Gadgetory

hey hello go to the Virgin Mobile show we're back it's exciting and I am dieter bohn i'm dan seifert and i'm chris sigler and this is episode 34 if you're wondering and I know you were it's the week of January 28 2013 I know you cared a lot about that information as well and we are in the hosts CES pre Mobile World Congress i would say doldrums but we've got a ton of stuff that has popped this week and I'm actually kind of surprised we've got blackberry hitting tomorrow we've got no key rumors we got HTC rumors we have an HTC event we've got just a ton of stuff to talk about actually dieter I'm going to challenge your statement that this is episode 34 i believe that i mis-read i just read whoever two handled the show notes I believe this is episode 35 I believe don't don't call me about I think ya know what might be you know you weren't you were here let this week to you it is episode 34 well why did somebody not update this also know our notes is really important for all our listeners our notes are counting CES is not a number this show we did it that's garbage that's ridiculous we need um we would have all of our live listeners complaining to us but we've we're not running the chat this week it also isn't running I believe on the verge cast there's problems with that chat and so you know you can still email us Virg Virg mobile show at the verge calm you could also tweet at us so you can post comments uh but don't go crazy guys I mean come on it's you you don't have that much to say really you know what they should do you know what our listeners should do is they should they should start their own google hangout in parallel to ours whoa and they they all hang out and chat and like video talk video chat with one another while we're doing the show the shadow hang out yeah don't be pronouncing pretty awesome idea um anyway yeah so like it's it's a surprisingly busy weekend news and we've got a lot of stuff to talk about which I've said like eight times and so I don't see why we don't just start doing that unless we want to hear Chris talked about how he sucks at getting his computer fixed no III don't suck you getting my computer it is fixed I'm just explaining before the show yea i meant to pick it up it's it's ready for pickup at the apple store I meant to pick it up last night and I so I started wandering through Chicago on my way to the apple store and I got sidetracked by one of my favorite coffee shops inteligencia was it open I go yes it was open for those of you who live in LA or Chicago you know that inteligencia is some of the finest coffee in the world so I stopped in and then start working on a review that I can't talk about with you unfortunately and then next thing you know a couple hours pass and that's what is Peter what is going on is that 33 maybe I was happening Charlie get a shot of the mirror on a pre three on my uh my camera here comes to God raised it up a little bit get that free three out of my face I haven't done to my bosses in it I was thinking about it but I haven't done it yet I like I don't even know if the service is still work it's that I probably need to do a doctor on it to get it going properly every year you should review the pre three just pretend like it's a new phone just feel like free 3 review well the webos nation did like a state of open webOS after a year last week and it's you know pretty sad state of affairs there I would imagine they're running on some Galaxy Nexus hardware but they don't have 3d acceleration going they can't get it you know offers right yet so they're working on it but like HP's network thing yeah um anyway we should talk about new stuff stuff that actually is going to be relevant and important ever burn yeah so HTC just today invited us to go to an event on the nineteenth of februari in both New York and London I believe simultaneously is that right yeah yeah they should be concurrent yep yeah and so I mean there's two really big interesting things about that one is whatever the big huge interesting thing is that they're going on Allison too for the first time I can remember it awhile HTC isn't trying to you know make a big announcement at overruled Congress me maybe I'm wrong maybe they've got plenty that they're saving up for a World Congress that I'm just not expecting but they're they're going the Samsung route they're going the Apple route they're trying to stand on their own two feet and announce a big old product without a trade show surrounding it yeah no it's good I look III think that HTC has reached the point where they are more than entitled to do that I just fear as an mwc goer and dieter as you're a goer and Dan year ago or I am starting to fear for the quality of the announcements that we're going to get out of that show and it's a little bit different from CES where you know that you're going to be able to still cobble together a really fascinating narrative about the goings-on and consumer electronics I'm WC a cell phone focused that without these anchor announcements it makes you wonder what the show is going to become and and I think that that what is going to happen in the short term is it's going to it's going to be seated to the Chinese companies and the the Taiwanese companies you're going to see huawei and ZTE do interesting things right so it's interesting that HTC is deciding to what we're presuming is separating itself from the main mwc event because last year they had their big one series announcement and that was really everything that a lot of people took out of mwc last year even though the event happened early on in the show there wasn't anything else that really detracted from that the big news was HTC's big announced and HTC made the show its own so it's interesting to see that this year HTC feels compelled enough to separate itself a week ahead of the event and do its own thing even though it's apparently going to be quite big as it's in both New York and London yeah I can't imagine that they'll circle back and do another big announcement at mwc but maybe they maybe they want to do some big 12 punch I just I don't know I don't see that happening well I mean neither do I to me to be perfectly blunt we've only seen leaks of one important device ma that's HTC m7 we've seen a let's see what's most recent thing is that it seems to share a lot of DNA lot block with the droid DNA which is not a surprise at all I think we can fully expect a 1080p screen on this thing and I think we can fully I'm hoping that you know they're managing to reduce the size of the bezel