probably not the best move but it is not i don't recommend i mean if you have you know Spotify or RT or whatever I guess you know check it out but I wouldn't buy it I would not spend a dime I this particular it does not get the Christie glar stamp of approval apparently maybe it's a concept album where like it act that the album actually syncs up perfectly with a movie like I'm imagining watching fast and the furious while listening to this kylie minogue album what does she do any any Abbey Road cover is there like any beatles covers at all on it i I don't know Dan I only made it to tracks in before I couldn't take it anymore uh but I would like to suggest you you guys uh you know flats not here so I guess we can't get the full quorum but we should start every mobile show with an album review really yeah I just reviewed Kylie Minogue's Abbey Road sessions and next week it's it's one of your turns to to review and album so get ready I'm throwing that out there um sweet I what phones now I guess can I make a kind of make a visual joke you may its Lumia 920 oh god it's somebody's everybody's making fun of me for not being able to lift the Lumia 920 I can't believe you still haven't sent that to me I asked you to send that phone no no no no no no no no no no no no no that is a lie I offered to send it to you and you refused because you said you did not want the black version you only wanted cyan version i would i would definitely prefer that I go to corroborate dieter story Chris poo-pooed all over the black version because all he wanted to see was site in look I would definitely prefer the cyan version but getting trying the cyan version out of Josh's hands is akin to lifting the entire world it's not possible it I don't have the strength or the mental power to do that so I think that I mean maybe I can still get that black version from you then eventually dieter ya know I can i can send it to you that's totally gonna happen yes I just negotiated a phone live on the air in exchange for nothing apparently I was feeling really down in the dumps after listening to that kylie minogue crap but now I'm feeling much better about life you know you just see you could see it in your face and since your faces in such high definition on this new google hangout um you know you can really see how it end up your day getting that uh that Lumia 920 it is right everything's brighter except the room that I meant which is still better now we can talk about thumbs for real so what do you guys want to know i mean i wrote a you know a big review in collaboration with josh and thomas and Vlad I think made it was a whole lot of people had input on this thing and you know we gave it a score it's there's there's a lot I can say about it still I think it's I think it's the best Windows Phone device i like it slightly better than the x despite how you know heavy it is and i do want to point out that just because it's heavy like that's that's not necessarily the worst thing ever i mean it's it's a big chunky phone and it's like it feels really dense but i mean the thing I said about the overall design of it is you kind of I don't know you kind of learn to have an affinity for it you kind of start to feel like I don't know defensive of it in a certain way um because you feel bad for nokia or because there's legitimate reason to feel defensive about it no because it's it's legitimately good Hardware legitimately feels good in your hand so you're feeling defensive about the design of the phone or the phone in general well both and I think that the the the well I don't know if defensive the right word like it's like I've used a couple of inappropriate metaphors to describe it but it's like you've got a slightly embarrassing uncle but you love him you know I'm really well and like you could totally overlooked the things that other people can't and so you might make fun of them every now and then yourself but you don't really mean it and you you mean it lovingly but if anybody else makes fun of them you will beat them down okay interesting it's kind of like when you tease your kid brother and yeah like you know someone else comes along and teases your kid brother and you just you know aren't gonna stand up for that yeah yeah so the the thing with the 920 though is like I mean aside from the you know the weight issue that might be a prob for some users the hardware is is pretty fantastic right like it looks great and it's the same design that we've seen on the since the n9 and then the Lumia 800 and the 900 and we've liked all of those designs yeah so it's the same thing and it's got a much nicer display and I see I see me now and and you know much ice to display and it's refined and and things like that so I mean there's I think little to complain about with the hardware itself yeah so I mean the there's two reasons that it's ostensibly so thick one is the wireless charging and two is the the PureView camera which is mounted on Springs and we have talked at length about it and so I need to address there's been a lot of complaints about our review score and I want to address we gave the the camera and ate at the end of the day and part of the reasons like it's incredible in low light it's pretty amazing but it also doesn't match what you see on the screen or what your human eye sees and not everybody takes photos in near darkness right you just most of the time you're just taking photos and when you're just taking photos you kind of need to know exactly what you're going to get exactly what it's going to do and it takes I don't know I would say more effort than I would like out of a camera phone so I just took a picture of this yellow coffee cup and you know it it looks a little bit washed out relative to the actual color of the yellow coffee cup and you know it might be technically a little bit more true but like it takes a little bit more effort to get it to feel like a great camera great photo you know in my and that that you know and I think that reading other reviews are on the web and you know talking other people at the verge and other people at the build conference which I went to last week with Tom you know that that opinion