Gadgetory

hello welcome to the verge mobile show this is episode 28 it's the week of December third 2012 we're going to talk about things in the mobile world that happened this week so many things that happened and we're going to talk about them as I said this is really choppy so I'm just going to say that my name is dieter bohn to move on my name is Gladys have oh I'm dan seifert and i'm chris sigler and were only ten minutes late today I feel pretty good about that yeah I feel pretty good that this is the second week in a row that we're on a Tuesday so yeah congrats to us and roughly the same term that were supposed to be on Roy what we would have been on time today but we found we found some some toys in in google hangouts that distracted us yeah well in other words we were playing fart sounds because it was a good time we like them they're fun um so yeah so I don't know I I think it was a relatively quiet weekend news which means that what we're actually going to do is probably rant and complain about lots and lots of other things um the chat room has already gone back to what we talked about last week which is that we need the Kin nexus 2 to be released which makes me really happy um so I think the first thing I want to complain about is windows phone 7.8 uh it's coming out in early 2013 now Microsoft has finally said and I mean there's some security enhancements to exchange but the big new feature is the the new smaller live tiles and maybe I'm crazy but this shouldn't be that hard push out I personally think that it has more to do with with Microsoft's desire to give the windows phone 8 devices enough of a head start on shelves because if you if you if you get 7.8 out there quickly I think that you disincentivize some owners from upgrading to Windows Phone 8 in a timely fashion so that that might have something to do with it well I don't know I mean let's be fair Microsoft people need a Christmas holiday break as well come on his december who does anything useful in December I was thinking about this Oh buena onda right this is gonna be the month where nobody makes big news intentionally like if you 7.8 is not big news don't don't over its don't oversell it bland 7.8 is the smallest news imaginable well fair enough but in the context of the windows phone ecosystem this windows phone seven point a and this Windows Phone 8 and there's all the rageaholics who bought the Livia 900 thinking the smartphone beats test was over and then that's the most ironic thing that has happened this entire year nokia n80 saying smartphone beta beta test is over and then the Lumia 900 being the absolute beta like test run for the Lumia 920 launch that's exactly the way that I see it so I mean I'm totally on board with dita this this whole thing windows phone 7.8 it's almost a question of why isn't it out already like you only give it a small modification read you should just get it out let people have it and that's the other thing you should have the confidence or you should have faith in the innovations of Windows Phone 8 to distinguish it from some point it shouldn't be just a visual tweak my people shouldn't be able to see 7.8 and I look I like it I like whoa it's all the same thing you should have some underlying strengths there as well yeah I mean I just we were so happy with Microsoft and how they managed to get updates out the door previous to this they you know they did really well with 7.5 all things considered especially compared to you know what they've done the past especially compared to android and I know that this is like this is not the platform of the future but you had these early adopters they're already angry about the fact that getting a windows phone 8 upgrade you give them this bone and now you're making them wait for it just I don't know do what you need to do to get it out as soon as possible and it is a little bit oh wait there's new theme colors that might be the problem they couldn't figure out the CSS codes for the new theme colors they've been they've been debating between FFF eight and f FF seven and they just haven't decided which to be fair I was a pretty hard hard to beat yeah no it's it's a it's a tough call look I mean for one thing keep in mind I think tom warren our very own tom warren microsoft ponded extraordinaire pointed out that 7.8 is microsoft's play in the entry-level market for the foreseeable future so this isn't a throwaway it's tempting to think of this version as a throwaway platform but in some ways it's not because until the hardware required to run Windows Phone 8 gets pushed down market enough to go into China and all these other places they're going to need to keep 7.8 and that that line that technology path alive but as I say dissembler is not a good news month that's all we'll go to say look oh I know I know I know exactly one thing about Europe and that's that Europe has like six months of holidays here so I think that's where this mentality of yours is coming from wed Wow no I mean what what is that to go forward to your probably going to overeat dramatically then you're probably going to feel guilty about it you're going to over-exercise dramatically on one day then there's going to be sales that is going to be regretful overspending during the sales and in January everything will be just you know on another clearance sale you'll be a few pounds heavier and there we know you software to be excited about like the only thing we've had to be excited about this month is gmail two-pointer for iOS and we already ripping at Frank to shreds ok we want to talk about our before we move on I just want to point out that i have a windows phone 8x here in blue this time which i'm pretty excited about does it make the power button any better yeah it feels a lot bluer but apart from that now all right gmail to point 0 for iOS on the iPhone on the iPad it's available and it should be downloadable now earlier today you had to like get the direct link to install it from the App Store's of using the update but it's out and i am happy enough with it that i have turned off notifications i haven't turned off email but i'm turned off all notifications and badges for the built-in email client and i'm just using this for email right so I I did the a similar thing I've had them turned off for the built in client for ages and I've been easing sparrow but today when i upgraded to the new gmail app i turned off of sparrows notifications and I turned on the gmail one so we'll see how well that works so here's the thing about the gmail app on both Android and iOS and on the desktop actually a webview I use mail plane the thing that keeps me hooked I you know I used to think it was the archiving and then I thought it was the labels but I realized that the thing I care about the most is the threading and more to the point when you're looking at a giant thread of emails with 50 people replying with their you know favorite cat gifs or whatever the thread happens to be it all appears on a single element and you can scroll through the whole element and you don't have to like scroll or tap or like scroll and like initiate something to switch to the next email you've got that entire email thread chain on a single view they all get marked red and you can just scroll through them really quickly and that's why I never could get into Sparrow because it was too much of a hassle to move from one email to the next within a chain and so despite the fact that there's some problems with this gmail app still some witch or google's fault and some of which are just limitations for what they can manage to do on iOS it scratches is my gmail itch just enough and now I will turn it over to Chris who wants to complain about this app out life so here's my take first of all it is an improvement i will i'm going to try and be as level-headed about about this as i can it's an approach it's it's a noted improvement over the completely the complete dumpster fire that Google what but but that's that's really not saying much and and so so you know if you think about how long google has spent doing seemingly nothing to this application factor they bought Sparrow the only viable competitor to the Native Client a few months ago and this is what they've come up with is little disappointing to me there are a few things that are already bothering me um one is that you don't have a granular control over notifications or they're either on or off essentially on my android devices i always keep notifications limited to priority inbox because you know with with enough training really