Gadgetory

hi welcome to the verge mobile show for the week of August 26 2013 this is episode 60 which if you are familiar with wedding anniversaries is our diamond show so i hope everyone who listens to us has been out shopping and looking for diamond jewelry for us and plans to send it our way but other that we've got a good show lined up for you i'm dan seifert I'm flats mo and bling bling i'm chris sigler i believe i believe the phrase is bling blaow chris and unfortunately dieter still has better things to do than come be on the show with us we're just not important in deters life you know it's it's a sad sad fact of the matter I do know that he's not in he's not in his normal home base of San Francisco right now I believe he's somewhere in the deep south I believe he told me that he's uh he gave me some insane stad about how far into the middle of nowhere that he is right now but he does have LTE service which is impressive does he really because the other day he said he was I believe yesterday I received a note from him that he was on GPRS and I was like I believe he found the one spot in the US that's still on GPRS well you know when I was doing the the Tesla review earlier this this year I was driving through parts of California where there wasn't any service at all which was completely nuts to me you think that of all states California would be completely blanketed but you'd be wrong yeah well okay this I should be honest this is absolutely nothing to do with connectivity I think dieter is just building up a nice beard that is going to spring on us next week that's what's happening he's building up a wireless signal blocking beard that is shutting down his wireless connectivity he's building up his lumberjack chops right now he's like gonna fill in the beard he's gonna you know pick out just an amazing selection of flannels and and suspenders or overalls I don't know I don't know which way dieter leans on this I'm the suspenders versus over overalls beat but I would I would I would 2 seed eater come on the show wearing overalls minus a shirt no nothing but a beard but i want i want dieter on this program with nothing but a beard and a smile Tecna Chris you guys shared a hotel room recently probably save everybody it's yeah so let me tell you guys about this hotel room uh we were a man echoes they were just in the wrong direction or anything yeah that well you know we're just going to first of all what this story that i'm about to tell is not safe for work if we have any children listening please avert your eyes mirrors we tuned to a different station for a few minutes watch some sprout which is that television for toddlers which is whip stuff by the way if you're like half asleep if you're if you're on a couch somewhere and you're half asleep and you turn on sprout it will freak you out because it's just like it's like you know basically just colors and shapes and like really soft gentle music it's insane as messes with your mind which anyway to be honest perfect for my level of intellect yeah well ditto I mean I have I I'm not gonna lie I've definitely watch it for multiple hours before um but anyway so so we were just it literally everybody in the company just returned from New Year New York we were there for the verge all hands meeting where we talked about these amazing plans that we have coming up over the next year and so we were staying at at a nearby hotel or a relatively new hotel I think it just opened in the past few months and we were staying two to a room and my roommate was dieter whom I love I've stayed with him at trade shows before he makes a great roomie worked out really well except for one thing this is a sexy hotel and and what that means basically in a nutshell is that the bathroom door is semi-transparent so all of your bathroom activity be it toilet related or shower related is is basically visible to your to your roommates so dieter and I that I guess what I'm trying to say is the internet I got to know each other very well this weekend and we're gonna leave it at that also to tie it into some freaky mobile technology in some fashion the translucency can can sometimes remind you of iOS 7 ah I like that it's mine I pulled his back I put his boat someday you know random what's the translucency the door tweaked at any time during your time there did it get more or less translucent for you know can you some feedback now well the fonts definitely changed also I want to point out that Dan for some reason that has not been explained to me was in this amazing like penthouse suite with Erin support us whom I'm sure look I don't know how you guys haven't learned how far slipping somebody at twenty dollar bill gates I mean the but the place was nuts I mean first of all you guys had the your mini bar was stocked with way more whiskey than artist witch I'm offended by uh you had you had a bathroom where the door wasn't facing the rest of the room so you could you could shower in privacy it was great anyway and today we're put they were pumping like this very faint subtle but pleasing floral scent throughout the air-conditioning in our room yeah that was absolutely unique to your room that nobody else got the said so while everyone else's room uh very very likely up over the weekend with as verge staffers you know did their thing in there ours was nice and fresh all weekend yeah that wasn't a fragrance being pumped in the room dan I think that's just your natural scent it's my natural aura yeah alright so today we had some Motorola stuff happen we had our droid ultra and Droid Maxx review go live and David did those reviews for us um and I took some time this weekend to actually play with and use these and David wasn't very kind to it in the review and I got dude I reviewing a brutal yeah heartedly like I I just aside from verizon's very specific very obvious business interests I can't come up with a reason for these phones to exist well David came I can summarize this really well I haven't read the reviews I haven't played with the phones i play with the mini which actually seems the droid me Jackie seems a tiny bit more optimistic a device in these ones but what I can say just scanning the review and looking at the scores is the fact that the droid ultra plus the droid maxx their collective score is just over ten huh uh yeah went you know sorry I think the this speaks to a couple things right one it speaks to the fact that you know design by committee is almost never a good thing and this was obviously a device that was co-designed by motorola and verizon and and it's verizon being verizon and droiding up these devices that didn't need to be traded up and they should have verizon just should have taken the Moto X and been done with it they I mean they didn't need to do anything else but but David came up to me before we publish this and he's like can I get a gut check on this am I being too harsh and I'm like no man like he you and I he was like I would never in my life tell anyone to buy either one these phones like well then give him give him a bad score and that's exactly what he did well I mean what really shocked me was I kind of expected the ultra to not be that great you know it's got the salami plastic back it's it's just thin for the sake of being thin there's no real reason for it but you know at least with the droid maxx you kind of expect it to be like the reason for it to exist is battery life right and while it will offer respectable battery life certainly lands on the good side of battery life it's not the droid maxx battery life that i would