Gadgetory

welcome to top shelf brought to you by virgin mobile I'm David Pearson on this show we bring you the best in consumer electronics past present and future coming up we'll talk the life and death of google reader and the aftermath of Samsung's Galaxy s4 announcement but first the week that was as expected Samsung last thursday unveiled the galaxy s4 it's more evolution than revolution with a similar look to the gs3 but a larger 5-inch 1080p screen new features include air gestures for hands-free control and an impressive 13 megapixel camera Samsung this week also announced a price for its massive 4k television the so-called easel set will be thirty nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine dollars with pre-orders starting in march you oculus rift our favorite virtual reality headset company is about to ship some 10,000 completed developer kits the test units feature of 5.6 inch 1280 by 800 display and will support valves uber-popular team fortress 2 after an update discreet the father of Android has stepped down Andy Rubin brought the mobile platform to Google in 2005 and has spearheaded its development ever since he's now rumored to be working at Google's secret xlab Android will now be overseen by sundar Pichai who also oversees google chrome and apps and finally sadly google is shutting down its popular reader service as of july first google started to decline in usage and a desire to focus on fewer products within the company but the announcement left many users feeling lost users like the Verge's own thomas houston for whom this has all been a very emotional experience three years google reader was nearly the perfect tool for someone who never wanted to miss the important things on the internet news hounds could stay on top of The Times New Yorker Bloomberg favorite photographers on flickr anything Twitter it was a world's largest newsstand mixed with the world's best in this period newspapers and magazines it also made me a better reader by offering your treasure trails with very reporting inviting that I knew I should be reading for eight years I saw the whole internet all the parts i wanted to see anyway i subscribed to hundreds of kids giving thousands of items every day J&K my way through everything that I'd missed hitting us to start the best of it occasionally mashing shift in a to mark everything read when I can handle flooding more over time instead of rousing aimlessly through the web we're hoping something interesting was happening on Twitter I done left my phone jump from google leaders endless stream of news long reagent gifts that had only one meter in my I tried dozens of apps trying to find the perfect way to read on the go miss I tried were slow or ugly or missing some key feature but thanks to google reader the perfectly reliable and totally invisible back end I could just install another app and pick up right where I left off now comes my first google reader goes the way of the dodo and rips from the palm pre loss reports on I'll miss the app itself but the whole the reader really leaves behind is in the heart of all the third party apps I use across different devices and platforms they're still good apps for reading your feeds like press or reader or netnewswire there are even a few that sync across a couple of devices like feebly but only if use feedly apps everywhere gone is the backbone the underlying foundation will let you build a system on top of it like Legos a few companies have offered to pick up with Google left off big says it's building an API to replace the one that powered so many google reader apps Feelies doing the same thing but those products were a long way off and this company need to figure out how to turn those readers into a business google never did google millimeter to help us never miss the thing on the internet to organize and collate everything we wanted to reach bring years my corner of the internet existed on google reader now i'm not sure where it goes goodbye google reader and thanks for all the memories which I starting google reader and will be able to ever access again but thanks anyway joining me now to talk about all of google reader and RSS and where we go from here is Cyril mushran from feedly he's the head of product and strategies Cyril thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us today oh thank you for tuning my pleasure so tell me a little bit about feedly first of all give me a little bit of the background and kind of why you decided to build both an RSS reader and one that's connected to google reader yeah so well we we started Philly a while back you know in 2008 and also we can add it for a while we saw an opportunity you know where there's this rich content on the web today and in our lives we have more and more devices we are in your mobile phones let know the origins Isis preserved in apparent war and we thought we was a really good opportunity for trying to reinvent the way people access is quite content on these devices across these devices so when Google Reader announced last week that there or when Google shut that house that they're shutting down google reader last week what was the reaction within feedly and kind of where did you you know did you see this coming was this why do you think I shut down yeah its heart is that we saw this coming we actually were preparing for that possibility now we saw over the last few years you know since we've been working very closely with the reader team now we saw the reader team being told you know first who does you know OpenSocial or Google+ so we saw ad google kind of stepping back you know and promote the product mountains and I we saw that as an opportunity for us to really you know how the users move beyond the web product the google video was and trying to be asleep adopt better with across experiences so we've been working for where we call normandy for about six months now which he was a backup plan more than a back-up plan it's kind of a back-up plan for the google decided to retire video but it's also kind of where we see the future for four feet to be it seems like to me that the two pieces people lost with google were with the reader web client which a lot of people like to is very simple and very fast but also google as this kind of universal ubiquitous back-end that powered all these apps and all these different platforms is that kind of what you imagine Normandy or tell me kind of where you're going forward with that yeah that's vehicle to what we see we see very free legs Toonami you know and one is definitely an API that filly could use but all the videos