seems to be pretty Universal that the camera has got some amazing technical things that it does but that doesn't necessarily make it an amazing camera for most people in a way it kind of feels like a like a you know a high-end SLR where you know in in the wrong hands you can take some really terrible picture with it but if you know what you're doing you can do you know good things with them right yeah I was going to make the point that uh we had discussed the camera quite a bit before publishing the review and it seemed to be like if you are really into photography and you want to tweak your photos after the fact the the 920 produces a great base to start with but just to for most people the photos that come Adam it just straight out of the camera on the phone and are being shared or whatever aren't quite don't have that punch that you get from other smartphone cameras that really make them look impressive right away yeah I don't know oh well can I just say that that despite the fact that I don't intend to really use this phone the price is such that it's difficult to justify not getting one doesn't mean it they the 820 I mean both both on contract and off contract prices are extremely aggressive and and I suspect that Nokia is selling because the off contract price is so aggressive I can only assume that Nokia is selling these AT&T at or below cost I mean 454 the 920 350 tons be off for the 820 is out of control to put things in perspective that's only fifty dollars more than what t-mobile is charging for an on contract note 20 you know well it's funny because if you look back to the 900 is the same pricing scheme for the 900 i believe i think on contract it was a hundred bucks and then off contractor is 450 and at the time when the 900 came out we could say that the 900 had kind of last year specifications right it had the slower processor lower res screen and stuff like that but the 920 he's got a modern processor it's got a high res screen and it's still only 450 off contract so I mentioned this earlier today when the pricing actually came out I was like you know I really wonder what Nokia's margins are on this particular with this pricing yeah now what color would you guys get I'm I wanted it like as you guys know I'm a huge cyan fan but I was talking to tom warren earlier today that I'm a little disappointed that the cyan is Matt know you should really happy that I really do not like the colossi versions at all I really look yeah I just I just think they look kind of cheap I I much prefer the mat and I actually i think the scions cool but I think the black fits with the aesthetic of the phone really well it's just like a you know I don't know I had a black 900 and it was boring either you know it's like at the cyan is great and the cyan is like you know I really cool looking I really like that gray that they showed off at launch um which I haven't yet actually had chance to see in person so I'll reserve final judgement on that but that looked really really short and ATT is not selling that one as far as I can tell they're selling black white red yellow and cyan yeah so i'm sad i don't know why the great was omitted that might be your only or something yeah so yeah I'll probably end up getting the cyan but I'm gonna take a good hard look at yellow and red as well I do want to you know briefly point out that I'm windows phone 8 feels really close the new kernel you know they've got a whole new basis they're going to be able to get much better apps and hopefully more quickly and there's going to be where be talking a lot more about that you know after the work that Tom did all at this bill developers conference so you know stay tuned to the verge for that but you know I've got a few niggles I've got a few complaints i'm still driven crazy by the lack of a notification center but think so the email app doesn't drive you nuts too i'm ok with the email app it drives you nuts because it breaks the threads when i reply but I mean don't forget I mean I feel like with as a gmail user and you know we're all gmail users that were sort of holding it to a artificially high standard you know if you compare the email app on windows phone 8 to the non gmail email app on Android or if you compare it to the email app on iOS you know it's in that it's way better than Android it's maybe not quite as good for me as iOS but it's really close and part of that might just be familiarity so I you know is it's not great for Gmail but I think that for you know exchange users and people that aren't deep into the you know Gmail way of thinking about email it's totally possible there is one great thing about the was just thinking about this this morning because I've kind of given in on iOS and I'm just using the mail app now which is really depressing thought yummy because I fought the good fight for so many years and I've just finally thrown at my hands and said screw it and gone back to mail but so the one thing that would be really tough for me is the fact that windows phone doesn't support it took years we finally iOS does the delete archive thing where you can choose either one on a per email basis you you press and hold on archive to bring up a menu can choose the lead instead on Windows Phone you can hack that on a per email basis by you know the default functionality is delete which you can configure through google sync on how how you want that behavior to work and then you can override that to do an archive by moving the mail into your all mail folder but and the only thing that sucks about that is that it's three taps you know you'd actually you know what a better solution is stop deleting email in Gmail why would you delete anything in gmail ever oh I don't know I get so many PRS into my email box that yeah I'm not a man you are Kaiser I might whatever god of that right I'm not going to allow junk stick around forever in my inbox well you don't you get it out of your inbox you are kind of it but it's still in my account I don't want it I want it to permanently be gone you're a hoarder dieter I'm gonna take you to be on the hit television disorders that's probably true I wonder what my um my gmail archive