doesn't take a lot a lot of training at all you can get priority inbox to the point where ninety-nine percent of the time it's doing the right thing with your yeah email and to be fair i managed to do that pretty well on iOS I I turned on the you know the VIP stuff and I pino marked a few people as the IP and it wasn't perfect but it was pretty good at just getting the alerts for stuff that I want and I do I don't use priority inbox like I don't just look at that I know everything else I look at all of my email got all of my email but just for getting noticed for getting notifications priority inbox is super convenient yep yeah so that's that's one thing and then and then also it bothers me that that this is and I you know I don't think there's anything you can do about this this is apple's fault but but this app appears to be just a webview much like the app before it and you know that's that's google's fault yeah I place the entire blame on Google I mean Sparrow is a third party email app that's a full native app that's not a web view at all now are you sure that everything here is completely a web you because I mean things are quick enough that I sort of wonder if its a mix of web and native code like going the course navigation go into settings and tell me that's not an HTML page yeah no but go but the thing that brings up the settings like the the panel sliding around and everything it's a bunch of web views in sort of a native shell it's a rapper right yeah what I was going to suggest is that even if it is you know based on the web view is starting to move away from that and it's time to feel more like a matey but even if it's still rough around the edges but I do feel like this entire discussion so far has submitted the biggest and most important change which is that the color of the icon has changed it's it's an outrage it is an abomination what I color code my home screen out of whack now I mean the this is like muscle memory that you've got built up for particular location of your home screen that's gotta disappear because it's no longer I mean come from a dark background to a white one it is pretty odd I mean yeah it is good i got its gonna take on there a thing on the bottom like it's sitting on something or it's raised up and though in a weird way and then chrome has still got a dark background around its icon so now if it is any background around chrome well yea though that would he talk about there's the black whatever okay well that yep that's right in my face right there right improve their but really i mean to be a bit less facetious this two points that piqua t to race here the first is that i see essentially once again google's kind of bringing something out that doesn't feel like it's fully matured fully polished so you see the ideas you see the new design and the design language and you know we're using google hangouts at the moment the same loading animation that you see in google hangouts this multicolored circle which seems to be flipping around i love it yeah that's replicated exactly in the the gmail app for iOS now so Google is working towards this consistency in this uniformity of knowing that you using a google program so that's fine but everybody on our team has remarked that the speed isn't great and there's lag some people is putting more lag than there is in the gmail one point whatever versions what out what I was to say is I've been using the previous version of gmail exclusively as both you guys go to sparrow within the native iOS mayo app I mean it hasn't been a great experience but I wouldn't go so far as calling it a dumpster fire because Chris described I mean it was survivable um but as one thing so as a dumpster fire technically I mean unless that dumpsters full of kerosene you proud of you got a pretty good chance of getting out of a dumpster fire alive not if you're in the dumpster well it depends on what's in the dumpster I mean no no I mean de jure is right I mean it takes a lot to kill a human being you would've let them fire but maybe not if you have to use it for like a year straight that's all I gotta be honest i'm using it a time on an iphone 5 and i don't see the legs other people are talking about so I think the animations are pretty cool the animations are in my opinion slicker than they are on the android app uh and you know scrolling is really fast and all that other stuff um does this thing though they slicker but they're not quicker ooh and then yeah if i rhyme it that means it's true and the other thing is the android app the big advantage that it has is the fact that you can just swipe laterally between email threads yes that again gets to deeds point about being really quick yeah no that's definitely omitted from for whatever reason from this version of the ios app which i can't understand one thing that we haven't mentioned yet is it actually does support multiple inboxes now which is a huge or multiple accounts i should say which I totally should 45 tabs to get from one account like seriously the one yeah yeah it's terrible three three tabs but closed forever man what well Jesus County they just want one final point to raise which again is about the visual style the new app which brian bishop from our team noted everything is kind of being enlarged like you little avatars now if you don't have a specific avatar or the person doesn't have a split hotel in your contacts they get a big letter so when i get an email from dan i get a big d and all these visual elements have been enlarged and the text is kind of being shrunken down and you see less of each email in it which people say looks pretty great on the ipad application but makes the iphone 5 seem a little small like it needs a bigger screen which i think might be slightly intentional google spot just a troll apple just be like our app is so epic you need a bigger screen the iphone sorry i'm just add a picture to uh to my deal all right now realize it wasn't there it's not acceptable decent dozen i would just like to say uh that the dieter is destroying me and letterpress right now what has you can see well because this is a letterpress fanboy so he wanted to make sure that right I only wanted as a show I only use devices and platforms that have letterpressed on them uh which means I can't actually use this windows phone 8x that I just showed you guys oh my god um yeah no I just thought I'd get in a few rounds of letterpress while I was waiting for you guys to finish what your whatever it was that you were talking about okay this was so so terrible because not only did Chris completely derail the conversation but he also looked to his left and beats audio branding by his headphones the thing that I'm already annoyed and irritated about was just visible for like a solid five second beats free ads oh lets you switch it to go DJ headphones yes so I he can't hear anything we're saying right now no get your smack talk in now I can respect Chris again yeah well that would that was a complete and utter derailment of the whole conversation I look um I'm relatively happy with the with the thing I'm it makes it easier for me to be using an iphone and because I've been balancing between Android and iPhone like literally like twice a day the past few days it's getting kind of embarrassing do you feel that you know one of the biggest complaints about heavy gmail users on the iphone why they use android is because of the gmail experience it is it enough for you to just kind of forget about android for now yeah maybe I mean there's a bunch of apps on iOS that I didn't think I cared that much about but I do actually love a lot that aren't available on Android but there's a bunch of stuff on Android that like it's hard for me to give up and it's like really little things like the unlock I've got an unlock gesture instead of typing in a code it saves me you know a quarter of a second every time i unlock my phone which given the number of times I'm like my phone every day adds up to a million years I could you be happy iOS latest for iphone 5 what's that the YouTube app for iOS has just been updated for the iphone 5c oh yeah it does it let you airplay yes streaming videos of their play really cuz that that's they took that out before right or they did something to take that away and so I yeah called jasmine yes that's that's big deal check out the verge calm there's gonna be some news on it in a little bit he's gonna says it does it work on the iPad down yup optimized for iPad an iPhone 5 okay could just break this news before I was posted on the verge we did Wow