could use as well so the important building block for helping people build valuable content at some chick applications and so we announced the API you last week as part of an ahmadi program and in a fee but we are airing up more than hundred developers have asked us you know about it you know who have expressed interest and so when the process of formalizing that part we saw or see also very important place for nominee to be a better environment for publishers you know where you will be the gentry do much in terms of helping publisher monetize their feet or giving more alternatives around how our kind of feed really produce result we are trying to engage a lot of publishers you know with Nandi over the last six months and we definitely see a very strong interest now you know a system announcement and we probably turn to provide basic building block for things like paid in our content paid paid premium feet or a few get programs within Almonte the thing that worries me is that Google Reader is shut down because Google couldn't figure out a way that it was a viable business for them going forward do you see Normandy is something that's both good for your business and as something that people will still adopt because you know it was a free API for everybody is that something you can really offer or you're gonna have to charge for how do you see that working yeah so I don't want to speculate too much about why Google say to shut down vida but I highly doubt is because it was not making money it atrophies it was not making money and was it was an issue in terms of creating tension between Google and publishers but I think more more than anything else I think is the duration of the product that probably you know when they remove the sharing you know functionalities last year we saw huge influx already of users typically because showing is a key component of that early adopters and people were very a bit of content need so decide you know in term of monetization we are seeing with the different ways you know we formalization we have a lot of users today that have been asking us for pro version of fiddly and wasting your process of exactly defining what this is be when I when talking with a lot of issues were been asking we are we are today at least five to seven percent of ours you know said they will therefore Philly and they don't be tell us which feature we want to pay for the existing product now so this heat has an important part of our life today of the things that you do and they don't want it to go away that's right one of you for us is to kind of figure out what is that you know full version is it like guaranteed of service or is that specific feature that we would put in it but then haven't they 00 or you know we really want to go beyond that and we want to offer a couple other novels you know one would be a GT dt based model for developers you know where other developers could come in and create this content that we have much more easily as on normandy and we would basically work out a pay-per-use you know model for the api and the third part is really opportunity to monetize fields so I both for the vapors not giving them an opportunity to to create to get revenue from revving pom-pom feet and giving an environment where publishers could bring content at a premium content or create enough yet programs where you know they'd be willing to the ski publish on a model so you know you've announced they are doing this thing with normally dig has talked about doing something similar do do you think like we will you be working together to make something that makes it accessible for everybody or are we gonna see kind of a fragmented market and we'll have to pick our best option and hope everybody else does to know so I don't think the market is gonna find my necessarily you know I think there is different layers to it so as far as Normandy is concerned we are basically starting to gather two two two two sides you know since we announced we have already over android developers were expressed interest in the API and we want to create a developer ID reserved it does a reward we didn't have you know a conversation with dig or some of the other players yet but you know trying to basically better understand what are going to be the key needs for the repairs people to create this feature application that we see that's it that's a key is key function of the board and whatever we can do to push things back into the standard that's where we want to go and then there's also a publisher advisory board which kind of act in the same way but on the Commission side so when you think about taking Isis two days great you know we can still do a lot of things with ice as it is today as a standard or at home as it is a standard but if we think about all the things that we may do to be able to support different models then as much as we want we want to come engage the conversation with as many people as possible and then figured anything that makes sense for feedback in the scallop do it in a standard because you know in our vision is that the more we have people believing that content should be open accessible on the web and when we believe so you know the better that other war is going to be I totally agree 0 thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us I really appreciate it and we're definitely looking forward to seeing what happens with feedly on july first thank you so we've seen a lot of android phones launched recently from the galaxy s4 to the HTC One to a handful of others and they all have their differences but across the board there's one certainty their version of Android kind of sucks we just like stock Android a lot better so we sent our own evan rodgers on a quest to find ways to make Android lighter faster prettier and just better the HTC one is a gorgeous device but the thing is we're not entirely sold on the sense interface and the same is true for Samsung's TouchWiz or any other skin that a phone manufacturer might lay on top of Android there's something so clean and consistent about Google stock Android experience something you can really only get out of the box from a nexus phone but thankfully Android is highly customizable you can make it look like Google originally attended with only a few minutes and a handful of apps from Google's Play Store no hacking a routing required to get the HTC One a little more in line with my tastes I focus on three areas the launcher the lock screen and the keyboard within the launcher the home screen and app drawer is where you'll spend most of your time I chose nova because it looks almost