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 this week we're taking a look at the new wireless landscape you hate your phone you hate your plan but what would it really take for you to change for years owning a cell phone has meant signing up for a two-year contract huge hassles every time you try to switch and constant compromising the cheapest carriers had the worst service and the best phones only come with expensive strings attached but timo we'll just made a pretty aggressive play with a new range of contract free smartphone plans and a bunch of new phones to go with it seventy dollars a month gets you unlimited data talk and text and ninety nine dollars plus twenty dollars a month gets you an iphone 5 a galaxy s4 or an HTC One the new plans would seem to complete t-mobile's move away from two-year contracts it's a bold strategy in the other national carriers Sprint AT&T and Verizon have definitely taken notice but continued levels newfound swagger really changed the playing field we sent me live to tell out into the city to talk to people about their carrier relationships and like all relationships it gets complicated until early 2011 the other way to get an iphone the United States was to sign up with AT&T in 2009 the only way to get the motorola droid it's a sign of rising back then you weren't shopping for a carrier you're shopping for a phone but now things would even nap all four major US carriers have the iphone then they all have the galaxy s3 and soon they'll all have the galaxy s4 and the HTC One so the question is what are you really getting out of here and why do we all seem to be in such incredibly long relationships look Harry idea sprint t-mobile I'm sumon t-mobile 18 teen virgin virgin my might I've sprint right 18 I've tried them all they all suck but sprint sucks the least to my experience services all right um but I mean I'm personally thinking about switching over not sure not sure where yet done why do you start with Timo four-decade um I'm not kind of lazy how long have you guys uh for about four years now have you ever been in my carrel a shin ship with a person for four years yes has I done turned out in tragedy how long have you had a teensy um since like freshman year in high school so okay yeah you don't know that so I guess yeah yes right now like eight years for five years it's been maybe five years now t-mobile wants you to switch the newly renegade carrier is banking on an aggressive marketing campaign and what it says are far simpler plans for a flat fee and no contract you get unlimited minutes messaging and however much data you want to pay for this t-mobile says there's no two-year commitment required you can leave whenever you want but even cheaper prices don't seem to encourage people to switch especially because when you do the math t-mobile's prices aren't that much cheaper but it's not the devices and it's not the prices that keep you committed to your carrier and no one seems to be happy with that relationship would you switch if the price and other carrier is twenty percent over no not really I don't want to go through the hassle of like changing over 50 for summer maybe how much cheaper twenty percent to be honest I pay about ten dollars a month for unlimited data and limited texts and I've got three hours of cops hey you you know I want you to know I'm moving goodbye that's fine % jeepers you leave no there a 50-percent cheaper I consider it your wireless carrier has become the longest relationship in your life and all of us seem to be settling when those two year contract send the easiest thing to do is just sign back up t-mobile seems to be banking on people being fed up with AT&T and the other more traditional carrier plans and yes its plans are indeed more transparent but at the end of the day t-mobile's biggest competitor is it's just apathy joining me now to talk about all of this insanity is Nilay Patel welcome back from bryant park we survived I'm glad you made it it was cold and sascha segan lead analyst to PCMag Sasha thank you for being here great to see so I want start with you so t-mobile kind of went out on a limb this week they did all kinds of crazy things uh is it is it gonna work is this like what t-mobile needed to be the biggest and greatest carrier in the world is this the right move for t-mobile I think timo was making a lot of the right moves but we shouldn't spend too much time or spend all of our time thinking about the pricing of the service plans because t-mobile's always been cheaper than the three other major carriers and um t-mobile has been pushing towards this prepaid angle for a while now but I think one of the biggest deals was that crazy guy in the magenta t-shirt and the alexander mcqueen sneaker crazy is like the biggest understatement ever by the way he's he's trying to he's trying to reposition he's trying to rebrand t-mobile as the carrier that actually gets your pain that understands how frustrated you are with the wireless companies and can relate to you and if he can charge up t-mobile staff he can make every experience a consumer has of interacting with t-mobile and experience where they really get how you feel as a consumer that's when t-mobile wins well so but I guess that's the big question right is is like is customer service then it are people gonna love their carrier are people gonna love not having a contract like is this something people were clamoring for I feel like we the three of us have been sitting here saying wouldn't it be great if we didn't have to be on contract but like do people care it seems like you found a little bit that they don't but maybe is there a world in which people care i think that