Gadgetory

fittings mobile accomplishes welcome to the Virgin Mobile show it is episode 45 from week of April 29th 2013 but you don't really care about the date and the episode number what you care about is who's here I am beater bomb i'm dan seifert i'm chris sigler i'm david pierce hey we've got David Pierce here uh he's here to talk about peanut butter and banana sandwiches that's true actually uh I had one of those yesterday by the way and it was phenomenal it's the best thing ever well no it's only phenomenal if you put money on it right yeah no no no it's the mix of the brittle crunchy and correctly you gotta put Nutella on you're both wrong the way you do a proper peanut butter and banana sandwich is with peanut butter and banana hence the name and you have to use the right peanut butter i'm using a an artisanal peanut butter from new york city may I add it's from New York City it's from I think it's just called the peanut butter company right that sounds like a New York kind of company yeah so we invented peanut butter don't ask questions right it's got like cane sugar in it in all this garbage listen uh if it's not the way Elvis didn't make it's not the way I'll just made it I don't care mash the bananas add bacon grill it up grilled would be good I'm not gonna lie uh so I was just thinking about something you know how we used to for a long time this actually predates the the mobile show this is one we were audio only we had the the variations of the number three well since we added Dan we never like got it thought about yeah we never thought about doing variations of four so this opens us up to an entire entirely new dictionary basically that we can probably carry for months on end yeah we we just kind of just gave up trying to come up with different variations yeah we exhausted the supply of synonyms for three but now we have synonyms for four right can they go quartet and not that's all I've got quote oh you're just scratching the surface so I can do this one time and then i have to leave forever so we had a whole lot of actual real genuine mobile news this week a whole lot happened and we are here to talk about it and i think the the biggest thing that happened is we had a review of the galaxy s4 david is not at all tired of talking about Alex ps4 not even a little bit have you got one with you is there I do it's right here it's also I like to play the fun game called which one is the galaxy s4 back on and I thing is everybody always loses matters right you're right you still lose well it via you know that the dead giveaway is the number of sensors around the ear piece right right is the gs4 as an additional sensor right because otherwise how would you wave your hand over your phone to tell it to do things right no the gesture where you like wave to like move and I come on between home screens like this thing like that is the like if you had to boil down samsung to a microcosm like that is it like that that tells you everything you need to know about what Samsung well yeah I like to imagine Samsung has like the same sort of twenty percent time thing that Google does but then they just take everything and they're like yes ship it question with the gesture thing is Ken intelligence between a slap and the back of the hand like you give if you give the phone the back of the hand gesture does it do something different no George ich8m it should yeah should say thank you may I have another um no unfortunately it doesn't and I kind of wish it wouldn't so you can't get to the point where like you feel cool and you can just be like super subtle with the gestures as you go over it to make it do stuff and that's like when you're a real power user of the gs4 but there are so many other gestures they could have done like they could have done this to force close apps you know the thank you that thing that would have been great okay so galaxy s4 basically like hopefully if you're watching this you have read the amazing review and the gist of it is and this is also top shelf for quite a while just if it is like it's a really really really really good found that nobody really hears all that interested in yeah I think that's there I mean and it's it's been really interesting to see all the the feedback to this review because I think like a lot of people uh we have this great benefit of being able to use all these phones and in some sense like if you've never used a phone like the HTC One the galaxies cores gonna feel fine because you know six months ago or two years ago when you bought your last phone like this is just what phones felt like in a lot of ways it still is but now like we've sort of seen the light and like once you once you play with these better design phones like the Lumia 920 or the HTC One then suddenly this just doesn't feel as good anymore even though for most people it's probably what they're used to I don't know quite what to do about that it's like just go play with this other phone I promise it's better yeah so I want to want to tell a little story so HTC releases a really well designed one phone two pretty good reviews they managed to get it out the door just in front of samsung's new phone samsung its phone comes out the reviews come out a little bit later than the the one reviews and people like this is a really good phone it doesn't feel about that great of the hand and then Samsung proceeds to completely obliterate HTC that was the story of 2012 and I feel like we could just like copy and paste that on to what's going on with in 2013 like it like like the only thing that changes is you take the X off of the one for HTC and you switch the 304 on the galaxy s I don't know if I'm convinced that that's true i think you're probably right dieter and and i certainly would have been on board with that theory a couple weeks ago but i was in an AT&T store over the weekend and i was shocked dino dan you right back up why were you in an AT&T store because i owned a gs4 for about 18 hours oh and returned it already well it will get to that in a minute we'll get to that in a minute but but the the store rep was was really really bashing the gs4 and use like you know look there's no comparison he pulled a one out of his pocket he's like this thing just feels so much better and it's obviously like a completely different design but the gs4 just feels and looks like a gs3 to mean he's absolutely right so if that is the sentiment that's that is being shared by majority of the 18 in carrier refs around the country this week that might end up steering the kinds of people who are looking at the gs4 right now not knowing a lot about these devices going into the store that might secure them in the direction of the one so they might actually have better success with the one than they had with the 1x this time last year I think yeah I'm surprised to hear that actually like if I'm if I'm HTC that should be super encouraging because Samsung it seems like they they just became sort of the default and you'd walk in and be like I want a phone and they would just immediately be like here's the gs3 it's pretty good you'll probably like it but if HTC has sort of commandeered some of that away from Samsung that's that's huge well there's a couple of other things HTC did write this year that it didn't do last year wasn't able to do last year this year it's got the one on Sprint t-mobile and AT&T at virtually the same time and it's a virtually the same phone whereas last year eighteen t had the 1x but t-mobile had the 1s and then later on in the summer the evo 4G LTE came out and then verizon didn't H interesting HTC device until like December um you mean what you know there's the rumors that verizon will have a version of the one in by mayish or something like that so that is encouraging for HTC I still think it's got a very very very difficult path ahead in order to you know defeat Samsung's marketing and you know there's a lot of things that Samsung has going for it between the massive support from bestbuy like the Galaxy stores within the store that Chris reported on a couple weeks ago we're not going to see an HTC store within a store so everywhere you go the galaxy's thrown in front of you and I know David mentioned this quite a bit in his