Gadgetory

hello welcome to the verge mobile show I am I'm dieter bohn we have a whole group of people whole huge group of people here so let's just run through everybody that's here it's gonna be amazing I'm glad savile i'm dan seifert i'm chris sigler and we have a special guest David Pierce well hello I'm Jay welcome to my horrendous intro cuz I was been been waiting to start for the past two minutes and then it kind of came and I wasn't ready at all and so I just want to point out that that at this point David Pierce's fame and infamy has has exceeded our own due to the premiere of his own program his own weekly program which I think we're all pretty excited about facial fame is a little strong I think it but don't be modest it's it's Fame it's just straight-up thing well say yeah the problem I have with cops shelf is that it's so professional it makes us look like the morons that we are and it's true the beauty of that is I have literally nothing to do with that that's like that's all these people behind me who I come down here and like swear into a camera for an hour and then suddenly it looks good actually actually disagree with DJ I think we're exactly its professional is David it's just that we spread it out among all four of us and we also I the next time but yes and the problem is that we also magnify or unprofessionalism by four times so it's true right so last week you guys did sony yeah and can you can you tell us what's coming next week there's a big secret uh well coming this week we have some of the same stuff we're going to talk about today actually the the HTC One and the Xperia Z and we're also going to talk with Tom warned about some of the cool stuff you saw Microsoft this week or last week I guess um that's gonna be fun I'm looking forward to it but I'm Way more excited about this if I'm being honest top shelf is whatever but this is way better actually as long as we're like talking about ourselves and we're just gonna continue doing it david has the New York office behind which is really exciting yes it's awesome you should all move to New York immediately just come hang out with me it's basically a 24-hour love fest over there I and I was talking to a to jour in one of our esteemed video guys who is saying that if only the new office had a shower he would literally never leave and he wasn't joking you will be playing around um okay I'm done talking about us we should talk about mobile stuff I think and I think most important news is from a couple of weeks ago I got my orange iphone i would agree so our last broadcast we unfortunately couldn't do video so dieter could not show off his orange iphone yeah so it's been bugging him for for two weeks now like has been weeks now how's the power button there is it yeah its needs it's a little bit janky no it didn't get fully cleaned out but although that it's great so but no okay the really big news is that we have reviews and I think there's two big reviews there's that HTC One and the Sony Xperia Z um let's start with the one I think because it's I think 02 is is selling pre-orders so it's available to some people now in Europe but HTC kind of just said that everybody else gonna have to wait a little bit longer than they had planned but that's you know they didn't have a firm release date anyway so it's like it's delayed from a thing that we didn't know about in the first place yeah they haven't said anything at all about the US yet right now nope shape that I'm aware of um Oh flats got one I'm the one but listen they did talk about it because he said a whole loaf and I don't know if it's a love affair I mean so the the thing to me was it's it's a really good phone like I'm personally kind of a sucker for hardware design and I kind of had this like visceral reaction to this phone where I just keep like touching it and I just want to use it for things and like it's it's not a very good TV remote yet I've forced myself to use it as my TV remote because I just like holding it on but the thing that was really interesting to me was HTC really pitched two things as like the future of HTC and the reason this phone is the best and one is the camera and one is sense and blinkfeed and stuff like that and actually think those are in some ways the the wii iker parts of the phone like they're fine the camera i think is good and does a lot of interesting things i'm actually curious what you guys think cuz there's been some interesting debate about what makes a good cell phone camera on but i think that that blinkfeed is sort of cool like this Flipboard thing on your home screen is nifty but I wound up moving it to a second home screen and going back to a normal home screen and I think the camera is fine but it's not nearly as good as I wanted it to be on ya I want to I want to get way into the camera because there was a ton of hope that HTC was finally gonna blow up the megapixel myth and we're going to stop this race to more and more megapixels we don't need 13 megapixel cameras or 16 megapixel cameras or whatever so they went down to four and they're ultrapixels everybody knows the story but like the proof is in the pictures and the pictures look pretty soft to me yeah i mean that's that's the thing I keep coming back to like it'sit's incredible in low light on that they're big pitch was you know we have these bigger pixels that take in more light at a time and that's true it takes in a ton of light and I I would take I took a bunch of pictures with the iphone 5 and then with the one and universally in every case the one photo was brighter and a lot of times the iphone 5 just wasn't usable because it was dark and the one would look totally passable and that's great and I'm psyched about that and in a lot of ways that's better than what any other camera out there offers but photos are just soft and like you you zoom in and you get this kind of moshe noise reduction anything that just doesn't look sharp and it to me kind of kills the vibe of the whole photo when nothing looks particularly clear and crisp in terms of low light performance would you take the one over a 920 uh there it's it's hit or miss i think it's they're both really really good is the point and I think the one to me is I think a little bit better because it's I don't know it just seemed to render colors a little better than the Lumia 920 but they're both really good and they're both leaps and bounds beyond any of their competitors so what's your take on the Zoe Zoe is its I it was another thing that I wanted to be cool and it is and like for action shots and stuff it's nifty and it's fun to like actually scrub back through a video and then be like that's the shot I wanted to get and I've always kind of wondered why you couldn't do that in just regular video footage and now you can and it works great but they have this whole sharing set up that I just don't think people are ever gonna really use and you have to remember to turn it off which is sort of annoying cuz i would take like landscape shots that you don't need as always for and i would take like 67 shots before i knew what i was doing and then going back through all those was kind of a pain well i'm gonna get this button the toggle Zoe's like all the way on the other side of the phone from the rest of the controls right so like you've got your camera you've got your video and then you got a toggle for Zoe like completely separate which seems insane to me yeah totally um and but again it's it's really cool I was playing soccer on Saturday and shooting with it then and being able to get like you get these action shots of like the moment somebody's foot hits the ball that you wouldn't get with a phone otherwise because there's always shutter lag and weirdness like that so it's a great thing to have but again i don't know if it's like this game-changing feature that HTC is kind of setting it up to be so i just because zoe of david talking about the zoe which was fun david good take a zoe your flag showing my talking about sign her longer I do love it wow you did way too excited about the show be okay hang on so I'm from gallery and is David and that's the other thing the gallery is now kind of customized so you've got Zoe's coming to life and just kind of doing little animations for you and there's David still talking about the Zoe he can't stop talking about