have expected especially not compared to last year's model last year's model you know two days no problem you know two days of like real use you could get out of that phone without having to recharge it and and on our like our rundown test it lasted almost 13 hours which was record-breaking absolutely bonkers and this year you know the rundown test is only managing eight hours it's tapping out after just after a day of use uh you know it's really disappointing well you know what bothers me about it is you know how the back I think the both of them is real Kevlar but it's like like you say it's like slimy feeling on the altar and then and worse on the max it's against it gives a good Samsung a run for its money of the slimiest phone right now I'm just looking at that particular photo of the two backs and I was going to ask which of them is a nasty-looking one can you actually get Kevlar and then that glossy disgusting thing that's going on on the same surface well it yeah yeah I mean I think one is like I mean I don't know what the process is but I think they might just have some sort of lacquer over the ultra and then they they don't apply that lacquer to the the max that's my guess I mean I don't really know but but what's what's weird to me I mean it's both good and bad i mean if you look at the david has really good picture of it in his review if you look at the bottom corners of the max you can see where the weave disappears at the right at the corners and it looks really weird and kind of gross in the amateur hour and then they're the reason why it looks like that is because they're literally sanding down those corners to form the inner tip to smooth and form the corner of the back because it's made out of real Kevlar so they can't fake the weave through the corner because they're actually standing through it so it's like it would have been cool if they'd found a way to like still have real Kevlar but not do that because I mean it looks like a half finished it looks like a prototype or something somebody deleted yeah that's what I when I first saw it I was like this can't be this looks like it's half painted right it's really bizarre also not made in Fort Worth Texas nor can you get a bright pink back with yellow buttons very solid points unfortunately if you're a verizon customer you can't get any phone in bright pink with solid yellow buttons but it's true you can get a moto x now oh okay yeah that's actually you know what we'll segue right into that so the Moto X will be available from verizon this Thursday you can order it online you won't be able to buy it in stores yet that's another quote coming weeks deal um but you'll only be able to buy it in black or white so if you're hoping to customize it sorry tough nuggies we know for a while the 1880s has the the customization exclusive unfortunately don't know how long that exclusive last but if you want to get a moto x on verizon you can do it starting this thursday if you want to buy a motorola phone on verizon you should buy the moto x this thursday yeah but you're gonna have to settle for black or white which isn't that big video actually I've seen a few of the black ones floating around the New York offices and I was actually very impressed you know picking up and using the phone in person the pictures don't really do it justice go ahead then well I was going to say that pretty much everybody who has like seen a lot of pictures of it and read reviews and things and then goes and picks it up in person and said the same thing I know I Chris i believe the other week when you got to see one of the review units we had he instantly tweeted that this thing feels amazing as soon as he picked it up so i felt the same way you really have to get it in your hands to appreciate the design of it yeah it's then it's it's a great you're so here's my conundrum with the Moto X actually I'm really glad that you brought this up then because I have a story about this so i got my customized review unit and I was like holy crap this is the best feeling android phone I've ever like it's just it hits a sweet spot in every conceivable way I have to have this phone in my life uh so I switch like right before I left for New York I switched from my iphone to the Moto X but I brought my phone with me just in case I day a change of heart halfway through the trip so went to New York with it and on like day two or I should say by day two I was just so fed up with every app I was using on the Moto X that I just I mean I literally like it was a snap decision like I just flew into a rage and switch back to the I pulled the SIM out put it back my iphone gave the the review unit to Ross because he wanted to try it and moved on with my life like it was that quick for me like it just I think I had some like weird bug in the Twitter app for Android they just pushed me over the edge I'm like screw this is ridiculous and I i left the platform and you know what else from the guys who been using the Moto X around the office we had somebody Jordan from our video t he's using the nexus 4 and he he was saying this is good just give me LT in a good camera and i'll be happy and then I think it might have actually been Ross who was responding well there's moto x and then Jordan said and a good camera and it was like I actually I'm not going to say that because the Moto X isn't going to give you that part I was it was funny where there was a some sort of Twitter canoe going on earlier today uh between I think Josh and dieter and Chris you might have gotten pulled into it as well uh you know saying how the Moto X a moto x max would be like the perfect phone because it alleviates any battery concerns but i think a moto x max PureView I would sell my soul for why never runs iOS 7 program no I don't mind android i use android every day I don't want android at all but Moto X tell me of you would be an amazing phone so you're telling me Dan just did just to make this perfectly clear you want a moto x with a giant circular hump on the back and the so the phone itself would already be like nine or nine millimeters because it's a max and then on top of that you'd have a giant circular huh you know that's what you're looking if you're already going for the nine and a half millimeters why not just go all the way and you know step it up to eleven get a giant circular home and and take amazing photos yeah yeah i mean honestly the reverse of my experience with the moto x is my experience with lumia 1020 because the first time somebody handed that thing to me I thought the hump on the back and it just felt really weird and creepy like I can't describe it it's smaller than the hump on the 808 PureView but but has we closed it just being cut flat at the top it feels weird and awkward in your hand so that's the star thing you feel yeah it's like all the weight is where that lens is so when you're holding it and it's a big enough device that you know you're holding like the bottom half of it the top wants to fall backwards yeah it's just like really really awkward in the hand if it was really weird so actually think that if Nokia hadn't cut away from it so if not gay I'd actually got and just had made a really thick and fat phone and just stuck fill the rest with battery that might have been a better thing I mean it would be in a heavy phone will be making more tank jokes like with Lumia 920 perhaps but still like the economics is a 10-20 a really weird and whack and actually the text point that I played around with in New York the processing with the pictures was a major issue for me