even further so that they can you know make make it a smaller phone overall and a a 4.7 inch screen at 1080p is really crazy like that's crazy crazy MA um so yeah I'm excited I hope that it is available as more than just you know a droid or whatever I also hope that it doesn't just get put on sprint I and you know we've talked sense to death and so I really don't want to get into you know my hopes for since five but you know we talked about it last week I'm hoping it looks good so I'm actually really interested to see what HTC has here I you know I feel like everything we have to say about them we've said right like hopefully they'll manage to get some traction with this but the thing that's interesting to me about can HTC get traction is there's a lot less traction available to a company like HTC we know that rim is announcing blackberry 10 tomorrow we know that all four US carriers are going to support it we also have something else from Nokia that we're expecting soon and we've got a post from Tom which we'll talk about in a minute about it maybe being a hero device for verizon and you guys know my pet theory that the phone that wins that's not called the iphone is whatever phone verizon decides to throw its you know marketing weight behind I mean we saw AT&T tried it with 920 and if you know it did fine but it wasn't you know a barn burner so like even if HTC managed to score major coos and got a bunch of support from carriers especially in the US I mean there's only so much support to go around right and so I HTC really has to just completely knock us off our feet for this thing to have a huge impact especially going up against the galaxy s3 in the iphone 5 well so i think that with this device so let's assume that that what they announced on the 19th is going to be this m7 that's been leaked and let's assume that they can get it on to carry ourselves in a reasonable period of time they might actually be opening up a nice little window up between that launched and the gs4 right which gives them of course i guess the same thing happened last year too so i realistically we don't know how much of a window there they're going to happen how much of financial impact that's going to have for them but if they can if they can get that lead that might be what they need to to make a splash with this thing because that is the elephant in the room in the android room right is is the the gs4 and that product is obviously going to have a big impact and i'm sure it's gonna be available in all four US Nationals so even if this this m7 also is the most they can hope for going up against the gs4 is a samsung alternative right be interesting to some people but not everyone and the thing to point out is you know if Samsung does what I did with the gs3 and the gs2 is like HTC's phone is probably going to look and feel nicer nice more better happier timer designed I totally sorry your design yes yeah but but it but Samsung just I mean we've seen you know from there was the story a couple weeks ago or three weeks ago about how much just how much marketing money samsung throws behind the galaxy s3 it's insane and against that you know juggernaut I mean there's only so much to HTC could do and the best thing they can do is have an amazing device and that's what they need to show us on the 19th so it needs to be an amazing device and amazing software because you know with all things considered last year with the 1x we all pretty much agree that it was an amazing device hardware wise but we were let down by the software so if HTC is able to improve sense enough with this sense 5 that we've seen leaked numerous times now to bring the software up to the level that the hardware is likely going to be at based on history then but that would be its best fighting chance for sure yeah I remain cautiously optimistic that since five is going to be a very compelling skin and I know that Vlad disagrees with me but he's on the show this week so he can that's all right hahaha I I think that sounds about the leaks we see we've seen precious little of this UI but from what I've seen I'm cautiously optimistic that they're moving in the right direction I know that I've said that before I said it was sense for but but this is definitely a noted improvement and it looks it looks the most different it looks like the biggest evolutionary jump in sense since the introduction of sense on Android with 1.6 I think yeah okay I don't know obviously we'll have to see when it when it's launched but I think that might be a stretch to say Chris yeah well put your money where your mouth is five five dollars says it sends five is better than sense for hahaha five American dollars five American dollars say that since five is better than sense for yeah I will I don't know if I'll take that bet oh snap okay that's your now say I'll say uh no no because you're saying that since five is going to be the biggest you know evolutionary leap since you know the original sense and I think since 36 the sense for was a huge difference like a huge dramatic leap so listen you guys we're not talking about the most important software and UI design story that we have right now with regard to HTC and we really need to because it's a huge it's a Titanic shift in my thinking about how phones work and that's this new HTC mini bluetooth well maybe maybe as Chris earlier ridiculous there's this HTC is planning a one-two punch maybe this is the two punch o WC if you're not familiar with what we're talking about in its day written in China right now bundling it with the butterfly in China and it is a little tiny phone little keypad and a little tiny screen and send an end things and it's is basically just a bluetooth headset that has got some controls for like dialing and answering calls and whatnot and end is this play in a display so you know it pairs up over NFC and it probably you know gets your contacts and stuff from the phone so the phone probably like it'll you know you can send your contacts over bluetooth so it's basically like like a bluetooth car stereo basically um yeah and I mean just okay I either there must be there is some cultural context I'm I'm see hmm look if the phone docked you remember that that old verizon phone that had a like an Englishman all set that jet set yeah yeah yes if this HTC mini docked inside the butterfly I would be I would be cool with it which arguably enough the butterfly is probably big enough to do this yeah yeah I I would be able to get down with that yet not nothing there's nothing else to say about the