it and all right well the display actually looks over it falls in the webcam but i agree with egg these are we things of fun they kind of like vines insofar as because they're limited uh you know I mean they're like three seconds we had this discussion with dieter second is it three seconds or four seconds man I don't know but the point is you get these really brief video clips and just like vines you kind of have to start coming up with creative ways to use them and the thing I noticed the first she's always that I took was I would press the capture button and then there's so we would capture me turning the phone around to review the photo which was fun no no but seriously like having this invitation of three or four seconds and having to do something fun with it and then coming up with something that is coherent and makes sense and that you can post or Twitter or wherever is actually quite satisfying so I agree it's a it's a gimmick but it's one of those gimmicks that you can definitely see you so fooling around with for quite a bit time definitely so I want to go back and talk about the low-light performance a little bit because you know Zoe's are cool and all but that's a novelty that's going to wear off but so it seems to me what happened here with the the ones camera is that HTC wanted to be the best in low light so it's doing these ultra pixels which are bigger pixels and supposed to let in more light but I don't think that at just the pixels alone were enough for HTC to get where it wanted to be as far as the low light capture so then it layered on all of this noise or diet and and that's what's ruining the sharpness on all of these photos and really kind of you know the worst thing in the world whereas if they had not if they had scaled back on the noise reduction it maybe not quite made it as impressive on the extreme low light end we probably would have had better pictures overall from the bright to the dark and whatever so can they have dynamically adjusted depending on lighting conditions what kind of all sure they do I'm sure as it raises up sent sensitivity the noise reduction gets greater but you know it seems to be too strong on all levels tita they'll do dynamic adjustments is just that they all kind of suck that's pretty much standard for all of the software but I mean that make it raises a really good point and the other thing is it's really disappointing at 4 megapixels to see the noise reducing for the smudging things up and getting the web sharpness and detail because you can forgive it with a 12 megapixel camera or 12 megapixels in air quotes because once you step it down to four or five megapixels the pictures look sharp where is with these guys it's essentially either you get a really high quality picture 4 megapixels or you screw and broadly speaking I do find that camera technology seems to kind of stagnated and either not advance or even take a step back because I remember maybe where we were had the advert for in the f-4s galaxy s2 galaxy s free those have some really excellent cameras like I'm actually convince the iPhone 5 has a better camera I don't know how you guys feel the galaxy s2 had a fantastic camera exactly yeah right so when we had those phones it was very natural that provision was always better image quality but now I think I feel like guys might be compromising on quality to make the phone spinner well as far as the iphone 5 goes i can say that comparative to the for the 4s in extreme low light conditions it's much better I've taken side-by-side photos with them and the defy the five I don't know if it's a software tweak or just a boosting of the sensor the five lets in a lot more light in extreme low light situations in normal situations it's it's you know negligible difference but as far as you know it breakthroughs in the technology the idea that I think HTC is on the right track as far as minimizing the pixels and increasing the pixel size I just think that you know they went a step too far to try and be the absolute best in low light and beat the blind 20 and maybe even get to where the 808 is as far as low-light capabilities are and they went way too far as with the noise reduction which is a little disappointing because I would have rather had you know good low-light photos that aren't like the best I've ever seen on the extremely low light spectrum of just like taking a picture with one candle but had better pictures all across the board yeah so one that's so are we basically saying the cameras like it's fine but it's still like it doesn't live up to what what we were hoping like it's not a swing and a Miss but it's it's like it it's like a ground rule double yeah I mean I think it's even like I would even go so far as to call it like an above average camera for where we are now I mean it at HCC made what's kind of a calculated bet that like most people are not going to look at the hundred percent view of their photos most people want to take pictures and put them on Instagram or Facebook and in that case like these photos mostly look fine like you're a 1024 x 1024 picture on Instagram so you're not zooming in and seeing the softness and the machinist and you are getting a brighter picture then you would get otherwise so like that's a totally worthy trade off but for people who really care about the quality of their photos whether you're on you know whether you're posting them to flickr or just saving them and wanting to use them it's it's definitely a step down from some of the best cameras out there and even like the 1x or the droid DNA both take good sharp pictures and and they got away from that in this case to do something else and i think it works in a lot of situations and doesn't work in others it is just to say that was a really complicated baseball analogy head i had to like think we threw this ground devils and what not that's about american glad it also just comes naturally to everybody else is easier when you're eating apple pie and watching baseball alright i'm kidding i'm tease way to help Doug on top so what's it like actually using blinkfeed I'm curious about this I you do anything under the skin I think everybody without exception just turned on this phone looks at bling feed and it was like okay how do I set my home screen to be not bling fee which is exactly what I did I did exactly the same thing as David actually want to talk about the display on this phone because again you just kind of getting pushed out by my terrible terrible webcam but it is great to stunning and I think this universal women among all of us that this might be once again the best display in mobile devices that crown was held by the HTC One X which chris reviewed and basically wrote an ode to how beautiful it is and this is still 4.7 inches but changes resolution from sounds way to 1080p and it's like it's beautiful one thing that concerned me in your review David was when you said that like you found that you had to like cup your hand over the display to see it in indirect light is that like a serious problem no I mean I think it's it's most phones are that way um but I it's funny every time I meet with a company that makes anything the screen which is constantly they talk about how it's better laminated and so the glare is down twenty eight percent and you'll see it and it's just not true like these things are still super reflective are going if you can eliminate this anymore than it is no you can't and and like I think it's just it this is the world we live in like if you're outside and it's super sunny you're going to have trouble seeing your phone unless it's so bright that you can like watch the battery died and this is not that and like it's no worse than any other phone we have for sure yeah go grab a visor prism and take it outside and come back and talk I don't want to do that I'm not doing okay you can actually really see the view dangos now where I'm showing it and and you just stupid like I said you call laminates it anymore like is he on weight loss the Glen what is on the girls Vlad we're going to happen is that at next year's HTC event they're gonna be like you're thinking about lamination all wrong like fundamentally rethought lemon this is ultra lamination where the glass is the display there was yeah I mean basically in order to step up lamination from here you have