hey sneak preview for those that listen to the Virgin Mobile show or watch a virtual show well its life got to give something back to the people as so far my take on it is i've been i finally got my nexus 4 in last week after much of a delay and I've been like try living with my nexus 4 and like occasionally going back to my iphone parts at times are the day and i think for me the biggest difference is there's a lot of things with the android platform that i like and the main OS that i like better than iOS but when it comes to the apps the third party apps just are really frustrating me uh for starters like I was complaining about it earlier on Twitter today that like there's no good camera app for or photo apps for Android that I can find none of them seem to compare to the third party options that are available on iOS and you know what what do you want photo editing photo sharing was no no like a photo-taking like like I use camera plus a lot on the iPhone because it gives me control over exposure settings and stuff like that some camera nerd and the ones I've tried for Android just don't work as well and are frustrating to use and stuff like that so I mean that's just one example but there's you know others where just the third party apps are just so much better and so much easier to use and that a better design on iOS it makes me sad because I really like the android platform and using the intro platform well I'm just going to mention because it surprised me picsart on Android is really nice photo editor um is that an editor though or is that like a suit er no it's not a she's definite say in a party you can how do you confuse an editor with the first person shooter maybe that's my problem as a whole but yeah it applies a bunch of tweaks and coders it has a really nice color isolation setting where you know you select color like red and it desaturase with the other colors and I thing that surprised me actually is that I found pics out on Android user enter phones I can't find any iOS App Store and so this is like the odds exception where Android has an app that iOS thousand I mean I'm sure this one here's an animal yeah there's an analog to it well there has actually one of the other things we need to talk about this week there's a feature on Android for facebook Messenger that's not available and I um they've had on certain Android but not all android phones which is actually kind of knowing SMS integration and now in a few countries and they're going to launch a worldwide as quickly as they can they've got a thing where you don't need a facebook account to sign up for facebook Messenger which is to me really interesting you'd think that with a billion users that they would that would be enough but they want to make sure that you can still use facebook Messenger to talk to everybody not just your Facebook friends they're trying to recontextualize it as just a general messaging app instead of Facebook messaging app yeah i think it's a it's a very very like definitive sign that that facebook isn't playing when it comes to message i I've always thought of facebook messages being a sideshow like you know it's just a feature of facebook and and this just goes to show you that they're out there to kill SMS they're out there to take on the what's apps and the kicks of the world and that is a bat ni messages the world and this is a battle that's being very actively wage right now and somebody is going to win it and ultimately long-term it's not going to be SMS also ultimately long be very interesting thank you can see player yeah the winner might not be crowned in the US either so I mean let's we've got I message we've got blackberry messenger which is still big in certain countries notably the countries where Facebook is first launching this feature we've got whatsapp with its you know I think it's a 10 billion messages a day but they won't say users we've got kik with 30 million users we've got 30 million users we've got over 30 million users we've got kako talk and chat on well chat on whatever nimbuzz 10 whatever ten cents the messaging app as I forget and like half of these messaging clients are like talking about users in the tens if not the hundreds of millions so like there's no shortage of contenders in this space and you know facebook wants to I mean you know I did the post it arose morning facebook wants to make every phone a facebook phone and if it doesn't have a chance to win on messaging that that's problem and I mean for me it's it's sort of like you know why can't facebook just let this one go why does facebook feel like it needs to win here that's the really interesting question and that's you know the futures phones man we're talking this is this is a podcast about the future right now that's deep man that's it yeah but I mean I don't know that we need to be asking that question instant messaging is something that doesn't have a dominant player at the moment and he's open to somebody to grasp it into own it and it's just another you know just another branch to any one of these big companies whether it be Google trying to gchat Facebook words own messenger and apple with I message it's just another way to poor users in and you know you pull users in you start data mining them you start selling later you start advertising to them etc etc and I'll say you make money and so everybody makes money so it makes sense why everybody would want a slice of the I am pie and I was just thinking recently I need to standardize on some sort of instant messaging platform because I've got a bunch of contacts with people just fragmented all over the place someone skype I'm getting I messages from like two people you know there's gchat but then you have multiple accounts for Google and yeah yes I got an aim account I've got a yahoo account that the question here is flat is how will you standardize on that if everyone is sending you messages from various accounts isn't it kind of you can't really standardized on something if everyone that you're talking to is using different things right I will tell you how but I will tell you how on the verge hopefully later this week nice but but I mean that doesn't point at this point you can't standardized unless you get absolutely bic whaty on one service and that could be facebook Messenger and this is what Facebook is trying to do by removing what is essentially a very very low barrier to entry because as neither said a billion people already have facebook accounts most people who have access to the web have a Facebook account already but Facebook is nudging that aside just asking for your name and a phone number which again is a play for these developing markets where people probably use IM and text messaging a lot more than ourselves right we do we tweeted each other I guess we do that more and twitter is the good analogy here because Twitter only really matters as much as it does be composed solely because it's because you know everybody's on earth you know I mean originally maybe it had technological advantages in being so simple and we hadn't even know what fits illogical that's what it was I mean right now getting reason everybody's on twitter is because everybody isn't it it's a cell-free for my Twitter doesn't want to be a messaging platform they've they've relegated direct messages to absolutely absolutely you know a submenu of a submenu and their app right which stinks and I can't I can't agree that everybody's on twitter i think a lot of people that are in our circle or on twitter um no like not what asked me well for instance if i wanted to send my wife a message i can't do it on Twitter cuz she doesn't use twitter ever yeah I mean I think what I'm glad assays and everybody that matters yes but upon also making isn't that Turner is that much of a direct person-to-person communication platform like I rarely actually use Twitter as a way to be having a conversation with one other person or to other people it's usually to communicate with everybody else but my point is we've standardized on Twitter as this information distribution thing just because anybody is using in the same way this is I not to toot my own horn but that i called i call the twitter is back in january and it's come true i called them a broadcasting social network and that's what it is it's a broadcasting network that everybody happens to be able to broadcast on yeah there's a little bit of social in there and there's a little bit of archiving but not much and they're promising to fix that but it's you know it's not a publishing platform it's a