is up to how much space i mean i love i love having my gmail account i'm using all five gigs of her gmail right now yes i love i love going back to like my personal gmail account and I've got 16 gigs of 2004 as not a 16 16 gig ative of email in my personal account that's insane 16 that's right what's up i'm using 3.7 gig of my verge account so i'm definitely more efficient know at why I'm harder with the delete button than you are let's put it that way yeah so yeah okay um I actually I do want to point out one of the things we did a report already out of build Tom went to a session and so he from Microsoft admitted that they were trying to get notification center some kind of no centralized notification center into Windows Phone 8 and they just ran out of time it blows my mind that Microsoft actually admitted that and like that was the reason that they gave it I mean this happens all the time with software development you run out of time and you're not able to add all the things that you want before your deadline that you need to ship but you don't say that publicly like so it just is like we're gonna dieter go Gators just gone of areas that was a little weird uh oh we lost dan dan just quit this is falling apart rapidly oh my god best laid plans hey this is our very first hangout for the Virgin Mobile show were allowed a few flubs and allows you mistakes problems will get will get Dan back hopefully that's amazing windows phone will be a lot nicer with the Notification Center because you still have this feeling like you're a little bit not as like jacked in as I like to feel on a phone because there's not a single place you can go to see alerts unless you add all those live tiles to your home screen and remembering that you added the live tiles and you know if you miss a toast you know a little notification from the top like oh what was that I don't remember well my home screen somewhere I don't know that's exactly the thing I I'm countless occasions while I was using the 8x i would get presumably a text message but maybe something else and you know that they're all configured to make the same sound and then by the time i look down the toast is gone I don't know where to go I don't know where to look so it's a pretty big problem for them I think yeah well and hopefully they'll fix it and actually hopefully they'll be able to fix it relatively quickly because they're on this new kernel you know they should be able to get stuff in there more quickly click right quickly um so okay so I mean you guys when I dropped you talked about the pricing which bonkers right yeah yeah I mean 450 off contract for the 920's is out of control and 100 bucks on contract I mean if you look at so at a hundred dollars on contract that the 920 is essentially going head-to-head with the 4s on AT&T and that's you know I always think you know whenever nokia prices have fun really aggressively my instinct is think wow that's a really great deal until i remember that there's an iphone at that same price point then it becomes an entirely different ball game and i'm not i'm definitely not saying that that people should just universally get the forest instead of the 920 but you do need to think long and hard about how important app selection and up-to-date apps are to you in your phone selection process because i don't care what anyone says microsoft will will swear up and down just as they have since 75 that they don't have an appt problem but they still do they still do i can name uh at the time I had at least five we talked about this last week I can name out that my head at least five apps that i like to use on a daily or at least weekly basis on my phone that are not available on windows phone right now and are significantly impacting my decision on whether to use a windows phone is my daily driver yeah well i mean yeah i agree with all those points Chris but I was just wanted to say with regard surprising what's even more insane is how the 8x is priced on AT&T because it's a 199 for the 16 gig model and that's yeah that's like kind of blow in my mind that it be priced at that point at that high I mean I think to both very very good phones and if like I said in the review if you're if you want to buy into the windows phone ecosystem I don't think either one's going to do you wrong I think I slightly prefer the 920 but i think they tax is great especially if you like 10 phones although I mean we'll have to see what it looks like in six months i mean the the power button is still a huge hassle for me right on the x yeah I'm 8x yeah yeah yeah no they the 8x is is yeah I I feel like I feel like they could have made I feel like that the design team could have literally spent Scott Croyle at HTC is probably never going to speak to you but but I feel like like his team literally could have spent another like week just you know tooling around with the design of this phone and they would have had like a a slam dunk / home run depending on which sports metaphor you prefer button instead it feels like there it feels like the phone is eighty percent of the way to where it needs to be but in all aspects of the hardware design and I mean that you know the software is an entirely different story but just speaking about the hardware specifically it's it's you know it's like they they started with the concept that is a very solid concept and a good concept particularly for conveying what Microsoft is the message that Microsoft is trying to convey with Windows Phone in general which is the metro-style UI and and you know they've talked about the fact that the hardware really mirrors then that's great but the the detail bowls of that front of the 8x are just not all there David David Pierce our reviewer extraordinaire was just talking about this as well he is not in love with the 8x so finally I found my a tech soulmate everyone else is telling me that it's an awesome phone but David and I are like this man he agrees with me I guess the other sort of Windows Phone related stuff that we should mention on this was since our last podcast right The Wall Street Journal said that Microsoft is testing a Microsoft built surface phone with Asian