to do like magnetic levitation above the display you have to do a hologram it's like that but I mean David Davis point is true reflectivities reflectivity it's kind of meh Malaysia couldn't go so far to rectify these are closer displays like if we don't want well if we want really saturated color riche punchy exciting devices that when you walk to store grab your attention we have to deal with the reflectivity otherwise I keep talking about the old IBM thinkpad displays which your color accurate but they were muted and Matt and nobody was particularly excited orgasmic about them so nobody's making that choice nobody is offering this man this place other than actually screen protectors there's some really nice screen protectors that term this play mat yeah but scripture to the worst things ever me all of it so wait why aren't there matte screen displays now thinking about this like I I always every time I review a laptop that has a matte does he play I'm like yes Matt display is why because well i mean the glossy displays make your blacks look deep makes your address higher and everything so when it's in a store it's in on a display shelf every lesson or with all matte display these are plastic anyway right yeah yeah yeah I mean I guess if you have the ground glasses and sort the glass is reflected yeah and they're heavier and thicker too I guess so it's fair enough but let this reduce let's let's kind of talking about hardware because there's a bunch of people who scold us about into hardware centric and how the hardware respects of matts its proper use experience and the other the other and this is where i actually i think david and i might disagree because i feel like every new android phone is kind of like the old android phones i just can't build up any excitement whereas take it is falling in love so instead of listening to me bitch about about it let's hear what David is suicide well so I mean you just defeated my whole ex parte even I mean if hardware genuinely doesn't matter then this phone is not super exciting but I really believe hardware does matter on but on the software front i think what what HTC is done and they've talked about bringing a lot of their sense 5 stuff to some of their other phones in coming months and actually think in the most part that's a really good thing they've they've scaled sense back and there's still some messy stuff i remember when when i first got this phone dieter was like open the People app it's terrible on every sense device ever since history of the world and that's true it's still bad and confusing and kind of clunky but it's it's better and there are a lot of you know easier ways to get around and the hardware so good that like even if sense is overbearing and big and heavy it doesn't totally destroy the performance of the phone and like I feel like software's job in a case like this is just to kind of get out of the way and let Android do its thing and let apps work and let the hardware work and it does there's some stuff about sense I don't like but it's it's not nearly as much of a pain as it used to be like I would turn on the 1x and just hate the world and my life and everyone in it and I don't get that at all with this phone well I mean this is the story of sense for the past two years now it's where we keep saying it's it's okay but it's not as it's not as bad as it used to be but it's still sense right i mean that's essentially that's the same thing we said about sense for comparing it to sense 3.5 and 3.6 it's still sense but it's not as bad as it used to be but it's not as good as it could be so here's my take on on sense like it it was solving problems that we had when we were using you know three three-and-a-half inch screens and android 2.3 it fixed those problem it is it contested what I've I've right it fixed all those problems but like now you know those problems are have been taken care of in you know the core stock UI of Android Google fix those problems right so it was up two cents to like decide what problems it actually wants to fix now and um I mean it I suppose it's still fixing some like you know contact stuff when you know social integration in there they fixed they fixed the home screen with blinkfeed but like just just updating the UI so it's actually appropriate to a screen this size made a world of difference and you know also throwing in a wicked fast processor so it didn't get bogged down yeah I have to say this phone just fit was very nice and quick I don't think it's necessarily them to the processor I think we can give HD credit for their own software but it is very quick and responsive so I like that an HTC did do a couple of things actually really like so like this is the UH know if you can see it very well but this is the multi-tasking menu its tiled instead of having like the one list going up and so you get nine apps at a time and it just looks better um like the homelands kind of ugly that's a marked improvement over the one nonsense for yea which is like the weird 3d thing you had to scroll and yeah it was awful and then there's like really good lock screen notifications and you can swipe right into them and so like HTC's done some things but then like why did you change the icons like they look worse now and you didn't need to do that and that's kind of HTC's end game is like let's change a bunch of things you don't need to and i can't use dashclock widget on the lock screen because it's not android 4.2 yeah well that's the other problem is that this is probably never gonna get updates and i said like i said in the review i was like i want this phone and then somebody's like should you get this in the nexus 4 and I was like well I'd buy this but then ask me again when the nexus 4 gets key lime pie and this doesn't and I'm are being uncontrollably on top of this phone wanting up yeah no I mean the other thing to consider and it's something that we tend to forget is that the nexus 4 is dramatically cheaper I do believe yeah I'm not actually sure what the HTC One pricing is at the moment but I imagine it's priced the normal way where is the nexus poorest price to be awesome price to one margin ear yeah and move it does unless you're crazy glare a new triple over pay for it no I know dude whatever I the nexus 4 before you did so whatever 600 bucks right man no i know i only paid like and i paid like 400 or something I don't know I I had to I'm I to sign up for a month of t-mobile prepaid to buy it I couldn't buy it without an account which kind of bugged me wow I'm already sure the t mobile sales rep just like took you on that one it's possible somebody get some mixes for right now they will have a nexus 4 before I do as well I've never gotten a hold of one what I do have and it is my kick-ass Segway is an experience said Z this is nothing yeah and I'm gonna start talking about this just by showing you it's viewing angles exactly as I did with HTC One and this is see the screen is a screen on no that's my point it has turbulence and you know what I think how the comments to my review have been what are the view tangos matter man you just look at it directly I don't know why I'm any great in our commenters by a terrible as I making myself you know I'm very friendly presence but seriously you and angles do matter in phones like one thing we don't appreciate how often we turn our phones on I think when HD were doing the HTC One briefings they were saying that people activate their phones an average of stuff like 200 times a day 400 times it was some crazy crazy number in the hundreds I was like wait guys are you serious like what will sort of you know addicted freaks are you getting this data from and it's just what we do is like you check the weather you turn the phone on then you forget that you also wanted to know the time so you turn the phone on again you might do like seven times in quick succession so do that a bunch without realizing it and another thing will do without realizing is we look at the phone from side angles a ton like so much so so many times I have the phone in my desk stretch your hand out just turn it on and check for notifications or whatever I'm not tilting it so I'm looking directly at it I'm looking at it from the side and that's where these viewing angles that's where these issues come in and sony has just chronic problem