review when people talk about buying a new phone it's like oh I bought a new iPhone or I bought new galaxy I didn't buy an android phone or I didn't buy an HTC unless you are like really into phone so I think there's still a hard road ahead for HTC yeah no doubt but dan I mean at 22 HTC's well not ABC's credit but but Samsung's downfall you pointed out that you're in your local best buy there wasn't a soul in the sampling experience yeah I mean it was it was like quite deserted now to be fair I we noted that this was before the galaxy s4 was really is really available so yeah I assume that's gonna be different once the galaxy s4 is actually on shelves and Samsung is advertising it every other minute and people walking and looking for it but yeah when I was there you know I strolled right through the empty samsung samsung display booths but hey you know an empty samsung Display booth is better than the non-existent HTC One so the differentiating factors between these two phones for me I mean one obviously we think the hardware is way nicer on the HTC One but you know HTC took this giant risk with the camera that's technically 4 megapixels and the ultra pixels or whatever so I'm really curious to hear more about the camera on the s4 is David you see were really like it's really really good i'm just sitting here like scrolling through pictures and i can just but um no i mean i think it's it's the best android camera I've ever used personally and for me it's it's very much a you know personal preference thing like I don't spend that much time taking pictures at night in dark places and if you do then the one and the Lumia 920 just blow this out of the water it's not it's not good in low-light it's very much like the iphone 5 and another like any other Android camera in that sense but just in terms of like I i I'd really just don't buy what HTC says we're like pixels don't like that the megapixels don't matter it's just like a 13 megapixel image when you blow it up or look at it and anything other than like the 5-inch screen on your phone like if you want to put this on your computer and actually do stuff with it the more pixels there is just more data and it just it's sharper and this camera is incredibly fast and they have just the most ridiculous number of software features and crazy stuff you can do but it mostly just boils down to the camera takes really good really accurate and sharp pictures and the one just does it it does some nifty things in low light but this ultimately just takes better photos and like for me that's kind of the whole ball game I mean honestly other other than like playing around with all the extra nifty features though like I'm sorry what this isn't their feature were like you take a picture and it records like five seconds of audio when you take the picture I mean come on yeah it's it makes no sense and so the idea is like oh it's a postcard where you take a picture and you're like hey grandma thinks about you happy birthday and David I I do have to say that get your the picture in your review of you and I think you're in like Times Square with like your your face in the heart is like the best thing I've ever seen I urge by far well not even look I mean that's like the whole reason I did this review if I'm being to do that on I just wanted to take a picture of me in a heart in Time Square know and that's another thing that like Samsung makes this big deal out of all these different features and all the different things the camera and the phone can do and this dual shot thing where you can take a photo with the front and back camera at the same time and sort of super impose them on each other is just absolutely useless like I can't think of a single reason I would ever actually wants to use this in my life oh let me cover a quarter of my image with my face awkwardly framed in the front camera and the side of a building yeah yeah but yet samsung spends all this time talking about this instead of you know any of the other things they could be talking about and it's right range to me yeah so is it just like if you care about the way the phone looks then you want the one but if you want you know utility and expandable memory in a replaceable battery in a better camera then you want the s4 and you know no shame in that is that does I mean that sound and again that sounds exactly like the story last year if you want something that is you know super useful and gets done I mean the galaxy s3 was my phone for CES because I was like well I need a powerful fast gmail access I need LTE and I need to make sure that I'm not going to be stuck with the dead battery at the end of the day and I was like well all those things put together the led me to the gs3 yeah you think it seems like there's a there's a just the same sort of calculus for the gs4 if you're looking you know deciding between these two phones well I think to me what's what's partly really interesting about the one is that it it used to be sort you bought the iphone if you wanted a phone that just worked and you bought an android phone if you wanted to tinker and do sort of weird customization things and you wanted expandable storage and you wanted a removable battery and you wanted all this different stuff and HTC skewed it seems to me skewed a little bit for the apple route of saying like this is our phone it's beautiful it works you'll like it we promise just buy it uh and like and other than like blinkfeed which just remains a travesty of everything for cell phone on it works I think and it's it's a beautiful well-designed phone but yes if you want all the tinkering and all the customization um you should probably buy the gs4 because it has a removable battery and has expandable storage and the one doesn't have that but I'm personally really excited about the fact that there's actual options now if you want to have an android phone that is beautiful and usable and friendly for all the same reasons the iphone is i think that's great what the what version of Gia come how much RAM storage you have in your gs4 i believe it's 32 is 32 because there's a thing going around that the 16 thing like a whole bunch of storage gets taken up by the OS yatrik the same thing Microsoft went into with windows 8 where it's like half the storage is gone because of all the crazy stuff it's trying to say you're like really gonna want to use that SD card slot apparently so that isn't a version that only gets you so far though right like if you've got say a big game like say you got asphalt 7 or something which is like one or 1.5 gigabytes I don't think you can move that to the SD card so if you are a gamer or using these big apps then you know you're gonna want have more storage either the 32 gigabyte version or what the access to your game early should be buying an android phone hey man I mean be 1080p displays games look pretty great so yeah are the three that actually are decent look Touche I'm a huge don't know I'm a huge android gaming hater so like the Ouya and the shield make no sense to me because like nobody's made yeah I I completely agree with you either like idea is a product that I just do not understand just because android gaming has not succeeded on what androids native platform is a mobile device why would I want on my TV but you know well and and just adding to that so for the for the fleeting moment when I owned a GS for this weekend I yeah I know soon no no stop just stop I love how he just tries the glass right over it you need to explain what happened here because you're like if you guys aren't familiar with mr. Crigler he's pretty well known for like buying a phone and then selling it immediately getting rid of it and he's also well known for like paying way too much for a phone just to have it and then like realizing he's made a terrible huge mistake and then getting rid of it a couple of days later um this happened with the nexus 4 you need to tell us the story behind your purchase of a galaxy s4 what color and why and like why don't you have it anymore well it's it's really simple so I you know I have a 1 review unit it's not you it's international unlock so no LTE and that the the back order for the u.s. LTE unlocked version which is that the real process the