suppliers already and we had heard that they were considering making their own windows phone but our sources tell us than the Sam wrote that it would be deployed as a plan B so basically if the round of devices that are coming out now flop and everybody kind of says peace out Microsoft's then you know Microsoft would have to go to loan and what's planned see that's the next question because because there is no guarantee at this point that that the surface is going to be the smash hit that Microsoft well I mean I'm surprised doesn't need to be a smash bag the surface right yeah yeah note that as going to say the surface I mean like it it feels like Microsoft wants it to be a hit but when you look at their their model for selling it it can't be by definition they're controlling the retail experience very tightly on that device so they're kind of limiting how broadly it can it can reach evil in that first place with the phone that couldn't be the case I people are complaining about hangouts look from now you guys in like and we use skype you don't like movies hang ups I think the next thing is we're going to just individually go to each of your homes yeah I know just to talk to you face-to-face will fly out we'll just do it listener by listener every week and we'll just show up and you're like it yeah I may have to I'm in give us think think about all the miles will get Chris you'll be a united premier member or whatever with no no problem is at all oh my god someone is ruined it we use gotomeeting no no no no I just want to say that we use gotomeeting for like some internal stuff uh and and we all hate it every single time we do and we want to just you know not have such not have a meeting what we're using gotomeeting yeah every single person on the verge team has at least one gotomeeting Horror Story um yeah I don't know so maybe this there's a huge untapped market here you know somebody needs to come up with the ultimate video live video but a proud podcasting solution and there's millions of dollars just waiting to be made oh man oh sorry it's just my Microsoft that meeting Lotus live we could totally okay all right I feel like we've spent so much time like having this 920 sort of be part of the discussion you know now we know the price we know what's coming out we know that it makes a tiny little noise when you shake it because of the camera and springs you know we've got it here like is there anything else that that we should say about it because I feel like it's been such a big deal now I feel like we've been we were waiting holding our breath for so long waiting for it to to get a release date and you get a price and to come out and then when it finally everything came down aside from the crazy price it's kind of like a actually can I just say this this was announced was it it was yesterday right the price and release date yes yeah election day the like yep why what like you make us wait and wait and wait and wait and then you do whatever you can to bury the news so that like regular humans won't see it classy move AT&T super classy spring anything on being suggested it's now hold on it's now being suggested that we all get green screens and use the magic with CGI to appear as though we're in the same room together yeah you like that that's well we do have all these effects that we could apply but I'm nervous to try any of them right now because it'll be a mess well if you if you apply any effects I think it's you're going to lose your lower third just just btdubs knows what you really below a thorough I am we won't know who you are where you are yeah right oh I don't have my city in my lower third anymore dang it where are you dieter oh um alright so something else that like needs explanation happen today and this was 18 PS plan they're gonna end landline phone service is that the plan Chris you can you walk us through this without letting anybody freaked out that ATT is trying to murder farmers or whatever well actually murder farmers no um so the long and short of this plan which they're calling what is it called victory I p plus it has some ridiculous name I can't even remember a velocity IP something other project velocity IP that's project velocity it sounds like it's act like your installment of the fast the furious that's actually not a bad name or for a film what they want to do here is a decommission over the next few years the legacy telephone network which still traces its roots to the various I'm the very same telephone network that's been in use for the past hundred years more or less they want to completely decommission that so that they can go to an all IP infrastructure in other words they want every single thing that's being transmitted over their network to be a data packet which believe it or not is not how it works right now when you at the end of the at the terminus of the connection in your home if you're using a what they call a pots line plain old telephone service it is usually the case that that voice is transmitted to some node as just voice and and they're they're trying to you know there's maintenance involving involved in in keeping this network alive and it really serves the only function that it serves in the year 2012 is to be to is to act as a fallback in times of emergency it's self powered it has some other good attributes it's been designed to sort of stay up 99.999 percent of the time which it has more or less done over the past hundred years but it's time to go we did this with amps and last decade and look sells service which is obviously a much smaller scale project and bringing down pots which is the you know still remains the single most ubiquitous network that we have but it is time to go they need to start diverting money and investment into next-generation networks and what really and so this this project velocity IP is laying out their game plan for doing this in combination with making an appeal to the FCC for changing uh basically 75 years of regulations that prevent them from decommissioning the legacy pots network starting with the Communications Act of 1934 up through the most recent major rewrite of that policy to the Telecommunications