with this and it just drives me crazy because the experience that everybody who looks at it just in pictures is like this is one of the most attractive most beautiful phones as a great design it stands out from anything else it doesn't copy your eight the iphone it does its own thing it's beautiful and in turn display on and lets it down but Vlad I thought that that the Xperia Z had Bravia Engine 2 how could Sony let us down like this yeah it's Bravia Engine x2 because it's like two times is awesome I think you're missing a branding name in there there's another one in there too good then oh there is is a reality engine yes the reality all right listen reality has bad viewing angles will be truly download boot there's also clear Audio plus whatever that is I don't know it just so cool be then who is worse on the branding of their features is it HTC or is it Sony oh man that is tough yeah sounds is pretty bad yeah samsung isn't even in this conversation yeah this boom sound is and this is camel case it's one word with camel case right uh but then you also have Beats Audio it's like what would the heck is going on here like boom sound would be it man that's this only way yeah and you go Oh trip aggressive if you think about it boom and beats I don't want my phone to hurt me well do you remember do you remember that HTC Rezound commercial from a while ago were the guys like walking on the street in the world really exploding around it like that that's what they want to happen you yeah I mean set wolf why we really really need you actually like get our heads together and come up with a ranking it because Samsung is pretty atrocious and nobody's LG is worst yeah howdy just takes what Samsung is whatever named it and then they like write lyrics for you but that's with Q that's all no no they run it through a translator and then they've run it back into like its original language so like things like smart stay become wise screen and like and it just happens over and over again with all these features that are just like the same feature but with a corny your name I don't know it's pretty hard to be putting s in front of every now and on the planet and calling it a samsung price stuff for the swalot Association wallet is still is a samsung wallet today they do look I'm I'm still waiting for the music app s hit I tell you what they were in terms of branding actually and I raised this point in the review Sony is really abusing the PlayStation brand and in a terrible way with this PlayStation mobile things Sony's just killing the PlayStation but like slowly with every new Playstation yes and and that that kills me it's heartbreaking to me seriously like that somebody actually commented on reddit saying the virtue of being anti Sony for so long and and is so wrong because myself and Eli are like the biggest sony fanboys I pretty much have to wrestle with ross miller to get into a Sony keynote right there's mud wrestling greco-roman style etc Andros Miller is a surprisingly powerful guy he's like he's like this so this out I mean most of us have grown up with Sony in the nineties and and just having that as a top-tier brand for well I I just want to say with regards to the experience see so many of us on staff are like we want to play with it we want to actually like this and check it and we're really curious about it and we've been waiting for this review and we've been anticipating it and we had high hopes word of course and like we love its industrial design but you know i'll let vlad continue because we totally derail this discussion of the review but you know it lets us down on so many levels and it's it's because we want it to succeed not because we hate sony or have a bad vibe against Sony or whatever yeah and like my mother is from them is that these are fixable issues like if Sony just fit fix a couple of things this phone could make tht one irrelevant as far as I'm concerned like the first thing I'll fix is give it a better screen give it a smaller screen because I mean this thing is 5 inches as well like that that merits saying it's just about as tall is the HTC One but it's wider and it's less economic because the sides is just so angular and straight edged which is you know kind of a sacrifice to do really attractive design okay kind of live with it but if you stick a really nice display like in the one and end the thing that a few people mentioned to me is that Sony is making some of the displays in the HTC One which is just inexcusable wow you're making the best display on phones with somebody else and not sticking it in your own phone but it's it's not branded mobile bravia to ya hagan some what you're saying fixed and display I'm assuming you're gonna get to fix a camera and then yes fix and software so basically fix all the things that make a phone what a phone is and then it would be sure build a different phone that's better and then it would be better ah it has the extra features it has the extra goodies well listen as far as I'm concerned I'm guessing the reason PlayStation mobile places certification haven't taken off is because Sony underestimated how much its licensing costs would be for those classic PlayStation games and nobody actually wanted to play ball with with Sony and just give those games away for free i don't know what the situation there is but you can't make it if you come do it justice just throw it away because playstation mobile at the moment is like this crappy-ass secondary app store for just completely disposable random games yeah there is no PlayStation action going on there it was such a huge opportunity that was just completely squandered by enemy leading up to the announcement of the original xperia play there was so much hype around the possibility of what a playstation phone could be and they have just completely blown it on every level including a certification yeah but what it will say is that's fixable either you do a lesson bishes version or you just get rid of it so you don't embarrass yourself in this fashion the rest the rest of the software is actually really nice I am a fan of Sony's Android skin because it's so light it's actually it might be the one that's closest to stock it just does a few to make some top and so I like this kid's got some funky animations but otherwise i agree i find it be one of the more tolerable customizations of android I don't think the responsiveness of this device is good enough it has another quad core processor exactly like the HTC One but whereas the one feels futuristically fast and smooth and all those good things this is not as responsive it's not as far so so many needs to sort that out like data says okay yeah to fix software and the camera can be so easy to fix like don't give me a 13-megapixel monstrosity with supposedly HD are built into the sensor that's an exmor r no it's an Exmor RS stats for RS i'm sorry the front facing camera is x more oh that's that's the old stuff so with more else now is it now with an S which like the iphone 4s is almost indistinguishable from the known as version but yeah i think you before i'm just waiting for them to call the camera and alpha mount just go all the way yeah i mean this is the other thing saudi makes awesome displays he doesn't have one here Sony makes awesome cameras and sensors because every also nickel sensor you can think of is made by sony basically yes Chris me Alice only I'm not disputing that there's nothing wrong with that if this if this show turns into me and damn debating canon vs nikon i'm not gonna allow it to happen friend just finally this this phone is waterproof well they call it water resistant but you can take it down to a depth of 1 meter for as long as 30 minutes and you can take it in the show which oh that's that's what I want to know that's what I don't know about this phone is like does that actually make a meaningful difference in like how you use the phone or like what you do with it or where you take it or like or is it just it like oh if I get drunk and drop in the toilet like it maybe won't be a huge problem if you know a real baby no I mean the like we love about it but it wouldn't be any problem I you literally could drop it I don't know I dropped my eyes in a urinal once and I thought I thought long and hard about whether to retrieve it believe me like it was it was a