Gadgetory

hey it's Tuesday afternoon which mean Virg mobile show which we're actually having on Tuesday afternoon this week unlike we've had to postpone it or moving around past few weeks but we are here we are in force this is episode 34 for the week of january thirty 21st 2012 i'm dan seifert I'm glad Sam oh and i'm chris sigler and you guys might notice that a dieter bohn is not with us today but we do miss him we are not in the bone zone this week we're not in the bone zone and I'm being told that I said it was January 21st 2012 but it's not it's January 21st you're living in the past man I live in the past man dude I I did the same thing I actually wrote it in an article saying that the new kodak microphone thirds camera is coming quarter free 2012 and people were like are we go back to the past which is kind of fitting since codec is no dead codec is a relic of the past Kyrgyz relic of thank you it is being resurrected I mean it's just branding exercise at this point because some random company called JK imaging which is just using the correct name which is already be done with polaroid news cameras oddly atrocious but this is dope show you know you know why that is flat JK imaging is short for just kidding imaging there they're just kidding about all these cameras are there controlling the public patrolling consumers you know it's actually quite funny I was thinking about that and naturally was that enough the show today we would have massive digression on the side but you know what without DJ I don't even know what topics are so low it's it's going to be a mess but I was thinking about this with respect to motherboards actually like a lot of these Taiwanese and small Chinese companies producing motherboards that was a bit which was one of the actually premier motherboard makers few years back and a whole bunch of others companies like albatron and whatnot I was just reminiscing on that subject and I was thinking how exactly companies like this random JK imaging sometimes lead and sometimes fail and it's just it's just an oddity to me you know you have these poor companies and some of them turn into issues and just explode into a massive consumer brand and then some of them like biostar for example shrink maybe it's cuz their name is biostar yeah all i have to say pegatron is worse than take it runs amazing i kind of wish I own some pegatron product I probably do it don't know right right so let's talk about mobile stuff unless you have more to say before me well why I do I have many thoughts on pegatron but no I was just going to apologize to our dear viewers for my absence last week my my imac uh so I've a late 2009 imac this is by the way completely different tangent but I'm gonna go on for the next 15 minutes late 2009 I'm imac 27-inch that was eligible for the drive recall they had a one terabyte seagate drive recall that keeps getting extended I think they originally put it out in 2010 and I never bothered to take it in for the recall and finally i got my comeuppance when the drive began failing last week so that's why i was off last week also because i was deathly ill i'm still recovering from that but the reason why this camera looks like complete garbage is because it is the built-in camera on my macbook air hello chris how far away is the the nearest apple store to where you live about a mile so so you had to transport a 27-inch my imac through downtown Chicago about a mile yeah I was it believe me it was a production I really I just would love to I'm envisioning you standing on the street with a 27 inch imac under your arm hailing a cab that's exactly what happened actually ah and I was surprised that any cab was willing to uh pull over and an intake but I yeah particular uses you're wearing your bass headphones at a time right I was welcome to the imax listening to some music but but the worst part was is that I get to the apple store and I give them the computer and they take it out of the giant box and give me the box back and I'm like I'm like no you can keep that and they're like no we don't have room for it so that I don't take the giant box back with me and now I'm gonna have to take it back to the store to pick up the computer it's it's a nightmare anyway we can talk about from the walks of shame that you have to go through for this imac yeah as in this experience may be tempted you to just say screw it and upgrade to the extra slinky new iMac uh yes and no I mean I said a few weeks ago on the show that there's nothing like spec wise there's nothing about my 27 inch imac that feels like slower outdated it started getting really slow lately and i finally figured i looked at the smart status on the drive and that's how I figured out that it was failing but but apart from that it's been great the screens fine so until either it just completely gives up the ghost or there's something about it that's like horribly obsolete whether it be you know the processor or the the total ram i can install i think i'm gonna try and see if i can make this one last yeah i'm with you i agree but since the Justice talking about extra skinny and new things let's use that as a really flaky segue talk about HTC so I feel like you know as far as mobile news is concerned we're in that annoying period where there isn't going to be like a whole lot of major announcements and everything is just going to be kind of like leaks up until Mobile World Congress like I kind of I like this time of year but I also kind of dread this time of year because you see endless leaks samsung things like at this time last year we were seeing leaks of the galaxy s3 seven different ways to Sunday and it was like every other minute it was a different looking device it is just a headache would be you know be honest those one technican leaks because most of them turn out to be folks oh yeah yeah the alleged leaks i should say um be ghastly they turned out to be wrong but I think the biggest news that's happened since the last time we were on the air was the htc's alleged m7 and device that is expected to be announced at mwc now um has has leaked or allegedly leaked so yeah it's emerged it's emerged it's like this is the public it is now before our eyes and it's still way too massive so I have to say it's it's unusual to me that the m7 bears more than a passing resemblance to the 8x because so wait let's let's wait one second Chris because you know in the time since our last show it's actually emerged twice with two very different looking to buy true right yeah so so so the the exact same thing that was just complaining about his Samsung what happening last year happens with this alleged HTC this year so we have this first device that leaked that supposedly was the the front of the new device and it looks very much like a on the back of an iphone 5 ha and then we have this other one which is actual physical pictures of a new device that looks like the 8x right and and that's actually a very good point there there's every reason to believe that HTC has adopted samsung strategy last year of encasing its new flagship devices in dummy cases and