broadcasting yeah they want to be I'm happy with that definition I think it fits as long as we talk about messaging we would be remiss if we didn't for the virtual show briefly wish text messaging SMS short message service a happy 20th birthday died already wow I didn't think very good Chris can get a sound effect for the birthday wah wah wah I think it's has too many steps here right no I got this wow I like I feel like that's not appropriate yeah I do this let's not do this just goes is so so what guy so can I just want to boil this down for you guys there there are only there only three almost went there are three problems my break is that bugs you today there are three problems with SMS that prevent it from researching to become the dominant instant messaging / mobile messaging platform for the foreseeable future one is the 140 character limit is obviously a huge issue right to is presents information which i think is key to any good platform and presents information isn't just like away status it's also things like you know seeing when people are typing that is you know optional reader seats and then three the fact that at present you need a phone number or phone number is your only form of identification when in fact there there can and should be much easier ways to identify yourself to to send and receive SMS is and that's something that then basically all other platforms have figured out I message is kind of trying to be a little I would argue well too smart about it with the way it integrates email addresses and I'm in a weird situation right now where like people with iphones can't text me because yes goes to a non-existent phone same say for me yeah so but but regardless these are all problems and I don't blame SMS for having these problems because the 20 year old platform but but you know there's some effort there's there's there there's a a ground swell of support among certain carriers for supporting and unfortunately the name escapes me there's an acronym for it there's some SMS framework that is built into ims which is part and parcel with LTE and and some carriers are already rolling about I think metropcs has deployed it and it has presents information it can do a few other select things so that's really their last and best hope for keeping messaging with in control of the carrier's if that fails then it is going to become a dumb pipe thing for them where they're just transporting the data on behalf of all these other services that are out there yes I want that future to come but yeah I don't I have lots of thoughts and feelings about this which would probably be boring because they're not fully thought through but they're close and i'll talk about them later do want to talk about some you SMS this uh police have called on Congress to require SMS logs for full two years it's bad it's there you go yeah it's anya kind of crazy i was under the impression that carriers held on to SMS messages for a lot longer than apparently they do for some reason i had in my head that they all carried him hold on to him for six months or 180 days but apparently they only hold on to him for about a week and police don't like that because that makes it hard to use them at a court trial yeah as opposed to a jumbo trial I I strongly believe okay so this is actually another another problem with SMS discuss is that it isn't encrypted like any any messaging platform that you use should be encrypted end-to-end and I message allegedly is in fact we were talking about this earlier today on the team the fact that I message apple claims that I message is encrypted but they've never shared any details on how its encrypted or what that means they also they also claim that facetime is an open standard is this true that's a very very good point um so so yeah but but but that is an obvious weakness of SMS and it is very disturbing to me to think that things that I have well what okay Vlad let me hear your counter argument the counter-argument is that the only thing you're really arguing for with this encryption thing is just the illusion of some sort of security some semblance of privacy I don't let it go no no no what I want well here's what I want I want it so that if somebody wants to crack my my my stuff I was gonna use a different word there he wants to crack my stuff they need to throw a supercomputer at it for a week then they can have it if they if they want to put that amount of effort into seeing what I bought on Amazon and by all means well i think i think what it means is that Chris really just wants to be able to send his credit card information over text message to whoever he wants without worrying about it getting well obviously of course I mean my problem with a lot of with this I'm actually a teeny tiny minuscule e miniscule amount conflicted about these these text message records because this is gonna sound lame but we this is how we talk to each other now this is how we send letters to each other now and there should be a permanent archive that I have the option to like save for posterity so future generations can read my messages because you know I'm a genius and people are going to want to know what I was saying to people and I want to give them that opportunity I mean when we look at you know famous writers and scientists through the ages we like have that letter is that they wrote to their wives and their best friends and like somebody thought to save that stuff and we're not thinking about saving any of this stuff and I know it's you know very short messages and it's a ephemeral and whatever whatever whatever but there's going to be this weird at black hole of context information about our generation that was never there for previous generation I can assure you I don't know if if I agree with that because those those longer letters that you they were writing to their wives and their family members that I mean we're just emailing them now and those are all archived and saved if you are they if you leave it if you want it to be if you're you know you couldn't it out out you put it on a DVD drive that will keep the ground that'll last about 10 years before it degrades into nothing you try to be around in a thousand years I'm serious like this is why I wrote this rant hang out I'm not done this is why I wrote this rant about paper but you know all those months ago uh there's no there's only a very small number of companies that are thinking about storing and maintaining data over millennia um I think one was called millennium or something anyway uh and and so when we talk about phone companies keeping records of SMS yes it's a privacy issue that's the most important thing and that needs to be fixed but when we're talking about messaging in general there should be easy ways to export the data and there should be easy ways to archive the data and it shouldn't and this is the next thing you know when you use facebook to message somebody or you use gmail to email somebody I mean that's using being used for advertising in the short term but there's also a whole social graph that you we don't I mean what is Facebook doing with the fact that it knows that I'm talking to you know certain people on messenger I don't know are they using it to better target me for ad so I don't know should that be a core function of messaging in this day and age what Facebook is tried to do exactly what you said these which is you know build a timeline built around the person so assuming some future geniuses or Jeanne I or whatever now show up and use Facebook extensively and religiously and the way that facebook wants to be used we could have a really detailed breakdown of exactly what they've done but here's the trouble and I think it's really well I guess so but I think it raisin a really good point but I also think there's another angle to it which is that when we get that timeline of the future what Thomas Edison whatever whoever what we're going to get when I'm just going to get those really awesome community kaise with his contemporaries where he discusses business strategies and how to capitalize on such and such innovation we're also gonna get he's freaking music playlists for every single day he's scrobbling activity will see every YouTube video that he liked will know about the cat in Japan that makes him laugh every night at 1am in the morning and and this is the trouble back in those days when people wrote those letters that we treasure now and which we find revealing about their personalities those are the only things that they were pretty produced terms of content now