mini oh oh oh and also if it played like the original snake baby that would be huge but I don't know if they'd be able to secure the rights from nokia for that I mean it's man so many things that are wrong i did another thing to charge is it how a camera on it to know I know it's got a big camera can use it as a remote control to control the The Magus camera what yes it doubles as a remote shutter trigger for the butterflies camera according to oh come on I want this thing in my life look it can all it can't cost as an accessory it can't possibly cost more than like a hundred bucks right so you you know you buy it at the same time that you buy your on contracts droid DNA for instance yeah I'm down coming in I'm on board this crazy train that HTC is pulling up to the station count me in um I have nothing else to say other than god speed you crazy train rider um so uh rim tomorrow or it's happening they're announcing blackberry 10 they promised to have a couple more surprises they have a Super Bowl ad entities they've already talked about the fact they've got a bunch of movie studios on board to sell movies and red buoys we had a leak that it looks like this is the most interesting part it looks like Vodafone in the UK might be selling this thing like right away the z10 that would be good that would be very good for them then the last thing they need to do is to do a Microsoft Surface style announcement for they show a phone without any date or price and say yeah this will come eventually they need to strike while the iron is hot yes yeah I mean they just they need to release it on all the carriers how they set a carrier number ma I know remember yeah rim is said like that over a hundred and fifty carriers of it in testing um so they're definitely pushing that it's going to be available worldwide on as many carriers as possible I may think yeah do you think there's any chance they'll show to ablett tomorrow no I don't base on tell you why nothing is leaked all right I would say no whereas the z10 has leaked to high heaven yeah the only thing we don't know about a device that I can remember in the past like literally like eight years that hasn't leaked was whatever the last phone was it got released on t-mobile because literally nobody cared the curve whatever whatever it isn't 15 I I try to remember the name of this phone every single week and I can never remember it I never bother to look it up afterwards it's you have held it out there right yeah so like the way that I don't know I mean you know we see apple stuff leaked you know we see Android stuff leaked we see everything leaked these days and rim sort of led the charge how that stuff back in the day uh you know they get their stuff out two testers we get their stuff out to their corporate partners and it leaks and I you know did the playbook well they announced that one Bailey really they showed the play dress way bug off like yeah they showed it off like what a dozen times before it officially announced so yeah if they mention i see it's a really bad idea for them to even mention it out because if they tease it like a in six months you'll have this then it all will just be all standing around talking about one's a tablet com who's gonna care about the tablet and we won't be talking about the phones which presumably are coming much much sooner right so it's still pretty crazy that all things point to rim you know releasing it to all touch screen version way ahead of a board model oh yeah well now way ahead right it's still going to be in the same quarter or half of the year I suppose yeah I guess it's it's supposed to be but with but that we've seen very few leaks of the keyboard while we've seen it on camera a couple times but nothing like we've seen of the z10 itself so um it's just kind of interesting that you know you know what I want would you Horschel slider I don't I don't want to pre three I mean I do but I want I want I want them to do the torch right with this new OS I want a portrait slider I really do i'm willing to have a fat phone in order to have physical keyboard I gotta be honest with you I'm on the exact opposite end and I know that like this because you're right i'm on the end of right and you're on the end of stupid I mean a couple of years ago I would have totally agreed with you that you know a portrait keyboard is like the the best thing ever for text input but like you know today's phones are so much more responsive that autocorrect is so much better I'm so much faster on a touchscreen keyboard than I am with a fiscal while you were just soliloquizing there I just tapped out the Gettysburg Address on the physical keyboard on this pre three I just wanted no you didn't because the spacebar probably wasn't responding so it's all one big word insert stock comment about thinking the venue pro is greatest portrait slider date hahahaha I seriously they need to take the the chassis of that phone and just upgrade the I mean if they can keep the hd2 alive for a decade thinkin they can certainly upgrade the venue pro just drop whatever on I put put put a jelly bean or put blackberry 10 I don't care just put something on it so rim is the only company that cares about physical keyboards period right which is what's so crazy about them releasing the touchscreen model first especially given that all of their other like all touchscreen phones have like been miserable nightmarish pieces so dieter I'm going to send you a link to Steve Jobs um a keynote from Macworld 2007 when he and really I've never I've never never heard never seen it was it good did he well he made some very interesting and I think important points about my physical keyboards are stupid right but what about the portrait slider man no none of those points about having more screen real estate apply when you've got a magic key board that can slide up remember need three screen I guess if you want if I had a 4.7 inch device like a nexus 4 here and I slide the keyboard yeah how massive that would be it would be like the most unwieldy thing ever I know it's already pretty unwieldy I mean look there is nothing cooler than getting done with a call and hanging it up just slamming the phone closed well the weird like answering the phone just popping it open like will you pop open a portrait slider like I'm gonna get stuff done now I almost swore there um and and like you know sly doin look tacky little code in no I just want to be like wow I guess that's all cool until the thing starts Oreo rotating on you nobody they did okay with the torch