Gadgetory


All Cool Mind-blowing Gadgets You Love in One Place

The Verge Mobile Show 071 - crafting a Vertu, the Jolla phone, and VSCO Cam

2013-12-03
your readings mobile accomplishes welcome to the Virgin Mobile show this is episode number 71 for Luke December second 2013 I am dieter bohn i am glad Sabbath and I'm delighted to know that we are now accepted gineering show i'm dan seifert and I don't have a witty comment to add and chris ziegler is here at least his thumbnail is here with us but chris sigler is coming to us from chicago where ok so we have a running stick on the show where we troll chris by making fun of the city of Chicago the city of Chicago if we tell the truth is a beautiful city that I love that we all like to go to and we have the chance there's a lot a big great tomato casserole yeah they may see I was trying to be nice and you know went straight for it oh I've been talking this entire time and apparently I was on mute oh I would rewind rewind rewind i'm chris sigler yes yeah i'm just going to go thing where i was going to say that the one problem chicago is apparently it doesn't have internet how many different ways if you try to get online past week Chris it's kind of like I'm living no not kind of like I'm literally living in a post-apocalyptic future we're like you know instantly the only currency that human beings still have is their connectivity and so like you're you know you're like you're trading my thighs for food or water you know fret you know clean water not that not like you know still water that's going to make you sick or like you know a fire if you're cold that kind of stuff that that's where I'm at with my life right now i have three my thighs each of which well no I don't even have three my thighs i have two phones and one mifi on three different carriers that all get one bar of signal and they're all finicky like sometimes they like to work sometimes they don't depending on their mood so like I can I can go for a little while on one and then it craps out and I've switch to another and that's what I've been doing for the past four days and I'm about ready to just say never mind and move to Costa Rica and disconnect from the internet apparently and and disappear off the face of the planet so is Ian here's the thing that I understand is from what I can tell from the maps you've shown me the entire city of Chicago has no comcast internet service and hasn't since friday i mean i'm sure that's not actually the case but that seems to be the case that you're making and in any other modern city on the entire planet that would not stand there'd be riots on the streets but apparently in chicago it's like man no internet whatever well so you know i went to starbucks both yesterday and today to try to get some work done because at least i get single therefore my my hotspot and the the the Wi-Fi situation there is kind of the most depressing thing ever because you you get like the you know the starbucks connection screen and then you accept their terms and conditions and then it just no matter what site you go to it goes to the same terms and conditions page so it's like it's like you're just permanently looking at a pay wall and that not a pay wall because it's free but like it's it's the worst possible it's like if you were using the internet in hell and and you just had to keep accepting terms and conditions to get on Hell's Wi-Fi that's kind of what I was so yeah everything about my life has kind of been terrible as a result of comcast for the past four days and the word on the street I've been doing a lot of Twitter searches about this obviously as you can probably imagine the word on the street is that a fiber cable in somewhere in indiana may have been cut by a construction crew on saturday which somehow took out all of Indiana and Illinois which leads me to the obvious question why is comcast infrastructure such that a single cable cut takes down two states which leads me to the next question of why are you at all surprised yeah yeah fair enough but then I also i talked to a comcast person earlier today who I think heard my my rant um and she said she said that there is a problem with my node whatever that means wow I've absolutely no idea what that means that almost sounds like a like a diss or a threat i don't know but so anyway this is this is the hell I've been living since Saturday its ongoing that's why you can't see my beautiful face right now and hopefully I'll be resolved this week well I think maybe the no she's speaking to about is I've memory sure how comcast does it but when you have fiber to the cabinet the cabinet is usually the node where the fiber ends up and then the couple starts coming out and and and also if I could just hijack or jump on Chris's tale of woe well my video is gone it is perfect fitting no but yeah I've had one wireless issues and issues with my isp how weekend and Monday night as well and the thing that actually frustrates me and I don't think it's terribly unusual is how many Wi-Fi networks that can actually pick up in my home and there's usually a solid dozen of all my neighbors but the thing is in spite of the fact that we some of us share a front door end up building and all of us share our street we don't know each other and if we don't know each other we notice I could go to trust each other with sharing Wi-Fi passwords so when my connection cuts out I need to go out and hit the library or hit a coffee shop or whatever to continue working whereas if we were actually social beings as opposed to being social things like Twitter we could save ourselves a lot of hassle but I just I don't think that's true I don't think that's true Vlad because I mean if I had access to my neighbor's Wi-Fi that's where I download all my all my illegal you know all my pirated stuff you know and then all the nano society is basically your focus I think I think the minor inconvenience of once in a while having to go to a coffee shop is much less than the the major inconvenience of having to getting to know your neighbors it's a good point touche or you know you could just pay for internet that works and not have it fail I Burnett I I have never comcast has actually been super reliable for me in the past and then over the course of the last four months or so the frequency of outages has become greater and greater and greater and this is kind of the you know icing on the cake so we'll see they're supposed to call me today to discuss my whoa they haven't yet we'll see if it happens but then again I can't get a phone call because I rely on a micro cell which relies on the Internet so we're back to square one I hey from the hood broke my reports look man I ended up I have no sympathy for any of you because I have files and when it fails I'll demand sympathy from you but until then you're on your own is hangouts acting differently now like it like what things shows on the screen is completely random hangouts is different every single week so I don't even know if I can answer that question cuz like I I don't know all of you