serious debate whether to leave that thing in the urinal you did yes the philosophical aspect of that is difficult so the thing with the thing with the waterproofing is that it's it can like you know withstand the water exposure but it's not a rugged phone so it's not like I think the average user is still going to probably want to put a case on this thing anyways because class but they're gonna drop it in all chatter I've dropped it twice maybe three times but like I'm serious like this is cases on things because they're afraid it's going to shatter this is their baby soft clothes like I'm not joking this is retail person and the way it's being put together is that the side parts wrap around the glass so both on the front in the back it just feels really robust like it kind of like when I hold this and use it and drop it because it's awkward to hold it feels like like any plastic fold in terms of durability like good plastic phones not like a pretty terrible one so I've got no complaints about it I think I feel like this is one of the most rugged flagship Android phones around and this is what drives me nuts like this waterproofing stuff again it's a novelty that were off but it's just so much fun and if you actually want a high quality phone you can literally take with you to the beach without worrying this is it you know I've done that I've taken a Galaxy Nexus to the beach it's like stick it in the bag stick it in the bag inside another bag so Sam doesn't get in it it's a pain man I know it's a first-world problem but it's pain i will save let that Europe your header beat rockin block was one of the best things that's ever appeared on the site yes that's inspiration he's been asking me to be more creative it's pretty amazing yeah so experience that is like it just it overall it feels like it's like okay which is what I expect from LG and then why are you buying into the communism of Zed dieter I don't understand why nothing this look it's easier to say than Z easier to understand exactly what I mean I mean what if I were you know what if I were like saying a sentence and you know I was talking about the sea maybe you thought you know the xperia c right z yeah but you realize that this is a gateway drug before long you can be talking and like kilometers and using the metric system and yeah measuring your weight in stone driving on the wrong side of the road way now you're just getting your nationalities mixed up I doesn't work at all listen we're in America you can do what we want you can t thorium mega stuffs anymore though right I've got yes my world came to an end this weekend of those we have said does anybody have anything else I want to say about the Z or Z whatever I still whatever I still want to use one regardless of lads review so uh AT&T has announced the Z right am I crazy or did that happen haha I want to say that it was rumored or likely to come but I don't think if there's been an official announcer beak razy though okay hey Jane Sony have like they've been friends for years now so it makes total sense that that would be the case yeah yeah I'm just wondering you know in the US how these phones are gonna be positioned yeah I worry about Sony because I feel like they really put their heart and soul into the Xperia Z and and put what they perceive to be the best possible product they could on the market yes it's going to do nothing compared to the one and the galaxy s4 I mean nothing it's gonna be a drop in the bucket right just just to raise a couple of extra points at the moment it's already on sale here in the UK and I expect across Europe I haven't checked somebody needs to send me out on flights with like Milan and Geneva in places like that just make sure this is to go to the stars season store shelves like check the sony store yeah people who preordered it and i think there's some others they get these mdr1 bluetooth headphones as well which are like 399 pounds or something and these are really good headphones so that's a nice bonus and the box is really barren which I want to congratulate Sony for just keeping a really minimal box there's a USB cable and then then there's a these headphones which also really nice like it's a headset it's I don't know XP something 300 it's got a pretty horrible name so they got a really nice headset and just a charger in the box and everything else is recyclable paper so I feel like Sony gets a ton of things right with this phone and then gets like diese says some of the core crux issues badly wrong Jesse a ton of things right yes yeah it gives a ton of things on the side right and then gets the main things wrong and that's the really frustrating part so Chris brought this up it's a Spectre thats hanging over this entire conversation which is where what almost exactly 48 hours away from the announced of the what could be a galaxy s4 yep yes yeah I believe we were 50 hours away to be 50 hours away ok whatever um 49 48 minutes thank you i hate you all so we saw a leak we saw a video leak and like so now we do need to be a little bit careful because we've seen we saw leaks of the s3 that turned out to just be like dummy boxes and not at the actual phone um but if these pan out like it looks exactly like the galaxy s3 but okay here's my thing though is that why would they change it like this phone has been a giant smashing success they have taken over android we've we've seeded Android to Samsung I'll tell you what on that all these issues with it but why would they change it it were also I'll tell you why they change it because we people buy a new phone they want it to look new and if it looks exactly like their old phone like I mean that's a Apple didn't have too much of an issue going from the 4 4 s designed to the five but at the same time like why why why upgrade my phone if it looks exactly the same no I don't think Samsung is after people who bought GS threes I think Samsung is after people who bought galaxy s tues or don't own a smartphone I think Samsung is like Apple plays to this crowd who buys a new phone every year and Samsung is like you have that apple will take the billion people who don't have that and what I think it's to mix a guy I do think that Samsung you know I mean of course Samsung has a long and storied reputation of borrowing from Apple's playbook I think that to a certain extent this is a continuation of that they're saying hey we can play the 4s 5s game you can we can we can make a phone that's basically a revised gs3 and get away with it because we are Samsung and and so it wouldn't surprise me at all if if the phone that we see on Thursday does look like the gs3y little boy I'm sorry but just briefly to clarify because there's be kind of a cold war happening between one tipster / leaks there in the forum in China who evidently does have a new Samsung device in his hand and it's sensing itself trying to drop a little teasers in the hints so Samsung's teaser today which are just a picture kind of shadowy with a little light cast on it is basically the galaxy s3 I can't you overlay a picture on top of it of the galaxy s3 in it that's what it is the only thing that's missing is the aps and front-facing camera and all those senses which sounds gonna have bone conduction man no your piece needed right so that'll be wild that's forgot yes you're in the galaxy s3 with bone conduction don't that gives us the possibility of the galaxy s4 being essentially unchanged from the galaxy s free design and just saying straight up this design is great we're gonna while you guys with something else and another piece of evidence that that is going to happen is the fact that the note 8 was literally just announced two weeks ago with the same ID and two to go just two weeks before changing ID would be very strange right well I mean there's not there's nothing suggesting that Samsung is going to change his eyes because the leaks that the person who has the phone his phone is evidently a or at least looks to be a 5-inch device it's bigger it has a smaller bezel rounder display but it's actually look and design is exactly it's completely consistent with the latest galaxy devices and with the galaxy s3 so either one where do you go with Samsung's teaser or with Lisa's images and video we're still looking at the same time it's just a matter of science I just find that I mean I know that we were not super enthused about the s3 and it turned out to take the world by storm just well I wouldn't say that I think at the time when Vlad reviewed the s3 originally you got the highest score of any Android phone that we'd ever reviewed yeah i'm in a minute the announced but i like like the phone itself just doesn't like inspire a ton of passion like it's it's like it's just a really good phone but and i think that the s4 is going it again just be really good fun i think that like my hesitancy to talk about it is like or like get excited about it is I just don't think that their industrial design is all that great it just doesn't look awesome it looks oh hey you know it's a samsung and that work it doesn't feel awesome and you're in your hand either well there's yes it works maybe I ergonomically but like the materials or not it doesn't feel like it has a craftsmanship that other devices have especially like when we just talked about the one yeah and at the end of the day you know the s3 was the phone that I used at CES right because it had a replaceable battery and it like it filled the slots that I needed for a phone that you know does the job yeah i think that the s4 is going to be another android phone that does the job and it's gonna you know Sam phones going to market the hell out of it it's going to sell fine but it's not going to I don't for me I don't think it inspired to cut a passion but I think I'm got a really good metaphor for this because I shared easiest feelings on this and it's a if you think about space travel oh there's no there's no friction in space but every time we have sci-fi movies and you know graphic novels and art about space travel what do we get we get these really sharp looking spaceships which is just like needle-like like a Concorde and looks so beautiful and they're firing flames out of the back even though there are more efficient forms of getting traction and locomotion and all these things so the samsung phone is like this chunky shapeless mess that just gets from point A to B edge of space travel well that there is actually friction in space I'm gonna challenge your thesis here uh it's yes watch no not much but in interstellar space there is a certain I mean you can go look at the data coming back from the Voyager spaceships right now and see that there is in fact you know there are molecules in space fair enough III don't I don't claim to know much more beyond sci-fi movies but does what that was my point like Sony HTC those guys are the ones that make the really pretty spaceships which actually break down and someone that just gets you from point A to B and does really good marketing so so the s4 is is what it's it's a fire fire casa spaceship and yeah yeah that would be a really good one because the was a movie firefly serenity that's what it was cold the only bad thing about our movie is that they use papyrus as the font as a side face on the title hey don't do that man they had their reasons I mean did you watch the show did you watch I haven't watched it show I've only well man don't even can I kick you off this podcast yeah you should then I could go and actually catch up with it I just watched to both series right now so okay I is there anything else to say I mean what else we're expecting maybe I tracking I guess I feel like yeah it's it's going to be you know the the design of it's probably not going to throw a lot space than what we've seen so far we're not going to be in love with the additional design but as far as software goes it's going to have like everything in the kitchen sink I just I hope that when they offered a software that it's not like the like with the s3 it was just like exhausted here's another crazy feature here's another crazy feature boom boom boom boom boom and there was no like coherency to any of it if there's like I want you to be able to share your photos right I just want smart stay too as long as they they bring a new smart stay to the table I'm a happy camper which actually they're going to write that's one of the rumored features is they have being with scroll with your eyeballs which is making the last thing that I think of all these features and like the first thing I do to extend my battery life is turn off all of these features so it's like and maybe maybe they can blow me away with some revolutionary battery technology that allows me to keep all of these whiz-bang features on and still get good battery life I just want to point out squirting with you I Bose is a great way to like break whatever muscles control your eyeballs like it's so wrong think about it every time you scroll whether by touch or by mouse scroll way whatever you pull the page up and your eyes look immediately down at the thing you just pulled up to see what it is right whereas in order to scroll with your eyeballs you have to look at a given point and pull it up with your eyes and then like you don't know exactly how it's gonna what I think think they could build in a lag there yeah no I think I think the idea was that it'll scroll automatically when it figures out you're down at the bottom of the page so you just like keep reading those last three lines and they are you jogging with you which would be cool but I feel like all of these features like watching Samsung's ads over the last however many months since gs3 came out has been really interesting because I feel like all Samsung does is say how many things can we have that nobody else has so that we can make ads about them so people are like huh that's cool and then they go into a verizon store and they're like I want that galaxy phone and it's like that seems like it's the ball game and that's how Samsung one so much is they like I remember it used to be you would either buy an iphone or a droid rachel is either that was that was the game and that has completely changed you now either by an iphone or you buy a galaxy like that people think and Samsung who did that by saying like all they advertised was NFC because everybody who had an iphone was like I want that that's cool and then they took off and so they've advertise all these features the they just they have and they don't spend it on the time talking about the look and feel of the phone because that doesn't play on a commercial they are like here's the thing that our phone does that nobody else's does and then people buy it and like that works and it's kind of smart and it sucks for us as people who like care and pay attention to get to try a lot of these but it's kind of a smart move it seems like well and the features don't even need to work right like nobody actually knows NFC we know that because they don't know it I just think those crazy photo sharing features we heard like everybody in the room is supposed to only galaxy s3 and then you hit shared it beams the photo the photo to all your friends in the room a Wi-Fi direct just the most ridiculous but like that's one of those things that it's like oh it looks really cool to commercial and you never actually use it really all right well we'll find out on Thursday um oh do you want to talk about the TV Odyssey I do dia TV Odyssey do you want to say anything about it should we just move I review okay uh you know it's like yet another windows phone for verizon that was kind of the whole issue that we had when when kind of constructing this review was that verizon's already got the HTC 8x which is a higher-end Windows Phone that I think they're pricing it like a hundred bucks now and they've got the lumia 822 which is taking care of their low to mid-range but you can get for free now and now there's this Samsung which is not as good as either of those and it's priced at 50 bucks so uh it's it's it this is definitely an example of Samsung just you know pumping out another phone out of its like massive factory of continuous phones to fill a carrier's request that didn't feel like there was any uh any innovation or input here on on Samsungs end so wha wha wha haha ok we go we have other Windows Phone rumors the Lumia 928 on the ride man well that's it so more exclusive the toaster that's koo pitchman scooper Rooney I just said that it's called Tommy ice cream in Tom two scoops born wow that's pretty good aluminum body xenon flash a little bit thinner and lighter than the night it sounds like I'm making