hardware right thinking oh right i mean it wasn't the sexiest thing ever but they did ok i guess hardware was all right i mean the screen was terribly terrible and the software was obviously a nightmare um what the the weird thing to me is that every carrier seems intent on offering one like crappy low to mid-range landscape slider but no one cares about doing that doing that yes the crappy landscape slider I guarantee you that if your tmobile and you go to Samsung and say crap us out a landscape android phone samsung is going to say excuse me I need to use the bathroom and they're gonna come back five minutes later with Lance with that ring with the smileys exactly that because that is the kind of service Samsung about us and it's the tragic thing about this isn't at 4 inches or higher that like Lansky keyboards are just stupid there's no way to adjust them yeah i mean the four-inch landscape keyboard phone man i mean you gotta you gotta take a lot of fiber to pull it off exactly I've been squeezing out yeah we can smiley I just eat you're talking about the emoticon yes yeah yeah that was amazing that was an Android right that was just running whatever that was an rtos may I think it probably has chat on it though yeah yeah probably yeah I'm just I'm really proud that we brought down to tears that makes me what else the nexus 4 is actually on sale for really real Dan mentioned before the show tell us the joke you said because it was a fun so uh I'm just double-checking my sources here and my sources being the Play Store but as of the time that we went on air you could still buy the nexus 4 in the place or which means that it has been over four hours in a row that you've been able to place an order for the nexus 4 which might be a like new record by about three and a half hours but it's like a continuous availability of the nexus 4 in the end it is still yes but it's like they must have been stockpiling inventory for the past like 12 weeks I mean it's been so long since you could buy a nexus 4 online that like they must have just waited until they had an entire warehouse piled to the ceiling with these things and then they flip the switch yeah that's my only guess and and you can buy the bumper now and you know obviously 8 and 4 16 gigabyte very you still can't get the touchstone no no and there's no record what ya think you can 3d print your own touch to our charging orb doc it's not you know the full magnetic charge but yeah instead of calling it the touchstone they should have called it the feel rock they didn't call it a touchstone know I know I know but I'm saying that that they could have called it the feel rock and then like it would have been like a you know synonym thing nevermind i just like to think of LG and like the Y screen which is its variation of samsung smart stay we also League of a white Nexus 4 which looks fine I think all of us want it yeah we tried that so managing can you imagine if that had LTE like I would die I was odd I just died I would perish I'm back on the nexus for this week and after having use the iphone 5 for a couple of weeks and the battery life isn't quite as ridiculously bad as i remember but it's still like that great and I said I I gave up and went down that dark hole of rooting it and putting a customer on it just because he'd you really yeah did I mean I uh yeah let's see where I'm at today I'm at sixty-nine percent it's been off of the charger for 10 hours oh it sounds like yeah max is for max yeah i'm at sixty-nine percent I've been off since 6am so that's six seven eight hours yeah so you're you you didn't have the same issues like mine would be dead by 3pm if I yeah and done that so i just want to point out that i was up at 6am yet again today i believe i called you know you call me at seven i was already awake okay yeah I call the you at six though right yes includes excited yeah and like how they just don't talk about the nexus awkward no like android OS twenty-four percent what does that mean what is doing it I'd say the same thing maps 11 / so well maps I know because latitude is the worst and you can't my candid are not know but if you turn it off then Google now is not as good as it ought to be wait Google Latitude still exists yeah I know right well it's like the you know keep locate keep track of your location / time feature and whatever anyway um man we're just jamming through topics we haven't even been on the air for so about the white Nexus 4 I really want it I have no hopes that we'll ever be available for sale just because we saw the white Galaxy Nexus as well and like Google never sold that directly I don't know where you could even get what you could buy that I mean like you could yeah i mean you that the white Galaxy Nexus was one of those phones were like if you knew somebody knew somebody the new a guy who stood in some dark alley you can go like talk to him and like he would open his trench coat and he would be one he would be nude but then to even you would have some white Galaxy Nexus is under his trench coat and like you could buy one for twelve hundred dollars that kind of phone and I have a feeling this is gonna be the same thing rich means that up I need to have one like I just need to have it well it's like what I have the experience it's like the white sega game gear when I was it when I was 12 years old like it was the same situation like you had import one from Japan it was insane also with the Galaxy Nexus you couldn't get the the stupid extended battery for the gsm version unless like you went to korea and like you know had a dinner with an LG or meanness an executive it was it was the exact same situation right yeah um the thing that I want the the unicorn uh nexus for that I want even not counting LTE is replace the glass back with the ridiculously thin plastic back from you know the Galaxy Nexus or some other phone and just use that extra space for battery give me an extra couple hundred milliamps that would be awesome i'd be down with that that good I mean to be fair the battery in it is already pretty big right it's 2,100 or something just make the software more efficient there's no reason that a 20 100 million of our battery not running on LTE can't last like the whole day and beyond well here's here's what sucks like I picked up my my parents iphone 4 recently I was like holy crap this is a really thick phone and that that pisses me off because like simply three or four months ago or five months ago I would have never dreamed that thought but like now I've become accustomed to these