Act of 1996 so what they need to do what the process the process that they've started today with an FCC filing is basically appealing to them hey this is what we want to do this is why we want to do it but in order to do that we need your help bypassing certain parts of these really old laws meteorol rewriting their parts of these laws and although it's very very very easy to hate on AT&T I'll be the first to admit this is a surprisingly broadly supported initiative public knowledge which is a public interest group based in Washington DC that often speaks out against moves by AT&T and is a very consumer friendly think tank uh actually had some very warm words about this initiative and I think that so that the conclusion that we sort of reached in our report that we put up on this today is that through a combination of fairly heavy handed FCC regulation and eighties initiatives through this project there is a way to dis Mart Lee and there's a way to do it that won't negatively impact uh folks in the most rural areas who are normally the most ill served by these like AT&T because it's not profitable you're sending all this infrastructure to extremely low density areas where you just can't make any money and so historically those areas have been subsidized by something called the universal service fund which used to be used and still is used to some degree to subsidize pots and it's been updated over the past few months over the past year or so to cover broadband and so that regulation which is due to the FCC going to help cover parts of this transition 18 key is saying right now that when all is said and done ninety-nine percent of their current wireline footprint will be updated with an all IP network that leaves the other one percent in this nebulous gray area what that is going to happen to them the only thing AT&T will say on the record right now is that they're not going to leave any customers hanging whether they're not angrily what that means it doesn't matter too much though because the FCC should theoretically have them covered through the National Broadband Plan and through what they call to connect America fund and all this other Simon there are plans in place and projects in place there's money that's already being diverted to cover these folks this is something that needs to happen and it's going to be you know the analogy that I used in the piece is that it's like ripping a band-aid off you know we've been relying on this network this pasta network for so long now that it feels really weird to get rid of it and there are still you know tens of thousands advices that rely on it fax machines modems uh you know lots of different gateways and serves you no burglar alarms that that don't work very well over an IP network like if you connect into like a vonage box or something sometimes they don't work and you know we'll need to get over that hump but we could meet you know we can't continue to pump money into maintaining this ancient decrepit copper based network this doesn't make any sense so I think this is in the this is the right step yeah so in the larger context like a used to be when 18t have monopoly over all of the telecommunications network that part of the kind of contract they made with America in order to get a monopoly was that if they're going they have to provide universal service everybody has to they have to give everybody a phone line if they're going to get to keep their monopoly well that monopoly is theoretically gone it's gone uh it's not a monopoly anymore anyway so that sort of contract is now I guess null and void but we still need to make sure those people are covered and this you know National Broadband Plan the the iteration of the Universal Service Fund is in theory the the solution for that to cover that last one percent and so it seems like there's no reason to panic everybody's on the same page that they're going to continue to get to the gold universal service they're just you know taking the step in that direction we don't have the full picture yet is that a fair way to think of this it is yeah I think that if you look on paper if all you do is look at what eighteen t is proposing today and then you look at the laws that are on the books right now you say well wait a second what eighteen t is proposing is violating dozens of rules and that's true but the reason that's true is because these rules are ancient and they were written in a in a pots world so the next year to two to three years is going to be about taking a very close look at the Telecommunications Act of 1996 and rewriting very large portions of it in a way that makes sense for broadband you know and that's how it has to happen that that's something by the way that has to happen regardless of whether 18 T's project is ultimately approved and signed out by the FCC the act is in desperate need of an update and and chairman Genachowski has said before that that's you know that's on his task list that's honest to-do list so so things are going to happen but we're going to see some big big rules change here over the next few years I guess the speaking of a AT&T talk about the wireless side they have a noun sir they're gonna have a goal of hitting was 300 and 300 million cost about customers with LTE by the end of 2013 it's yeah by the end of 2014 oh yeah the prior projection was 250 by the end of 2013 and they plan to add another fifty million by the end of 2014 which is like you know virtually the entire population of the States yeah so uh in 1880's release they mentioned though there they've acquired a whole bunch of spectrum through various deals i think they mentioned over 40 deals this year that they've acquired spectrum from and they've got the rights to an access to about 118 megahertz spectrum um in order to do this rollout but the the whole thing just is kind of like you know AT&T pretty much said it couldn't do this when it was trying to buy t-mobile um but you know now it is so I mean III guess yeah there's you know the the talk to try and get their their interest push through with regards to tmobile but you know I'm glad to see that it's at least going to happen even though ATT