guys look like really beautiful pulsing sir it's kind of like hip hypnotic you're all pulsing circles for me yeah well when i talk like your circle stays on the screen because that's that's what the people want to see that people just want to see chris sigler and I don't blame them I I don't blame them either yeah um actually what the people wouldn't know this is a terrible transition I'm doing it anyway I'm powering through what the people want to see is however to makes it's ridiculously insanely expensive phones and Vlad went to the factory can so give us the set the scene where is this place what's going on here triad well said seen well first of all you gotta say the guys in vertu were extremely accommodating extremely nice and I have to punch that like for a luxury company and they were just so modest and sweet it was really surprising like usually you kind of expect and to be honest I've being inverted stores and divide you get in those places is no one of welcome everybody when I see you like if you don't look like you have millions of dollars in the bank they're not particularly interested because they know then I'm going to say but anyhow so the virtual HQ this is a place on the outskirts of London near place called fleet the specific location is called church crookham which is just a really amusing name and also worth mentioning the virtue chief designer is called hutch Hutchinson which I would just love to be able to put that on a business card my name is hutch Hutchinson I'm the chief designer / 2 and I work in church crookham as like the salami the next bubbly that is the most British thing I've ever heard yeah um well what are the important things about it first of all this is where everybody phone has been made from the beginning so it's one pretty large building but it could say is basically the entire go to operation have another facility still in the UK which handles repairs but this is where every phone is manufactured and and it has an atrium on the inside high ceilings it's kind of like its a mix between a manufacturing spot a factory and just a you know a classy modern office and it's just it's really what really surprised your mother is the scale is how smooth it is and how compact the whole thing is so basically you walk in and on the right side there's a design team the admin team etc etc and on the left side there's the guys assembly in the phones and why are you standing at reception you can literally see through some dark and glass people putting together the ten-thousand-dollar phones now I was I know kind of burning I have a question for you glad uhh you keep saying that they're they're assembling the phones so is this like the same kind of thing as Motorola's factory in Texas where all the parts are essentially made in asia shipped there and then people hand assemble the phones or are there actual part manufacturing going on here oh oh is it is very different it's very different from the Moto operation there there's a lot of custom make parts for me Hansen so a great example was the battery cover of the sing Shiva which is ten thousand dollars and above on the inside of it they have this pattern it's an angular person but the thing is it's made out of metal and we're talking about the inside of a freaking battery cover ok this is this this is the damn metric opposite of Samsung's plasticky thin cover on the inside is pattern is it's very geometric it's very pretty but it's plated metal and it's done so in such a refined fashion that we actually touch it there is no texture to the pattern ok so the amount of precision that's required in this is crazy you bay like literally the guy who explained it to me he made the sound of kissing is like we just make it will make it kiss the surface in the back right what I believe that I believe that you're like I was kissing the thing they're very passionate about making it phones is like people invest their pride in it but the thing you told me is that fifteen percent of those parts get thrown away because they're imperfect and this is the thing that sits next to the battery the thing that you pretty much never see so wait you're telling me is that there's good money to be made in standing by vertues dumpster collective discarded parts and making secondhand virtues that are like almost as good yeah I mean if you could like a simple cobble together that discarded like sapphire crystals and things like that and and throw together a verte you look like you're not really good report the cityscape like renowned British sculptor Richard Wilson did yes over to his plan even the discarded parts probably because of freaking expensive is turning into a kind of a scale model of a futuristic city which is I don't know two square meters it's a really nice thing I didn't understand it because I was like usually it's right next to the reception area and usually when companies do that is the wide facilities or like a map or something related to the company but this was just you know having fun with essentially rejected parts antennas display panels etc etc and it just made to be futuristic and they are going to make money out of it because they're going to sell it off auction it off for charity so they have a plan for the rejected parts even though Christie strategy always thinking with his business mind isn't a terrible one to be honest right so here's the thing that I don't get like when when I imagine vertu I imagine that they're like pumping out like five phones a week and they're just selling for ridiculous amounts of money but looking through your pictures here like they're making a ton of these things like relative to what I imagined like do you have any idea how many phones are kicking out a day out of this place it seems like they're working on a whole bunch at a time and there's a whole lot more people I just sort of imagined like I don't know five jewelers in a room crafting handcrafting phones one by one like an order comes in and they're like all right Jim you go do it like I'm trying to think what the market is for you know $10,000 phones and apparently it's way bigger than I the market is Gwyneth Paltrow is she is a known vertu fanatic okay there's just got there making all of them for her yes yes and and what's his name from Coldplay her husband mo the dude from called the dude no people who find it and well does to answer this question how many phones are they shipping out is exactly what they wouldn't tell me but for my observations I walked through the entire process from start to finish and packing and then put it into the boxes and get in the ready to ship and there was there was always a phone in progress so to date this point they are doing a higher volume the most of us probably expect in total though since his beginning vertu has shipped roughly 350,000 phones and I think I kind of imagined they started ramping up more recently and write numbers are growing and particularly now they're doing android phones and touch screens and have google play store axis and all these more contemporary features you