we produce so much freaking content that you could you just don't have any filter to like bring out the important stuff and and that's the difficulty like people just either over produce all the under produce like some people just take pictures of everything around them and everything in that life and angels becomes meaningless and then other people don't take enough pictures and find that years pass by and then I have any connection to the memories that they built up over that time and that's you know sad it sounds it no seriously um the privacy point though I just generally assumed that somebody somewhere has access to my stuff exclusives so that's just how I operate it's it's a paranoid Joshua cops teen inspired kind of way to be you you shouldn't accept that you should you should demand 128-bit encryption of anything that you're sending and receiving are you uh are you ask somebody something receiving it for me and as somebody can look at it I mean I remember I remember back in the day I used to get emails that people would put their their pgp key and they're in their email signature like every single you know thanks so if you wanted to you could you know go turn on EGP and have an encrypted conversation kris chuck i want to know if your moves in letterpress are encrypted ah they are actually yeah I wouldn't dream of playing letterpress unencrypted yeah the words that he plays I don't think they're in the English language so they must be encrypted that's just but so look I think first of all dieter I think that you're a significantly over romanticizing uh this this content that we're generating I mean like you know with the exception of a few luminaries they're actually you know millions and millions and billions of people that we know nothing about over history yeah and and that's because you know none of their communication has been preserved nothing that they did has really been preserved and I think that you know to vlad's point i think the exact same thing is happening now except the opposite where we just have this constant stream of noise that nobody is going to bother to take the time to do anything with the bigger issue that that I really fear for our our future generations about Oh somebody just uh friended me on game center you can beat Chris at letterpress yeah the the bigger concern the bigger concern I have is the fact that nobody is going to have any good usernames for any service yeah and and I'll be damned I'll be damned if anyone is going to be allowed to have my user names after I die by the way whoever on xbox has the username back lawn i will give you money to give it to them it drives me like I managed to pick a word that nobody uses and so I can usually get it on most services but on xbox there's this one person that like put those strings of letters and numbers not numbers letters and vowels together very unhappy about it it's a debate i'm usually i need to be perfectly fine because there aren't that many flats avos anywhere on the globe anyway so i can just stroll in and be like that's my name give it to me not on gmail and I praise the hell out of me is like who the hell needs Vlad sever apart from me I did I'm sure it's gonna be kind of like Vlad on Twitter which is one of those abandoned accounts and you know hey can you just go with bladvic what's this noise chris is getting more friends on gamecenter apparently hey uh oh yeah I am um hey Vlad I just did a quick google search and turns out that there's a Vladimir Sabbath who is an Olympic lifter yeah and when are you saying that he has bigger muscles and Vlad does that's a very good point i didn't think about that that I can't believe that's possible yeah he hasn't won any medals though I'm looking to see what country he's Bulgarian middle heavyweight class Oh dieter I meant to say on xbox it's me is it you you mad oh man we need like a like I'm saying before the podcast all your version of this podcast is going to sound quite about those beavers game center note sound effects and applause I mean it's gonna be grand yeah but the thing is we've got a couple of trophies visuals which people aren't going to see and as soon as they go up somebody giggles it's like these guys must be high if you just listening to this and people just like TV I got accused of being legitimately hi it was it last week both in the chat and on Twitter and so I had to say that I was actually only high on life and it's because you know I'm standing and I like to bounce around when I'm trying to have fun and I try to have fun with you guys because I like you and I think that we should be engaging and interesting and it's hard like right now this isn't engaging interesting so let's move on up north london it's like a whole different world ok would you describe him as a brother from another mother what no sister from another mister just a weird of no no we're good friends and colleagues and we'll leave it at that but anyway Aaron got a hold of the galaxy camera for us he did a really thorough review and it's it's a frustrating thing it really is because it's well designed it works really nice and quickly and if it were actually a phone with a massive camera on the back of it it could have some potential but the trouble is just the camera it can't function as a phone so all of that good stuff would enter it 4.1 and the great processor it's snappy is responsive 4.8 inch screen it's an LCD it's a really gorgeous one 720p as far as I was concerned and Aaron is a massive samba samsung fan I want our boy you just submitted Samsung fan 4x massive tracks Samsung products religiously so as he's concerned is the best display the Samsung is put on any of these devices so that's high praise the trouble is it's still just a really really fancied up camera and as a camera it stinks it is actually worse than most pony shoot since price range which well is it it stinks on a couple of levels right it kind of stinks on handling and it kind of stinks on image quality right right yeah yeah I mean well the thing is with pony shoot cameras they've kind of eliminated the physical controls anyway like you're not going to go and find $200 point shoot cameras with knobs and dials and really handy physical buttons and controls that they just kind of disappeared and may be replaced by touchscreens anyway and i have a few control schemes anyway so I don't feel like the standard there is really high in the first place but Samson doesn't prove that you actually write that but image quality is the thing that really needed to be good to make this device makes sense and that's where it falls out so again December guys what was gonna say well what drives me crazy is I mean if you're gonna have a device that we we've seen point-and-shoots at a reasonable price point that are good and we've seen Android devices at a reasonable price point that are good but yeah you put them together and like they chose not the youth they can't they couldn't hit a reasonable price point here uh if you're gonna have I mean what's this thing retail for 50 us it's like 500 yeah if you're gonna sell a five-hundred-dollar device it's it's gotta have fewer compromises it really is the thing that I would say the nikon coolpix s800c i believe it is it was the first attempt you know it was the first android-powered point shoot camera and that adds so much more issues so many more issues excuse me and it was slow its display was an awesome it didn't have the same processor it was just way way behind so if we actually keep this going and if another company steps up and makes the same leap that we've seen from the lick on attempt to the Samsung attempt to the next and repair camera and then we could be looking at a really good device at that stage but it still just kind of is exactly the leader says like you take a reasonable price camera you take a reasonable price phone you throw away the phone part which is the thing that kind of stinks and then you put them together but also you put together the price for both it's like then you have a problem because nothing comes free you pay for the extra foam like functionality you pay for the extra Android like function at ebay or from the android perspective you pay for the extra camera functionality but neither one is good enough to justify and that's basically where we are like there's a lot of good things in it but as a sum of all the parts together it's actually less and so we wait for the next one right I'm curious as a Samsung's approach more feels like they went from the ground for started with a smartphone and then added