switching costs are just too high even for tmobile to say we're gonna separate out the cost the device and the cost of the service which they've sort of done they've released made them different line items which is interesting right now you're on the contract for the foot the dream i think is to be able to buy any phone and then open a window and have it say ATT has the best service in this area and it'll cost ten dollars r and verizon has slightly crappier service I'll cost eight dollars and you can just push the button and then when you go somewhere else and you're like man verizon service here is better and you push the button you're holding the phone and you're switching costs goes to zero then that's the dream that's that's I'm actually buying whatever service is best for me wherever and whatever some extent we've had that right with these these prepaid carriers like is this there there are all these other options out there but really talk about except the prepaid carriers also don't make it very easy to switch and we're not going to see this ease of switching between carriers for at least several more years because of the technical blocks the carriers are put in place to switch it so so who are these carriers I guess is is the big question like we have you know we have the big four and then there's all these other companies that give you cell service and they've been offering you know cheaper phones and cheaper service that you pay ahead of time so like why haven't they caught on yet what what what makes it important the t-mobile is doing this is that if you look at a lot of the little guy's virgin boost h2o wireless simple mobile black wireless whatever those are just like the least crazy names yeah there's a Tenace crazy major yeah except for except for metropcs cricket and US cellular most of the other ones don't actually run their own networks they are using one of the big carriers networks and that was always sprint right no simple Mobile's t-mobile straight talk is tmobile and ATT net 10 is ATT etc etc but in a case they've all signed contracts with the bigger carriers which basically say which basically prevent them from endangering the larger carriers businesses okay okay these little guys are structured to not be a threat so what does that mean like you get to you know too many customers and then Sprint's like whoa whoa whoa they just can't alter pricing okay so that it's basically a shell game so that if you have bad credit you don't become an ATT customer right you go to go to one of these prepaid carriers and they can deal with the risk of having customers with bad credit t-mobile saying they don't care uh and I actually think the device story for them is getting more interesting because they you know they have the s3 they're gonna have the s4 they have the one and the iphone and the iphone in particular you can unplug it from 18t and go put it on t-bones network right and we had two million people who have been there already bought it and switched and before they even but it's like gonna work now like it's gonna work the newer versions of the five will work on there faster 42 megabit 4G network it'll work on the LTE network how much is that the devices part of the other thing t-mobile announced was like this big ang of new devices that the devices are just aunty okay the devices are just what you need to be able to play at the table with the big boys okay if you don't have an iphone and a galaxy s4 and an HTC One you're not one of the big boys and you're not going to be one of the big boys and you're relegated to the second division right ok so the devices are important but they don't give t-mobile any advantage they just let t-mobile play at the table mm-hmm so then it is two mobiles advantage then like is this a still don't know if this is a compelling case to customers like you don't have a contract I don't I don't know that people are like leaping out of their seats to go not have a contract I guess cheaper is great and but I said she was always brought in their seats for and I think this is where the pricing the phone's really comes into play what people want is they want a new phone faster right the service is like whatever it's just it's in the air it's like literally invisible waves right it's like I pick up the phone it gets some data that's great what they want is a new phone every year they can't get it and shot but John Legere at the after the event made a hint to wander reporters I forget who it was I forget who wrote about this but he hinted that they were thinking of maybe some sort of subscription club right that could accelerate your upgrades and now that's a thought that's a thought that gets a lot of power users on my word I mean I think that's like that's like overthinking it in a way they mean that's great it's a cool idea but if you look at the market for everything else in the world it's like if you really do separate the cost of the phone and the cost of the service and enable a market for devices to emerge then you'll get cheaper things and to write in it they have legitimately done that at this PM right it's yeah it's fair to say they you know they're still charging you twenty dollars a month to continue to use your phone please you guys right but that's as hell the phone at any moment and then the phone is paid off it's just an installment plan you're just paying for your furniture on layaway right yeah right but that's right but like if you look at the laptops for exam right right laptops have just gotten cheaper over time it's not because dell is when i check out our subscription plans or laptops it's just they're competing in the market directly against each other and