can see how many audience open it up to their devices but actually to dance point you know Dan said hey Jim we're going to order pick it up that is actually very close to what vertu is doing because one person is responsible for each handset and at the end when answer is completed there's a laser engraving somewhere on it with that person signature now that doesn't mean that they make every single part because did you essentially serialize some of the tasks so some of the polishing I think some guys are just doing polishing and some guys are just doing whatever which might require works with tease but generally speaking one person is assembling the components of the motherboard screwing that down into the case polishing it testing etc etc and the virtual actually had customers call in and say I would like Wendy and there is a lady called Wendy Bevan he's been with words you from the beginning I like Wendy to put together my next phone and and then yeah the Wendy in question was apparently in the brink of tears because it was she was really humbled by that Wow nah did you get a tip I don't know about that and Chris stop thinking about money Mac what yeah I gotta know Vlad did you bring the blackberry bananana with you I did and did you compare it to the the virtues and which one is is more luxurious very good question that fantastic I mean the first thing I had to do was present for two chief of design with a blackberry / no no no no no no 9 a-9 a 2 and ask him what things with it and actually he was more more positive on it than I thought I mean he pulled a credible effort I don't think that was everything goes pure diplomacy like he was like I think it's on his design because it's honest in terms of what it wants to be and what it was to present and project to people it's quite a clean design because he's a designer he's not talking about the software which obviously would be how other bag of hurt but yes I compared the a competitive there's the virtue constellation which is the most affordable hanser you can get it's only thing affordable very loosely yeah it's a real so it's nothing like five thousand euro whatever it is you know it's oh just I'll take two yeah I mean if you get a nice text break you probably cover that but that's if you led to be clear that's if you get it without any that's if you get it without any options right like you can get them in cold you can get them with diamonds or whatever you want that's right I would like to point out you know somebody else covered my article with the visit to go to and he said that they make phones up to fifteen thousand dollars in price and that is not correct thirty thousand dollars is where the top end 42 begins right there are parts and components that you can put on in customizations and laser engravings and I mean you can basically call them and say I want you to draw the Mona Lisa in diamonds on the side of this phone and they will do it because they're having skills they have the expertise and they have the diamonds I hate to say this I'm actually I'm on vertu site right now uh the the signature in black stainless with white ceramic inserts is absolutely gorgeous it's a really beautiful phone I i would i would rock that with android like four point oh and uh no no that your old processor so here's the thing like signature is that's we 40 rate we do you point out that like I understand spending okay I don't really but I can I can live in a world where I understand spending tens of thousands of dollars ah jewelry on something precious that i will have with me or that i will keep in my house that is beautiful and expensive and unique and amazing the problem that i have with vertu is that it's tied to a thing a computer that is essentially not going to be timeless it is going to get old and break down and at that point like what do you do with the rest look I think here's here's my theory and Vlad maybe you can expand on this but my theory with vertu has always been that the kinds of people that that by these phones are the kinds of people who don't want to deal with their phone they just want to press the concierge button on the side and talk to someone who makes magic happen at any cost and and if you look at the signature series in particular if you look at you know it's been around for a long time and if you look at a signature from say 2005-2006 it looks basically the same as a signature from 2013 so they've done a good job of making at least that line in their design DNA kind of timeless I ensure the innards have changed i'm sure it's you know 3g or maybe even LTE now whereas a USB edge but that you know the the appearance of the phone is the same and frankly for the for what people are doing with these phones which is pressing the concierge button a 2005 signature works just fine I'm curious Vlad did you ask about the concierge service and how much it's used by virtue owners I did I didn't they they have metrics you should head to but they say it gets a lot of it gets a lot of these but what I noticed was that the latest Android phones the cheaper ones aren't getting as much uses signature wounds but I basically goes Chris's point oh so then I saw you grinning when Chris said maybe has LT and you're like no it doesn't that is exactly the case there is no aunty here and I mean seriously the signature again the most expensive phone is basically and chases when into since it was introduced in 2008 the fact it runs nokia series 40 is just amazing to me i mean and the screen is probably like what the same resolution is my pebble more or less it's cuz screen let's go look at that guy i mean it's it's a 2006 or 2007 arrow nokia with a fancy shell on it that's that's what it is right but you buy for the fancy ship right you buy it from and listen the thing is i am really surprised by how candid vertu were abroad their motivations as well like they weren't trying to spend a whole other story about giving people the best in technology and what not like they're not particularly interested in competing respects they want to have leadership but their idea of leadership is will give you the customer service in the cosmic air and frankly they do give you that because we need call up tech support Weaver to you call the guys in that building so when when somebody picks up a tech support advert to they can literally yell at a person who put together your phone it can be like you know what Yuri from Moscow ordered Alpine letter and he did not get that and you know you're from Moscow knows about leather because easier e from Moscow and and and also to that point the letter on the virtue consolation is a little bit rougher in texture a little bit more sensual than the leather on blackberry porsche design so if you're picking between the two I would stay for 2 as a better level but then it also costs twice as much but then again if you're spending thousands upon thousands of whatever currency cheese and a phone again I don't agree I don't even think the considerations that data presented of particular importance of these people like