real gem which is in theaters pocket right now is is way way out right now they're short like if you go to HTC site there it's a ship date 528 or something like that and no human being much less somebody like myself is that patient you know and I yeah I already yeah I mean like the galaxy s 8 is gonna be out by 58 oh no so they're like I ordered mine they said it was going to be two to four weeks for the ship that they shipped it within a week so yeah I mean and that's something to consider but that's still a week which is like two years and in my they also never sent me a confirmation email so good job let's talk great job really impressed with the retailer that HTC chose to sell these phones it just medically better than google better than a less true not hard to better than google right so you know the bottom line is that i hand played with the gs4 yet because i didn't do the review i didn't have a review unit so I'm like hey you know I'll go buy one so I got a white AT&T one and it's weird because like every time I buy a phone for full price from a carrier store it's like I'm from another planet yeah they're like like I go to buy it and they're like oh I'm so sorry like you eat your you know you're not eligible for an upgrade yet i'm like that's fine and they're like what it won't give me like it like I'm like I'm insane so uh yeah but I bought it um and the you know it's yeah I have the groove with everything David said the one thing that I noticed which which maybe I don't know if it was the abscess running or what but like consistently it was stuttering like really yes everything I did like just as simple like uh screen transitions were stuttering and it and it's like that is so unacceptable when you're on a Snapdragon 600 or any 2013 processor like yeah what is what have they done so tragically wrong at the at the operating system level so that this is at League I totally get why Facebook had to rewrite the core of Android to make homework now like I did it well and that the crazy thing is like facebook facebook did it it worked it's so smooth and yet nobody else's figure this out and and I notice the same thing in the review and like I don't know if you spending time in the gallery but for some reason the gallery app is just broken it's just slow and laggy and crashes all the time and it's just like it's all these little things that it's like Samsung you have so many powerful features and it does all this crazy stuff yet you can't make it so that you know swiping home screens works perfectly every time it's ridiculous yeah um so yeah anyway my gs4 is back in eighteen tease hands now oh I got an email from Chris on Sunday and the subject line is I did something horrible yesterday that I am ashamed no I was totally ashamed of it like cuz I I swore up and down that I went by GS for that the one was better found and I believe that it is I as I think most of us do but you know I haven't played with gs4 I wanted to so whatever for 25 minutes for 25 minutes um what else it's got an IR blaster just like the one David I know that they're not David dan you're deeply in love with the IR blaster yeah man it's fun like I know I read an article you should I i didn't i didn't think that I would like actually be using it on the one like when when these were all announced and they're like oh they good ir blaster sounds like oh well that's stupid oh and right you know what am I going to do with that and then you know I think both Samsung and HTC have contracted peel to write these television remote control apps and they work really great and I mentioned in my piece that these do not really replace your your standard remote that comes with your cable box or your DVR or whatever it is you have these days just because they don't support all the functions but if you're sitting on your couch paging through your fitted Twitter feed or your your facebook news feed or whatever while you're watching a TV show and you just want to quickly change channel or mute it or turn the volume up or whatever it's right there in your hand and it's like and super convenient and it was super easy to set up so uh you know i'm i'm happy with it and i think it's cool um and it is frustrates me no like I I mean i'ma I'm a harmony one user and I Mike my cable isn't really set up like I I think I've got like three channels and because their breasts are encrypted and whatever so like you know I wash out the TV i watch xbox I want I've got like my mac mini hooked up as a media pc and you know I want to like hit the button and have it go through the macros of launching all the right things in the right order and switching all the inputs and you know the apps don't do that so like like I could get it to adjust volume i guess i could try to program it but i would really like i know there's an sdk for this stuff but i don't understand if these things are going to have I airports we should have like logitech should give up on their hardware thing they basically have and just give us a remote app that works they've got a remote app that works with their little repeater thing but I would love to see somebody like actually try and do like a smartphone remote app properly now that there's hardware that I've got good IR blasters on them because like if it has hungries damn right the funny thing is that i think i cant rember what that repeater is called i know you're talking about but it's it's discontinued already like if yeah I I feel like it was in production for like six months and then it they just continue now know if that was I selling halo poorly I pulled his Eagle around and I bought one and used today hahaha I didn't return it though I think it's sitting in a closet is it no good it's terrible the the delay on it it's like it's like you hit a button then you wait 10 seconds to hope it works oh so that's like the kind of performance I expected from using my smartphone as a remote through an IR blaster but you know it it hasn't been that in my experience now I think I might be wrong but I think you can set up macros for the cable boxes and stuff that are supported like within the HTC app so if you have a cable box and DVR that's supported by it I think you can like go to like a watch TV setting it'll turn your TV on it'll turn your cable box on with one button press but it really is more useful to you if you are subscribing to a cable service or satellite service or something that has a cable box instead of a mishmash of set-top boxes that you might have if you're a cord cutter so i can see you definitely understand your frustration there because it is not as fully featured as say like a harmony remote rom but like the whole observation is just that like 10 years ago every single phone practically came with an IR blaster and virtually every smartphone up until the iphone and then they were gone for like six years and then this year we've got the two top android phones on the market both have IR blasters samsung's built it into a number of its tablets it did started that last year i think with the note 10.1 had an IR blaster so it's just it's uh it's just funny to see like yesterday's technology make a resurgence even though it looks like that different purpose today yeah yeah it's gonna say that's the kicker there is that the the IR ports that were on most phones before the iphone were focused on ur da and they usually didn't have enough output like the you know that they weren't bright enough or whatever to like control devices reliably like there you know they were just intended for data transfer and like it that you know there were always like apps that were available to like turn them into remotes but like they frequently didn't work because like they just weren't designed for that so you'll get like really close to the components so now like or they were just on a bad spot on the phone yeah it's on the side or the bottom or something like that right it wasn't designed for that right so these new ports are not the right place but are designed to have sufficient power output to reliably control all components from a distance man speaking of old-school features on phones Chris reviewed the q10 with a physical keyboard I did I did uh it's it's a bold let's go through a bold move there they did uh yeah yeah I yeah I mean I don't you know I think my conclusions thumbed it up it's like if you use a bold and you love your bold then yeah go out and buy this q10 and you know Ingrid's is blessed you won't you won't understand the features and the apps that you may be missing once you leave you mean Chris go out and buy this q10 but still hang onto the ipod touch you're using for all of your apps and exactly that's exactly right yet notes it's look it's it is hands down the best portrait qwerty keyboard that I've ever used which i think is what all was probably expected and i think we say that about that would've been bad yeah and the difference with the q10 is that it's um it's it's wider than a bold than a bold 9780 so i think by a little bit so you end up with a slightly better keyboard but the cliq eNOS is the same the shape of the keys is the same the screen is not great the the resolution is fine i have no problem 720 x 720 but it's very very dim even compared to the z10 side by side which was a little surprising to me and it it's AMOLED right it's not LCD correct cry on sam alleging um so yeah I mean that the conclusion i drew is that you know if you're either accustomed to using portrait qwerty a more specifically accustomed to blackberry this is going to be a great upgrade for you that's what you're into but if you're accustomed to using the Android phone or an iPhone I can't imagine I like I can't formulate a good reason why I would recommend conceivably recommend this device to any of those people so I can what I was really curious about uh reading your review was sort of the idea that like it used to be that uh physical keyboards were just kind of objectively better than software keyboards but it seems like part of your argument was that were not there anymore like I was it's you know you know if you just attach the keyboard to you know the iphone it would be a better phone but like maybe that's not true anymore right it no absolutely and I know the people like sean hollister will be humanely disagree on this but some are Shauna be right there thank you shit is just right there but if but if you but if you um if you look at swiftkey if you look it's what I love the new ver I mean I've always looks white but the new version of swype is so good um but even the iOS keyboard a windows phone has a notoriously good keyboard it has since one doesn't 17 but it got better in 7.5 and ate any of these to me are better and more efficient ways of entering text at this point then a physical keyboard that wasn't true five-year that certainly was a true five years ago and I wouldn't say otherwise but but now I think the story has changed so for me a physical keyboard is it like I'm faster on a virtual keyboard but like the like feeling of using it makes you feel like a boss makes you feel like you're like I'm typing on here i am working and i'm doing something on it i feel fast and that's awesome and like there's there's value to that i was really hoping that they're there whatever they're called they're quick actions or just type things where you could like launch stuff with little keyboard shortcuts was a little bit more robust um but i just don't mean like I didn't see the advantage of like going to the home screen and typing tweet and then my tweet instead of just going to the Twitter app and typing my tweet like I didn't get it well it's a verte it sounds like it's a version one I mean with the old blackberry you could assign you could like go to the launcher and hold down a button and have it launched an app so you can pull down t to launch Twitter the way that they did it on whether lasses you could you it would it would guess or design shortcuts so instead of typing tweet da da you just have like T space dadadada da so I was like like Alfred I guess so like you would you be able to do stuff a little bit more quickly with a little bit fewer key presses or like a mess i'm saying this if somebody and actually one thing that i will admit that of all the major platforms right now i do think that blackberry 10 particularly 10.1 has the most robust universal search because like when you start typing a list of uh you know actions pieces of content like emails and text messages and apps I'll come up among other things and when you tap and hold on any of those it shows a role or excuse me a column of icons along the right side of the screen and if you swipe over to those it extend it expands to show like text of what that icon means and those are all the actions that you can perform on that item that showed up in search so that for example if an email comes up you know some of the options might be like reply to like you know open I'll you know those sorts of things it's it it's a context menu for universal search yeah that's that's cool actually but not enough to make you feel like you were still more effective and useful at this thing right right that is the that is the core outcome of this review is that it's like at no point did I have I thought any productivity game game but certainly not enough productivity gain to justify sacrificing everything that you need to sacrifice to move from Android or iOS to blackberry 10 really does that make blackberry and particularly the the keywords sort of like the AOL dial-up of the spectrum tree where literally all they can bank on now is that people it is sort of the inertia of like this is what I've always had I don't want to get anything else because until now the keyboard was the only thing that was a convincing reason to buy a blackberry right on and you know there have been others over time there was security and there was email and those of all then sort of pushed away and then blackberry is now just really touting the keyboard and if that's gone like what what do they have what's left yeah well like I said I mean like if you have a bold right now and you love your bold to death please by all means go by the q10 because you are going to be head over heels in love with it but yeah outside that I don't know how they're going to appeal to new audiences I think well but so but even that like you're sort of saying now that if even if you have a bold and you love it kind of you know try something else because on-screen keyboards are great and they're better and we think you'll like that better uh yeah that that's sort of that's gotta be scary for blackberry at this point yeah and you know obviously that's what they're trying to do the z10 right it's like capture that audience that is outside their core in a way that the certainly the the torch never did and and the storm but um green clicked it was amazing yes very critical I forgot about that oh my god that actually happened oh man I totally forgot about that so so Dan is Dan is actually going to it's not called blackberry world anymore right it's called some black rely very live like react thank you and so I think that's going to be what they need to do we already know torsten heinze said before that they're going to be showing what a total six phones in 2013 and and so the only way that they're going to be able to revitalize the blackberry user base and actually start adding people to it i think is to really take the q10 down market and do something really creative and innovative to like show people why this is the this is the right form factor and then pull people into that ecosystem at a low price point and then they can graduate over and q10 right now I just need to release a portrait slider and they'll take over the world that's as they did that the first time around L&T Thank You Belong its price that I think it's suggested price of two hundred fifty dollars on contract so this is very much not an entry-level device this is you are not not even competing with like the first level of iphone 5 or the one or the galaxy s4 year now competing with the upgrade version that gets you more storage so it's like as far as that price competitiveness is definitely not well hang on I mean that price yeah I mean they'll bring it down for consumers but blackberries have always been way more expensive than they really had any right to be so like that price is there just so that they can convince CTOs to buy it and blackberry 10 just needs