stupid seven millimeter thick phones and now I can't use a nine millimeter thick foam like creepy just just go back to the tank usually the guy that wanted yeast be the guy that was all about the resound you thought that that was okay oh my god result is awesome that my sound oh great for 720p phone in the u.s. result awesome be other they should have they should have never gone from nine to seven ish who their donors own and they put better reach through the screen look man I'm gonna be in my other life loans we're gonna be a little bitter stick hundred yeah you're gonna be I'm California when you're riding afraid to come to the city you're gonna like snow plower South just but you know be safe no I'm going to come to California and Friday I'm gonna I'm gonna personally see to it that that I slap you with a glove like a gentleman's fight anyway I have gloves for you Chris but they should have well now i'm going to use studded so so just so to keep our readers in loop you guys are going to find out eventually on the website but the verge calm but i'm super jealous of why chris is going to California and you guys are going to find it to visit me in your future courtrand yeah I actually have a cameo in Terminator 5 are you sure it's not fast 6 I was gonna say well imagine hang on hang on imagine a terminator fast mashup oh my face is gonna melt off even stop now you didn't astok the vast 6 trailer premieres this sunday and I'm like I can barely contain myself by throwing a super bowl and it was just confirmed last week that Arnold is going to be in Terminator 5 which is also pretty excited so Chris the full disclosure chris is going to California to see a screening of fast 6 that would be that would make my life uh but but no anyway back to my original point I don't know how we ended up on this tangent I don't know what you're saying say you should have net gone below nine millimeters and they should have just making the inside of the phone thinner and used that remaining space for battery and everyone would have been happy fine it's hard to sell a new phone they're like I could totally see where they're coming from though like it's a lot easier to sell a new phone as its new and thinner and lighter elder than the 920 sort of try the tank I think and then definitely kind of a kind of payable over here idea but the 920 doesn't even have great better I mean it's it's not bad but battery life but it's not great it's not particularly amazing so it did we kind of tear it apart for being heavy and thick yeah should i do the full like weightlifter squat like um anyway so the hospital yeah the noke in leisure the users flagship windows phone on Verizon what do we know about the laser so it sounds like the laser is going to be basically a cdma / LTE 700 block c / aw or presumably AWS version of the of the catwalk let's daily just like talking about ieee spectrum all this occasion just things about that we know about the laser just like suck them all as all y'all okay we have people we definitely have people on this listening to the show right now who appreciates spectrum the way I appreciate why did this turn into the troll Chris show I don't understand if she doesn't deserve it it does make it easy though so so that the laser will probably be a carrier variant of the catwalk which is expected to be the successor to the 920 which I believe we're expecting to see announced at mwc so so the catwalk could actually end up being the most interesting thing to happen in Barcelona and this is it sounds like nokia is going to go back to aluminum construction which is something they haven't really done since the na yeah and I guess that's exciting news i mean i thought that nokia has has done a really amazing job with their poly carbonate shells but i can see why they would want like they probably feel left out by the aluminum train well I mean you could definitely make a phone thinner with aluminum then you can't rent with poly cotton Polly's got to have some thickness for rajula rigidness yeah I mean I'm with you guys I love the the the polycarbonate shell but does anyone think it's kind of crazy that Nokia just announced the 920 in October and here we are in February and expecting to see it success accessory coats like that is for months yeah I mean yeah I do think it's a little bit crazy but I mean let's not forget that there's apple and there's everybody else and everybody else is on the faster cycle and they know when they release new phone they bump sales and I think that we can expect it from rim to be perfectly honest they're using you know off-the-shelf parts I think you know I mean it's not fair to say uh you know HTC is or Nokia's or even rim is but I mean so yeah that's the chips are the chips and they don't need to spend you're developing this stuff they just you know they can put it together put a body on it design it well and and put it out there so i think it's a it's just par for the course now that we should expect that everybody would Apple is going to be on a faster cycle Samsung is the only company to really buck that trend and it's doing quite well for them but I think everybody else they can't be need a marketing it clear that I gotta compete Samsung's doing quite well with that because a it's doing that on the high end but it's also just like spraying the market with everything at every price point right every size and everything like that so do you think that it's like the 920 had actually taken off and done better that they would spend more time on the catwalk its replacement like is it they basically put these things out there see if they catch fire if they don't like well let's not try and let this one burn for much lawyer less replace it yeah I have to believe that's the philosophy I mean if the 920 was a runaway hit and they were selling by the tens millions i doubt that they would be I mean look at the gs3 that it's been on a slow burn for the past year or well it will have been on a slow burn for a year by the time the gs4 comes around and I I don't know why by Nokia wouldn't like to be on the I'm sure that that's every OEMs dream is to be on that cycle right and and I guess you know depending on how things go for nokia it doesn't have a nokia dream was to have high-end phones on every single carrier in the US at least and right now it's just a TT so and speaking of 18 team we've got the EOS which is apparently going to be a quote-unquote true PureView handset for ATT is that right that's that's what our guy tom warren is saying and he knows his things