it's not it's not really a case of I want to have like a family heirloom that I passed down to whatever it's just it's just pure ostentation what is it is an invert to the virtual guy said to me when you pull out the signature and you put that thing down on the table that basically says of people I'm the boss so there isn't a question about who is the chief in whatever the hell is going on here i well I was never I was never in out that that gwyneth paltrow is the boss I mean if I i sat down at table I carranza yes that's Tony Danza probably can't afford a vertu unfortunately oh man ganzel burns dang it there's some like back catalogue very hopeful show where we made fun of Tony Danza I seem to recall this happening don't even we're Tony Danza all right like back in the legit panda days when that was a running joke I feel like honey um yeah I don't know I I mean I hate to the standard joke about virtues oh my god why would anybody spend that much mana phone what idiots is gonna be obsolete and this is just money and like I'm you know I want to look deeper than that at this but at the end of the day like it's it's it's a lot of rich people thanks it's very cool very well made very interesting rich people things but it's just like Birkin bags and you know all those other things that are exceedingly expensive and they become out of date in a season and they end up you know I don't swear it was the same thing later did you buy it if you buy a fifty-thousand-dollar watch like the $50,000 watch isn't like out of date and can't run its software and tell you the time in 10 years right right that's what I'm saying yeah yeah if you have a small wood right I'm actually kind of surprised oh my god virgin watch maybe I mean maybe vertu does have a either a trade-in program or an upgrade program where they can swap the guts out on the device well well while we're bringing up watches in virtue uh there was a report recently that uh forex virtue designer or current virtue designer is working with metawatch uh yeah on an upcoming SmartWatch which would believe the guy on the po2 he was head of design and look here yeah Frank nuova with his name right yeah acetate yeah I mean it's you know I've said for a long time I still will say metawatch has exactly two problems that prevent it from from being a much better solution than pebble one is the display is a sick sick joke and two they need they have some work to do on design I mean the frame actually is a pretty good looking model but the strata is really unattractive and getting some serious design shops on board hopefully we'll do some good things for them well it's it your engine isn't a steaming pile of reflective guard right having good design shots would do good things for this this this burgeoning SmartWatch industry as a whole right I mean right that's that's that's probably the biggest complaint levied against the pebble you know aside from maybe it's it can be a bit of a user interface issues but most people complain that it just looks cheap in like a toy and they don't want to wear it doesn't match their suit or just you know doesn't have the high-end feel that even a watch of a comparable price offers so right uh if if this does come through and actually happens and you know metawatch is able to release a watch that can match the the craftsmanship that you get on a regular wristwatch that would be very good for the the wearable world I thought you were about to say match the craftsmanship of the pebble and I was going to reach through the microphone and punch you in the face so listen guys I just wanted to wrap up with a couple of points and uh yeah grandpa very briefly one of the things that really amused me and the thing that I couldn't photograph was the fact that they actually have essentially a bank vault at the back of packaging cities it wouldn't let you take a picture of the bank vaults like there's maybe an oceans 15 style like George do need Brad to do and steal all their phones though was wider than I don't know my body is just massively white door and then you go steel bars and behind the Super Bowl a citation for ostentation sake that's hilarious yep I guess it's fair right I mean it's wearing diamonds and gold and sapphires and all this other crap they glue on there I guess they need to keep it safe right yeah I mean Dan had to you know class it up by saying the glue all that crap on but I mean those are expensive parts doesn't like is set aside the home phone element of it they work with some seriously expensive components and I mean it's like things like the alligator skin on the s40 answer that handle which I have to tell you is completely indistinguishable for anything else and it's just kind of like any other surface there's nothing alligator about it but then again I haven't fondle too many alligators to tell you didn't try and bite you no I mean the phone almost it is so sharp and angular I mean these phones are crazy there's so much oh this is this is what I think chris is in love with him because they're just completely totally yeah so this is like the the dream phone for the droid set I don't know gotta try said anything like that the ultra masculine you know that the whole droid thing that verizon's been doing with the four years with the ultra masculine angular edges see see now I'm getting this vision of influence you with a droid notification he'll be quite quite terrible hmm oh there he goes fire goes Chicago he got Chicago Tricia's did the Chicago remix in himself wait you hear me how their your back okay I I wanted to ask you what you were you were talking to us through a mouth harp which I don't know where you got a mouth harp um good is that another word for harmonica no hmm I have no idea what a mouth harp is mom yes well know what's not called a little like durian gran-gran what's that thing called so-called mouth harp right yeah I could be um I mean have to yeah its copyright yeah uh but no my question for Vlad was is there a signature vertu like a ringtone or sound set oh they have they have custom ringtones and notifications yes do they have a composer who like customizes ringtones for each client it's just a ching ching sound right every every ringtone is just like ching ching ching ching ching just just the money cash register sounds I'm not going to answer that then well it is only talking my honey you just not well it's not a good heart that's really offensive I'm guessing but that's that's what wikipedia has it as a main entry a one heart just let it go ah sure no I'll get very very fun to put a fine point oh my god is you don't get any more final points ever I go ah just kidding that's her it exactly exactly the point about not talking about money I in no way I'm going to seek to justify spending thousands upon thousands of whatever currency on the fog I'm not trying to do that but what I would say is having been through their factory and have you seen the way that they work and haven't seen you know how long people have been working there and the fact that you can have a career as a phone