said that it wouldn't be able to do it a year ago the other thing that is a note here is how far behind AT&T is from Verizon Verizon Scott you know over 400 markets already covered with LTE over 260 million residents by the end of this year so Verizon's already a full year ahead of AT&T LTE rollout yeah and by the way it should be mentioned that the LTE that 300 million number was was mentioned part and parcel with the project velocity IP it's it's all part of a tts big picture of saying you know we're gonna we're going to expand u-verse to cover a bunch more people we're going to connect a million businesses to directly to fiber and by the way we're also going to expend LTE to cover three hundred million pops the idea being that between those three initiatives they're going to end up reaching ninety-nine percent of their wireline footprint with some form of broadband data you know and once once you have access broadband data you can you can obviously do whatever you need to with it you can turn that into you know a virtual landline phone like you know any number of web services bondage whatever in fact 18-team mentions in its FCC filing that they're planning for customers that would be affected by the loss of one line service they have some product at and what they call it where they just you know it basically connects LTE and gives you you know Leslie plug in a wireline phone right uh what else what else happened this week Oh HTC and Verizon have an event on what November 13th annex Tuesday yeah we're pretty much expecting it to be the droid DNA from HTC this 5 inch monster of a phone which we've seen we've seen pictures leaked from evleaks we've got you know we had hands-on with the j butterfly which is the japanese version presumably of the same phone it looks pretty much like a lock yeah no it's definitely going to be that I I still don't I'm not a believer in this in this phone as everyone here knows but I'm anxious I'm excited for HTC and Verizon it proved me wrong make me a believer HTC tell me why I should want a 5-inch 1080p yeah I'm just like I don't get like ok they're taking this giant phone but like they refuse to put the One X on their network to go head-to-head with the galaxy s3 like Verizon is being so aggressive about putting phones and different slots and making sure you know like they've got the razr HD and HD Maxx and they've got the galaxy s3 another putting this way up the high end now see I don't even know if that story makes sense though because they've got there they did verizon take the note 2 yep yeah it's got the note 2 so if this makes HTC's like latest phones available on verizon more quickly than that that makes me happy but in terms of like myself being interested in a phone this big I mean I probably I don't know if I don't know if Verizon so I think that Verizon I don't know this personally but I get the sense that Verizon likes to throw its weight around with oh yawns more than any other American carrier including AT&T absalom and and what and and so what that means is that you have things like the droid brand which of course is done by Verizon and it also means that fries and I think has a very heavy hand in designing virtually every phone that comes onto its network the only two companies that it has capitulated to on that are of course Samsung and Apple HTC has nowhere near the weight that either those companies have so I you know I think that that verizon is still a little too proud to just release a stock 1x on its network even even Samsung's power is limited because with the like didim entered the note 2 for verizon's making samsung etch its logo into the home button which is just like one of the most insane carrier customizations I've ever seen so yeah I think you know what you were saying is you know that is that's a that's a that's a verizon tramp stamp is what it's exactly what it is is it is really inappropriate and I'm know that the verizon is doing it sounded like a good idea at the time after a few drinks and after partying all night and then you know the next morning yeah exactly what happened yeah a damn need Dan need and education we're out getting drinks and then you know they had one too many drinks and you know they woke up the next morning in some strange you know city and they're like what did we do last night and JK Shin pulls his phone out of his pocket but the verizon logo ash to the body's like oh my god what what did we do down exactly what happened why Dan and Dan is just like I don't know but we have the contract here that stipulates that it's staying that way yeah okay so so I'm pretty excited to see this phone in person III really want to see what a screen with you know a pixel density of 440 PPI or something insane like that I can't say that I really want to I'm excited to use this phone as a daily device just because it is so large and I'm really nervous about the power button actually being usable with all we've had with the a Texas power button and this is even bigger and it's still on the top of the phone so now the way that you turn it on with it with the phone that bag is you don't you don't reach up with your finger to hit it you just like bang it on your forehead like you ought to use your phone and oh my god that works like that totally network but the problem that you can't even do that with the a Texas power button even a push first of all first of all it would it would crack your skull because of the shape second of all it's flush with the edge yeah Wow um we want to pour one out for verizon's App Store and android and blackberry because it's going away you know I think the three people that use it are going to be very upset the rest of us will be happy that the stupid app is no longer on our phone and it can actually like disappear at verizon's actually removing the app through a software update in the future so that's that's pretty cool bit but it was it was one of those apps that like you couldn't remove in Android and you know I can't remember if you could remove it on a blackberry device but uh it's just like one of those stubborn carrier things that you know and verizon's not alone because ett has its own