to be good enough so that people will flip a table and quit their job when they get handed to them but Cory but but if blackberry you and he doesn't take over but BlackBerry's biggest success was with the entry-level models the curve 8300 seer he was the one that with blackberry sold millions upon millions and pawns millions upon millions on and it like dragged out the death of the curve series for eons because he couldn't figure out anything else to do but that's where blackberry got all its market share wasn't selling bolds and it wasn't selling the high end or the 8700 to the 8800 or whatever it was that was priced at three hundred dollars on contract at the time so if you know if blackberry wants to appeal to that entry-level market we need to see essentially a curve level blackberry 10 device between may see a blackberry live hopefully we'll see a blackberry live you know sooner rather than later well the original plan was to continue to offer that kind of devices blackberry 7 devices i think it was like two years after the release of the first the the the z10 i don't know if they could stick to that yeah i don't know if they can really release a blackberry 7 device in the US market they might be able to do that in the emerging markets but in like North America and Europe where you know the people can buy an iphone 4s for a hundred bucks on contract order an iphone 4 for free on contract a blackberry 7 device is just going to get steamrolled but also releasing a new blackberry 7 device would be deeply stupid on many levels because the they need to be spending every single drop of their energy right now beefing up the blackberry 10 ecosystem they can't afford to divide their attention between q ecosystems right now certainly and two if they've coded themselves into an operating system that on its surface appears no better than Android that isn't capable of running on entry-level hardware they've really screwed themselves yes God knows that you can get an android device for free so if if I mean you're looking blackberry 10 is stuck on two hundred dollar on contract hardware then it's game this hardware is not two hundred all our own contract hardware if you're looking at like say the z10 that's competitive with a galaxy s3 that was released in june of last year so I mean it's for on a spec level it's competitive with a hundred dollar pantech which is an entry level or mid-range android device why blackberry is insisting on charging the price premium you know dieter mention to maybe it's to just you know appeal to these these CTOs that need to buy them at fleets but it's definitely not giving you the same value that you get on a droid was right and I guess well okay so apparently the q10 is selling well in the UK they're expecting to sell tens and tens of millions oh but we don't know the library says it's selling well but we don't really know any numbers yet I mean this single I think this thing's gonna outsell z10 for sure yeah I mean it's an obvious there's an obvious reason to buy it like if you want a physical keyboard buy this phone like there there isn't one like that for the z10 it's like if you sort of want a universal hub for your messages by the z10 like I I don't know why whatever tell someone to buy that whereas with q10 there's at least like somebody's like I like my physical keyboards like oh by q10 right yeah no one knows language I need to upgrade no one's like I need to upgrade from my curve 9380 or like I need to I need upgrade I need to upgrade for my storm like yeah no one instead you know the storm people are saying that the store people were oh boy yeah if they have an upgraded from their storm um p I pity them greatly so we can't talk about BlackBerry's i'll talk about the latest thing to come out of tourists in Heinz's mouth um like the new Eric Schmidt just saw I'm saying things ever know he's a new he's a new bike lesser ease yes it's like these statements well this statement today that has been in the news is that he says that tablets will be dead in five years which is kind of an insane thing to think about and he's also elaborated and saying that TVs tablets as a poor business model because the money is not where hardware is but it's with software services for these companies um and to be honest this is something that he's actually said a number of times maybe he didn't say in explicit words of you know dead in five years but he's really downplayed the importance of tablets for quite some time and said that blackberry feels the smartphone is going to be the convergence device that takes over and it crosses over to between your laptop and you know your mobile and things like that um but you know when you look at Apple's balance sheet and you know where Apple is making tons of money and where every other company is trying to break into and grab some of that money a lot of that isn't so it's I can see this and not be like that is just the insane hubris that we've heard from blackberry for the past five years well I'm sure that you know he was trying to meet I'm guessing that he's trying to speak in like these general terms of the future of computing and that you know the phone is going to become the hub and then you just have these terminals and maybe other tablet maybe a big screen at your desk basically the exact same stuff that Jeff Hawkins was talking about back in the day with the folio right like the blackberry spokesperson Alex Atala said that the commons torsen made are in line with previous comments you made about the future of mobile computing overall and the possibilities that come with a platform like blackberry 10 like that's fine if you want to say yeah we don't know what the what computing is going to look like and in five years not just mobile computing we're computing in general like it's going to be crazy and what we're doing now is not we're going to be doing and get ready for you know innovation like that's fine but um you know don't say tablets are dead because you know what time what is dead as a playbook yeah or tablets are poor business model because you know who they're poor business model for blackberry yeah well everybody got named Apple right yeah yeah I was about to say like like that's that's the weird thing about it is that like you can see if if you live in this weird vacuum where you haven't used an ipad for an extended period of time you could seriously make you know pretend to make the argument i like to call that these d jon rubinstein vacuum yes right famous for having claimed that he never used an iphone which may very well be true but but to this day if you have never touched an ipad you could seriously like I can imagine how tourists in hinds could be living with those blinders on but yeah if he's only ever use the playbook and this is this is his tablet experience and sure but it's interesting to see that we've been maybe kind of thinking that with the launch of blackberry 10 now out there maybe we'll see a tablet device from blackberry to go along with the new phones and this kind of puts a big damper on those kind of hopes or anything like that so yeah well what's funny is it makes me think that you know towards makes me think that he thinks the like the PadFone is the future of computing on and he may well be right and I will be fascinated the day that you know blackberry comes out with whatever they feel like calling the PadFone David you love the PadFone i do i love the PadFone the PadFone and I are best friends we really are I'm more of a phone pad guy myself but things like I think torso hands might be right ultimately the India in that like your phone will be the hub of all your data and then you just sort of a talking to masters just steal it from Hawkins boy yeah Coggins is right and then there was there is the atrix which tried to do the same thing like people tried and liked this may well end up being the future of computing but come out and say in five years no one will have a tablet anymore is just you just make yourself look dumb like that there's a better way to say what he was trying to say and like if I'm giving him as much bad for the doubt as I can here there's a better way to say what he was trying to say than to basically say no one's gonna