maker assembler whatever and you can feel proud about it you have job satisfaction you have customers reaching out and say I like your work etc etc I mean I think I feel like this is the way things should be done you know and as a customer if I could afford a phone that expensive I would spend the money on it because then I would feel me buying the phone isn't victimizing whatever person is making it and we keep making these complaints you know working conditions at Fox phone etc etc Billy would keep buying the devices and and they remains their fathers there's a middle ground here like I i yes not absolutely okay I'm just saying that what I saw there is so much closer to what we expect and wish this industry to look like I'm again I'm not trying to justify the cause of these phones well there's a there's a middle ground but I think I mean to vlad's point I mean I think it goes beyond just making sure that people have like good working conditions and at like a basic living wage I think it has as much to do about like a supporting craftsmanship which is something that is like increasingly lost to robotics um and like it speaks to like a simpler time like almost pre-industrial age where like everything was made by like you know professional craftsman so that's kind of cool too and and you can understand when you have these extremely highly trained basically you know jewel makers we can these devices that's why that's in part why it costs so much to make them it's not I mean obviously have the cost of the raw materials which in some cases are very but then you're you know you're you're paying people I'm sure very very good money to do extremely high quality work you know man i blame the steam engine for all this like I think we're better before we automated things I mean is what I'm saying is that when you think that you have something cheap so I price is paid somewhere yeah you know it might be cheap to you but then somebody somewhere is paying the price it s so I have no way to the transition from that to Jana that I think we should talk about y'all are briefly know the transition is really obvious they're both former nokia or you know it and they have relationships with Nokia's right there well they've both X nokia well ver 2 is X nokia y ella is like nokia expats yeah yeah they both sure the nokia germ so you had to spend some time with with selfish and the other actual shipping phone right flap edit and which I mean the thing that I discovered is that the Nokia fanboys do alive and well he just found a new outlet in yola which y'all yes y'all are yola this is working out your Nokia's honestly I asked him and this I was gonna say the Swedish the Finnish pronunciation is yalla yalla but their tolerance of people calling in jolla if it's more convenient or comfortable for them okay so there you go they you already have a fragmentation issue with this platform so right and but on the software side it's a continuation of what we saw it in Akutan nine so it's me it's the Mego project that Nokia abandoned but at the same time it isn't building on the nokia n9 or the hobbit an interface davis and she started from scratch and done the whole their only new spin on a gesture interface with a lot of swipes left to right a lot of uh coming in from the edge top bottom left right they will do different things my issue with it is that Dean's face is just highly intuitive and it's also not visible so they've taken away all the chrome of the interface yeah lets you to guess well yes others you need to memorize these gestures it's not intuitive it's crashy and there's no app library so I'm wondering um I know ality what I know us okay let's oh you know they can have no LTE that's again like you get if you get a mulligan on that one um other than like the dream of me go and the dream that they'll be somebody else I can actually compete in this smartphone world yeah you know maybe by getting android apps on there somehow so if they've got some kind of parity like I'm at a loss to know why I should still be excited about this I was excited about it as a possibility now that it's like becoming a reality the reality seems like they didn't like finish the work to make it like to get there there's like there's just a lot of stuff that feels maybe I hate everything today it's a theme yeah and so I'm just continuing that theme of anger and frustration well you write though you're right it isn't finished the sailfish OS is an official terms is still in beta beta aah the thing after alpha whenever no I'm good now it's been a long time since we've heard you say beat us I felt it's nice to hear ya alright so yola is in beta and so sick officio is is in that state the LT support is software issue which is going to rectify it it has DLT hardware as please do four point oh and as NFC it has decent aspects and in terms of the actual physical design is blocky and chunky because they have that other half second part which attaches to the back of the phone and that can include upgrades so one of the ideas maybe if you into physical keyboards you can buy an other half which adds physical keyboard to your phone so there's a bit of modularity going on there but none of that as you saying is available today so again we're kind of looking at quite a bit of potential and essentially it needs to be driven by the investment of enthusiastic supporters which is fine I mean I can't think of a single person who's rooting for yola to do well because it's small start-up company and they invested their money the effort the passion their pride is such a intimate and they've had a successful launch I think they've had over a million euros sale sales since they started shipping the devices out so they're doing decently well and and the one reason for optimism is actually they're still such a tiny tiny company with small expenses and making a profit on a per device basis as a company they obviously not making a profit yet but because if I have such a fast cosplays the way the Nokia did they can potentially afford to just so few devices work quickly on the software keep its rating keep giving people more and then you know survive long enough to have a second generation which will be refined and improved so it's the same problem as always though where you have all these guys at the tail end fighting for table scraps right you have the the bun to phone which is coming and and this you can obviously see how this device would go kind of head-to-head for the same hearts and minds well I think you bunch of phone is a great example of flathead mentioned that it's you know sort of going to survive on the interest of these enthusiasts who are willing to plug down six hundred bucks for an unknown uh the a buncha phone didn't get enough of those enthusiasts to make its its goal by a long shot yeah but I mean mark shuttleworth is a billionaire so like hey if the dude wants to make in a bun to phone he'll make an app onto phone well III think that the I think that the crowdfunding campaign as is increasingly the case with crowdfunding campaigns