exactly like google's default launcher nova also includes a number of interesting improvements like support for custom icons and lots of screen transitions simply download it and set it as your default launcher it prompts you to do so the first time you press the home button and you're set to go as for the lock screen we've seen a lot of variety of form and function here personally I prefer the simplicity of holo Locker the HTC one's lock screen is kind of busy for my tastes what holo Locker does yet again is make your lockscreen look very similar to stock Android 4.1 jelly bean now the keyboard there are a lot of insane third-party options out there but my favorite is Swift key word prediction is great and you can easily change the keyboards appearance with a few tabs this app is the only paid app on our list but a quality keyboard could be one of the best app purchases you ever make and honestly it's what you'll be using the most these tweaks only take a minute or two to install and they bring back some of the best and most beautiful features of Android that many manufacturers cut out it's a better cleaner experience on almost any phone joining me now is avi Greengart the research director for consumer devices at current analysis to talk more about Samsung and all things Android avi thanks so much for being here by blogger so I want to talk about Android no one's talked about the gs4 but first I want to talk about 2010 let's go back at all carriers so it seems to me that sort of at the beginning of this run of Android phones Motorola was like d brand they kind of owned the Android world and like people bought droids instead of Android like that was they had the brand and then six dates it's important to make this right to know absolutely and then it seems like Samsung sort of showed up and all of a sudden just dominated and like brute forced their way in is that fair is that what would happen not entirely and I actually think you need to go back probably another 10 years before that took a half years yeah to the transition between analog and digital TV that was when Samsung as a corporate brand made a big play as a pioneer as a technologist so that was when the digital ad campaign really cemented Samsung in in Western consumers minds as as a brand that they could relate you so then fast forward back to back to 2010 Samsung's strategy around smartphones has always been to bet on every horse and whenever possible enter their own horse into the race bada TouchWiz so they always supported every known operating system symbian palm Android Windows Phone Windows Mobile up but when they saw a lot of success around Android they doubled down on Android and they put a lot of resources there the first thing that they did that was somewhat unique in the industry was that because they had a massive internal supply chain where they could give themselves good processors good displays that was the first thing that they really did was that they gave themselves the best displays and then if you went at retail and you saw an array of smart-phones sitting in front of you and one was brighter than the others the retail store clerk was able to point to that one that one's the best just simply because it was it had the the brightest display and in some cases the nicest display and is that kind of was that unique to Samsung like his Samsung the only company in its space that has that particular like they you know the end-to-end we make everything and we give ourselves the best stuff at unix to an extent yes I mean Nokia certainly had a massive supply chain because of the volumes they did an apple uses its financial wait to literally buy up supply chain often several years in advance but LG is in a similar situation to Samsung and to a limited degree so was Sony where they had they would make some of their own components but Samsung did this to a greater and better extent than anyone else so that was step one step two they started differentiating around software and that's something that we've seen a pretty much everyone do and to be candid the first versions of TouchWiz weren't very good no I'm and it's like the kindest way you could have said that their stock Android there's a lot better yeah but it's it's gotten good and they've added things in particularly at the larger screen sizes that are genuinely useful so things like tabbed calendar on a very large display means that you can quickly and jump around around your calendar and and and that's nice so and you think that for samsung was because we've talked a lot about their stuff as kind of meaningless differentiation but you think this is actually something that people were like oh tabs in the calendars I want that I'm gonna buy a samsung no I think primarily it was at the time primarily it was the screen display the displays end too and the XO knows the really fast processors and the fact that they have great distribution and I mean global great distribution and so with the galaxy s2 that's when they started pouring on the marketing and there are two aspects to this marketing what is the sheer dollars i mean we're talking billions of dollars but simply throwing money at something and even having decent as doesn't necessarily equate to sales i mean you can just take a look at Microsoft Surface sure but the they did two things with that one was yeah they spent a lot of money but the other was there as were really good first from a branding perspective the fact that they may I made fun of hipsters right said that um if you're not a hipster then you should buy a samsung galaxy phone and the Samsung Galaxy phones have all this advanced technology that's the brand promise for samsung but by doing so in a very clever way they gave consumers permission to consider an alternative to Apple I really think that before that it was really if you thought of yourself as someone who wanted a hot technology in your phone yeah you pretty much were limited to Apple you you were at the gs4 launch event I was so tell me tell me about that event kind of in this realm of what Samsung is doing and like how do what do you see from Samsung well i mean first of all that is insane yes it was way over the top it was over produced we can all argue about whether there were not enough women or the women were portrayed poorly the one thing that they did do a really nice job and this plays off of what they've done in their ads is not just Samsung as a brand they've done better than anyone else other than Apple explain the benefits of a feature not just selling you a spec right and that's something that if you go to any business 101 marketing 101 technology course they will sell stay cell features sell benefits sell benefits not features that's the that is that is but nobody does it oh yeah oh you can look at the palms you know launch webos with a vampire lady talking about the flow of her day what is that um but samsung says we have this phone it does this thing for you and at Radio City Music Hall that was that was a lot of what they were showing off they did a really bad job in terms of being cheesy but they did a really good job of showing you why these features matter how EU would use them why someone might want them yeah and so one of the things people talked about a lot after that event were that Samsung is kind of mimicking apples tick-tock strategy right where they have this big the gs3 was like this big innovative thing with a lot of new hardware and software and this was more of an iterative upgrade well so is the gs3 from the GS to you think so I do I'm and the gs2 from the from the original samsung galaxy okay um I mean the design and this is not a galaxy s4 tha's a galaxy s3 but if I just showed this to you you might think that it is because the screens a little bigger that's Grace's I mean it's the same plastic design no but the gs3 hit a level of popularity that the gs2 didn't ever reach I it that I could be wrong about that but it we did it it kind of vaunted Samsung into a whole different level of Fame if it's just kind of an iterative upgrade how did it get there well I got there from from the factors i was talking about earlier that it had the brightest displays earlier that it had that that advertising campaign that gave consumers permission to ask for one and they literally did if you if you spend time at retail you will see consumers walking into the store and they don't say can you show me what your best android phone is or can you help me decide which android phone to get they walk in they saying saying i want a galaxy s can HTC and sony and Nokia and LG and whoever else catch up i mean we think sort of objectively they're making a lot of better hardware and some smarter decisions with software but it still seems like it's samsung's you know it's samsung's market to lose so how does HTC for instance catch Samsung and then on the flip side has Samsung caught Apple everybody seems to say like Samsung is killing apple and apples going away and weird you know sounding these death tolls like is that happening and is that is that even a thing like will yes let's do let's do the iphone iphone vs iphone vs galaxy fight first there's room in the market for both they they have different areas where one is significantly better than the other if you want a really large display if if you want certain Google services baked in if you want to do those things you see in the ads you'll notice the Santa song specifically calls out things that it does they're fairly unique then the galaxy s3 or if you want to take a photo of your kids with yourself in it which i think is the flagship feature of the galaxy they don't work that a lot it is a great feature i want that feature i think that's a great feature yeah i want to do that then then yes the galaxy s3 or in this case the galaxy s4 may be a better phone for you if you want better access to content if you want a greatly simplified user experience plus all of the great apps and in many cases greater apps or higher quality apps that you find on iOS then you're gonna be very happy with an iPhone 5 or whatever is next Samsung is still doing Tizen they're getting into watches they're doing wearables like Samsung still wants to blanket the market with every possible option is that is that good for samsung is that good for the gs4 is that like how does well where's the fit in samsung has the resources that many of its competitors don't to follow blind alleys and see if they actually go somewhere Eisen seems like a blind out it does to me um at least right now the other aspect of that though is there is you know we've talked about apple vs samsung and that's probably the reason that gook that Samsung didn't mention the word android more than once in its right in its presentation because they're really positioning the galaxy s4 against Apple not against other Samsung feels like it one and if you only really see it does it does but with with great power comes great responsibility or with great power comes great conflict within Google's so so so some of the things that Samsung has invested in are aimed at maintaining a balanced relationship with Google's some of it may be simple negotiating techniques give me a higher cut on search revenue or don't give Motorola early access to android because that would hurt me and that if they do that then I could for you know I could I could go I could build I Samsung could go off and build my own version google has to listen samsung its samsung samsung so so there's a lot of those interplay elements and when you look outside of that so so that's one of the reasons why Samsung is investing in so many of these other areas but when you look outside of that in terms of watches and wearables and and things like that that's simply expanding the ecosystem I think we're going to see a lot of that innovation sometimes it makes more sense to put NFC on your wrist than it does to have it in the phone sure it for personal identification for for retail for collecting data from your wrist for presenting data from the phone to your wrist or to your eyes also we're going to see more innovation in in wearables regardless so Samsung's gonna make Google glass clatters what you're saying will and then probably take over the market with it and we'll be right back where we were III don't know um but that's definitely something to watch for in terms of yeah I'm not really intended um but we will see you know glasses and watches and pacemakers and and embedded tattoos I mean this is leah looking out a bit but but yeah i do think that we're gonna see a lot of innovation outside of the phone itself and Samsung is definitely going to want to participate there and Google likes to drive some of that innovation and there's no question that Apple is gonna be a big part of that too all right awesome Bobby thank you so much for being here really appreciate it we'll have you back to talk might blow about s glass whatever comes out and that's our show thank you so much for watching thanks to avi Greengart for being here thanks to Cyril from feedly and of course Thomas Houston and evan rodgers be sure to check out all this and more on the verge com thank you again for watching and we'll see you next week you