a camera to it and I'm curious as to if the opposite approach might have might produce better results if you had say a cannon that was already an established good camera and then yes 100 the candidates 100 is so obvious yeah it's a great camera excellent Cara we all of us on staff really love that camera so if you just inserted you know uh the Android operating system and cellular radio on it and see where it went from there and I think that's when nikon was trying to do with the s800c as you mentioned except that ran android 2.3 you had an underpowered processor and a number of other problems with it so right it's it's I think connected cameras are definitely wear cameras are going in the future there's definitely going to be a point where you can't buy a camera that isn't connected just like you can't really it's really hard to buy a TV that's not 3d these days but I defined connected you mean you mean Wi-Fi or cellular or both I think eventually it's gonna be both but I mean it'll start with Wi-Fi Wi-Fi have actually been around for a long time nikon had Wi-Fi cameras back in like 2003 or 2008 for an onerous or 2001 there you go so so Wi-Fi is no longer a long time and it didn't really catch on to every single camera model but you are seeing more cameras with Wi-Fi now and then we have these actual cellular connected cameras that are running smartphone operating systems and I think that's definitely where they're going in the future it's just unfortunate that the galaxy camera is not quite the answer to that question yet yeah i mean my problem with these cameras it's a very particular problem to me is that I need the wireless either to the cloud or directly to my laptop if at all possible to be as reliable and fast as humanly possible so that i could use it to live blog and i know that there's like you know a hundred people on the face of the earth that care about this but i'm sorry i do it would work yes movie moving to google hangout so now you know if you if you're watching this live now you know why chris has been so quiet for the past 10 minutes is he acting is this face overlay Wow uh no I'm just gonna say like I would like to see the wireless reliability be better um and I'm gonna move on and let's talk about the other thing that that the notable review brief review from this week and that is the tramp stamped a galaxy note 2 Jennifer will do that to pull do that I wanted to just wrap up the galaxy camera okay do it again and give Dan a chance to recover because the man is in Madison tears nope that was more than I could even a little bit though hey so I just wanted to rephrase myself from earlier to say correctly which is that the galaxy camera in totality is less than some of its part parts galaxy camera in totality is less than some of its parts like I said it in a really karateka passed away earlier on their side also I was just thinking about the grip of how you handle a camera which is all touch screen on the back and the fact of the matter is where your thumb wants to rest is exactly you on the top right corner of the touchscreen yeah yeah you have to do this move particularly well particularly if you have a camera shaped hand grip as opposed to a phone which has different economics so I mean it has issues and the whole idea the whole concept of Andrew power cameras still has issues that need to be ironed out but also today this point about Wi-Fi connectivity I think we've all dreamt of this awesome awesome concept of being able to just shoot with our cameras and having the pictures pop immediately onto our devices but it's not just reliability which is yes the number one thing but it's also speed yeah right so if you take a picture and then it takes you 10 seconds it's reliable with six to 10 seconds for the pictures pop up on your computer then you start thinking about cables and others right like that's the whole i phi card promise if you're not familiar with what an eye-fi card is it's an SD card with a Wi-Fi chip built to do it that you can put it to virtually any camera now what it is what it is is pain and sorrow and heartbreak and disappointment a crammed together into a tiny little plastic wedge that's what the eye-fi card is I have gone through probably half a dozen of these things yes my name is promises it's time it's going to be good promises to cut the cable so that you can just shoot your pictures and they instantly we are transferred over to your computer but the problem as Vlad mentioned is it's very bottlenecked and very slow and as dieter would more than likely say next is that it's very unreliable and you lose connections and drop connections all the time I know I know too she go ahead something called the flash a card which functions pretty much the same way and it creates like a server that you can access on any device because it's web-based and pictures all seem to pop up reliably I saw that an ephah trouble is I didn't see it this easy for a so it lost years Eva and then you got delayed and I'm supposed to learn some sometime early in this year and I feel pretty much joke about it since then so you know we're still stuck one thing that I would point out about the galaxy camera like I really want to love the concept but i think that Samsung made a major branding misstep and i thought this ever since they announced it i think they made a major branding misstep by calling it the galaxy camera because that implies the name implies that it is it's it's like a smartphone with a camera grafted on which it kind of is it's a smart phone with camera grafted on minus the the calling part right I and that's and that's not what they should have made they should have done something more along the lines of what nikon did which is graphed android on to a genuine point shoot which is the point is about nigga it's a go damnit crystals busy five minutes and making sure that he could get the visual trickery ice the name of the company nikon comes from the name of japan in japanese which is nippon it is not nikon he is nikon nikon it's not i don't know like who told you this and like if it is it does confirm they fun why don't they just call the company nippon yeah like why is wiser ago I i I'm going to stop a few reasons why they wouldn't call it Nippon but uh yeah that's exactly the point I had earlier is that you know if they had started from a good camera base and added the smartphone on top of that I think would have been a better result of starting with a smartphone base and adding camera parts you know I don't feel like anybody has really gone right enough because frankly the other thing is the sensor in the galaxy camera is a joke it's actually smaller than the one in the 808 POV the nokia 808 POV so it's like it's a tiny tiny little sensor and its standard fare for like a hundred dollar point-and-shoot camera is going to have a sensor of that that's sort of it right but doesn't does the thing the market for those things is disappearing and people are those people are going to buy a 500 okay so so really samsung is trying to innovate its way into a space that is being vacated just because nobody was buying anything in that what i want to see is something like sony's next series cameras you know fool aps-c sensors tagged android tag dropbox integration tech technical those things on top and then okay find the price is gonna be kind of crazy but people might be able to justify that more and the notion and the notion of data share um are you know the data plan sharing i think makes that a little more palatable i'm still not comfortable with the way those plans were currently like i'm really upset that i'm paying an extra ten dollars a month just so that my my tablet can use the same data bucket as my phone but it's a step in the right direction yeah and now let's talk about verizon's tattooing of the galaxy note 2 yeah so I i was using this thing over the weekend and let you know i will lean heavily on your thoughts about this since you did our original review but this is actually the first time i'm a low embarrassed to admit this this is the first time that I've ever carried around a note a galaxy note of any kind as like my daily driver for any period of time and that happened last weekend and I really really disliked it a lot more than I thought I would I thought that I would like I thought that I would pretty quickly adapt to the size and the weight and just move on with my life but the problem I was telling the David about this david pierce the the problem that i kept having is that the galaxy note 2 is is big enough so that