now was really just a publicity stunt to drum up interest in the phone and he succeeded he got a lot of publicity for that device and now he can take it back to the drawing board and decide what he wants to do with it but I mean like money is not a problem for the guy I'm Eliza you talking about money again I'm keeping I thought that you weren't supposed to be okay I'm no I really wanted the jolla phone or i guess i was rooting for it i didn't put down my own money I didn't have you know help them out but uh I was really hoping that it would be better a better execution that I guess we've seen so far and maybe as what says it's a betta uh so maybe there's room for improvement that we'll see obviously there's room for improvement maybe we'll see them actually take action on that that room for improvement but they've got a they've got a very very uphill climb as as far as I can tell yeah i mean the thing that I want is for the interface and like the thinking of the way a smartphone should act and behave and how you interact with the stuff that a smartphone does would be like radically different enough for me to go like I want this to succeed this is so much better than what's out there and um that's like when I saw the early stuff I'm like they are thinking differently they are thinking better about how to like change the way we manage stuff on these little screens and I want them to finish that and that's like the thing that I wish they had done was let's finish that and maybe they still can't because it's still in beta mode um I'm kind of hesitant to say this because I probably endangered wildlife but given that i'm not in finland I'll take the risk I have to say the blackberry 10 interface actually makes so much more sense to me than the only one yeah a smoother animations it's so much more okay you still have to figure it out but they do give you a really neat tutorial on the blackberry and you swipe up from the bottom to dismiss the app get back to multitasking you swipe down for notifications Oh settings Radha and then all your notifications are in the hub and then all your apps on the right side that's it I'm done I'm ready to use the phone numbers of the yellow you do a whole heap of trial and error it just takes way too long I don't I or anybody else living in 2013 has the patience to sit and study and learn a new phone precisely because the point dita was also making is that by the time you've gone in the language of this new interface is something else on horizon right on this company's debt just by the time we figured out unfortunate well I mean yeah a talking about palm here DJ I am getting literally rage about whether less as that's all I ever do um then me why I wrote it back speaking of unintuitive hard to understand interfaces vscocam is available for Android Oh Glenn come on that's not fair totally fair is no fat totally barren tell me what M does in biscoe can tell me what the little flag button does tell me when I take a flexor image yeah except it doesn't actually appear for like ten seconds on the little thing a little corner thing tell me when I take a picture inside visco cam where it's backed up to yeah Josh couldn't even figure that already tweeted about it today so so okay so this go cam uh I want you to tell me it's not backed up and that's what anyone see one does that's one of the filters that tell me what which one what does it do it's if you tap it and then you tap it again you can see the name of it and then you have a slider for how well how strong at you Peter it turns out the time I've tapped that it's already applied a filter and you can go back it's non-destructive why don't you just tell me the name of the filter make the thumbnail a little bigger and I can see it's called see one you're turning your toggling see one on and off is look I'm not going what's doing em to fend m5 I'm not going to defend the interface because i don't think the interface is perfect i think it's very minimalist and maybe it's too minimalist for people like dieter ah but at the end of the day when you're talking about a photo processing app all that really matters to me is the output that it produces and produces some really really impressive pictures from uh android phones which is not something that we ever say so you know I'm really excited about it does you know a really great output on the iphone and it's I've been using it on android phones for a couple of weeks because I was beta testing it and it does really well there as well so you know as a photographer I'm really excited maybe it's a little too dense for the average user not offending you at all theater that was not a comment at you at all and I'm sure that I agree that it's annoying that the photos don't save directly to your gallery and aren't automatically backed up and there's definitely room for improvement with the interface but as far as the photo processing goes I think it's great i'm excited for the photo processing I'm excited that on my Nexus 5 when I hit the shutter button in fiscal cam it takes a picture within a second or less whereas in the you know the default camera app it takes about four seconds lately so okay that's an exaggeration it's like two and a half but still but teach it to your point about give me a larger thumbnail on the filter etc cetera that just sounds like somebody who says I can't order a restaurant unless the menu is on laminated paper with pictures of every single meal um look I want to know what actually I think I think that physical cam has a learning curve there's definitely a fire I think there's a definite learning curve once you learn what's frustrating with the learning curve is it's unnecessary the interface when you're looking at your different filters there's a ton of unused space there you're already having to scroll left and right just like tell me what this button is going to do when I tap on it besides giving me a color a letter and a number if you're already giving me a color a letter and a number is there some system why one thing is labeled B and one thing is labeled P I don't know I bet there is just like if you're gonna put that much work are you complaining about the iphone version here the iphone version is exactly the same as the android version their UI is exactly the same and you know a lot of people complain that it doesn't adhere to you or a lot of I guess Android users are clean that doesn't adhere to Android standards but the iOS version doesn't adhere to iOS standards yeah I don't care about to hear that their own their own interface for it and like I guess the only reason I'm being so like vehement about it is because I've been waiting for something you know like this i mean snap seats fine but like I want better photo tools on Android I want photography's better on Android and so there's a whole lot of pent-up desire and then like you know I don't know for some reason i decided to rage on vscocam today and I'm going to continue stands right it does take really good pictures i wish that i could make it my main camera but i totally