buy an ipad in five years I'm sorry but that if that's really going to be the case whereas like the phone is our hub of computing we plug it into all these peripherals it's hard for me to see as blackberry as being the company that brings us there you know Google's going to do that way before then and then you know apples been converging iOS and OS X for the past year and a half in that looks like okay even more so I can't believe I'm saying this but cute equator platform to make that vision a reality than Android is that's true perhaps but you know Google's just going to like show more knit like it does with everything so you know we're going it's very likely we talked about this a number of times of the convergence of Chrome OS and Android it just makes sense for Google to combine those businesses so you know and Google is so far ahead of where blackberry is uh in the smartphone world and it actually has you know laptop devices that it can try converge with that I think that Google is going to do it first and it's going to grab the attention long before blackberry is able to um okay so coming up we've got blackberry live we've got google i/o same time we've got a nokia lumia announcement we've got WWDC we've got an xbox announcement what else is coming up that I ocga between yeah yeah there's gonna be nothing happening there but we'll be there computex isn't that Papa copy tax like buckle up it's gonna be a crazy couple of months yeah I guarantee you that I guarantee you that we're gonna see a pad phone for ad copy cuts mark my words we'll wait has the PadFone three hit the market yet that's why we're gonna see a bad phone yeah exactly I bought them all which is why they didn't hit the market I'll get in my apartment and I regret nothing I'm really got fully on the brain like because like plugging in a phone is stupid it should just be do it over wireless it should just magically won't be in your pocket and work well that like that's the most obvious use of NFC ever like if you just walk in tap your phone and sit down uh yeah that that would be amazing right that's not the convergence device that these people are talking about or at least what i read it is they're talking about that looking what thought Heinz has been saying for so long is that we've got these laptop great processors and graphics processing units and amounts of RAM in our phone and why can it power all these other things unless there's some like wireless technology that I'm not aware of I mean if you're going to be doing all the processing level on your phone uh NFC your bluetooth isn't really going to cut it as a bridge to another device well I see it just for the pairing but then it uses Wi-Fi director you know so they're crazy like there's plenty of wireless standards and there's more coming that would be able to have that kind of bandwidth it's more an issue of battery life but lining the standard no but but still nobody especially in the age of like family plan or scheme that family plans mobile share and cloud computing no one is presented a cognizant argument to me as to why out we should be trying so hard to converge our phone with anything like give me a tablet give me a phone let me live my life I don't need to because verizon and ATT charge you twenty dollars a month or ten dollars a month just to connect your tablet hey Dan imagine the AT&T Death Star sunglasses coming down deal with it okay so I have to say um ok so at WWDC we should we should talk about Apple a little bit we're gonna see new versions of iOS and rumors are going around nine to five Mac did it wsj did a little bit for them that it's definitely to be flattered all new icons maybe more glanceable information basically all the unicorn dreams we've been hoping for for iOS have been put it out there as possible features and then improved looks on it I mean I genuinely believe that they're gonna they're they're going to try and make iOS 7 look better and they're like right now the rumor is that we're still going to have the grid Oh icons is the home screen because that's real and familiar but if they can genuinely do something with Notification Center and genuinely do something about either multitasking or glanceable information I think there'd be a really big deal well and I think if Apple's smart there they have to be really aware of this because like this this running narrative is you know apples lost its touch iOS is boring they can't do anything interesting you know Scott Forstall is out and now it's like Johnny I've is here too he's you know that the White Knight coming in to save the day and he's literally at night yeah that's that's it he's white sooo so so there's been that narrative but in reality it hasn't really affected iOS device sales has it because you know we had apples financial report recently and they're selling more iphones every single quarter than they did the previous right but i think what what's gonna be interesting about WWDC is I think if Apple doesn't do what everyone wants them to do I think this might be when things like when people actually start to be rightly upset and start to you know look elsewhere on because this is where we're kind of at the point where like they've run out of excuses like Johnny I have is supposed to be the best in business they're leaking all the right things they're talking about all the right things on but and then if they don't come out and do what we want them to do then what like I'm waiting for WWDC and if they don't do what I want them to do I'm gonna go buy an android phone and I can't imagine I'm the only person like I have this and I'll get rid of it if they don't fix know modifications and give me widgets but vine David how can you go to a platform without mine so yeah there's that you get coming down you know the little new banner when you download an app before for the first time i downloaded vine like three months ago and it still has the little new banner on it I've never I don't know you're missing yeah yeah so harnessing vines front-facing camera vines all rights office am i okay wait now now I'm gonna get into vine okay no idea what you guys just signed up for I mean I feel like with regards to you know the people are upset the apple doesn't do I at people have been upset at like Apple not doing what they want forever right like it took five generations to get a notification center of any sort uh and you know every quarter apple sold more iphones in the last so I when it affects the bottom line and I could see like a decline in sales and totally but i know i don't know if it's come that's really going to do it people are happy with their iphones yeah but if I mean critically Jony ive is in charge now like David said I mean like internally the game has changed even if they're they're not concerned about the bottom line and and that you know the trajectory of the product and the company which frankly they don't have a ton of reason to be considering their circumstances I think that it was enough of a shake-up so that you're going to see I mean Johnny I've is is is perhaps the most influential industrial designer of the past 25 years at this point and clearly he's going to want to put his fingerprint all over this software and we've heard countless rumors literally Johnny I fingerprint instead of black metal you'll have squirrels well there's those rumors that there will be a fingerprint sensor on the 5s I you fingers up fingers my daughter I I don't believe that for a second by the way that it's like that that is the most samsung thing that Apple and we also saw how well the fingerprint sensor worked out for motorola with the game matrix but but so you know III think that he is going to be looking at what we heard countless rumors that that he hated force all and and hated is it the the direction that he was taking the platform so I thoroughly believe pretty much everything that 9to5 mac is reporting about about iOS 7 right now I hope so yeah I'm actually really excited because I can switch back to my my my iphone and me night you know I've been using it quite a bit but you know I've got this orange phone man I want to show it off be cool so I don't know what else quick Google now is on the iphone and it's like it's not that good like it's pretty it's weird that they got the cards at the bottom it it things it turns on your location thing so it's not running GPS all the time but because it checks location in the background it looks like you're you're sucking down your battery and I guess it probably pulls it down a bit more but it doesn't do background notifications it doesn't do doesn't you know pink notification so it's just sort of like there are some cards there if you want to look at them which for some reason just that little difference of like you've got to go look for them make some way less compelling yeah it is on Android yeah the fact that it doesn't do any sort of notifications kind of blows my mind like I would have expected it to do something you know the notifications on Android are very passive I guess is passive as a notification possibly be because yes show up in your notification center without really like making the phone vibrate or sing or whatever but there's none of that on iOS so unless I think to actively open the app and check it you know it just my life carries on yeah oh no a pelada earnings we talked about earlier and on the call Tim Cook well he did a couple of things that was weird one he kept talking about the iphone 4 and then he also said that he would not make a bigger iphone a iphone of the bigger display unless he could solve all the trade-offs that everybody else is willing to make the biggest one was probably you know app design uh so if i think it pretty much shut down the rumors of a larger screen iphone no although I disagree but the binary BPD bah I would not put a pass in to be to be able to come out and say we all these terrible trade-offs we solved it because we're we're amazing exactly but that that's exactly the same thing happened that happened with netbooks uh you know the exact same verbiage that Steve Jobs always use from netbooks and then we finally got the 11-inch MacBook Air I think we're gonna have this same it just like really stretching the definition of a netbook because you're comparing a two hundred fifty dollar computer with a thousand-dollar computer but yeah but but I would shocked if we saw it this year because just because just this fall was the first bigger iPhone that's ever happened so I'd actually been really surprised if the very next generation was even larger um right but you know and that doesn't rule it out for something further than one yeah could they do like a 1024 x 768 big 4 by 3 iphone would that be the worst thing ever and then just use like ipad apps the same great ideal i need you have you have you ever used a 4 by 3 phone yes is awful i put something on into picture goes i think of the pantech pocket and then of course the LG vue and home of the novel hey I don't hate on the pantech pocket was awesome massage your keys ergonomically like I ergonomically incorrect devices ever it was such a piece everything about it from the skin to the materials to the shape the shape of just a layered like I couldn't help but law every time I pull the phone but don't you want to live in the future we're like you're carryin like crazy like dip like not all devices need to be uh you know the the standard aspect ratio of a phone like a bunch of us are trying to hang on I'm hang on i'm watching Star Trek next generation like Hulu put together this playlist where you could automatically queue up all of the queue episodes in aalborg episodes and not watch the rest of this stuff so I'll link rinding through yeah it's great so I'm like grinding through a whole bunch of old-school Star Trek next generation shows and like they're holding like the tricorder and their phaser and like man we used to imagine a future where we like made devices of different sizes and we're not doing that anymore like everything looks like this you know everything looks like this like like come on like I've got you know a couple other extra inches I could you know extend I hear you need er uh Anna and you know mixing it up would be great and and new devices and designs maybe something to flexible the screen and make our dreams come true with that but you know the fundamental problem with the view and the pocket is that if you ever try to ease it with one hand it was an absolute nightmare like it just use a holster man that's it that you want to start Trek just a lot of good ideas here dear you know it's even worse than try to use a note to with one hand because it's like there's they were just so wide and so ridiculous okay so so we're all going to be using square open webOS devices and holsters is what I'm oh my god yes that is exactly what I will mean yeah I can't wait you should go if you haven't precentral I'm sorry webos nation has the the Windsor knot photos of the winter not oh so you can go look I love that is like the best code name ever yeah anyone ever though the Windsor was the pre three this is not the Windsor it someone's or not um anyway um there's a whole bunch of I guess we should we've got a bunch of their like random stuff to grind through and we've been gone for almost an hour but I we do need to talk about some carrier stuff looks like the t mobile metropcs merger years ago I mean does anybody have anything interesting to say about that week I mean I hate to not point it out yeah the only thing I would say about that is that you know this this doesn't change the game for tmobile just allows them to proceed with what they basically been promising for the past six months terms of their their LTE rollout so it's you know this is effectively the status quo and it's what you know what they've been staying would happen so right we are um and meanwhile like the clearwire sprint softbank dish fiasco still won't die like there's still stories coming out about softbank says it's okay for sprint to change their agreements like in Simon and da with dish to talk about their thing for clearwire and then clearwire borrow some money asos print is more likely to be able to do the buyouts of dish named and they're like it's just it continues and like if we get a definitive like sprint spying clearwire softbank its sprint by the end of May like I'm taking the rest of the year off because there's nothing left okay i right I'm done um so anyway that's coming and then verizon is trying to buy the rest of the wireless unit out from vodafone but they're arguing over the pricing hundred billion offer Vodafone thinks it's worth a hundred twenty or thirty or something what's up no what's 30 billions right yeah well from so that's all happening but as long as we're talking about like high level stuff we should also mention that a rumor has it that we're gonna have the new FCC chairman to be guy named Tom wheeler and like I don't know literally nothing about this guy yeah before the before we started the the show today I think we we established three facts about this man we do tia very quickly I Wikipedia research it was the ctia president before Steve Largent I think who is the current so that press I mean that gives me some serious paused right I'm not I'm not a huge fan of the ctia as a policy group like I hate going to their conferences and having to sit through their videos talking about how evil taxes are on mobile carriers you know I just don't believe the CTA has a consumers best interest at heart well I mean if they are a very very dress right yeah right right but what always cracks me up about the ctia is that you know their their membership includes both like you know 18 keep risin and also these like microcarriers that sort of like a thousand people so like they will frequently abstain I'm like really hot huge policy issues because they don't want to piss off like you know half of their membership so so like they end up actually taking a hard line I'm like two issues and like everything else are just like you know whatever and they would they wave their hands they are good for telling us how many text messages have been sent every year though yes they are very effective at that so yeah he used to be the cja president he was for the AT&T t-mobile merger which is arguably not a good sign and what was the third fat we knew one more thing about he was a lobbyist yes I am and apparently he we have a UH a Robertson wrote