maybe they're doing something like that here although the the device the second device that emerged the physical pictures but by all accounts that looks like a real phone and looking at the pictures now so it would be a very elaborate disguise if it is in fact a disguise but but at any rate what I was saying is that the the 8x you know HD both HTC and Microsoft made a point of saying that the industrial design of that device was kind of like designed from the ground up to compliment windows phone and now HTC if this phone is in fact real appears to be repurposing portions of that industrial design for Android just I mean it's you know it's it's a base we saw some of this design on the DNA already in the butterfly like if you look at the back of this well sure the cameras in the same spot it's got the kind of that matte finish that with the the curve to it so the front is is is a bit more like the 8x but the back is very kind of familiar for the DNA yep that's fair and it also it's worth mentioning that anytime anybody says the hardware and the software were tailored for one another that's basically BS dead touchscreens guys the touchscreens the bezel like if you think about your list of design priorities when you put together an iphone and android phone windows phone even blackberry nowadays it's a case of minimize the bezel maximize a touch screen area do something fancy that makes you stand out that's it it's not software dependent at all and and in fact the only device that I can think of that had any sort of connotation of being really connected on the hardware and software front was no key as n 9 which is perfectly ironic because dn9 was put together to work with Nokia's me go home town and you can kind of see the curvature of the icons the squirrels is Nucky's designers forum you can kind of see which they took from the zune I don't know if Microsoft ever called it a squirrel on the zune but everyone else did hmm i'm trying to think back to that but anyway the zune Asia was also another device the the zoom of this control pad at the below the screen was a squirrel and I think that's where everyone started using that phrase skwerkel that's as that's early as I can remember okay I'm not quitting nokia would invented the word but like the point is that the industrial design of the n9 and its curvature kind of echoed the icons and just a consistency of the UI and then Microsoft did not get turned around and said well this is less hardware with viva 800 for Windows Phone yada yada yada the perfectly matched and they weren't actually and it's just marketing when when they said the 8x is specifically tailored to windows for it's not a like if you have a straight line in any phone it specifically tailored to Windows Phone because it has squares do you remember the the first prototype of the 800 that that Elop showed didn't even have a capacitive buttons at the bottom it was a it was a virtual arrangement because they were obviously just using an N 9 with different guts inside of it so they didn't have that that manufactured yet that's right i think i think it was a codename see ray was it see ya see worry that sounds okay yeah you know set was one of the most obviously self engineered leaks in the history of it was like it I mean that was about the time when i published our and nine review and everybody else which is gushing about it people like what is nokia doing not giving this device i was just my future and then Stephen Elop and company decided you know we'll just shoot our own video oh god I remember the video now that you're talking about that yeah let that like internal meeting event yeah and multiple angles any laps like don't take pictures and then he liked coming around if I can take pictures let me just hold this up yeah did you can you get did you not take a picture of this did Eugenie I'll get that shot what do you guys eat you you should be using your flesh that's the best way to take fiction I mean don't take a picture yeah but but back to the m7 I think that may be the bigger news than the industrial design of the hardware is this sense 5 yeah which is a dramatic departure I mean going all the way back to the original HTC was the hero or the magic or no no it was a windows mobile phone no no but I mean I mean a rosy on Android 100k yes was that the hero the first Qin device yeah the hero yep yeah and I would say this is the most dramatic departure for sense since then if it is in fact real which I think a lot of evidence has grown in the past 24 hours to suggest that it is because we found some rom links for other devices uh what do you guys think oh dude I need to I need to opine on this I looked at it and yes it's a departure but it's a departure in basically the wrong direction really well no it's it sort of in the right direction but off to the side and okay it's not far enough like okay I it's a lateral boob is what you're saying yeah yeah so his thing they've cut down the chrome again yes so thumbs up for that but is the same sort of thumbs up the dam will recall from last week's podcast that he was giving me and that I was giving people at CES when they try and you know pimp out a feature which is completely you know tepid and uninspiring it's like a well done you took you took off some chrome so you had crap in yourself to wear and you took it out and now we're supposed to like upload you guys well done okay so they took two and crow they went to more two dimensional look with their icons they simplify them so again that's kind of neat kind of good but at this rate of improvement at this rate of change it's really gonna be like 20 20 something before we have a sense that we actually really want to use like this might be dramatic by sense standards but it still not like I can still feel underneath this stuff that HC just clinging onto just dearly clinging onto and there's no reason for HC to stick with us you can be just completely revolutionary as far as I'm concerned your sales are going down you need to do something to kick kick start things we've had this discussion a whole bunch of times with one series where no complaints about the industrial design about the specs about the displays etc the problem is in the software NEC needs to face that and really make a leap with its next version of sense I just not do that it's just like yeah what is it doing its messing around with the edges instead of like fundamentally changing the software again we've only seen some screenshots so maybe I'm you wrong it may be long you say that we've before stuff very limited screen shots we've got a shot of of what we put supposes the lock screen the home screen and then a couple versions software version screens um but you know we don't see what the launcher is like yet we don't know what the notifications with the notification part was like the biggest I think pain point for me every time I picked up a sense phone and we don't know it's according to this device it still has um capacitive buttons for home back and multitasking and they're in a really weird position on this particular device that that has emerged