you can't handle it like a phone you kind of have to handle it like a tablet and what I mean by that is that if you if you just try and pretend like it's a phone a you know a regular phone then you are going to drop it because unless you have truly enormous hands you're you you have just enough trouble getting a grip on it especially since the note 2 is such glossy plastic all over that it's going to end up falling out of your hands and I'm convinced that if I use this phone for another week or two it would have hit the floor David was telling me that he dropped one of his review units so um I don't that was public information or not but yeah that was the biggest problem I had as a phone and Vlad I think you relay this in your review very well as like if if you are in the market for a 5.5 inch phone it's a it's a fine device I just don't think I was surprised at how unable I was to adapt to that size yeah this is the thing that I'll be stressing all the time with the original galaxy with the second galaxy note 2 it just isn't a phone like so many people will make the argument it fits in my pocket whoa fine let it fit in your pocket but it isn't a phone you can't operate it like a phone you can't treat it like a phone and exactly to say Chris the instinct is to treat it and to work with it as a tablet I see as you think that as a device it has a ton of good things going for it but I just wanted to take this opportunity to also raise another point which is I've been using the iphone 5 for a bit for a week or two now and switching between it and the 1x the windows phone 8x which I was reading through G asked about I still really like I just don't have one cuz HC took it away and they've given Chris like free or whatever fine that's fine I'll live with that um very well be switching between the oven 5 and 1 X and the 1x is a 4.7 inch device it significantly smaller than the galaxy note 2 and every time I make an immediate switch between the two between the iphone and the 1x the latter just feels like the former put over sides like you still have icons but there's just this massive spaces between the for no good reason and then large for no good reason and the keyboard is one and a half two times the size for no good reason everything just feels like it's bigger without there being any benefits to it and it just kind of reminds me in reiterates the fact that there is an ergonomic sweet spot and he's 4.5 inches above phones aren't eating it and anything that is five inches in a bob season the phone that's just it right yeah anyways it's a live one just just get a 7-inch tablet yeah right yeah yeah yeah um but listen we're really in love with the S note in the Snowden and the S Pen snow yeah I mean I i will say that you know i was really kind of blown away by the battery life on it like the the thing that really stuck out in my mind was that I didn't connect it to the Wi-Fi in my house and I have pretty crappy reception here was able to connect to verizon's LTE network and i and i charged it to one percent and set it down I just in my living room when I went to bed and I woke up the next morning and just left that left it sit there for look like probably another two hours then looked at it it was still indicating a hundred percent despite being on LTE all night even though it wasn't really doing anything and I plugged it in and charge for daddy so blatantly an American version of that phone because you mean the berry can't beat a hundred percent but is so like Bozie and you know oh not a hundred percent to just give you whatever you gonna give me it's like our luck right I got a hundred percent for you well it does have that tacky tattooin lab yeah Chris you have do you have any spell out sand oh yeah yeah I don't have it right here show us show us that awesome I don't know if you can see that yeah I can chant yeah yeah it's got the tramp stamp on the home button and then turn it turn around because I know the back is also very branded yeah you could say it says verizon 4g galaxy note 2 on the back and i think i think risin I think verizon was just like Verizon and Samsung were both like whoa we have this giant canvas so they yeah they have three logos on back and then both Samsung and verizon are on the front so there's a total of five logos on this on this phone um I'm convinced that we're getting close to the point where they're going to start like carriers are gonna start selling like ad spots on phone so it'll it'll be like they'll just be like a random best buy or target logo you know and yes I'll just think I just thinking about that if they actually had a flat edge on the sides we would get phones that are like no Scott cause hahaha yes absolutely we just get the galaxy now I can epic 4g touch sponsored by mcdonalds McNuggets I can see I can see this sort of like like dystopian future where like you that the the level of your subsidy depends on how many sponsorship stickers you're willing to put on your on your phone I I can totally believe that so last last week Chris was talking about how subsidies and whatnot the nexus 4 and everything need to go away now we're getting to the point where they're going to go away bye-bye via sponsorships these little etching machines in every carrier store and then you hand your phone to them and they will tattoo on all the logos and right cheaper yeah which would reach not going to beat this token but not allegedly I would put a starbucks logo online ah get your terrible dad I'm so disappointed between this and beats actually actually can we talk about the the starbucks a date I think that's there's a guy there's to negate your starbucks up letting it comfortable that happened yesterday uh one the iOS app was finally updated for the iphone 5s display which I've been complaining about since I don't know when was the iphone 5 much September yeah so so I've been so that was finally rectified and then last night starbucks finally updated its android app for Android 4.2 so now I can finally install it on the Nexus 4 now what makes it when what makes it update really funny is that and I seed eaters forever alone now so what's funny about it by this update is that oh god you guys are killing me what's funny about you a coincidence I was yawning physically un what's what what's funny about this update is that up until the point that it was released if you contacted starbucks and complain that the out was crashing there were like oh there's something screwed up with your phone you should contact google you should contact LG you should contact samsung should contact AT&T and then all of a sudden the update comes out and is and they you know they're just suddenly works on 4.2 so so now I I now I no longer have to go into Starbucks like a Buster with my nexus 4 in one hand and an iphone 5 in the other hand connect to their Wi-Fi to pay for my coffee featuring you know anyone I go into Starbucks I swiped my credit card that's what I do or I give them cash no rewards myth throw it away all those rewards yeah you're living in the 20th century you're living in the 20th century century dater like I just want to know service board 1995 called a way 975 called it wants its payment method back I just want to make serious part here which is that I think when we are spending our money and when we're making all of these consumer choices we should aim to help the specialists and by that I mean it's things like here in the UK this is really terrible in my opinion trend where supermarkets are just broadening out and spreading their tentacles into things that supermarkets don't eat itself right so they started off by selling clothing alongside groceries now you can pretty much but until you go into I'm gonna be fair with supermarkets oh I see but the thing is so they started off with those figs and I can like buy lawn mowers if it's a big enough supermarket but any start selling insurance now Tesco Mobile have you know there's the what was the MV na that was the Emir now you should listen em oh right yes and you know on on tues network and you're selling insurance de selling mobile contracts things were easy doing the same thing and ultimately you know they're trying to pitch you the idea that if you stay loyal to one one of those companies you're going to get a synergy from all those products and you know say some money whatever but the only thing that's really happening is that they're squeezing out again the specialist the guys who only do insurance and the guys who only do banking and the guys won't do whatever and we're just going to end up