store and t-mobile is ridiculous and even sprint as well as their own stores and it's just like you know you're these curated app stores are of no benefit to to the actual end user they're just there to sully serve the carrier's needs so I'm more than happy to see you go yeah agreed I'm not going to waste a perfectly good battle of king cobra pouring one out that's absurd Wow um yeah you know what I'll save it i was i was gonna talk tell a little story but i'm not i will say that it was always I think that these stores were confusing or are confusing to some users and so it's good that they're gone I mean it's confusing to users and like if you buy a nap through that store and say a like say you're an Android user and you buy an app through verizon store and then you want to use it on your Nexus 7 tablet you can so it's like you know it's you're not doing anybody any any paper purse with these steps or these app stores I think the last thing before we wrap up is we do have do with you we do we sure do got them that they are reviewed of Nexus 4 it's up on the side it went up on November second Josh Kowalski reviewed it do we do review that we got that thing there during from you I don't know what's happening right now but it's really concerning me i don't know if i can continue to podcast with you guys if you're gonna sound like that so look before before i go completely off the rails on one of my trademark grants why don't you guys talk sensibly and logically about this phone so actually i do want to say something this phone has elicited a complete and total existential crisis amongst i want to say like seventy percent of the verge staff at least and okay and we talked about this I want to say last week when you know Neil and I put up the editorial about the lack of LTE and how it it we you know it seemed to some people like we're trying to apologize for Google which was not at all I wanted to do it is completely on google for peacing out on this yet we talked about this last week but you know this is a really good phone that everybody wants to buy and just like can't or won't because they feel like they need LTE and like I would say in our little you know internal chat i would say twenty-five percent of the stuff that we talk about now is every day a different persons like okay guys help me pick out a phone okay go oh yeah the phone and Chris you did a forum post like this is this is not my next about it again yeah I way it was mainly in responding was intended to be a direct response to vlad's this is my next on the 8x because theta X is most definitely not my next but it kind of turned into a dual purpose 8x and NASA's for hate session I just felt I mean looking at this phone and again you know I mentioned this the comments on my forum post I totally reserve the right to just buy this phone on a whim in a couple weeks and use it maybe love it but from everything I've seen up to including our review of this device it is just not it is it is the first Nexus device that has been incremental enough to not really tempt me at all well hang out yeah yeah I want to set you back up it is is incremental when compared to the other flagship Android hardware that has come out in the past you know three four months but and the Galaxy Nexus no it's compared to the audience it's way better discreet way better the camera way better the overall assessor the bass desire every battery life the overall feel the build quality right like the glass back is like that gives me pause but like I there is not a single thing that isn't like oh yeah totally better except sir like I'm LTE there there was likenesses if you compare it to the GSM Galaxy Nexus from last year there was like three major complaints that people had with it one the camera to the screen and three the build quality and all three of those were addressed through the nexus 4 so I mean it's it's like uh it's definitely an upgrade um you know and and it's frustrating that it doesn't have LTE and i think that's that's probably the more reason why you don't want to upgrade to it or don't want to purchase it Chris but to say it's it's it's a it's a mediocre upgrade or an incremental upgrade I think it's more of an upgrade to the Galaxy Nexus then the 4s was to the iphone for the woman and i was about to say that i think that the four to the forest is a very good analogy it has the same to me as the same feel to it there you know it's it's a it's a warmed-over Gallic the way I described it was it's a galaxy nexus one point one in feel it has helped us no no no not not to feel I don't mean like physically feel good is not sorry that was a term no you're right you definitely have me in the field department look and and like I said I serve the right to completely do a 180 on this oh you're going she will because he just said earlier that four hundred and fifty dollars was like you know automatic buy it now territory for the Lumia 920 but you know but then there's mine funny that's a night morning which by the way is LTE which gets me to the real core of my argument which and and somebody I can't remember who somebody can warn me not to rant about LTE on the Nexus 4 in this show but I'm throwing caution to the wind here the fact is you know I always hear people say well you know most people aren't an LTE Marcus blah blah blah that is a complete load of yet okay we are now at at last count verizon has over 400 LTE markets can you name 400 cities in the u.s. any name 400 metro areas in the US now you can't so the fact is the odds at right now uh if you live in the United States odds are statistically speaking that you live in a verizon LTE mark and over the course of the next a year to odds going to become very good that you're in an 18 TLT market as well in fact odds are already pretty good but they they will be enormously in your favor over the next few months to a year to year and a half so LTE is a very relevant thing um it has a a market effect on the data experience on the device and in markets with saturated ages HSPA which as you all know i am in LTE is not just nice to have it is a requirement so for me it is a true deal breaker in the sense that i want to