so it doesn't look like they're moving to software buttons for those which is a little bit of a disappointment but I mean to your point Vlad it seems like the only change is a very very surface level as opposed to the the radical change and let me just back myself up here because I'm saying they're clinging on things perfect example is you still have that full screen whether animation stuff going on do that yes this one screen show we have a full screen of you know starlit sky and the weather and it just kills me I mean look I'm happy that they finally accepted that they can have a clock widget without the flipping stuff going on and without the whole animated thing just having numbers so we can see this is the reading of time without being bombarded with innovations I'm happy with I just I just feel like it's so very superficial I feel like it's not pushing boundaries enough it's not doing anything to excite me anyway so Dan I'm actually going to challenge your notion that it's a disappointment that they're not going with soft buttons I six months ago I would have agreed with you but what I've realized is I realize two things one on on Android there isn't enough that they're doing with those soft buttons to really make them worthwhile I mean about all they do is disappear when you're like looking at a picture or something so all you're doing is eating up pixels at the bottom of the screen that could be used for doing actual things with and two were a year removed or more than a year removed now from the from the google edict to to get away from the menu button so that becomes less of an issue as time goes by well i mean III agree with you there that they definitely could be better used and i know like the the whole android development community and custom roms and stuff like that there do is really crazy stuff with the virtual buttons but knowing standard manufacturer unfortunately is it google certainly isn't doing anything interesting out yet as far as the menu button goes though but like for the big x that matter it's still there and like so facebook and twitter and these major apps you still have that stupid menu bar that's sucking up your screen real estate anyways and and HTC like sort of fixed it on the 1x would that want that option that you could configure the bot in the the capacitive buttons to hold down the multitasking button to bring up the menu instead so it got rid of it but they didn't extend that across their line because you don't have that option on the droid DNA so i'm not confident that it will be on any new devices unless you know someone complains about it and an HTC just puts it in there um which is annoying but yeah I mean listen guys I again I'm expressing disappointment base of very little information and I'm willing to believe and I'm interested to hear actually from Chris what he thinks is such a dramatic departure that he's noticing in since five or the local time go finish your anchors and respect before before we do that though um yeah I had a point in that I lost it and cool story bro I think it's because my pet peeves with HTC devices and Android devices probably in general now a 2-1 is sighs that are too large and the other is the software that they don't improve it and they bloat it out and with HTC that's the case of tuning radio and facebook app and all of these things that I can't even install right I wish I wish glad had to use a verizon phone one day what had to use I know I look for a weaker would I know in a teensy I know they load up crap as well I mean the only reason we don't get that in the UK it's probably cuz our carries on that savvy you know there are savvy enough to do that so you know screw in the customer right and I'm quite happy to level the same accusation at Samsung in fact Samsung's Galaxy devices are a guaranteed minimum half hour of just cleaning stuff out cleaning widgets of the home screens that's the other thing I don't use seven home screens with a million widgets on them so don't preload them HTC has em so do that all the time so my my puppies are the size of devices there's no choice they always wake too large and the software is never clean enough to the point where now there's enough room for Google to be doing quote unquote signature devices with it with the Nexus is where there's no book where there's no whatever you know the way max listing with maps of signature Windows laptops and devices previously so that's it so as far as I'm concerned the m7 fixes none of that stuff but now can handle with Christian could tell us what it does fix so look call me superficial so first of all I will agree with with you Vlad and and you Dan I mean we've seen very little of this interface assuming it's even real which like I said I think we can probably safely assume it is but we don't know you know how far along they are in the in the design process how early this rom is there are lots of things we don't know we've seen very little of the revised UI and UX but one of my biggest complaints with sense has been the amount of chrome like I don't want 3d anything and that's that's that's one of the most powerful that's why i keep getting drawn to wind it well one of the reasons i keep getting drawn to windows found with each new release at the play form is because it is a very visually appealing UI and that's something that sense is not and even as google has tried to make android more beautiful starting with you know three really and then for and 4.1 4.2 that's that's a message that OMG she seemed particular was sense of not really taken to heart I don't think and this is the first time I've seen an HTC android device where I say yes wow they get it they finally understand that that you I should not have like you know artificial like lens flares and like you know weird shadow element's it's very 2d which is where you know that is the state of modern design is very 2d and very simple and very monochromatic and it looks like they're adopting those principles and hopefully what we don't know the unanswered question is whether that principle will carry through not just these superficial things like the the you know the clock widget and the icons but will it carry through the way the entire UI works and we don't know they that yet we probably won't until nwc or sometime between nine mwc good grade totally so I mean I guess it's just a matter of how much of it up to mr. a pessimist you are thing with me is also I feel a little bit burned by sense for because HTC said streamline everything about sense for so although superfluous things that you won't know by we listen to you guys we got rid of them and then a couple of months pass we go to review devices settled in and they will figure it out the sense for know wasn't all that streamlined after all and well in relative to sense 36 it was but relative to it like that for that's that's the point which I started off with if you just go into every single year it says we're trying off the chrome we're trimming off the crap that we've added ourselves I'm not gonna give you much credit for that yeah yeah that's fair enough and