a good piece on our site about that uh and he sounds like he's very much not a surprise and it has sort of been the de facto first name they came up ever since Jenna Cassie step down uh and he was part of the obama presidential transition effort and so it's guys like he's been around and even though it's weird people are like worried about him it seems like but it's just sort of gonna happen anyway well not also he's Obama's pic so i can't like i would not associate like a super pro big business guy is being like obama's first pick to run the FCC so maybe there's there's some part of the story that we don't know yeah yeah well and I mean like opinions are mixed out like like pop acknowledged seems to like him free press doesn't so I like I don't we'll just have to see uh but I mean the other thing is like now that the t mobile ATT merger fell through like other than like may allocating spectrum I mean I guess there might be some crazy thing happening to sprint because there's always some crazy thing happened to sprint that he might have to preside over but I mean it's pretty always tied up in drama what are the giant totally screw over the consumer from the wireless industry perspective things that you expect the FCC is going to be weighing in on next few years uh so there's auctions coming up for spectrum they really screw the pooch on the 700 megahertz one and that's really weird feeling the hurts of that now because you can't use your ATT LG phone on Verizon in vice versa so if that doesn't get sorted out properly then yeah we could really definitely feel negative effects with consumer if it goes in the interest of the businesses and the companies that will be using it as it did with 700 makers block right right uh-uh motorola if they lost a patent case against Microsoft and so like instead of getting four million a year they're getting like what like 170 million or something ridiculous yeah might as well like six dollars yes a click so if you haven't read and realized piece about why why does anybody know why google bought motorola um it seems like all the answers that have been floated like if these were the reasons they were really bad reasons that Google should have known better well you know I was just thinking about this the other night yeah if Google had not bought Motorola how much longer could they have survived as as an independent maker of phones because like what do they do well I don't I don't know exactly how much money they had in the bank but since google bought them they've lost money every single core yeah so I just can't wait for like Google's spring cleaning announcement 2016 have a one line that says the clothes motorola down we're closing or could and oh by the way we're care less about that than they did about google reader oh that's a sad but you know but I mean you know maybe if you never know it's google they could very easily uh rejuvenate that division and do some cool things with this rumored X phone that we keep hearing about uh this year who knows yeah I mean isn't that enough like if Google does if they do come out with this you know stock phone that's durable and just the right size on it doesn't seem like it would be that hard for Google to justify this 12.5 billion dollar purchase if they like actually want to make a real play and Android hardware uh well I don't though they don't think they want they would have to be hugely profitable and hugely successful for quarter like a long string of quarters in order to make back that 12.5 but they wouldn't and that's the beauty of being owned by Google is google just makes so much money off of other things that they can just kind of do whatever they want and like this is an easy way for google to start making cool phones that like Larry Page can now carry around the Googleplex and like maybe that's worth 12.5 billion dollars to Larry Page uh and if it is then you know I'm happy for him and I'll probably buy his phone uh but i don't know i mean this this patent war thing is is increasingly interesting and does seem to be kind of a giant swing and a Miss from google and motorola but I mean until Dave what did they say it was an 18-month product line that they acquired for motorola until they've exhausted that and sort of seen what comes next I don't know you're currently being trolled by a ross miller there uh-huh the nice tie Ross was wearing I was really trying to read what his card said I believe it said hello yeah that's good yeah is that although those cue cards necessary for when he does does 90 seconds the first one oh yeah Ross can't remember anything russ has coupons for Brazil were there one rave heart is it's like the box video Muller shoot takes a very long time but we love Ross so we do it it took kind we do love Ross we do we miss him I've got on the show we totally should in fact yes let's book it next month he's gonna be captive um so I'm looking at Motorola site right now so I was secretly hoping that they still made they don't appear to you but until very recently they were still offering a windows mobile 6.5 device through sprint um I just like it gives me it gives me great pleasure knowing that google makes the windows mobile 6.5 device but I don't think they actually sell dameware I think they finally just commuted however both the razr maxx HD and the razr HD are webtop compliant which I did not know what is oh man i still like bluetooth crap to the motorola sonic writer chris loves his motorola bluetooth crab yeah the s11 is like hands down the best stereo bluetooth headset on the market right now that's true actually that is definitely true maybe they should google should get into headphones yeah just as your 12 to five billion dollars right drop all this other stuff just get into headphones also that's 11 supports optics which i really wish the iphone had but it doesn't could you imagine a google glass device like designed by motorola it would be like all giant and Kevlar and heavy i would just like slice your brandon happen it would have liked instead of the little tiny little screen thing that the glass has now it was just like cover your whole lie yeah wait a second hold on hold on hang on wait it looks like motorola does this can't be through mobility but they're selling baby monitors through why motorola mobility's motorola makes some of the highest rated baby monitors on the market you would know being that your bear you're the only parent on the yeah you know there there there little pricey but if you're in the range of a few hundred dollars for your baby monitor I think Motorola's like one of the best ones you can do they run web top oh no they should mmm that's a missed opportunity right there seriously like this super high-end one this uh MBP 36 remote wireless video baby monitor looks like a like a full-on like tablet yeah it like they're like three and a half inch or four inch screens it's like yeah I definitely I definitely want to play three birds on this baby monitor Chris you should have kids and then boom there you go do you really need kids to buy baby monitor is a key to buy baby monitor if you drive it what are you gonna monitor like your plants yeah I don't know she's gonna check in with a myer run on monitors I'm gonna monitor myself and I would monitor myself I'm gonna turn the camera facing me anyway this is what Irvine no no I that ladies and gentlemen has been the virtual show we want to thank you very much for listening you can follow us on twitter i'm back lawn chris is z power dan is DC seifert and david is pure stated yep not David Pierce no and companion court and pain I don't know who that is you whoever you are out yourself that's like Andy that's bad because you're much favorite further than I am we are at verge of lad who we missed dearly as of lad salve off not Vlad wiggle you can follow flat book to which is pretty amazing you have to follow Vlad and Vlad with those yeah because there's a way it's always a one-two punch but he has to we also don't know who who glad which is um and yeah we'll probably be back next week it's like I said earlier it's going to be a crazy couple of months so if our schedule starts to get a little bit unreliable please don't get mad but do our best folks thanks later