cheaper things sell really well unlocked phones seem to be the real dream for people right we're in its kind of what you were describing before like i buy any phone put it on internet west but we're not there at all yes neely says that's the dream the dream is this this fantasy we all have of the European market which is not actually the case in many European markets of you buy a phone and then you can connect it to a different carrier every month if you want it okay but we can't do that because of because of the various LTE bands and CDMA vs gsm and all of this i can use the word right yes cuz John Legere use John majority yeah it's alone all of this that the carrier is bacon to the phones beyond the plans right and I think that's actually going away so I think what's interesting is that as a teen T and Verizon are getting pressure to increase their like revenue per user they're realizing that building custom phones like they did in the past as bad idea and that's why you're ending up with a one on every carrier that's why you end up with a note and that s for the iphone and every carrier because demanding that samsung value disarranged no no no device I don't agree one hundred percent I don't entirely agree there because what Verizon wants to do is they want a one and an s4 okay and they want a one in an s4 with AT&T LTE frequency band locked out oh no okay that 80's he wants a one in an s4 with verizon's frequency band locked out and these are very cheap easy modifications for the manufacturer to make and it maintains this lack of an open i agree with you there i'm saying the days of the galaxy fascinate and the captivate the cap and gown today well you're building these like you're spending money to build custom variants of phones free it's the markets gone away from that because it's the carriers know that the phone manufacturers are doing a fine enough job competing and building high-end devices so they don't have to demand high end devices they just say we'll take whatever you have and as that happens the next logical step is for these device manufacturers to say look we want a real market now and we're gonna start selling all my phones in a real way so we'll so i think that's a dis is HTC's next step right they're never gonna compete in this game against apple and samsung their next step has to be to say to consumers screw them like buy our phone it'll be cheaper up front no contract go to 18 and there's some proof that that works right like google kind of proved it with the nexus 4 in not on like a huge scale but in enough of a sense that like they sell out it would mediate leagues you think people is subsidizing the next for that's the thing Google can use its other businesses the profit on its other businesses to subsidize this phone which loses money on hardware it's it's what Amazon is doing with the kindle fire unfortunately HTC does not have that model open to them right these phones right now still I mean they still actually cost five hundred and fifty dollars they cost 500 550 dollars and if you see a good high end smartphone for less it's being subsidized by something that made you just not be the case so that's what i think is we have a couple of we have like this is t mobile's line up + this little company called blue here and I blue is you know just one in a number of companies that are basically selling unlocked you know straight off the assembly line in China phones for a lot less than they would are these just are they cheaper like this phone is 299 dollars and has like a reasonable spec sheet is it just cheaper because it's worse like went how do we get to the previous whether one is 299 not terrible you know the thing but it doesn't cost any more to make bad software than it does good software right we thought of Mormons court records matter it does it does cost more to make the top or it costs more to do the people or to hire good do grammars to hire more testers to get it better tested and better studied yeah that cost more so I mean so then how do we go through where our stock well right well honest I mean that's that's a fair question like how did we get to the point where the HTC one is two hundred ninety nine dollars unlock we ever get there because just like why don't they run stock because just like the carriers are afraid of becoming dumb pipes the manufacturers are afraid of becoming commoditized yeah but how is it I mean I was just come back to windows yes a that phone is just unless something so weird nice on it it's great sorry I don't I like the clock bad judgment I want you to know that's fine I understand I'm not getting uh well how does the windows pc market have all those OEMs just shook windows the way the phone market works is more advantageous to the manufacturers then the way the pc market works you can see and you can see for instance Apple is trying to drag it species into working more like phones because that's more advantageous to them iOS is more advantageous to them than mac OS and they're an apple is thinking oh we want things to work more like iOS because that's better for us so this phone market is one where the manufacturers and the carriers both have more strength than the consume right they don't want it to be more like the pics are real market minutes and that's well that's all the way back to the start this is t-mobile's move is the first baby step towards some kind of real market where the price of the phone doesn't affect the price of the service it's not baked into the price of the service now I don't know if the price the service is compellingly cheaper enough compared to AT&T and Verizon it doesn't appear to be we actually we actually did a big study