so I'm done talking about the m7 I have nothing more to say Michael I told announced yeah it's not over until the next leak that we're talking about exit right a couple quick mention for I mean having to expect the m7 to be is it a 4.7 inch with a 1080p display I believe is what it's been said to be six point four inches actually with summer 5 inches they're gonna one-up Saudi with a six point four five inch yeah actually can is now a good time for me to go on my weekly rant about phone sizes is that everyone we should I know that we weren't necessarily planning on talking about it but I have to invoke this absurd leak of a sony panel that's allegedly for a six point four four inch phone that would probably be introduced in the WC if it is in fact real I didn't I think I like I totally get why every OEM right now wants to ride on the coattails of Samsung success with the galaxy note I get it but that that is not a blank check to keep going to bigger and bigger like that is not there there is an infinite runway to make phones bigger and bigger like yes 5.5 might be okay for some people 6.44 is not play with them but I think it was you that played with the huawei at CES right mmhmm yeah I've later then Vlad played with it yeah and it was insane right yes yes so and and this is bigger no no good way you know the problem I had with the huawei was uh the first thing I did I put in my hand and I'll put my nexus 4 and and my nexus 4 I can I could touch my other finger with my thumb so like you know I can't be off that comfortably but at least I can horizontally reach across it and I could not do that with the the huawei like I just could not reach across in my palm and I was like this is the worst thing ever oh yeah so flats let's got a nexus 7 no this is a sin ipad mini so I'm stretching my thumb to try reach it is the thing you know how they said the initially when the ipad mini was introduced that you really have to stretch your hand in order to grip it in one hand and apples kind of pushing it yeah that much is true but i guess i have big hands i kind of do that but yeah I mean the huawei does the thing is closer to this that it is to any phone in terms of ergonomics well I mean there's the gnosis and you know continues we're going to be talking about a rumored eight-inch phone by Christmas you know the thing is it really doesn't actually matter if the software is good enough if it's a 6.1 or 6.5 you can just use it as a good tablet but that is actually Google's biggest problem because at the moment i'm thinking the most exciting industrial design isn't actually happening with mobile phones just because we're kind of stuck four dimensions and every single millimeter has been sliced off devices you still need some space for camry sunni space of batteries LT etc whereas things like the ipod touch things like the ipod may ipad mini rather have more room for those things because cameras and lt are not such big priorities as with phones or they don't expect the same quality let's say so industrial design innovations far as I'm concerned is coming in other areas so we mentioned the new iMac which again is just really gorgeous to look at if nothing else I agree with Chris is no reason to upgrade the specs but it's pretty nice the ipad mini and ipod touch this new generation design the more time I spend with it the more I love it I think it's really real so and I'm really actually excited by the Xperia tablet Z that's only just introduced which is a 10 inch tablet is even thinner than the ipad mini but then you turn the tablet on and it's Android on a tablet and I just like ah I just have a lot of things gasm tablet p sony's tablet and built in the peak with the tablet p it's been all downhill ya know mi alone it is don't you guys kind of feel underwhelmed when you realize it's an android tablet yet another android tablet yeah there's something about it i've never really been able to put my finger on it i'm sure that other people have done a better job of it than I have but there's something fundamental about the Android UI that is not conducive to tablet use and and i think that the that the nexus 7 came the closest to solving that problem but the way they solved it is by making the screen small enough so that you can kind of handle it the same way you handle a big phone yeah not but not by making a really tablet appropriate you I so I think that they're really struggling between nine and ten inches and and they don't have an answer for that yet and of course the way iOS solves it is two ways one with a ridiculously simple and arguably outdated home screen where that's just literally like a grid of icons and a great app design you have you know this giant phalanx of amazing app developers on iOS who are really obsessed with design and have found ways to optimize tablet UI on ipad in ways that frankly android developers do not so between those two things they still have the advantage while we're on our crazy phone sighs ramp can we talk about what was announced in Japan today I didn't I don't think we added it to our official list but NEC is releasing the echo again if you remember the commuter echo you can I do yeah a date and they re releasing well you say icon in their attempt they're doing a to a dual screen smartphone uh yeah you can connect together into one giant screen but it's their own design is their own product yes it's a row design but it's the same idea so so you can terrible TRO then I'm terrapin yes notes2 it's not to 4.3 inch displays that you can connect together that are like one is on the front and one is on the back and you can flip them horizontally so you've got one almost square display that you can do two things at once or view the webpage on the did the full screen as well which which cracks me up our guy in Japan Sam be who sam byford who uh who got hands on with this seem to be pretty impressed with it in the video but I just I just kept thinking about that poor kyocera echo and and the the death that it suffered because it was such a poor poorly executed idea for some reason every time you say echo dan I think a nod of e CH 0 but of ecco the dolphin video game not a designer no III don't know what it is I mean one thing to keep in mind is that the needs and wants and desires of the Japanese market are still somewhat different than they are elsewhere in the world and maybe this form factor is going to go over very well who knows we just know that the echo was not received with much love in the US but yeah actually that reminds me there's something really peculiar by the Japanese market peculiar from Western perspective anyway which again is about size and that is that they sell drinks the so soft drinks in different sizes so there's like 100 millimeter cans and then 330 millimeter cans but it certainly the same price from vending machines and the rate would sell both because people in Japan seem to have the self-control to decide what do they need a hundred millimeters of a drink or 330 and and like some people actually buy a smaller portion because they don't need that much either that I do that flat or they're ripping off the people that want 200 milliliter that feels impossible there's like gas stations here in the US where UK well they'll say like you know any size coffee is 99 cents and I guarantee you that the vast majority of people by the the biggest coffee they can get for ninety-nine cents right i mean it does does the whole idea that we have broadly speaking and this isn't just like drinks or food or anything else so tech devices everywhere it's like more quantity was more Valley most people think yeah although by the same guy i don't know if that analogy really converts to what we're talking about here with phones because it's not with these quote-unquote flagship devices it's not about value right it's about what makes a flagship device and and there's a very strong association with many OEMs and presumably with many consumers that that bigger is better and it's the exact same thing that's been happening in the car industry for the past 50 years it more so in the u.s. than in Europe and Japan but it yeah we talked about it two weeks ago with someone I don't know who I'm dying to find out who someone in the verge trailer at CES have nexus one and all those evan rodgers Oh Evan who brought like 20 phones with him including I get a tmobile galaxy s that was glued to a tablet friend no no no is glued to a battery pack that he's use it is evan is insane evident if you're watching i love you but you're in any way so he added nexus one there and we all picked it up and it it felt and looked like a child's toy it was so small yeah I'm sure I'm sure that if you used it for a while you get used to it you might even come to prefer it but it just struck me like that for me really um was the moment that I realized how far we've come in terms of our perception of phone screen size in the past two years that here we look at this nexus one now and just looks tiny yeah so also announced in Japan is LG's optimus g pro which was rumored this week and that is officially unveiled by a TT docomo which is a 5 inch version of the optimus G that has a 1080p display and chances are we will see the global version of this announced at nwc so it's just yet another 5 inch phone on the market so that's what we've got the j butterfly droid DNA the Sony Xperia Z and the LG optimus and the ice instead so those are all in the 5-inch 1080p yeah then this ziti and then we got this yup and the upper find 5 the upper point five so I don't include the Oppo in the same conversation is the rest of these it's all day okay do you got you gonna see the UI and the thing I wish you know that's that's my problem from CES it's not seeing the OP animations and madness like if we think the Japanese is slightly different from us the Koreans and the software add a load on their devices just like a whole other do you guys remember three or four years ago there was that fake Oppo phone going around and they reverse letters it was the poop phone like it was apple logo but they just wish that piece and you know presumably it was being sold in China and presumably they didn't realize what poop meant it was definitely one of my favorite posts that I wrote at engadget was this very special moment for me we have to look that up I vaguely remember that but yeah just googled the poop phone and it'll come up was it joke's on you own that you own the Google juice on the poop phone yeah I'm googling it right now I'm sure it'll be on page one maybe they were faking dopod as the brand because that was the way that HT was burning his phones in China for a long time I know the name but the the dopod logo was different this was it looked like the Oppo it was the apple logo is the same typeface uh yeah shoot i'm not on page one but but uh John Biggs of big cheers like a crunch yeah he's got it unlocked down yep there it is the poop phone anyway uh sorry to uh really conversation I just any time that you wanted to rail the conversation to talk about the poop phone is say okay with me I just don't think that that oppo has earned the right yet to be included in the same conversation as the rest of these brands you the gold standard for me and I know that this is a very American thing to say but for me the gold standard is if you can convince an American carrier to carry a device of yours then you you deserve to be included in that conversation otherwise you're just a second tier OEM oh yeah but yeah second tier is actually being charitable to a pop yeah like yeah yeah it was i got on an upward trajectory that's what we can say they're going up we're just jumping on that bandwagon nice and early so like 10 years time with a finally catch up and get this stuff together and they're right there with sense 15 then 10 yeah I co these guys about a dozen years ago I covered it yeah I know if since five if sense continues on the same trajectory that we're seeing on some incense 5 they're just going to come a point in time where it's indistinguishable from stock Android that you know you know they'll brand it in some way so that it sounds like super advanced when it really I'm gonna say about sense give us a freaking option man total stock Oh sense make sense the default that's fine i'll find the option i'll dig up the freakin option and i'll just toggle it and switch to stop it is not gonna kill anybody i guarantee you people will not die oh come on it might kill HTC's engineers because that's an entirely new round of validation that that they need to go through to make sure that they have you know the phone working one hundred percent with stock just as they do with with sense right I mean like that's why it takes the signage in guys so long the ship a stable wrong for new devices is because it isn't as simple as like you know compiling uh LSP and dropping it on a new phone like you eat there are drivers they need to compile into the kernel and you know it's a huge nightmare yeah okay well I said I was the last thing I'm gonna say about a song about anymore but yeah quick mention go back to the LG that then actually that phone was one of the quickest to go from being rumored which actually happen like last week or maybe the week for the optimus g pro and a boom it's announced in japan well this is kind of funny kind of funny story because the same exact thing happened with LG in the optimus g last year that's true like the japanese carrier partners were like well we're shown enough now so here you go and then LG has its big event weeks later that unveils for the rest of the world even though everybody if you've been paying attention had seen it already yeah that's the thing i can just foresee the event at mwc where this really straight-laced korean executive steps up to the stage and he's really nervous it's like one of the biggest moments of his life and he's playing it completely straight and he's like do g pro the five inches today's if you just play IPS it has an RGB is no I'm like oh excuse me you know it's a real ideas hey guys this is pretty awesome over like yeah soda in Japan last month you just took our you just single-handedly took the Virgin Mobile show from a g-rated