the processing speed that is so you take a photo it takes a long long time to get you back to take the next photo so even if the tents what it takes amazing pictures you know if you can't take to free in quick succession it's kind of a major pain point because that's the sort of thing to do with smartphone cameras right like if you actually have the time to sit around and really frame your subject and think about your composition and balance things out etc etc then you just kind of bring a camera with you you know it's never do you don't bring a camera you bring a stupid snap on sony rx1 whatever that that's what you want that you don't even in front glad I know I know you you mean the attachment right the Sony attachment so of course just just to clarify here our producer Evan who since he's making me clarify this I'm going to also tell an amusing anecdote about him following this I you can actually use a smart camera app on the Lumia 1020 as opposed to the pro camera app the smart camera app does let you do like rapid-fire burst pictures which I don't think is what Vlad is talking about I mean I absurdity and you hold the button down and it does like 10 shots you just want to be able to go snap snap snap snap snap at your at your command quickly and easily um and so Evan actually has a lot of experience with the the 1020 I believe he bought one this weekend and then promptly dropped it and shattered the front display into a million pieces just because you should really be recording that story with a big burn your face I'm sorry Evan but I think that is proof positive of the odd organ ah miix of the we were we were just talking about this before we started broadcasting and I was noting to these guys that when Evan dropped it it shattered in such a way that there's a there was a hole on the screen where you could see all the way down to the circuit board which is like kind of like kind of like really like cyberpunk like I almost wish she had just captain used it that way because it looked awesome so it's not like it wasn't like you know what a lot of people drop their phone or shatter their phone they have like a spider of cracks but they could still touch the screen and use it and things like that that wasn't this case with Evan was it no no was like the screen worked it like it was insane I like I don't know if that's because I mean you could say that that's one of the advantages of ammo LED / LCD is that you know it isn't I don't know I like I had something about the architecture the display laws continue functioning when it's that busted but whereas with LCD it just would have look like a you know a weird liquid whatever the pixels illuminate themselves you don't have one consistent backlight so right comp bust up the backlight and I'm gonna display and I love this vision of a phone that looks like an exposed cyborg like it's just being for the wars yeah you can see you can see it's freaking motherboard and is still doing things away it's a terminator phone so wait did it did Evan swap that in the store let's do have it because I think we could probably bid up the price on it I believe he was able to make an insurance claim on it so unfortunately well fortunate for him he has a new phone that works and it's not dangerous and unfortunately for us we don't have an art piece for the office damn so I just wrap up our discussion on motorola this weekend pictures of an alleged droid 5 leaked to the internet um and it's got a keyboard as you might expect a droid 5 to have which is kind of uh I feel like it's kind of like an endangered species these days sean hollister must have fainted when he saw these leaked pictures sean hollister huge qwerty hardware keyboard fanatic very excited about the droid 5 he will defend the qwerty keyboard to the death long after it's it's past its prime his reaction was please let this be real everybody else the direction was like and why does this exist everyone else is like why yeah on is reaching is LG remarkable like Sean who really liked the physical keyboard and don't want to have to buy a blackberry mg launched a slider qwerty keyboard phone on Verizon I think ya say something like a week ago yes but it's so freaking anonymous that I've got no idea where this model name is for the specs are how big the screen is I just all I remember is wow there's a sliding qwerty keyboard I don't see one of those for two years uh it I can't remember the name of it to be honest with you but it sells for about twenty dollars on contract so that can give you an idea of the status of that phone um but you know this droid 5 leaked you know I would be surprised if it is real when it is legit and Verizon does decide to buy it I'd be surprised if we didn't see it hit shelves like october november from the holiday season I mean you guys probably know sooner do you guys remember the droid 3 uh yeah that was horrible it's like the most hilarious project no no the voice notes the most hilarious thing was that the droid 1 was released in November of like 2009 I believe it lasted about 10 months on the market or so and then for the fall of note of 2010 we saw the droid two and then like februari of 2011 droid 3 hits its market and it was like we had all these droid phones come out in like less than the span that you could have owned one on contract was like four generations of droid phones right but the droid 3 wasn't on the market for very long at all right because I think it was the last I think it's literally the last like major release of verizon's that didn't include LTE right which woods I'm like at this point i cannot even fathom what it would be like to use a video on my smartphone again the mere thought terrif buys me do you remember the the r2d2 edition of the joy to know me I was pretty cool hey I broke that story hi i scoop that phone that was me Chris to scoop scoop Ziggler that's right breaking our GD two editions that's why they call me raisin bran uh sorry that was really terrible uh I really needed a follow-up question but I'm not gonna ask it uh so I am I am looking for this this phone you say there was a verizon released with a qwerty keyboard yeah it's an LG model for verizon it's an android phone it's an android phone i know for a fact it it sells for twenty dollars on contract I can't find rice i'm going to say on the subject of these kind of semi-autonomous android phones on my way into New York last week while I was taking the air train from newark which is hands down the best sign I've ever seen ok you taking the air train which is elevated so essentially if you step out of the doors and you know the attestation you basically have a I don't know 30 or 40 foot for drop ok and there's a sign on there really prominently position saying stay inside the train tracks a dangerous and I just feel like that size shouldn't be there you know we should have a bit of natural selection happening so if anybody needs the sign and has to step out will let them step out and yeah see if they surviving ah the risks but sorry I was degrading myself there what was trying to say was while I was on it I saw a lady with something like a 3 inch display android phone with big sprint labeling on the front I just felt so sorry for her I honestly that there was something inside me emotionally felt pain for the for the thing that she's suffering for it so the the LG phone is the LG enact it features 4G LTE qwerty slider over word I believe it's a 4-inch WVGA display um but it's got really big 24 60 million power battery so there you go guys hang on hey I think I identified a phone that's still for sale on verizon that runs android 2.3 and if you can slug the wait do they still sell the palms because for a long time you can buy a palm pre 2 on verizon like on contract and for a long time you could buy a what was that one windows phone 7 device they carried you could buy it for like 20 feet contra PSP trophy yes yeah amazing but i can't tell i mean the product pictures for this it's the LG spectrum the the product pictures for it on LG n verizon site clearly show a customized version of android 2.3 i don't know if it's received an update since then if not spectrum owners my apologies but then again if you're using a spectrum as your primary phone you're probably not listening to the show so say that if you're using a spectrum and you bought it a year and a half or two years ago I don't feel too bad for you if you're using the spectrum and you bought it yesterday my apologies yeah it was especially funny is that they sell the spectrum to like Verizon cells both the spectrum in the spectrum two at the same time also you can currently this is this is a hot deal folks you can get an LG intuition also known as the optimist view for free on a two-year contract right now how is this not a good deal on our site I know right you know I hear stories Chris I beat you all because you can buy a blackberry bold 9930 on contract for a hundred dollars wow that is a good deal okay and it I don't really know which America holiday is the one that makes you do good things for other people pick one maybe thanksgiving maybe it's christmas to whatever but i think for our listeners and viewers the task should be find an ill-informed person and saved them from buying one of these devices like everything we just talked about for the past five minutes put that on the list find somebody who wants to buy one of those was dig them up with like a web forum asking about it and save them but here's at the 9930 come out that was two thousand eleven twenty old what's the entry they come out of my year it's like it's literally two years old already and you have to pay a hundred dollars to live with it for another two years I don't know that this LG enact is pretty tight it has like that you know it's like the aesthetics of the the original Galaxy S it's got a pretty nice looking keyboard it runs something newer than android 2.3 I'm only four years late in that case would you say would you say that the LG enact is your next Chris that it probably is also I want to point out that it has dude okay so it has a hard menu button but it has adopted the look of the soft menu button in android 4.9 hollow so it's just the three vertical dots but they like LG took that and just made it part of the hardware on the device this is okay never i I don't want this phone first for a second I was really stoked about it the 5 megapixel camera looks pretty tight anyway what's uh enough about LG enact what's next uh moving the next I just leave you I just need to register a quick complete with Google for the fact that the Moto X doesn't seem to be coming to Europe or at least haven't announced any plans and I is bowing me up okay well you know why God glad it's because they can't use the made in America tagline their chest it has no value there yeah like all you Europeans will just be all like you know there's grubby Americans making these phones we don't want these vote no there were actually set some countries which consider the whole made in America thing kind of a wedge of prestige to be clear it's only the customized ones remain America the one you buy from verizon it's going to be made in china so right and the thing is Europe is between China America so it's kind of like yeah you don't even have to land just air drops on them yeah just like sprinkle moto X's across Europe and be let's see what happens here okay because I think people will be into that phone is it would be do you think Moto X trees would grow like they sprinkle them from the air myth the myth of mer metaphorical ones trees of load with a new design I mean I'm serious like the bezel in the front is really really nice like the bottom bezel in particular is so thin that it really having the software buttons for android they're pretty much exactly what you'd have them when they used to be capacitive but it's screen you know so when you're looking like a video a picture that is filled up with image and one of the things that really stands out and everybody's been saying it but until you I put it the thing in your hand you just don't appreciate it this is like a 4.7 inch display right then yes 47 720p yeah and it feels like it's just marginally bigger than the iphone like it feels like HD what me which is a much more display so the whole okay because everybody has been saying this didn't say this with laptops as well we have a 14 inch display in the footprint of a 13-inch laptop and then you look at it and it's like what is the same thing it doesn't feel that different but like a 4.7 inch display I've never seen it in a device decimal and I is really nice impressive yeah somebody ik member who might have been might have been evan rodgers are our podcast producer somebody was showing me in fact I'm pretty sure it was he was showing me an HTC first which has a 4.3 inch display up against a moto x and there the outlines of the two devices are basically indistinguishable despite the fact that the Moto X says point four inches on it yeah so I wrote the first right here there's the first air and there's the iphone 5 and there well the first is a bit bigger than the iphone 5 and then the Moto X is a bit bigger than both of those but that's the point like I've been hating on 4.7 inch displays because they make for such big devices you can fit that display something that's about the size of the first then I stopped complaining like you're giving more for my money I'm happy unless I can't buy it which are car so I'm not happy so I've just been thinking about this concept of Motorola dropshipping moto X's throughout Europe and like thinking about the the nightmare apocalypse scenario of these these robber baron gangs like scooping up all of the supplies with like machine guns and then and then charging like extraordinary amounts for them to the to the poor groveling people that won't want to own moto X's I think you've been watching castle in the sky the anime from Japan I I don't know what I don't know where that nightmare scenario came from dan I i well like you know what when when the they air drop like a a food supplies for people who are like refugees and like then like some like gangs come and take them all and then like charging lots of money you realize that Europe is not particularly Western Europe is not a war-torn wasteland right oh oh that is a propaganda dropped over it but if they know that they might have a chance at a moto x it might become such a wasteland that's all I'm saying that's a demand for the Moto X might might might bring some apocalyptic scenarios that's a bold prediction will glad I do have one really exciting piece of news for you which is that Motorola has promised a developer edition of the the Moto X which presumably you will be able to buy off contract if you're so inclined so fellow ninja meaning oh man that sounds good yep so I get the good stuff from the outside and i gave the tweakable stuff on the inside that that is thumbs up for me also I just want to play this is it won't work with your LTE well again in the UK IOT situation is really sketchy anyway um I'm gonna bitch about that next year I promise this year the carrier's think so the phone manufacturers get away with it but I just want to say to me when motorola were talking up the whole premise of it's not about specs it's about real-world use blah blah blah blah blah blah honestly I just I just wasn't buying a photos marketing spiel but I do feel like this phone has a few of these usability things which again you have to pick it up and use it it Motorola has done a few of those things right and you know what nobody's going to remember the specs in a few months anyway I mean I remember them what's up in my head right now so I you know I I I have believed in that mantra ever since Windows Phone 7 because that's the message that they've been pushing since Davis since Microsoft has been pushing since day one I think they've kind of I mean ever since the first Windows Phone 7 hit devices hit the market they've kind of put their money where their mouth is in terms of performance right like you've never used a windows phone and said the performance on this sucks like they have all of the performance advantages of iOS the problems that they don't have the app so that you know the Moto X kind of like doesn't have the buttery smooth performance of iOS but has all the apps so it's a it's a trade-off but it's it's certainly you know if you compare the performance of the Moto X to say galaxy s4 or an HTC One I don't think that you're going to say this phone feels way slower I don't think anyone's going to say that that's correct yeah and actually I have a killer segue right now I was which is a big way it's all ready to jump in and segue why are you guys fighting over the segue nobody fight over the segue you want you wouldn't use a real segue sitting on the sidewalk you want to fight over that don't fight over the words yes I would I mean I was crushing within like 20 yards but I would like just like get on board okay will do the segue then we freaking segue back to the Moto X and it will do Dan segue I think that's fair it's just a very brief thing which is to say that the motor works really only has like a couple of weeks in which it can be the real standout mobile device right maybe not even a couple of weeks because II fleas coming up in Berlin we know Samsung and Sony you're gonna do some new devices Galaxy Note Sony's got a new flagship coming those might not be enough to overshadow the Moto X particularly in the United States but in September 10th is the date we can anticipate see the new iphone when we expect see iOS 7 release public sector etc maybe I found plural right right and that's where the Moto X is going to have a bit more of an issue and that no one is when you should bring it to Europe so we can keep it going and you can't get the motor works in gold you cannot get the Moto X in gold or champagne yeah just just get it in yellow and i don't know like dirty it up a bit well Chris ordered his custom was in yellow and he can attest that it does get very dirty uh but I don't believe it turns cold at all uh no I've never had a phone that I was rubbing turned gold never that has never happened you don't have the Midas touch chris i don't i don't now it let me take a quick informal poll of the two of you are either of you even remotely considering a purchase of the Sham ponyo iphone 5s now i'll say this as the eye i was saying this to some colleagues earlier and i own an iphone 5 and if everything that has leaked or rumored about the iphone 5s comes true I've never been less excited to buy an iPhone like I I just don't feel like I don't really want to buy the new iphone unless something is completely different like the the camera technology is completely different blows me away or you know the next processors been rumored to be you know whatever X percent faster and it contains 30 / 10 lectures like faster or something how do you even measure that anyways but you know the which doesn't sound a whole heck of a lot to me it's not like like when I went for my 4s to my 5 the first thing I said with my 5 is like holy crap this thing's fast yeah but you know I and so in that case I don't really have any interest in the 5s period and if I did have interest in the 5s I am going to say I'd wait until ice we actually see what this gold looks like officially and how Apple sells it to me cuz they'll probably put some marketing spin on it and make me really want it yeah this does sound like a very iterative device right it's going to have a marginally better camera a marginally better processor uh probably the same body and display and we're hearing a lot of noise about this biometric sensor built into the home button right and and that might be it and and maybe if there's some something wireless to whether it be NFC or who knows is it like with every generation of iphone going all the way back to like the 3gs there's been rumored there's been a rumor two of integrating wireless technology into it um wait a second in a phone is wireless technology you know what I mean oh thanks for uh yes more one of those technology so and if that is the case I I think that yeah I'm not gonna be too excited about 5c is interesting i'm excited about you know finally seeing an iphone and a bunch of official colors but then again I wouldn't want a mid-range iphone so but I'm definitely about not buying a sham ponyo actually this this this great one that's rumor now looks kind of interesting although it seems like the least plausible of the the rumored colors I wonder that's maybe just like a pre-production chassis that hasn't been a you know completely colored or something it looks like it looks like unfinished metal today yeah yeah I'm not sure if that's actually production right so well the thing for me with the iPhone 5 is it is pretty but then like we mentioned previously everybody has managed to scratch up the edges on the damn thing so if the big selling point what about iPhone 5s is aesthetics if it's like a nice pretty cool paint job and I've gotta say the idea of a gold iPhone seemed so outlandish I wasn't buying it for a long time but then we saw the leaked pictures and it's a really subtle code it's kind of it's very desaturated it's kind of like a silver with a tint of yellow to it essentially right I'm champagne listen man know every one of our listeners is familiar with champagne and Prosecco for Italian listeners or sparkling wine for our American listeners or a corona light for our our basic or Miller Miller High milk miller high life for Wisconsin listeners at labatt blue for a Canadian what kind of is that p vrbo whatever it was blue Rob that is the color of urine there you don't know red ball no PB uh I think it's go get here yeah perhaps Pabst blue-ribbon is what that is called love flood which is and just makes you a horrible beer just exactly just to make sure that we're not actually promoting or endorsing the use of beer beverages everything which is discussed is garbage so don't cry I didn't get a good phone miller high life is the chef anya of beers this is true you should save your money and buy better beer i fix fix that for you but yeah oh so uh i'm not gonna even try to go back to my segue because we would have had to jump out come on board op it's not teasing like that because oh what we were talking about windows phone somehow about the windows phone and so today ATT confirmed that it is offering the low key lumia 925 starting on September 13th in what might be the coolest looking Windows Phone I've seen yet like it's in this this custom all black it's like it just like brings me right back to when the black iphone 5 was announced and I was like holy crap that looks totally murdered out and awesome and makes me really want one i'm going to divide shall come to look at that picture now it is it is a tight looking phone and here's the thing i mentioned this on twitter this morning if you are an AT&T and you're seriously considering Windows Phone device uh I I'm hard pressed to recommend a three-hundred-dollar on contract 1020 over a 100 dollar on contract 925 especially when the 925 has a passable camera and is the best-looking Windows Phone ever made yes the ergonomics on the 925 outclassed the 1020's like it's not even a comparison there's so much nicer and what was surprised me was if you've seen the t-mobile version of the 925 t-mobile's headed for a couple months now they offered in the white and silver color variant that we've seen quite a bit before they slapped a giant t-mobile logo right lo the capacitive keys and is like the most tacked on garish looking thing ever and surprisingly surprisingly for et there's this tiny little globe in the upper left-hand corner so they showed a bit of restraint and plastering their their logo all over the place well you know why that is you know why that is dan it's because they were debating you know they're like well you know we have like a really wide but but not very tall area below the capacitive keys so do we want to just like squash the the globe and make it like you know an oval do you wanna like change the AT&T logo for this and just make it all the way across do you want to like keep it a circle and ultimately they decided not to disparage their own logo by squashing it that was the only thing that drove their decision I mean they could have really lobbied for nokia and microsoft to let them put the globe in the position of the start key people think they could have or or they could have lobbied to make the phone with a taller so that there's a giant black hole the capacitive i think it but like you know like a four-inch diameter verizon did etch it slow dough into the home button on the galaxy note 2 so that like i don't think that would be like totally out of the out of possibilities no the next step is you know these phones will detect silence during phone calls and then whisper in your ear between words just like the ultimate branding it's just always in your ear in your face the instead of instead of when you dial a number instead of hearing a conventional ringtone you here hi okay you guys these are just I don't know diamond ideas as far as the market is a concern so I think they're just coming up with him because we we're gonna find any some freakish phone you know Carl and the line yeah unfortunately yeah I was just thinking you know they could also do a thing we're like that when you press a number on the dial pad the via the the DTMF tone is is like a it just says verizon but in in the right DTMF tone but then I was thinking you know what if what if three did that because that would just be really confusing because every number you press to just go 3 3333 yo you got you can't apply that to every operate around the world fortunately nobody makes phone calls anymore right ah so you know the other actual same point that I wanted to make within 9 25 on ATT is that ATT is once again positioned itself as like the windows phone carrier in the US they've got the 920 the 925 the 1020 they've got like multiple lower end models they carry as many windows phone devices as you know other carriers offer a range of Android devices so um yeah if you want a windows phone chances are you're probably shopping at AT&T ATT is doubling down on Windows Phone doubling down hard yep I was actually surprised but surely that that isn't too expensive a tts Android range right I mean maybe chops of things like the original spectrum I mean at the end of the day though 85 or eighty-seven percent of ATT sales or still iPhones so I don't know how much 18 he really cares yeah I mean we've discussed this previously well we mentioned that blackberry would get some carriers to port just out of the fact that carries were more competition among manufacturers they don't want to be forced to choose between Samsung's big device and apple's big device right which seems to increasingly the situation of the moment Justin ten nine twenty-five like we did that that is a really nice and slick black look but I'm saying those free dots they look like they might be for wireless charging perhaps yeah so the 925 actually has a snap-on wireless charging case which is the dumbest thing ever but it was three dots on the back of it enable it to enable the snap on case to communicate with the phone's battery and charge wirelessly but it does not do wireless charging out of the box right and in district 15 were reporting to with it yeah that's not unique to the 18-team bottom right yeah the 925 looks horrible with that snap-on case because it only grabs the corners of the phone it's just like so yeah it dad I remember that it is pretty ugly so we can just kind of move on can we talk about ugly talk about garish branding again so I don't you have this in our topic list but we mentioned last week that Verizon was picking up the HTC One finally and one of our staffers chris welch went out and bought one he's been waiting for it for a long time when i bought it and you know I told them jokingly like oh you could probably you know get some light acid or whatever and take off that that Verizon logo that's on the back of it with just a little bit of friction and it turns out that the logo is actually like etched into the metal so you can have this massive verizon logo and 4G LTE logo like you Norma's things that you cannot like Eve feasibly remove you can scratch the beats logo off like the beats logo comes off with your fingernail verizon logos not going anywhere but if they were serious about it they would have backlit the verizon logo so that whenever the phones on it lights up or like they could use it as a notification like you know with the verizon will go pulses when you get an email and they're just not being creative enough they need to hire me as their CMO clear as I'm saying crazy turns into a freaking marketing brainstorming session I mean clearly the delay for verizon to get the HTC one was so that they could figure out how to apply the logo and not let you remove it yeah and mission accomplished might just know stuff that that's all God you guys are uh what do you guys wanna talk about next you want talk about some blackberry Wall Street Journal but before we talk about that I want to I want to transition into an anecdote that has nothing to do with anything so what's up for those on was a Thursday or Friday last week Chris Grant editor-in-chief of polygons our sister site was was in town in New York and he was showing me his iphone 5 which he detests because it he has to charge it four times a day apple says that it's within spec they won't swap it out it's insane but the phone is like physically benched like it looks like a boomerang like I don't know how this happened but the phone like is the the antenna you know the the metal edge is bent on the side like at like probably a five or ten degree angle and ne ne to the Genius Bar and they were like well did you have in your pocket he's like yeah he's like you you're not supposed to put the iphone in your pocket and and you just look at them like what and and sure enough if you go to apple's support site there is a thing somewhere buried in apple's documentation that's like the iphone is not meant to be put in the pocket this is like a real thing this is like this is so Apple this is like when the iphone 4 came out and yet they had all the issues of the antenna gate and people were holding it doing the death grip and then Apple told everyone that you're holding it wrong and that you need to hold the phone like this or whatever it was so that you don't block the antennas so right i totally totally read this the two finger grip does anyway you hold you that's perfectly reasonable rational but there is actually an even earlier person for this which was the HTC nexus one that was one that a whole bunch of people had issues with the screens cracking I mean it was original Nexus device and HTC on a supporter just like Apple will say you know supposed to put it in your pocket and then everybody kind of had a backlash about uh saying what the hell are you guys talking about this is nonsense the original HTC nexus one had so many hardware issues I don't know of anyone that owned one and didn't have to have their like power but replaced and then the screen started like disintegrating doesn't matter it had an RGB trackball that's all that matters this is true that was high quality that was every awesome that was that was hype is what it was is straight up pipe and we haven't seen another Nexus device for HC since I think that's a google just being kind of vengeful google play edition of the of the one bro not an exit device Oh Evan Evan wants us to know that that the nexus one was beefy which by the way is a new adjective that he is using and Sam sheffer as you see I don't know if this is like a new trend or if they're trying to start a trend but something is good you say it's beefy stop trying to make beefy happen like just not gonna cop I know we can talk like that I agree yeah let's do the professional thing uh we'll start with the the news today the wall street journal reported that uh the blackberry is looking to spin off BBM or blackberry messenger into its own separate company um as it goes through its various ways of identifying how it can sell itself apart and make a bunch of money uh but separating vbm just seemed like struck me as like the oddest thing it's like the one thing of value left in the company right that that really like has a lot of users uh people are really into it as a brand name and they finally got to the point where they're we're almost at the point where you can use it on iOS and Android they said by summer well summer's almost over so and and and now they're looking at spinning it off to do a separate company so the latest rumors peg whatsapp at a roughly 1 billion dollar valuation and I can't imagine at this point video is worth any more than what's app may be that the user base just isn't there right do you know how many users what's up as I know blackberry will say that depending on you know the phase of the moon BBA has anywhere from 60 to 72 million active users and what's up i don't know but i wouldn't surprise me if it was that hot yeah that wouldn't surprise me either i'm looking right now in any case i find a whole thing kind of dumb because like them saying bbm is the big value and a big appeal 300 million users wow so whatsapp is way bigger than visa but the but the one thing i can say is that you know whats app should be way bigger because it has multi platform support that's not tied to hardware like BBM could have been way bigger if blackberry had decided to make it multi-platform two years ago yeah apparently yeah really according to The Wall Street Journal's report they've had working internally uh multi-platform support in BBM for as long as as well as long ago as three years ago and they just decided not to release it yet and they even had desktop versions that you could message BBM users from your desktop and they decided not to release it you know BBM is is BlackBerry's microsoft office right because microsoft has head office working on the ipad like a full-blown version of office on the ipad for what a year and a half two years something like that and maybe less than that year and a half for a year and it still is now exact same situation but it's not perfectly analogous because microsoft charges for office microsoft already kind of gets an income from it but the point I was trying to build up and then you guys completely stomped all over was that bbm as a value and as an asset to blackberry just makes perfect sense as a selling point for blackberry devices like just isolating BBM it becomes far less clear how you going to monetize and get cash out of that allocate I I can tell you how blackberry thinks it's going to monetize it thinks it's going to do it through the channels these new channels that it can sell to advertisers and salta brands and they can own them ah but that's I'm that just seems like a really long shot to me um so I mean at the same time fair enough if you're going to take away the exclusive to blackberry devices then you actually take it away that big selling point you know you're not going to say the device in the basis that have BBM if I was an Android have it as well so i can took i could totally see the point that chris is making about blackberry intentionally dragging his feet but at the same time nobody else is going to sort our blackberries features up to them yeah it's up for some Heinz and those guys to actually make a final decision at some point instead of waiting for some really really bored millionaire billionaire to come in and fight him up Chris didn't you tweet something earlier today that uh the ultimate troll would be a thorsten heins used his the three billion dollars blackberry Hasna bank to make a game system yeah I don't know if I necessarily call it a troll I just feel like if you like the ultimate solid you'd call that solid financial advice for black yeah I mean they're just be I mean think about it it's like the ultimate yolo move right like torsten just throws three billion at like trying to win at gaming out of the blue like nobody sees it coming they call it the black box okay think of how hot a name yeah right thank you but you know they would call it the play box playbox would call whatever you want it's not going to sell any anyway but it's gonna it you know if you murdered out it'd be like maybe twice the size of an Ouya they could they could pipe that it's blackberry 10 powered have these like insane controllers for it that like have like this some hinge in the middle so that you can rotate him like this for no reason like it it would just be it would be the most insane device ever created and they could do it for the three billion dollars that they have in the bank no question about it I mean Chris you clearly put a lot of thought into this you should whip up a PowerPoint deck there are two things that I think about a lot dan one is verizon's marketing strategy and two is BlackBerry's video game console those are those are the only two things i think i spent a lot of time thinking about and only one of those is fantasy they answered yes that's that's true okay you guys need to make sure you were seated and prepare because of a kick kick a segue ok with the segue blackberry should come up with an indiegogo campaign for his black books ah yeah it's not a bad idea sure i can see that NM feo asking 32 million dollars and only receive 10.2 is that is that what your segwaying into blood that's the one do you enjoy edge nonexistent smartphone I mean I really think everything this was a marketing exercise more than anything you know I agree I totally agree you know you two guys the head of software done in some fashion some form back in January they still working on the software you know that they gave us a bunch of renders day us for you know ob2 amount of money they didn't get there nobody expected to get there but at least they got the name out there the world's tiniest violin is playing from our shuttle worth right now the dude is worth what we set it on last week's show I think five or six hundred million dollars yeah I mean he can just he can you know he can spill some loose pocket change on on the floor of a grocery store pick it up and fund that yeah I don't really think that this whole campaign set the back at all like if you open to and you well rather if your canonical and you expect your phone to be funded by this campaign then you're making some really really optimistic projections and forecasts like that their roadmap would have been we're gonna have this campaign if we actually get the 2 million out of somewhere where we use the money but our plans are just going along as if we're going to fail that must be the way that there would have been planning it so I don't think this said them back any i think it was good promotion they got a ton of coverage from a whole heap of people who typically don't really care about boot to his whole right I got a bunch of interest so I mean frankly even though campaign Flay what I think that boasted the chances of this phone actually becoming something because now people are actually aware of it I mean it think about the the yola what's the name of their phone now uh I just been calling it the Eola exactly well I the best-case scenario for the edge or whatever device ultimately comes out of this project it is in you know a blue sky scenario is still going to be like a developer you know a super shitty developer phone it's never going to be a mainstream device right yeah which is fine I mean it's all good I'm cool with that are you cool with it I'm cool you cool cool uh we got one more thing on our topic list we actually mentioned it this week the HTC one mini you can buy it on a TTT as of this friday i got to play with it for a little bit so um and i really like it really big fan of the mini yes the one mini is a great phone it is but I mean that the problem so what is 18 he's selling it for how much hundred bucks okay yeah i mean i was going to say that the motorway I'd rather Moto X but then again it's a hundred dollars more right and I will say that the one mini gives you little aluminum body which is awesome gives you front-facing speakers which is again awesome it gives you a 720p display its 4.3 inch now 4.7 so it's a little bit smaller but it's I would argue it's a better quality display than the Moto X and it's got a slightly better camera neither cameras are great I would take the ultrapixel camera over the Moto X camera though the Moto X camera is so bad yeah like I feel like I seriously feel like Motorola went into the Moto X just like with a defeatist attitude they're like we're Motorola like it like people don't expect us to have a good camera we don't know how to find a good camera so we're just gonna half-ass it and people be like oh yeah it's Motorola I mean to be honest with you there's only so many companies that make these camera imaging sensors right like they only have so many to choose from that means that they're definitely or more than likely using the same image sensor as somebody else but right for some reason they can't figure out the image processing to make that image sensor saying uh and that's something that you can see with the iPhone 5 is like the iphone 5 technically does not have as good spec take camera or respect to a lens as other phones on the market but it consistently takes better photos in more difficult light situations just again and again and again and again and again very easily because its image processing is so good and so well yeah and Motorola just can't figure that out no I don't gotta say is by the Moto X don't worry about it because in a week's time stone is gonna kick out this awesome camera accessory you strap that on your Moto X and then you're away you got beautiful beautiful pictures and all those iphone fools whose phone could actually fit into their pocket witness camera they can jazeera go and do whatever they need to do we won't be worried about rule i am psyched about the sony phone accessory i would love it if they if they also come up with a phone with just no camera on it like super high on phone no camera and just saying we believe in this thing like that would be bosy it won't happen but it would be nice you know I wouldn't I wouldn't surprise me Sony's been known to do is just really weird high-end niche hardware Raleigh I know it's pronounced broly but i prefer raleigh i've always called it Raleigh I'm gonna continue to say that sounds like a very Midwestern wave pronouncing it yeah i would also throw the PS Vita in that category now go to price cut so it actually has a chance now do you remember the personal media players that they had a couple years back that had this like you know graphite edges and everything like that they were like super well designed nobody bought them of course because an ipod is a million times more usable uh but they looked awesome and they probably only played a track oh they only had like you know four gigabytes of internal memory for a check file so you can play four songs yet you had trouble finding 48 rock songs actually play yeah yet you guys remember that old the the the digital walkman that looked like a pen is like it i think is available in like 32 and 64 megabytes versions in the late 90s that was a yeah it was awesome it is super expensive i spent like i spent like two years of hard-earned like summer job cash on that thing I think I once it was like 399 or something insane like that and at least felt insane at the time but the the the interface for getting music onto the Singh was just completely absurd because it was this like you know of course it was a custom Sony app they had to put on your Windows machine and it only scored a track so if you wanted to put an mp3 on there you had to import it into the Sony app which converted it to a DRM encoded a track that you had to check out to put on the the the Walkman and once it was checked out you couldn't do anything else with it so like it it basically took your rights to your own mp3s away from you it was amazing is the most Sony thing ever ever produced beautiful I still had that player by the way um I don't have a piece of software that can put music files on of course so I'm stuck listening to some Sammy Hagar album for the rest of my life but and of course it only fits one album on it so it's just this probably is probably like a late 90s Sammy Hagar too yeah another one that you'd want to listen to I think it was his first post van Halen album I can't remember the name um but it was it was yeah it was a very special album yeah this entire conversation is happening way above my head not a sammy hagar fan i was aware of his existence until like right now what I hear right I'm done I'm done I don't want to hear this anywhere I knew with that that's a wrap for the verge mobile show episode 60 for the week of August 26 um as always if you want to check us out you follow us on Twitter I'm DCC fruit if you really want to follow Vlad who doesn't know who Sammy Hagar is he is a lad Sabbath chris is Z power and dieter who maybe someday we'll eventually join us again is back on and of course you can leave comments on the post we'd love to read your comments we always do so until then until next time see you guys right