we did we did a huge survey called Readers Choice which we do every year and we found out that the issue with t-mobile and why people are not switching to t-mobile is not price they get great ratings for price they've always had lower prices they have lower prices then they have lower prices now the reason people are not switching to t-mobile is number one customer service and number two network quality and so all of this focus around price you know t-mobile already had the price if you want to change t-mobile's fortunes can you change their customer service in the perception of their network quality so what I mean I guess where does all this go in a year like t-mobile is rolling out LTE and they claim they're modernizing and changing a lot of this stuff and then the service is gonna be there so in a year is t-mobile the number one carrier or they still where they are have verizon and AT&T move towards what t-mobile is doing like what what changes now execs from all the other carriers have said that they are watching this very closely because they don't want to be paying subsidies actually okay because that's that's money that goes automatically to the manufacturers right so if this really succeeds and t-mobile starts gaining customers from sprint and AT&T probably not from verizon because Verizon customers are very network centric then you could see the other carriers trying to move more towards a you pay for your phone we're not going to subsidize this for you model but they are still going to try as hard as they can to prevent you from switching carriers with your thumb and my phone is still gonna be six hundred dollars it's gonna be six hundred dollars it's gonna be locked and it's gonna lock out everyone else's Bam's but they're gonna try and get rid of subsidies so things are still super depressing just slightly less depressing blending that's depressing especially apparently if you switch to t-mobile if their coverage is good enough yeah fair enough I'll take that thank you guys both so much for being here really appreciate it and we'll we'll talking on in a year when everything is still at worst it's always somewhat of a pleasure I'll take it so in completely unrelated news this week I got to spend the week playing with the razor edge razors new gaming tablet that they've introduced like four different times but it's finally coming out it's a real product and it's a tablet for gamers who really want to spend a whole lot of money to play games on the subway there are three parts to the razor edge really the first is the tablet itself it's a fairly normal looking Windows 8 tablet the biggest difference the thing that sets the edge apart is that it's huge it's eight tenths of an inch thick making it not only thicker than most tablets but most recent laptops as well there's a 10.1 inch 1366 x 768 screen surrounded by a pretty gigantic black bezel the screen itself is okay it's a little low res for device that's expensive but it's bright and has good viewing angles the only part that's rough is the touchscreen it's just kind of unresponsive often scrolling awkwardly or taking three taps to do something which really makes no sense on a device that's powerful this is razor says the only tablet with a discrete GPU inside a separate graphics chip that is basically required for any kind of serious gaming along with the tablet itself there are two accessories that are more or less required to get the most out of the edge one is the hundred-dollar docking station which adds three USB ports and an hdmi port to the edge the other necessary accessories the two hundred and fifty dollar gamepad controller it adds a lot of weight to the edge but it also adds all the controls you'd need to play almost any game you get two analog sticks and a d-pad plus all the buttons and triggers you'd get on an xbox or playstation controller as well it also adds another battery into the edge which it turns out you kind of need as a PC the edge is more or less what you'd expect it's powerful enough to do anything you throw at it it's specs like a high-end laptop and it performs like one but let's be honest this isn't a tablet that also happens to play games it's a gaming tablet and I'm sort of surprised to say this but it's a really good one I played all sorts of games on the edge and everything I tried was playable not perfect when I cranked up detail in Crysis 3 the framerate definitely dipped enough that I could tell it was stuttering but that's an incredibly intense game and it was still playable slightly less intense games like borderlands 2 works really well and relatively simple ones like NBA 2k13 were perfect here's the thing I don't quite know how to feel about the razor edge it's much more powerful than any tablet on the market and if you're in the market for a gaming tablet it's really the only option but if you're just a person who wants a the edge cost a thousand dollars for the lowest spec model and by the time you've purchased the accessories and may be upgraded to the more powerful Edge Pro you're looking at $1,500 for a gaming machine the edges performance is great without being remarkable and if you're spending this much money on a gaming laptop you can probably do better for your money but if you want a two-pound gaming PC with a pretty cool controller and you can afford it you really won't be sorry you bought the edge that's it for our show thank you so much for watching thanks to my guess Sascha Segan for being here thanks to nilay patel for being all right as always head to the verge calm for more on t-mobile and for our full razor edge review spoiler alert it plays games thanks so much for watching we'll see you next week