podcast to a pg-rated podcast web while quoting a future I think that's okay that's about uh look I still don't think I know that droid DNA is a pretty baller phone I get it I still don't believe in the 5-inch 1080p panel I I don't literally gay I don't need that that dot pitch and I don't mean a five inch device and I've tried people keep telling me oh just carry the the note to around for a week and you'll love it well no I will I just returned my note 2 review unit I couldn't I couldn't wait to get that out of my office yeah I I hear you you know what's really funny to me is that Samsung you know there have been these rumors of the galaxy note 3 moving to 6.3 inches which makes a lot of sense if the if the galaxy s4 is going to be a 5 inch or four point nine inch 1080p device right and here they're going to probably announce it at Eddie fuh just like they normally do and they will already been bested by 76.4 4 inch device but they're just gonna look like complete Buster's you're not going to be able to give you know Samsung the the Korean manufacturers samsung LG for years and years and years have been known for really pushing numbers as being very mean or you know the world's faster the world's biggest or the world's brightest those kinds of superlatives are very important to their market right and if that's not something they're going to be able to push with the Galaxy Note 3 at least in terms of styles if it is in fact 643 in fact I bet Samsung is going back to the labs right now and and make get to creep on the evidence to do that before is 6.45 yes Samsung did take their first the 10 inch Galaxy Tab they saw the iPad get refreshed and they were like actually i think is garbage it's a good thing then I yeah so we'll just ring to use it they have done that in the past but the same time is such a meaning listen random thing to claim is the biggest it's the biggest until the seven ish devices cover rape honestly it's like and as somebody once again tweeted Samsung's display Samsung's coverage of the display range display platypuses like 2.8 3.1 3.3 3.7 3.94 cetera cetera I mean if you notice and if you follow that there's a giant gap between 5.5 and seven point 0 so I'm tired I'm tired do it man but the sad thing is you'll probably so again because people are people and we don't understand them it'll sell like gangbusters man did to use a term from the 1920s because I don't know better what to use and anyway we won't get it because we just don't get it then we took a good but there's so many dissidents I show about size the last thing I just want to mention is I do want to cast doubt on the idea of a 4.7 inch 1080p display on the HTC m7 because nobody has done 1080p at 4.7 inches that's the densest we would have had mmm but it known as shown a sample not to my knowledge hmm nivin there's playmakers I'm challenging your notion on the googles right now all right what why do that we can switch it up and did you talk about rim yeah so the speaking speaking of leaks um you know obviously Rams got its big event next week we talked about this a little bit last week and more stuff continues to flood the internet with what the device looks like what the operating system looks like and things like that we just saw this past week we saw Verizon's promo page that leaked that was talking about the z10 over the z10 that's what I would like to say and it shows in white so looks like verizon will be carrying it in white and we also had a whole rash of screenshots leaked earlier this week that go through the whole setup of a new device and with various settings menus on blackberry 10 so it's out there if you want to know what it's like what are you thoughts in and then look into the screenshots they look very blackberry to me I the screenshots really don't get me that excited for a couple of reasons one there they they're very much they look like blackberry to me they don't really look they don't have that that polish and that design aesthetic and sharpness that I see like even with Android 4.2 and certainly with iOS and with Windows Phone which is always been kind of like a bummer for me for for blackberry but the other problem with the screenshots is there just like a whole bunch of settings screen shots and they're not loaded with data or with information so it's really hard to get a feel of what it'll be like using the thing in day-to-day use so I don't want to be too judgmental based on those screenshots okay Chris how's your search going I cannot find any 4.7 inch 1080p panels that have been shown at dude this is my this is my realm is yellow in last town well yeah well just plays I mean it is a true though isn't it like this plays are basically the one speck that remains that matters and device to nothing's like if you're going to get one thing right get your display right first get the dimensions right get the technology right and then go from there yeah I feel like we're kind of at the point now where it's hard to screw up a display because there are so many like really good technologies out there for making them gapless and you know for not having like a really crappy like pentile appearance that they kind of have all their bases covered oh yeah that wasn't necessarily the case a year ago but we're at the point now where like there's just no excuse and and that's something that dan I think you've probably had the most experience for some reason with the razr maxx HD yeah and and yet would you would you say that that they've kind of gotten the display thing figured out now save for the maxx HD sure I can't look at that display it just hurts my eyes really it's just that the max hd's display is so oversaturated it's like you're on a mushroom trip every time that you look at it it drives me nuts and it's it's it's like over sharp like you know when someone went into Photoshop with an image and they just like way over did the sharpness and it just hurts your eyes to look at yeah that's exactly how I feel about the razr maxx HD display and and the razr m display to an even greater extent funny enough as soon as Chris said pencil the only thing that pops in my mind was motorola I just there's a pentile yeah that I was going to say the funniest thing about that is that pentile is literally a samsung trademark like they own that trademark and the technology behind it so it's funny that Motorola's is the first thing that pops in your mind well sometimes I got something Association someone on twitter is telling me that this NEC meet me deus ex has a 4.7 inch 1080p display NEC medias s x that's not Xavier so somebody suites in the same thing at me as well and that it's 10 0 7 d's is for at ntt docomo or I Kevin Lowe that's now that's old that's one like a year ago if it's for it it's 4.3 inches 4.3 I don't know sure that would have been 4.4 in 720 so yeah this has to be 712 oh you know what I think I saw oh maybe not hmm I may have seen this phone at seatac when I was there well in case that this actually drugs back to back Barry because yeah there was really intruder hilarious moment that happen wood rim when those in hinds noted that the company is willing to consider selling on his hardware unit and just becoming a software services company and then it stopped price shut up I mean that's that's how bad room is doing that you see you say you're considering selling off and you stop right shoots up because people don't trust you to manage your resources and what you have properly yeah but I think that's kind of always true it's it's pretty common for a company to say that it's exploring song off a unit and oh yeah yeah goes up and and to be fair I think it's like a universal you know it's like it's a truism in in the entire technology industry that software and services are much more profitable than hardware is which is why I be is except for Apple Apple is like the one one thing that proves that rule yeah that's true um yeah but then Apple make stuff like this and start you want to rub on your face and so I see that side of this sorry for that for this no.7 DIC I mentioned in the text of 1920 x 1080 but I think that might be video recording anyway you just see the numbers in the most of a bunch of Japanese aren't you Chris yeah yeah yeah exactly oh no but like to me it's it's a perfect score mood room because it's a double whammy of no confidence so room itself is saying we're not confident that we can continue operating the company that were operating even though that's what we're building up to and january thirtieth hardware/software selling devices so as soon as we launch this massive new revolution which everything is big bet on we're gonna start looking into selling it all off because we know confidence that will make bility out of it so that's number one and in the market itself says you know we agree with you guys and we think if you set everything up and split it up it will be better than if you just keep running it so it's like number two with the no-confidence so basically the market is doing the home Michael Dell things they give the money back to shadow to sleep yeah and the question is who would be with all due respect who would be dumb enough to pick up rims hardware business and agree to shoulder the cost of designing uh hopefully you know revenue generating / profitable new phones running black a completely unproven platform in blackberry 10 I just I I have no idea who unless it was like it's just a complete fire sale III don't understand who would pick that up and why Amazon Facebook just for the hardware designers I guess but if you look at this and I'm already talking about you Gus TRO designers because we're hasn't done an industrial design for I don't know yeah Kate z10 is not an impressive piece of industrial design but yeah you know this is the thing this is the expertise that we keep talking about with nokia motorola you know the internal stuff the antenna engineering the stuff under the hood that can be valuable and the staff that room has can be valuable somebody like Amazon try to get a cell phone that's true yeah I can see that I could see that only what you would it would really have to be like one of those amazon today's special value discount sales you know thank you by this hard way you did with it makes our gold gold box sell rims hardware unit basically yeah ten pieces please yeah i mean i don't know what what what hasn't uh uh Hines said that RIM might sell I mean it's just yeah I mean it's been the company line for the past year like no options are off the table is basically been his message so and I think those cufflinks guys really nice my wife got into for me last year their silver you know so was coming back to style and I'm not saying that we won't sell these yeah yeah I can't imagine that I can't imagine this being the way that RIM separates its its hardware and software divisions I could possibly see a cell or licensing of the software to other manufacturers assuming that it's able to prove itself on the market but oh yeah I think room will be desperate to license it to somebody some of you signs up for a room would be like what you want this stuff okay done they have no interest in being exclusive on the software they want to spread out as much as again I just don't think that they will i still think is really really believe me as far as i was concerned yeah well as far as we talk about apps all the time with rim and indeed is written 33 reports on rims getting apps but it seems like every week ram announces that they've got more and more apps ready to go and more and more apps are being ported to blackberry 10 so they're looking it's looking like they will hit their goal of 70,000 available by launch whether there will be 70,000 apps you want that's another story right that's that's the million-dollar or in rims case the billion-dollar question yeah so I'm sure we'll be talking about rim a whole heck of a lot more next week and probably the week after that once their event hits mm-hmm uh what else do you guys want to talk about today we've got a little bit of exciting financial news as I say very sarcastically Oh Chris um this is up your alley about ATT finally is letting face time on the iphone 4s uh what do you do yeah this this really comes down to is a continuation of the efforts of public interest groups like public knowledge and free press to work with aging team have CC to kind of like push back on this notion that it's okay to just uh you know fly in the face of the tenants of net neutrality and to be fair that the the FCC's rules around net neutrality I'm on wireless are practically non-existent they're very very weak compared to the rules that they're trying to put there in court right now they're tied up in court but the there is an active effort on the part of the FCC to impose some pretty reasonable rules across the board on landline but they are much weaker on mobile but i think that 18t recognized privately that this was a battle not worth fighting considering our nightmare that it was becoming for that because it was a very arbitrary decision and and this all being said even though you can do facetime on the 4s now over cellular I don't know if I'd want to HSPA still stucks in many areas although although for the first time ever last week I was at o'hare at at a very very busy time the airport was completely jam-packed and LTE 18 tlte was slower than 18 th s PA so I think that bike by quite a bit i was on my speed test as only getting about point O five megabits down on LTE and about point five half a megabyte down on a chessboard a yeah so via the tide is turning in some markets at some times of day I think and that's going to create an interesting dynamic over the course of the next year or two as more people ditch their HSPA devices for LTE but but yeah i mean the the practical implication of this facetime move is Pratt is virtually no but from a PR perspective and the aggressiveness to which they are being pursued by these public interest groups it was I think that it was the right move for them to make I just want to say this entire ATT and facetime Fiasco has been so fragmented I've lost track of it a long long time all I'm saying is our head like I'm just giving you the across the bomb perspective Oliver seen this lines about agency allows facetime atg doesn't allow facetime ATT is back ATT change this one again now is the for rest now is this something else I've lost track I just completely lost track and I think Chris nailed it in saying it's really arbitrary and annoyingly and knowing so yes annoyingly arbitrary and I think when when the announcement came that initially that they were going to allow it on the iphone 5 but not on the iphone 4s I just kept screaming in our chat this is so arbitrary this is so arbitrary and it is right because it wasn't limited to LTE at that vine it was strictly a model decision which made nice because the iphone 5 could use it on hspa+ if you were not on an LTE network but the I / 4s cannot which means absolutely no sense so right let me also monopolize whatever that to the podcast with some european news and segue into the idea that ATT is looking into expanding to Europe you can have it which is very excited about american telephone and telegraph being in Europe flied to set does that make you happy uh dude I think that the first saw can you target is a UK right that's the it looks like UK's everything everywhere and possibly a Dutch carrier company so everything everywhere is pretty big at the UK right like they are t-mobile and orange right so yes well I mean everything everywhere the moment are really trying to work out some sort of cochin strategy toward becoming one brand in one operation and killing off the orange and t-mobile brands and closing up the stores which they've been doing etc in the thing with them and I've seen the CEO as a beautiful beautiful beautiful name name I think it's Olaf Swantee or something like that and that they got my memories and what it used to be and he I'll say I've seen him do a couple of speeches a couple of presentations and he looks like a straight man to be honest with you guys and maybe that just been reading too much into it I feel like EE has a lot of money deeply invested into being the first 4g provider and beating everybody to the punch and the company is trying as hard as it can to get as many customers as it can during this advanced period so that he can stay afloat basically so Lucas survived which is the essentially the Sprint story of two thousand when did the was a 2010 when the first wimax phone launched in the US yeah yeah another that's very good analogy actually yeah the only thing is that sprint survived screwing up so yeah thanks thanks to softbank coming in and scooping them up as yeah it does how so maybe AT&T will be a ease softbank think about that no because something isn't evil blue stone now that now be just another but yeah I mean what I'm trying to illustrate is that it's a make-or-break situation for EE they're trying really hard and they might not have the financial resources that you might imagine with the big promotional push that I do right now they might just kind of be putting all the chips in now and say we do grow big now or we fail which creates the vulnerability for a takeover by somebody like ATT so that's this potential that I just see like zero potential for consumer benefit fate since he comes into the UK market nothing particularly good is really going to much but I don't think well they could do it very silently just like vodafone's presence via verizon wireless is very silent that you know there's no aspect of Vodafone that that comes through in the way verizon presents itself and yet Chris promoter is a British company 80s American Vodafone being understated natt not is kind of to be expected yes but Vodafone is correct me if i'm wrong i think that by total subscriber account account they are the second largest wireless carrier in the world so yeah so in you know in terms of you know the quote unquote evil empire it's hard to dispute that that vodafone is is up in that in that group not to say i think any of these companies are evil i just think they're aggressively capitalist which is evil uh but but it is mel garion like like this an Associated political doctor bulgaria like we spent some time not being enslaved by somebody in order to have a doctorate come on oh god this conversation getting weird but i just do just bring it back to e this week they're introducing a couple of new price plans so now there's a thirty one pound per month entry-level price paid for the LTE service but it's kind of daft if you sign up for that because you need to sign up for two years sim wrongly so you don't get a phone with it you sign up for two years you pay 31 pounds per month and you get 500 megabytes of data so it's like you get really fast data if you're the right area you have the right connection and you get half a gig of it really fast data for a very short amount exactly yeah 500 megabytes is is criminally low for LTE rights you know 500 megabytes is like like when we go to Barcelona for mwc and I have to buy prepaid SIM card like and we're there for a week and I'm like I don't know 500 megabytes enough I always end up buying like a gig if I can yeah whenever I'm in another country for a week or whatever because I i I'm afraid that just my using maps and email and whatever is going to use up 500 voids yeah yeah if I gotta remember eyes you just enough to get for you to a defeat and prove the gifs that Chris posts premature when is when if i last posted a Jeff on Twitter I don't know if I ever have it's been a long time I think identities happen more often I reject your criticism of my Twitter account this it was a flagrant accusation and I withdraw it thank you with my apologies thank you ah but yes also 2 p's the power users they're also doing a 46 pound per month 20 gigabytes plan weights so big yeah so you go from 31 pounds per month for 500 megabytes 246 pounds four months for 20 gigabytes which is 40 times email right but that's what they've done did they just introduce more extreme version so now they have the cheapest option and now they have the most massive option they still have price plans in between but it's only a 15 pound difference between the cheapest and the most expensive plan yeah okay so just to give you a comparison with ATT so 18 TS mobile share plan I think that their lowest cost ah a plan is ninety dollars for two gigabytes and then that gets shared with how whatever lines you add to it and then it goes up to like two hundred and eighty dollars or something for ten gigabytes it's really good but there's somebody coming around to your house giving you a massage every weekend right uh they're massaging your wallet that was really really freaking good actually as far as imagery goes it was like high five on that message on the wall on that note I think on wallet massages we can we can call it a wrap for this week let's say you guys I agree so that's the verge mobile show for this week if you want to follow us on Twitter I'm DCC fruit Vlad is vlad savov chris is z power and he promises to post more gifts and dieter is back lon and hopefully dinner will be back with us next week but who knows so that's it thanks for watching guys thanks guys guys