be able to access data on my phone and i cannot on an HSPA device so and maybe that'll that'll start to become less of an issue as more people get on the gs3 is my iphone 5s and HP start in fact in you talked about this in your post this morning ATT is going to start rolling out small cells in dense areas for HSPA and q1 of 2013 and theoretically that should help to alleviate a lot of this stuff but in the in the very short term this phone is simply not an option for me so I'm imagining what's going to happen is I'm just gonna break down a buy one at some point and like I will use it a lot but when I really need tape data when I really need LTE I'll have to swap up to something else and I'm really lucky that I get to be able to do that but that's what's going to happen because I don't need LTE just for data on the phone although i really need LTE for date on the phone because the apts HSPA network is ATT HSPA network but it's my second tethering solution I need you know I need to be able to tether with it for this job yeah yeah I use tethering all the time as well but you know the thing is that I don't live in an area that has ATT LTE coverage I do have verizon LTE where I live so you know using the nexus 4 for me uh will be akin to using my iphone 5 at least you know in my my home area as soon as i go into like you know the city then yeah it's it's a no contest but i don't know i'm still I still really kind of want one I mean we're all like HD about it we're all like ah it is only 300 bucks unlocked is that eight or 16 at 300 a date yeah it's got a 350 to 16 yeah yeah I kind I kind of just want to buy this to have like a relatively inexpensive unlocked phone that i can use when i'm not in the US yeah and I could have like you know it's a cutting-edge unlocked phone I'm not dealing with you know if I were to buy a different phone for three hundred dollars unlocked I'd be dealing with you know a galaxy s1 or something like that I don't know dan dan i'll tell you what i will sell you a nokia c7 fits under five bucks I don't I don't I don't think I you'd have to like pay me seventy-five bucks and I still would be would be wondering if I should take that deal you know whatever right now 1x running cyanogenmod 10 it's still around still not quite there but it's gotten way better in the past couple of weeks and I'm pretty pleased what's the is the rogers hack still usable on the 18 t1x Oh unlocking the bootloader yeah I don't know what the state of that is minds with my bootloader is unlocked and once I got that done I like peace down i'm paying attention to that whole situation cuz i'm a jerk that's fair yeah so what's missing on that wrong that's not only in battery life oh that's you know minor issues no idea life has gotten way better and it's it's pretty stable there there's some way clocks which are things that like apps opening up in the background it sucked down the battery life but like I'm not seeing any real showstoppers right now on rom from the six but like if they're moving along quickly that the hassle is you know the colonel needs work because HTC went with a crazy colonel so they're working on actively so yeah when one is when is HTC going to make a nexus phone again and you know when nexus one came out it was like the best phone the HTC could may get it ran stock Android and it was like why can't do that again we have developer phones from motorola and HTC who else is making developer edition phones is Sony doing it now I can't exam samsung goes samsung definitely is um you know if you're unlocking the bootloader on your developer edition phone just offer a stock Android ROM and see what happens you know it's already a developer phone it's already you know not available subsidized with carriers so you're not gonna sell a ton of them I mean see what happens man just try it go crazy put it on your developer website for develop cups throw caution to the wind and just throw it up there I mean would if there were an Android LTE phone that had a developer edition that offered a you know stock jelly bean experience tell me you wouldn't buy that uh i wanna i would pay not knowledge for that yeah i mean chris paid like eight hundred and fifty dollars to import a gsm galaxy nexus last year so yeah but who who didn't I mean like I feel like I mean the Galaxy Nexus was the Galaxy Nexus was such a like a a watershed moment for android there was so much kind of demand among Android nerds such as ourselves for the Galaxy Nexus that I think that many of us were extremely desperate to get on get in on the first shipment of devices myself solely a cute our chat says it has dropped a link to XDA forums that are xda-developers that will show you how to root and unlock them 1x the most recent oh I kind of want to get a 1 X on my hands now well there's one x+ though man I don't know it's tough one it's got a bigger battery but yeah what what doesn't the one x+ have can you can you tell me android 4.2 ah LTE well yeah no no the one x+ is got out to eat yeah that's the whole like the UK one does oh no not the UK one I thought you meant the 31 all right yeah the ATV is getting that I totally spaced on it my bad how about a Dan how about a nokia nokia n79 i'll say a 99 for fifty bucks you know what I know what I got I got a I got a phone have a headache about an HPV HPV r man dude i have an HP here oh if you have an NA Chris I would actually like consider that but I have a cyan and eight not ten feet away from me oh well I know you may not happen I will take that phone to the grave with me gentlemen I have a thing I need to be at in like 15 minutes so I need to go so I'm gonna wrap this show up sorry it's a little shorter than usual but that's okay because it's short and sweet it doesn't mean we don't love you and we want you to watch next week just like you watch this week really appreciate everybody stop and buy if you want to follow us on twitter you can we are at her giant Matt back lon chris is at z power and I think he's tweeting again which is crazy and Dan is at DC seaford with an e I and we'll be back next week who knows what time who knows what they will be back just trust us thanks for watching