awesome android phone yeah I say about flash weeks be excited because you never see that anymore except on old nokia so can somebody explain verizon strategy here to me i don't get it at all like verizon continues to say we want your phone your best phone but kind of a little worse and we want you to change these four things so that nobody will buy it and we want to wait six months to put it right you know like really why verizon seems like they have the clout to do whatever the hell they want like if they ask for the 920 i'm sure they get the 920 so what are they doing well they wanted to be exclusive only on verizon that matters but it is this what swiss about it this sounds like a bit well it's yeah that's worse is that it's coming out later basic it's thicker cuz it's it's incremental against the 920 and presumably it's not going to show up with new version of Windows Phone it'll ship with some service release of Windows Phone 8 which is is fine i guess if you're into that sort of thing no i think it's going to be a very very good blend of this one it'll be the best windows phone on the market it'll be on verizon and a verizon won't do what's necessary to you know sell and market it yeah yeah classic Verizon Verizon is reason reisen is is of all the carriers in the world reisen is definitely the most possessive about brands and about building its own image as the the purveyor of the hardware you know what I mean even more so than AT&T which itself is a very meddling carrier obviously but verizon is really concerned about brands right I mean they created and they own the droid brand this this goes back four years I mean the original stories of verizon rejected the iPhone because Apple wouldn't let Verizon Verizon it up I mean which is so this is this is definitely of verizon's reason to be yep okay I'm excited to see an aluminum nokia phone though because i love Nokia's hardware and their build quality and their what they've done with the polycarbonate so very excited to see what the company does with aluminum I'm less stoked about that because I think I mean I know key never gave me the one thing I wanted which was an N 9 running in cyan yes running Windows Phone 8 and and if you go back to the n8 which I think correctly wrong was the last Luminum phone they made no there was the e7 came out after it yeah oh yeah yeah good point yeah but yeah sure so but if you look at those two phones were of the same ID though right they they yeah yeah birds of a feather they they did not inspire me in the same way that the n9 and the Lumia 800 did from an ID perspective well I mean what but when the m9 in the 800 came out like nobody was doing that with polycarbonate right like like that was like when you when we first saw that and and people were saying it's like plastic we're like well it's not really plastic because if you go look at another plastic phone it doesn't look anything like another pie or feel anything like another plastic foam so they've been doing that for a couple of years so maybe you know they can apply that type of manufacturing technique to aluminum which would be pretty cool why I think what really set apart their plastic phones which let's just be very blunt about it that's what they are they're plastic I think would set them apart was the fact that they're they're built using a unibody approach like that you know the the 920 900 800 the a9 there they're kind of like milled from a single block of plastic as far as I can tell and that's what really made them what they were made them how they felt and I'm sure that they'll be able to apply some of those techniques to aluminum I mean other companies certainly have I don't know i I just I feel like yeah I think Tom Warren mentioned on our last show from mwc that he felt like the the seventh was it the 720 was kind of like the ultimate execution of that yeah I'm not sure that I agree I think that they could have continued along that path for a while yet it gave them a lot of flexibility in terms of coloration and maybe they'll continue doing that with aluminum they can anodized it certainly at the way peter has his iphone but we'll see well clean they're just afraid unless service phone yeah the surface phone yep as I judging an aluminum cyan nokia would be pretty amazing in my opinion just so uh ass or anything else going to talk about nokia i mean i guess i guess we could this this ridiculous pressure they're trying to put on instagram to instead with love knows actually I don't want to talk about that just surprise me crazy I mean I think that's the Nokia trying to own the the whole movement like and brand itself and put its own branding on it yeah yeah but I mean this is just it's kind of sad to be honest it's really sad it's like looking at the somebody with a physical disability struggling along and my card I just you know you it's not something you want to watch little what's so what's the company also nokia and microsoft both of them already struggling to get apps and until they do what's the point in discussing this like it just grown increasingly desperate so you know what's really sad about this is that Microsoft is a major investor in facebook and yeah maybe they don't appear to be able to get instagram on Windows Phone but but uh blackberries getting it though well kind of kinda yeah almost the backdoor way of getting it that you can come up with yeah right so so with with Windows Phone how much do you guys think Microsoft and or Nokia would have to pay facebook to get them to port Instagram TV spend it effin as their strategy I thought Microsoft one of those companies is already building an instagram app yeah i think they're just gonna build it and then be like listen we've already built this give us an email interview guys know but but if I'm facebook then I say well you know is it bill to our standards do we want to license your name let me let me just say this facebook's mobile app standards pretty low for you facebook for android and facebook for iOS the app built in-house fair enough I don't really think Facebook cares as far as Stander's come varna hang on so we've gone an hour which is good for us we usually been short lately but it's running over so David Pierce has to run I don't want to keep a mirror if he's got other more important things to do than Yammer on with us do I have to go build Instagram for windows phone I'll tell you all about it well thanks for being on David we agree thank you David I put it up with our super professional broadcast any time I guess all right so now it's a quote broke-ass there we go all right on talk smack MIDI we've gotten rid of the the 5th Corps the let's see what's what it in video call their two companion or confession which actually runs most of the show yeah because if the one that's used those that okay we can't roll out without talking about t-mobile and MetroPCS their murder has been approved by the FCC they still have got a few more steps to go but this is this is basically like this is going to happen yeah yeah I mean there's no major roadblocks like I think with the biggest comparison that we have always to compare this type of merger to is with 1880s attempt to purchase t-mobile a couple years ago and how that was famously stopped in its tracks by pressure from both the DOJ and the FCC and so far for the metro pcs and t-mobile deal the Department of Justice back down and a couple of weeks ago said it's not going to pursue any more investigation and just today the FCC said that it's gotten the green light so I mean there's a little bit of things left i think the FTC technically has two degree light it and the handshakes and papers have to be signed but for all intents and purposes it feels like this is this is a done deal and in terms of size difference i feel like this is a closer arrangement to verizon's acquisition of alltel then yeah 18 tease attempted acquisition of t-mobile and i think that the fact that the FCC green let this was so little opposition Shin speaks to that and and this recognition that even as a combined company there they're not really that there's no threat of them creating a anti and antitrust situation it's it's not not going to be an issue and I think this is going to be it's a big win for tmobile and I think that you know it's really funny me if you look back 18 or even 12 months t-mobile really looked desperate and like they were in very very bad shape for a variety of reasons they didn't have the spectrum they needed Deutsche Telekom seemed desperate to shed them and and it wasn't clear how they were going to really carry on and and now i think they are looking in many ways like the most competitive major carrier in the US this this is a huge spectrum acquisition for them they're going to pretty rapidly deploy LTE in 2013 they've already got HSPA 42 and in a lot of if not most major markets in the u.s. at this point and they're they're doing some really creative things with subsidies and prepaid versus postpaid that i think are going to end up being Bell what Bell weathers for the entire industry I think that in the long term you can see ATT and Verizon go the same way oh wow Verizon Verizon how do Olsen someday I I'm not saying this is 2013 thing but I think that I've been saying for five years that the subsidy model is not sustainable I mean I don't want to say that that I I informed t-mobile on this decision but I inform t-mobile on this is chris Christie uses clairvoyance and his Jedi mind powers to predict five years ago the Fallen Jedi mind-meld but it's been it's been eating that the subsidy model has been eating itself alive for years now and it's going to continue to do so and I think that t-mobile has really done some pretty ballsy things to try to break out of that and and I mean I you know hats off I think that they've they've put themselves in a position where they aren't being particularly offensive to customers who are trying to buy phones affordably and yet they still gotten out of that model so that's that's good that's healthy and I think that you know it's it's looking a lot better than signing up for two-year contract and getting a heavily subsidized phone every two years Curtis I have to just change you quickly on the point about the subsidy of malobi and sustainable mean it is what 18teen verizon practice and those guys just keep rolling in massive profits every quarter yeah but it's like have you seen the movie Ferris no no too fast in somebody's gonna get furious on the crab with that thought that's how that works I'll rebut that Vlad because actually if you look at the major carriers 18 teens verizon's last fourth-quarter results both of them attributed a big loss to Sky's Christmas making his google face right now like I'm sorry to interrupt but he's just he's concentrating so hard it's yeah I'm googling he's actually this actually googling but it I mean they actually are on the books saying that subsidies are causing you know 18t lost a lot of money last corner for a couple of reasons but they specifically mention the subsidies that they had to pay out because of all the smartphones that they sold and as the iteration and the pace of development has greatly accelerated smartphones over the past couple of years people want the new smartphones faster and they want them more often and that's where this the subsidy model really starts to fall apart so what I want Chris is finishing up his google job margin call margin call Martin calls the movie I've never heard of them but let's quickly mention that the blackberry z10 got announced by AT&T for 1 99 99 which presumably doesn't have too much of a subsidy on it everyone was like that's a terrible price it's probably got some kind of subsea it also deals or doesn't have a chance in hell but yes elevate motivated selling it subsidy free in the US for what is it 629 now I think yeah 689 I think there was they dropped the price today if we was 999 yeah but so uh so anyway that that the the point I was trying to make about margin call is that like that you know this this hedge fund business looks like it's going really well but one of their risk assessment guys notices that there's some like trend happening that nobody else sees that the business is about to collapse entirely I'll stop there because I don't want to spoil it for everybody but yeah oh girl what happened to the US economy it was the dramatization you know there's no spoiler it's like spoiler alert Bill Clinton won in 1992 I mean come on just now this is I'm talking about a movie I'm not you guys know boiler room I'm not talking about your oh I like that movie boiler room is one my favorite movies boiler room is a top five movie for it and it really is other race cars and boiler room there's no yes exit there are there are race cars in boiler room because all the all the guys working at the firm have like Ferraris and stuff but anyway so so the point I was trying to make is that you can you can tell there's just a malaise in the in the industry because customers and carriers have become so heavily dependent on the concept of having the concept of not paying full price for the for the hardware that they're owning it's unhealthy especially if the rate people are dropping their phones then what I don't know it's just if it's bad and the fact that t-mobile's trying to break out of that I think is extremely healthy for the industry and for their consumers and we've heard AT&T say we've heard out of his Randall Stephenson or Ralph de l'abbaye I think with Stevenson said just very recently that that they were looking at the subsidy model and re-evaluating how that's going to play out in the coming year so it's definitely on their minds they're looking at what t-mobile is doing right I think they're going to look and see how well it's working for tmobile in it right formulate their plans but well listen as an outsider I'm still getting over the fact that t-mobile was nearly lost into the ATT giant globe of white and blue paint evil yeah so I'm happy that that carries to exists I'm delighted to hear that now they're stepping up and actually acquiring new spectrum and you know new opportunities and you know since chris said it is basically fact that verizon a TD following in his footsteps and you guys are going to get a better deal i think out of it I mean if everybody follows t-mobile footsteps US UK europe etc that would be brilliant look I'm basically the nastradamus of the phone industry I'm just gonna be out with that I mean you say it as a joke but when the when eventually the freaking amazon / kindle phone comes out yeah oh yeah doesn't doesn't that mean you'll be right about twenty percent of the time or something Chris now it means I'll be right a hundred scent of the time as usual just like I'm right about nikon over canon oh wait what NASA night are you a choice wait Jory Chris I don't even enjoy dropping your eleven hundred dollars on a cool pics a man and all you're gonna it's gonna be the best point shoot I've ever owned whatever man nikon yeah plus Sony right here that's right foot forget about plus it's it's it's what about so many thank you you guys are having lost centuries conversation new converse Canon it's about so I'm sorry when you say when you say it's about Sony you mean it's about nikon since they're using so no interest no I mean it's about Sony's mirrorless cameras and I mean it's about the rx1 yeah right down next ya know the arcs one is an amazing phenomenal camera and that's what I'm talking about like any and you know what else I'm just gonna say it openly to Sony so it hears me I would actually pay a higher price than any other smartphone if they fix all the things i mentioned i need to be fixed with experience that i would pay just because it's so any engine because that trust them but they don't trust themselves to charge the premiums that leaves you and they I don't know hey I'm gonna start rental sony needs the market helped so many need some love itself yes not your fault it's not your fault it's not your fault sony it's not your fault diggin sorry that's that's our little show for that we thank you so much everybody for listening Sony's Matt Damon yes thanks especially to David Pierce for coming on if you want to follow him and you should he's pure season on Twitter at Pierce David at companion core reversing his name makes it pretty suggestive anyway I'm a backline on Twitter flats last ayah dan is DC seifert chris is Z power we are all at verge and if you want to talk to us you can you can leave a comment on this post you can go talk to us in the forums you can message us on Twitter and we'll see you guys maybe next week probably thanks finalized