with these massive massive corporations that have way too much control over pricing which is the thing that worries and scares me so I mean Starbucks is it less puffy if that bridge yes starbucks is ok but if what you're I mean these giant super corporations controlling our lives and or taking the state as the dominant form of control in society I mean we're almost there and I think that's great because oh yeah you guys they know it'll it'll bring forward you know shadowrun right i mean if if we've got you know these giant corporations in charge that's what this one step closer to me being able to cast magic spells in a cyberpunk future I don't know how to note about my fans here nobody nobody knows what I'm talking I don't know how you're gonna get there but paying with rib with cash for everything dieter but also just just a quick extra point here about the UK on the point of subsidies actually because the times the local will respect the newspaper which is actually owned by News International which in turn is owned by news corp again making a point about massive corporations they've started subsidizing the Nexus 7 and they're subsidizing it very much in the carrier model which is to say you pay the upfront fee which is now 50 pounds instead of 199 4 32gig Nexus 7 and then you sign up for the ATM of square motto so it's basically you get a subscription with them and that subsidizes your hardware so they're acting like one of the carriers and they're trying to push their digital subscription which to me is interesting because and we've had commenters point out that German and Czech publications have done relatively similar scheme so this isn't the very first paper to do this it's interesting to me because now you have something material that goes along with digital subscription to a newspaper and one of the barriers for a lot of people to pay for digital subscription or to accept any payroll is that you're not getting anything physical anything tangible were you paying your money and any money over so maybe this would be stimulus for people what do you guys think how much is the subscription do you know in total it adds up to 360 pounds but for 18 months plus a tablet including Sabbats price yeah I mean if the papers I mean I pay what is it 22 bucks a month or something just for the digital wall street journal so that seems like a pretty reasonable do yeah it's 17 pounds a month in the UK which is i mean frankly steep it's more than the wall street journal and i mean i'll say the times isn't the best newspaper around anyway um but maybe the pricing is more reasonable right maybe it is like 10 pounds amount to something yeah for sure I'm just wondering whether the hardware aspect would warm you guys to the idea more like okay I can get the subscription I'm kind of iffy on it but hey look I can get a tablet for the cheap that swings me over the edge like I can actually see that happening for me if I wanted the publication well if you're already sold on the publication then I mean that's not a hard at this point I'm so done a publication but notice price and then he just kind of sweets in to deal with so hard when I'm like okay fine I'll pay the price I mean IBM the only thing I guess is like I I'm always nervous about I mean I'm nervous about subsidies in in general and it's in principle it's fine as long as you know exactly what you're getting into at the outset and I mean what what you're describing me Vlad's it feels like a like a we were talking about the 90s it feels like Columbia House a little bit oh god you know you sign up for the one CD a month and then then you know if you forget to cancel they just keep on sending them and you get those 13 CDs to start it's amazing your CDs are twenty seven dollars a piece right so like it's fine to sign up for you know a subsidy either from carrier or from you know random newspaper or from a grocery store from starbucks or whoever as long as you know you are thinking through who it is that you're committing you know your money to and I think that the whole point of these things is that it sort of short circuits that doing it with publication makes a bit more sense but I'm nervous to say that I think that's a great solution for everybody hey guys I'm i just want to point out that Columbia House it turns out still exists excite right now oh my god I'm signing up right now yeah no no but like that their slogan is the worst slogan ever pay for the dvds you want without the streaming you don't this streaming is like this evil that needs to be banished this is amazing so so they do DVDs now yeah do they do CDs at all well I think this DVDs well I just like to point out that Columbia House is something I've never heard of before I know exactly what you guys describing just well there was a there was a few of these in the 90s I think Columbia House is the biggest one but there was also a BMG which was yes a record label for some reason but BMG which had the same exact concept and then there was some others that I just can't remember right now but they were all the same thing we're like they're like get 13 CDs for a penny sign up for this contract and we're gonna send you CDs every month and if you don't want it you just tell us we don't want it but then if you forget we're going to charge you anyways yeah and it yeah it preyed on like me and preyed on teenagers who were like oh yeah sweet and then forget to you know every time you wouldn't you wouldn't think cancel it until the next CD came and you'd be like why are they setting me Burl Ives Christmas music this has to stop and he doesn't read his digest working pretty much the same business model I don't know brendan are our producer says that that Columbia House is what motivated him to switch from cassettes to CDs oh that's that's food for thought I haven't thought of it that way maybe maybe Columbia House had a major impact on the transition disease yeah you know I'm actually we're really lucky that Columbia House didn't get into streaming in a big way because it would be forever tainted with people's history and memory of being screwed over by them and streaming would have never gotten off the ground so thank you for Columbia House for staying in the past sending out dvds over the mail and this is YouTube and cat videos popularized raving you know what would be amazing as if Columbia House offered to like send you like a rotating assortment of cat videos on DVD for like people who were really internet averse but still wanted to get in on the cat videos what we need is for Columbia House to get into the business of selling tablets and phones right because we're you know we're switching phones were complaining them we don't have the perfect phone so they just send us a batch of six phones right away for a penny and then they just keep us setting it out and they send you that like $49 on contract Android photo you're just like ahh dude what did they partnered up which is this is like just put I know you mean without me why did I get this i forgot to cancel what are they partnered up with like no you mean calm i started selling grandparents a meme a week or whatever i keep up with the young ones yeah that would be amazing they just said you like I nine every month they could send you like a different troll face every every month that's like a poster you could wear it would sure like so do you like in real life you just be like okay brilliant i'm in i mean i'm signing up um I call this podcast if lad it gives me permission wait there's a couple of I want to point out we we've updated our how to buy a smartphone article so you should go check that out or one of the point send your friends and family there if they ask you which phone they should get like well actually you should find out what kind you want the first place and then then excellent how to from evan rodgers for us users about how to travel internationally and still maintain a connection and not you know have your entire bank account get wiped out at in roaming charges haven't had a chance to use my dad face yet jeezy just walked away these are my dears all flipping some tables sorry that means a caption to be honest uh yeah that ladies and gentlemen is the virtual will show we want to thank you so much for watching if you want to follow us you can and should we are on twitter i am back on chris's e power Vlad is Vlad Sava dan is DC seifert with the I we're all I heard you can leave a comment on this post now or when it goes up or whatever and next week we'll be here maybe on tuesday you never know all right guys