can't because i need to have my pictures secure in the cloud it's great for like composing shots but it can't become my main camera advocate it's also it's also good for editing a photo after if you're if you're processing the phone if you take a whole bunch of photos and then you got time later on you import them into the app and you can process them and get all the quality and effects and all that fun stuff did you guys ever use like you know like what what was what the first computer the first pitch is like what it is what OS dinner uh I had like toss I mean I didn't he's a junior so before da so the best word processor of all time bar none is WordPerfect 5.1 because it was wicked fast nothing could slow it down no matter what you did was instantaneous but everything had to work by a function keys and so you had this plastic thing you kept on your keyboard with different color codes tell me what all the functions did since you can hit ctrl f5 do one thing or a five to do another thing I'm just going to get one of those stickers laminated and pasted to the back of my phone so I can reference it when I want to edit photos and descriptions that's the plan and then I'll be super happy I mean to be fair the little thumbnails at the bottom that have the P for the c1 and the m5 and so they have little previous of what the filter is going to kind of do i'm using as nexus 5 I do not have a small screen and come on like come on just saying it doesn't get but then you want to be fair whereas dieter is grinning and trolling so hard truth is always like might be for today is a good until disco has me two copies webos is card interface I will never move you know what it could copy webos is awesome eat off cameras and uh oh god you really really want to go there we all know how great the priests camera was oh so bad did you ever use the pixies camera okay we can't talk about we can't go down this path I don't know speaking of failure motorola doesn't know how to make a website that runs god this is so embarrassing it's like their cyber monday sale for the Moto X was a complete and utter debacle they sold no phones because I well well they sold the developer edition yeah but they sold none of the moto maker customers customized phones which is just like cyber monday is the biggest online shopping day of the year yeah you are run by what is re or owned by what is arguably the biggest internet company the world yeah and you can't get this to work like I just don't understand how this fell apart so hardly I bet you that the people who ran the Google Play device sales for the nexus for last year got put in charge of this year and that's what happened I was just gonna deja move for that exact conversation around the nexus 4 where Dan was raging about Google being the biggest web company and not being able to you know handle honeymooners no I know this is an ongoing problem that Google has had they didn't have any problems with the Nexus 5 uh an order seemed to be no the store stayed up orders going through it handled whatever demand was there uh but I just I just can't see how this went so wrong for them like on what is the biggest shopping day of the year for the internet it's just like and I can't imagine the demand was really that high because I mean as reports have shown nobody was buying the Moto X before most people don't buy phones off of contract it was an off-contract promotion to give you a really good price on the phone which is without a doubt not arguing that at all but it's still a lot more than you would pay if you bought a phone on contract in a carrier store like most people actually do so I just I'm trying to figure out where all this demand and we're all this trafficking from that actually took the kept the site down all day and I don't know if it was really traffic or demand or if it was some other factor well people don't realize that I was trolling vscocam like that that was all stick we've got a couple tweets at me they're angry at me breanna rutter little let that go yeah well actually on the part about this go cam that is the most interesting arrival and Android in terms of software for a long time for me like to me I don't feel like Android his head I feel like Android has had an app where is fallen behind iOS even though even though i have to mention badland just came to android over the weekend god it's so awesome and I somehow hadn't played it it's great ways yeah neither and I play that thing on Android and it made me smile and that just stood out to me because okay well what's funny about badland is that it also last week or the week before very recently another high-profile iOS game finally came to android in the form of ridiculous fishing but the Android version was such a poor port initially they've updated it since its launch but at launch it was like really slow and choppy it made my phone turn like a thousand degrees and it just nuked my battery so it was a really bad experience so then went bad land came and I downloaded that and was playing that I was just it was just like so surprised and relieved at how well it actually ran on Android it's just as good as it does on iOS and it's a wonderful thing but you know when you when you have all of these frustrations this is frequently happens where games or apps get ported from iOS to Android they frequently stink on Android I thought Eric Schmidt told us that people are going to develop for android first I thought that's that was wearing live in that world Eric Schmidt's is a lovely day she some people do I mean it might not be stuff Schmidt says it might not be the premier apps out there but people who I think android now has a dedicated following a dedicated user base which as I've been saying recently includes me now I am attached to the gmail app on Android I literally if I have too many emails to filter through I might step away from the computer and go and do it on my phone because it's nicer to swipe things away particularly if you have spam email and you want to have a physical gesture to go with your disgust it's so nice to just swipe to delete it's like screw you man I'm not interested you know also great there's a good thing work you swipe with your middle finger of mutes and so just archive I like that and you can use the touch sensitivity all those other senses and whatever yeah but yeah top tip if you have media alert in the headline of an email trust me you don't need to be alerted it's not that input oh speaking of a ruler they we aren interviewed or interviewed well I just want to say before we get to know that Motorola is going to try again tomorrow uh and next cycle Wednesday so they're going to offer the same deal again uh so hopefully they're able to to get their stuff sorted out and real when it goes live again just go to ww Motl calm wah wah that might not be the exact address you should probably look it up before you try um anyway uh yeah uh the Moto G not bad not a bad phone not bad at all you know what's funny is that normally we would say in a situation like this it's not a bad phone uh