I this actually makes me excited because I would love to I'm sure dr. manaan is really excited about that code name dear I I really love the 808 s camera when I reviewed it I mean it was like absolutely mind-blowing what you could do with the the video and the pictures and stuff like that so having that in a much more capable smartphone would be quite a treat I guess a game that everyone's been waiting for when we learned that PureView was coming to the Lumia life yeah well so one problem here and we knew this was going to happen nokia has already diluted the PureView brand right because they they called the camera on the 900 a pier view I think no the 920 late at night 2921 yeah right okay so they've all you know I don't know how they go back to like when this comes out did they say no really for real this time it's a pier view or like are they gonna come out with like another name for it or you know how are they going to reestablish the uniqueness of that device true plus P really like it yes here plus you pureview plus that's that's exactly what they need to do um I want to go back to to one thing you're saying a minute ago about like um like you know the chips are out there for for the via for the blackberries you guys remember a couple years ago when i know mike lazaridis was at d 9 or 78 or denied and he's like oh it you know what we can't do a blackberry 10 phone until they have dual core chips well here they hear you know we are like 18 months or 24 months later they missed an entire cycle on that when two quad-core now I mean come on well he also they also tried to say that blackberry 10 was delayed because LTE wasn't available with the chips that they wanted and things like that yeah they they were they were they were issuing a lot of blame to their component suppliers which frankly did not deserve the blame right uh I had nothing else to say about nokia i mean i hope we see this stuff at Mobile World Congress otherwise like I don't know how we're gonna see what World Congress we're going to see a ZTE releasing a six point two inch phone oh my god and and if we're lucky won't see the note 3 there that's gonna be Eva yeah that's gonna be fuh I mean that the only chance of any I mean there's the note 8.0 or whatever that we seen leaked a couple times it's a tablet wish that was a phone I really wish them is gonna be a phone I just hope that we see a beam to hear ya so Samsung can a follow-up last year's awesome mwc announcements yeah blockbuster but obviously Samsung does its own thing and we don't really expect to see anything huge there yeah uh pebble uh we reviewed it Neil I reviewed it he likes it it does i think i think we all want one yeah I mean yes and no I well I just don't think look I think the pebble is like a really exciting product and I'm really happy to see that that somebody has finally pushed the notion of a smartphone into like the mainstream head space or at least my logging nerd head space right that's my watch yes um so but like the thing with the pebble is like I'm happy with what it is now but uh you know in six months I anticipate being unhappy with you know it hasn't kept up with development and I really think that if Apple or Google decide they want to get into the space because they control the platform's directly they can do much more interesting things and so control the platforms and they also have gobs and gobs of leverage with with you know manufacturers and suppliers at their disposal right so I do one of those companies could you know on a whim turn around the most amazing SmartWatch anyone has ever seen yeah so like evel's great and you know the thing that I said in our best of CES thing was that you know sometimes you need to remove the bells so you can make a better whistle and they did that like they they made it work for the things that it does is best that they could and they didn't over shoot what they were trying to do and that'll come later hopefully and we've seen a lot of other smartwatches be way too ambitious so this is this is crazy but I'm going to draw this parallel anyways but that pebble is to the SmartWatch what the original iphone was to the smartphone in that to the original iphone when it was first released was really kind of a dumbed-down thing just like you were saying that pebble is there's there was a lot of features missing but the features that had worked very well and it was very accessible to a larger number of people than what had come previous we've seen a lot of smartwatches on the market chris has reviewed I think every single one of them are at least used every single one of them and all of them try to do a lot of things and they all kind of fail because either they're too cumbersome to use or their hardware doesn't live up to their expectations and things like that whereas the pebble is more or less if you know you're into so if your type of person that would actually think about wearing a SmartWatch you can probably use the pebble without any issues as far as getting it set up and working and things like that even though it doesn't have all of the features that you might want eventually if your SmartWatch runs Android you blew it then that is so true and I feel like I feel like the the end game for all these guys and I said this in my metawatch review last year i think that the end game the only way to really make this a successful industry is to target the very same clientele that wristwatches have been targeting for a century which is you know people who are looking for a fashion accessory and it's just that this happens to be a very smart fashion accessory in order to do that you need to take the core you take the guts of some like a pebble and make it available in you know literally 75 or 100 different styles you need be what be able to walk into the fossil store in your local mall and they have an entire case of smartwatches that all look completely different because people don't want a single wristwatch they want one that looks good to them and works for their style right and we're a long way from that so the the only way to make this a viable ecosystem is if the gatekeepers want there to be a viable ecosystem you know the pebble does okay with what's supported by bluetooth and what's supported by iOS and by Android but where's the motivation other than us clamoring for there to be an ecosystem for either these companies to improve that especially if they're working on their own watches right like why would Apple work to develop a vibrant multi manufacturer or SmartWatch ecosystem when they could just own the entire thing yeah this is true and and you know I think that Apple me I don't know what Apple is doing there I kind of want to believe that they intentionally moved the ipod nano away from that form factor to make room for a future product I've heard rumblings in fact theater I think we were exchanging emails about this I've heard rumblings that that third-party developers are seeing some like weirdness that there seemed like the you know the framework that the scaffolding for a really full featured and rich Bluetooth Low Energy uh you know ecosystem inside iOS 6 but it's not fully implemented and they think that parts are kind of being kept under wraps or they're only partially exposed for for exposure in say iOS 7 along with maybe the launch of something like an iWatch so that you know that that's certainly a possibility and an apple is probably the only cut well Google to they could both create I think a very commercially successful product like that that goes on the wrist but long-term I truly believe that if you're going to make a smart watch industry the only way to do it is to is to make it make it a wristwatch and and that's something that no one has done yet except for Casio and citizen who are of course traditional wristwatch players and citizen has the proximity which is a gorgeous watch and from a distance you can't tell you know close you can't tell it it's a Bluetooth watch and it's fatal flaw is that it can't give you alerts for messages which is insane and Cassio makes a Bluetooth 4.0 gchat but it also can't alert messages so I don't those are both Japanese companies I don't know if there's like some like I don't know if maybe like met message alerts are not a big deal there maybe and and so that's why they didn't think to include them but it's completely insane to me moving on awkward transition I want to talk about this the fact that if a carrier doesn't want you to its now technically illegal to unlock your phone if it's subsidized by carrier thanks to lapsing of a thing that library Congress did for from the DMCA like everything about this just like makes me sad yeah I you know I don't want to advocate crime but you all should unlock your phone so okay well this is a Vogon civil disobedience it's nice right across civil divorce rates I don't know why the DMCA is like part of this I mean it's a justification that like technically the carrier owns a phone because it's subsidized and so therefore they can say what it is it belongs what's what's so crazy about this story is that like it wasn't voted on it wasn't you know vetted by anybody it was you know a librarian of Congress that read the DMCA in a certain way interpreted it to mean this and then like enacted this and odd is that's how it got freed in the first place it was a librarian of Congress so I mean don't hate on librarians I'm just saying not librarians as a whole but this particular judgment was maybe a lapse or maybe he was heavily influenced by lobbying which is really what I kind of happened um and unfortunately all of us that are interested in the locking our phones are kind of getting the raw deal on it because of this interpretation I'm not unlocking my phone right now yeah I guess the idea is you can you can still you could theoretically by unlock phones easily and so they don't need to protect consumers anymore I mean kind of can you I'm easily wear this really burns you those I was actually talking about this with some friends of mine who are not like super into into phones and things like that and they're like well what do I care if I if I you know by phone from ATT I'm going to have to have service from ATT anyways and I'd have to pay a termination fee to switch to t-mobile and blah blah blah and I was like well that's all fine and dandy when you're at home but as soon as you travel into another country and you want to put a local sim card in you can't and then you're stuck paying your exorbitant roaming fees that are set by carriers that you might have never heard of um and that's where it really kind of gets you if you don't have the ability to unlock your phone no it's like so I mean you know i unlock phones all the time when it was illegal I'm gonna continue to do it now that it's illegal again see you in a reason bro yeah we just had this next week you know six six month period where like we had sanity and now it's gone and that makes me sad you know of all these uh these cell phone these notorious cell phone on lockers on death row you're gonna be a one-hour prasar prisons filled with cell phone buckers yeah and cell phone unlocking is a gateway drug it is something else jailbreaking be yeah well no jailbreaking still okay jailbreaking is cool yeah but I want the double entendre uh-oh we haven't talked oh my god we have there's a brand new version of iOS and like that's well well theoretically a point one update I wouldn't call that a brand new version let's just say I'm not seeing jony ive's influence yet in rest in fact you are that maybe works it's going the opposite direction because the one design thing that I've noticed is if you are using the music player on the lock screen the controls are different and they're aluminum eyes now so yes oh no oh there's there's one other design thing too if you go into passbook now there's there's a new card that's like hey this is passbook it's awesome hey good cuz I I suspect that no one was using passbook so they felt compelled to put a card in there so that people know what the heck past passbook is real isn't that something yeah it shows a card i use a passbook but it has it has a button in there that that takes you out to the app store with a view of like all the passbook enabled apps right and to be there I mean one thing in this starbucks and no I've actually used it quite a bit like I use it for starbucks i use it for United all use it for luft hansa um and walgreen cuz you fly Lufthansa all the time yeah good point when I'm flying between Chicago New York it's always a love times of flight ya know but but I am actually flying left ons at mwc excellence i'm looking forward to sampling their passbook invasion you know i don't know who i'm flying off the look you're flying over at harrahs applying our pants yeah okay oh yeah i do that i sent you that email oh right i know more about your itinerary than than you do exploited yeah Oh plane is dieter flying on what kind of kind of plane crisp probably an a330 would be my guess but I don't know that for a fact I'm out of 767 that's what I know all i know is this going to be uncomfortable and already cramped and unhappy yeah and it perhaps it'll be something to write about indeed uh-uh so Chris wrote up this really great breakdown of verizon sold a bunch of spectrum to ATT for a really exorbitant amount of money or and it's pending approval Chris broke down exactly what that means this week and it means a 18t might not be using its AWS spectrum right great yeah yeah I was really I mean so I'm in I'm in an 18 tlte market where they have a like very very little bandwidth and there are I think five or six major Americans nationwide where that's the case where they kind of got shafted in the 700 megahertz auction so they they had both 708 of us standing by but they'd only rolled out 700 and the the assumption for a long time now has been that they would eventually light up AWS and indeed all of AT&T LTE phones support both 708 of us well what has happened there have been two major incidents in the past year that have led everybody including myself to start to believe that AWS does not factor into 18 tease plans one the first thing that happened was the breakup not break up at the failure of the AT&T t-mobile merger and one of the terms of that failure was that 18t would give t-mobile a bunch of AWS spectrum which coincidentally has is one of the things that has really helped t-mobile firm up it's aight LTE plans between that and the metropcs purchase and then the other thing that happened was this deal where verizon is giving not giving selling a bunch of 700 megahertz spectrum 280 and AT&T is giving a bunch of AWS spectrum mostly in western markets to verizon so you know a couple years ago verizon was a hundred percent all in on 718 t was splitting its its prospects between seven hundred and eight of us and then now Verizon bought a bunch of AWS from spectrum code that that cable company consortium that we wrote about last year gave a little bit of that to tmobile to get the FCC off its back and now they're getting more from AT&T so they've kind of flip flopped verizon is is going to go with two different bands 18t at least in the short term is all in on 700 it looks like and then longer-term they'll be looking at the incentive auctions and and WCS which we wrote about ever report up on that it's linked in in the the report I wrote last week uh but yeah it's it's a very dramatic time to be following the spectrum story in the US but what do you imagine that I'm sorry imagine if we saw companies playing these kinds of shenanigans and doing this kind of horse trading with like national park land right that's what this is right like we were like oh yeah you guys go ahead and borrow the parks for a while that's cool you got to pay us some money for it but you know make sure you do some public good with that we guess you know because it seems nice and then they just are like make sure you pay us some money for it yeah they go well you want a little bit of redwood well I can give you some Yellowstone I don't know it's like come on so yeah I just regulate this stuff I have no idea is just in turn down up and regulate inside money yes exactly orangi AT&T up I would love to understand I would have loved to been a fly on the wall in some of these intro meetings in AT&T where they decided to not deal with AWS cuz I don't know what I don't know if they just wanted to concentrate on on 700 because of its superior building penetration and you know it's probably you complaining about chicago's ago basically most you know what it is you know what it is you know it is there in a board meeting and to talk about AWS and some was like AWS that smells like smells like t-mobile we hate them now and they just said no they just killed that's it hey that's entirely possible yeah this brings up the question for me at least so a verizon owned this spectrum and is in the 700 megahertz and now it's being sold to ATT does that mean that I'll be able to use an AT&T phone on Verizon at some point in the future you would like to think so but the answer is most definitely cuz it's illegal to unlock your phone well it's it's unlegal it's illegal to unlock your phone a and B these are different blocks so 700 is divided into five blocks a spectrum that span a fairly significant amount of bandwidth there's a b c d and e verizon occupies the nationwide c block but they also for god only knows what reason had a bunch of dormant B Block sitting around this morning according the B Block yeah so they could use it for the stupid National Park horse trading for the stupid Nashville parcours trading that's right and AT&T uh they used the B Block so it was a very convenient trade but I do think it is you know these carriers are treating this spectrum they're basically holding it hostage as an investment in many cases and not actually deploying it and using it the way it was meant to be used and that is one of my greatest frustrations as a writer in this industry is the fact that but not you know these guys aren't using every last drop of spectrum that they can well at the same time they're they're screening from the highest hill tops about the quote unquote spectrum much I don't know why I'm all sudden hot under the collar about the spectrum thing now because there's certainly been worse shenanigans but it's like it's like you know okay I'm nokia sold their headquarters and now they're renting it back and who's a bunch of companies do that and it's always a really bad sign right right well we're selling our spectrum and then renting it back i mean we could at least like still manage the building right nokia is still hiring the janitors and they run the building mm-hmm it's our spectrum man just like the Everglades everything so maybe it's in so swampy morass with filled with crocodiles alligators and lies and lies and pythons apparently an icon problem in the Everglades phones I can't work on more than one carrier yeah us spectrum is the Everglades that's I think we can just leave it at that hot sticky okay ah that friends is a virgin mobile show we want to thank you so much for watching if you want to watch us again next week you probably can if you want to leave a comment on the post you can and i believe the new plan is for it to be like one true post room also just leave it on the posterior watching out or with your listening to it go find eagle send us an email its mobile show at the verge calm i am back on dan is DC seifert with an e I Chris's e power Vlad is vlad savov we're all at merge and we'll see you guys next week probably we'll see Sita thanks guys