it's not a bad for a two-hundred-dollar phone or a hundred a telephone but like this is just not a bad phone pure well I mean the camera is pretty terrible right but so is the Moto X's camera so you know it's definitely not a bad phone for the price and it's not the worst like like this is a better than say that HTC first right yeah yeah um I mean and it's way better than the galaxy s4 mini in the galaxy s3 mini and all these other phones that occupy this mid-range garbage level sphere uh it's like our esteemed producer by the way heaven rogers who you got to watch on the mole show last week as soon as i mentioned the HTC first he literally just like thumped his chest kisses fingers point is this guy that's just happen I don't even know so much potential yeah so so so much is is this really the mid-range that we're talking about here I mean the Moto G is so cheap price its sole its sole at the low below the low end right if you're comparing it to like priced phones here in the US uh it's sold out like the lowest of the low end but it is operable with a mid-range vote right so that's that's what makes it so interesting so appealing and kind frankly so surprising so intimately to me the biggest challenge two guys to newcomers like yola is their pricing their phones let's assume it's a reasonable number right for the company to have some success have some chance of survival in the future but they're facing a market we have the Moto G which costs so much less than we used to paying for the amount of stuff that it gives you and the Nexus 5 so today it's like the Moto G owns a low-end the Nexus 5 owns the mid end and then everybody can have the big scuffle with the high end but it's a where's the room full and you come up to step in and compete it's hard to say I mean Motorola says that at the pricing that the Moto G is that they are still making a profit on each phone if assuming they sell them so how a small company like Joe loyola could make the same kind of profit margins it's really hard to fathom that yeah yeah i mean the moto g is that it's not just cheap into you as a cheap everywhere it's a play to be a global phone to be globally available in and I think that's the point with it the absence of LTE still it's so sad i have to say you know if i was in bulgaria and saying we don't have OT so that's cool that would be kind of predictable but I'm in London and the cases for most carriers and most people here not having to use not a problem because you don't have a network that you'd be missing out on so there are still plenty of spaces in places that lag on the LTE availability where the Moto G could be quite an idea phone I mean even if you get the HTC One which is really nicely design and all of that you see a kind of a crummy camera no so why not save yourself to my get a moto G and then gosh I don't know do something nice with your family um take a boat ride one last thing to talk about sort of a bad news and then good news and bad news cyanogenmod pulled from the Play Store I honestly am a little bit surprised that the move against cyanogenmod was pulling their installer from the google place while they're like how to install our thing whatever my call it from the google play store because it like encourage people to void warranties that seems like a really i don't know it seems like kind of a cheap move from google like if you're gonna if you're going to go after cyanogenmod then like go after people distributing google apps and google code don't go after like an app that like you're not quite sure you like the you know what they're asking users to do in your store oh yeah it just it feels like there instead of having the fight that they ought to have and like I'm like actually saying what it is google apps are and what it is android is and what their what it is exactly the relationship to android hacking is an android openness is there like doing this like Nick keep doing what you're doing but make sure you do it over there in the shadows so you're out of the store but we're not going to address this other stuff like that just feels a little chicken I don't know dan is making fun of me right now in some chat room right now I can hear typing oh no I apologize i was completely distracted by our chat room okay i was you waiting for the good news hit me with the good news oh the good news the good news is that the mad geniuses at XDA a whole crew of them together have ported uh and installed mostly okay kind of successfully KitKat on the hd2 the redress putative oh man yes sir easy to it you know why five maybe that's working so much cell phone connectivity maybe not quite there yet running other HD two I mean that's amazing right kudos that that is deserving of epic phrase when did this thing come out when the Leo was released it's 2009 wasn't it was late two thousand one turn of 2010 I think well the the the evo 4g was like spring of 2010 or summer 2010 and this predated it by a good six months so the first giant orange juice came out and then yeah so may not it may have been late two thousand nine when it came up maybe early 2000s employer on phone guys yeah but the coat the thing what kick-out is it's designed to run on low-end phones right so why not give it a shot man it's got yeah dude I'm gonna try this I don't have an hd2 anymore and I really am unhappy about it I had one for a while and I let it go and I could man I get it's all so much software I think if I haven't I remember the first time I saw somebody using an hd2 just out and about in the wild as they said yeah uh and it just like blew my mind how big the phone what like how big the display was and how thin the phone was and we're talking about a 4.3 inch screen and I think it's like something like 10 and a half millimeters thick or something and I just was like I remember I was with my wife and I had like a total geek out moment and she did not understand why I was like freaking out like oh my God look at look at look at it and yeah so and then here we are with you know the average phone is for half or 4.7 inches or whatever it is yeah and I just like to point out that the hd2 can now get KitKat and the Galaxy Nexus cannot so Merry Christmas well to be fair the same nerd source different nerds at XDA have ported the galaxy neck courted KitKat to the Galaxy Nexus already so I mean technically they both have it in the same capacity right wait around the joke damn sorry I didn't want to say I didn't want to be pedaling uh inaccuracies oh yeah well I had to add to run my own extended joke what vscocam so that ladies and gentlemen is the verge of all show we want to thank you so much for watching and or listening if you want to follow us on Twitter you should I am back on Vlad it's wet Sava dan is DCC fair with Annie I chris is said power we are all adverse you can also follow a virg video if you want to see how the cool video stuff that we do at the verbiage it's actually a lot more than you might know and we'll be back probably next week adios
We are a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites.