 Hey everybody, thanks for coming to the Verge Lounge. We're sponsored by Ford, they have a Mustang. We have been doing Verge casts every day and we thought it might be fun to do another one but make it sort of a special edition. So we're calling this the Verge Roundtable and rather than the standard Verge crew, we've got some of our friends who are, what do you call you guys? YouTube famous? YouTubers. And also super hardcore into gadgets, unapologetically just love them some gadgets. So we thought it might be cool to just sort of hang out, talk about the gadgets that we saw at the show and how things are going. So I am Dieter Bohn, I'm the executive editor for theverge.com and let's go around the table and you guys can introduce yourselves. My name is Marques, I make YouTube videos as we all do, youtube.com slash MKBHD, that's about it. My name is Austin Evans, I make videos that are slightly less good as Marques and my channel is Austin Evans. I also make videos, John, short for Jonathan, I like the bulls and youtube.com slash TLD. Can we talk about this hat that you're wearing recently before we get into gadgets? I wasn't prepared for that but we can. It's a very nice hat. Is it not hot walking around the show floor wearing that thing? It's comfortably cool right now. Yeah, okay. It's actually nice here, yeah. It's a good hat. So yeah, you're walking around the show floor, what have you guys, how's the show floor been for you? Does it seem super crowded? Are people costing you everywhere or are you just sort of having a good time or what? This is my third CES and I feel like every year you have a different strategy, I guess for a one man band you kind of have a different strategy of what you want to see. I'm surprised there's this many people here today. Usually it's slowed down by now so I guess I would say yes, it's more crowded than I thought it would be. But I've made my way around all three centers, I've seen a lot of stuff. I don't know if you guys have any specifically awesome things that you want to talk about that you saw. So I was a little bit behind but I finally just played with Gear VR about an hour ago. What do you think? I was really surprised. So I've been a guy who's, I tried Oculus the original, I loved it, the developer kit too, Morpheus, I just played with the Razer OS VR and all these things and they're great and I put on Gear VR with very low expectations. Like, it's just a phone, Google cardboard is cool but it's like, you know, whatever. So I was expecting something like that and I was really impressed. There was a game, I'm not entirely sure what the name of the game was, it was like a spaceship shooter and basically the entire controls were like you're just constantly moving forward and you move your head and you're able to, because there are no tethers with Gear VR, you can spin the chair around and do everything and you're always flying in whatever direction and there's just a little touch pad on the side that you can shoot stuff with. I just wanted to say, the footage that I was shooting was hilarious. I was finding people who were doing random VR things and they were just kind of like, you know, moving around and it looks weird but playing this game, you're flying forward and you're just kind of looking at things that pass you but you're in a swivel chair. So you're actually like swiveling around really fast and impossible to hold focus. Looking ridiculous. Yeah. Making it easy for you. Do you guys find that there's enough content, enough stuff to do in VR to hold your attention beyond a tech demo? Ask that man. Maybe you're a master. No. Not yet. I mean, I have the Oculus, the developer kit too, and I play with it sometimes but, I mean, unless you're really into like, you know, all the demos and all the little things, like, a lot of the games I've played with are very much like the, okay, look, this is a game, we ported it over to Oculus. It works, it's kind of cool, it's a better experience but it's not quite there yet for me. So for me, it's definitely the tech demo, the kind of the, hey, look, you got like a friend over something, play with this, look how cool this is, and you put it in the closet for like another month or something. Right. The most fun thing to do with VR is hand goggles to somebody and watch them use VR. Yeah. Oh yeah, that's awesome. That's awesome. That's not my line, I stole it from Addy Robertson, I can't take credit for that. That's true. So you guys do a bunch of phone stuff, right? I love watching your phone videos. Not much in the way of phones. No, G Flex 2. G Flex 2 and then the whole lot of not G Flex 2. Yeah, no, that was easily the most, that was the most requested thing I've heard people that want to see a video about is that phone and then little murmurings of other things. But phones, you see the bigger phones getting their own events, their own announcements, so CES has become a place for the lesser known brands and lesser known phones to rise up from where they were before. So what'd you guys think of the G Flex 2? Did you like it? I thought it was really comfortable. Yeah. It reminded me of the Galaxy Nexus. Yeah, same, same, exactly the same. And it feels kind of restrained to me like LG's figured out that they can just, you know, it's an ostentatious phone, right? It's a giant curved phone, which is crazy. But it's not like blinged out, look at me, I'm full of chrome. It's just sort of a chill, cool phone. I think that's good for it. Yeah. If they want to make this a phone that people actually want and want to buy, it's a lot closer to what the LG G3 looked like. And I think that was a really popular phone. It doesn't have the same, you know, beautiful tiny bezels, but it looks like, like I said, people were saying it looked like a OnePlus One and it looked like a LG G3 on the back. And those are phones that people already like using. So the G3 from before was huge. And this is actually a smaller phone, which makes it, I guess, easier to pocket, easier to hold up to your face without looking ridiculous. So I actually haven't seen the G Flex 2 yet, but I did play around with the original G Flex. Is the screen any better? Because that was the big thing for me. The screen was a little rough on the original G Flex. The screen of the last G Flex was a big plastic AMOLED 720p screen. And the screen of the new G Flex is a slightly smaller, slightly less curved 1080p display. I think it looks a lot better. Yeah, for sure. Two thumbs up. So what else do you guys find on the show? What's your favorite gadget? We should go around the table and do favorite thing at the show. The most fun I've had here is actually off the floor was Sam. He'll agree with me. The Z Board 2. Yeah, talk to me about that. No, that was sick. So it's lighter, faster, charges faster. And like I've played with it before and I've kind of been okay with it. But this was the first time I've got to use it as transportation. So we're going to downtown Vegas and I could really see it being a means of transportation. So that was kind of cool because we get so discombobulated with tech and chargers and headphones so it's kind of cool to bring that tech into something that you can go outside and get a little air right around. So that's probably the most fun I've had at CES so far. So I'm a giant klutz. I tripped on the way over here on the thing. I can't do anything. And I used to skateboard as a kid but I don't now. Is it any easier to handle? I don't skateboard. I mean I think because it's a little more intuitive it seems like if you have just the slightest amount of like foot coordination that's all you need. So I'm out? You're in. Maybe. But I don't ride a skateboard and like five minutes in like we were flying down the streets. Yeah? How fast were you going? The new one goes up to 24 miles per hour. Whoa. Whoa. That's fast. Yeah. I almost took an old lady out. But you know it happens sometimes. It's worth it. I had to bail on it so it was the lady or the board so. You can bail at 25 miles an hour. Yeah I was about to say whoa. I wasn't going 24. It can go up too. Right. I mean I think maybe Sam will go 24. I'll keep it like at 15. Yeah I know. One of my favorite things that I saw. I actually like to talk about two things. There's a BMW stuff that was outside in that tent. Yeah. And then there is some 8K TVs I saw today. Didn't think I'd think that much of them. But as for as much as I see 4K stuff and 4K TVs, the 8K TVs looked a lot better than the 4K TVs. Really? Yeah. And these were at like 89, 90 plus inch TVs from 10 feet away. Yeah. And looked a lot better than 4K TVs. So what kind of stuff are they showing? They're showing these slideshows. They had this one text demo where you could read a whole bunch of text and at the bottom there was this tiny text and you could literally walk all the way up to the TV and read the text on the screen if you wanted to. That was cool. And basically photo slideshows because at 8K no one has 8K video but you can show these 25 minutes of photos. Well actually they did have some 8K video. They had some from this one Japanese 8K camera that's somewhere in Asia right now. There are four of them exist and like one Japanese news agency has three of them. Yeah. And they like bought all their footage from them. But it looks awesome when you actually see it. Yeah. So that actually looks significantly better than 4K. It's super expensive though. Who wins the TV battle this year? I have my guess but I'm curious to hear what you guys think. There's a lot of cool stuff at Sharp. None of the TVs that I think are like coming out that were really that impressive but they had a lot of different interesting panels. They had the one that wraps around the pole. I think it was like a...I'm going to forget it. It was a super like hard bend around the pole. They had some of those like completely bezel-less displays like for like gauges and that kind of stuff. They had 120 inch 4K TV. They had the 8K stuff. A lot of that stuff, I don't know if I could pick a single thing but they had a lot of really interesting stuff. And a lot of it was just like, look, this is a concept. If people actually want to buy it, let us know. We might make it happen. But it's more just like, hey, look, we can do this now. Hit us up. You want some? We got them. Yeah. I think I like the new Samsung TVs the best. I mean the one that EPA designed is just amazing. But I was expecting this quantum pixel technology to just be a complete and total nothing. I expected it to be just a gimmick and I wouldn't be able to see the difference. But I feel like I could. I feel like it got closer to the dream of having an LCD panel that looks more like plasma. Did you guys check those out? I did a video on it and that was uploaded last night just explaining what it does and what it is. But I saw some Samsung Quantum Dot TVs that looked really good. Unfortunately I couldn't see them next to a regular LCD TV. So of course it looks great in the demo. The footage looks amazing but how much different is it really? But yeah, I was going to say Sharp had a little bit of everything at their booth. They had that 8K, they had OLED, they had a lot of curved TVs, a lot of flat TVs. I saw a lot of curved TVs. Yeah. There's a lot of curves. A lot of curves. I have not heard a single television producer utter the words 3D once. Nobody's like, they all might be but from what I've seen they're all like pretending like it never happened. No, there's like here and there the occasional like glasses free 3D but like it's dead. I'm happy. I'm happy it's gone. Yeah, it was never that great of an idea. It was never that great of an idea. Just you know guys, come on. OLED looks awesome though. OLED, yeah, yeah. OLED, yeah. Really? OLED is the future of TV. It's the future because it's too expensive but it looks so much better than everything else. The blacks, also I saw the BMW M4 in their booth had these OLED taillights and the thing I think of when I think of OLED because I'm messing with so many phones is not very bright. OLED tends to not be as bright but then I look at these OLED TVs and they look awesome and they have pitch black blacks and these vibrant colors and super awesome contrast ratios so I'm a fan of the OLED TVs. We never got around to your favorite gadget. Was it the gear? It was the gear as well as those two. The BMW stuff was, there's a lot of really cool stuff on the, I don't know. I think my favorite thing was in the BMW booth they actually had these, I think it was they had the i3 which was not only driverless, well driverless. Basically you could hit the button on your smart watch and actually be able to see like, okay look, I want the car to come up and pick me up and so you see it driving, the wheel spinning by itself and everything. And then also the crash avoidance. The i3 was wild. The i3 had the best demos of anything. They had the one smart watch thing that summons the car. I sat in the back seat of it and basically the lady closed the door behind me so I got the camera set up and I was waiting for it to get summoned and basically the wheel snaps into place and it slowly starts rolling and that was weird because that was in the back seat of a completely unmanned car. You don't think that's going to be something you're going to do but it was awesome. And then the crash avoidance thing where basically I sat next to the guy who pointed the car at a barrier, floored it and didn't let go and we didn't crash into it. It slowed itself down, stopped and he showed me he, after we stopped, he floored it a couple more times and the car didn't move so that was pretty awesome. That's wild. Yeah. Okay, so mine, because I have a huge long history and I'm a big dork, is probably the webOS watch. Have you guys, it's out in the parking lot, Audi's showing it. They're showing it, you know, they can unlock the car or whatever. So wait, Audi is the first one to show this off? Audi is the first one to show it off. They first showed it off, they wouldn't say what it was. Everybody assumed it was Android Wear and then somebody reported it was Android Wear and then my old guys back at Android Central went out there and like went into the settings and it's webOS. Whoa. Yeah. And, you know, it probably won't come out for forever. They've got to do a bunch more work on it. But it was really fast, really nice screen and it's just, you know, I've got nostalgia because I'm a big old Palm fanboy. Yeah. And also the Palm brand. So I was reading up a little about this. Don't even. He's going to leave. Never mind, I didn't say anything. No, no, no, no. It's so, yeah, we talked a little bit yesterday. So it got sold to Alcatel or no, TCL and they make Alcatel phones and they just want to like have people help them figure out what to do with it. So they haven't actually announced anything. They just bought the name like, hey guys, what's up now? They bought the name and said, tell us what to do. We don't know. We know you guys love Palm. Wow. It's a good strategy. So was there anything else besides the name that they bought? Like there's not much left of Palm, right? No, because webOS went to LG and they're making smart watches and TVs with it and all the patents went to Qualcomm and you know, all the employees left. So what's left? So it's just the name. Wow. I wonder what's left of that name. Like how, I feel like some people will probably know it, but I don't know how much value really is in that name. Yeah. I think that old dudes like me, like take like you guys, you guys are like Blackberry has got some really hardcore fans, right? Like take that and cut it by like a quarter and that's probably it. But the problem is you can't really use Palm or webOS devices anymore. So they're dwindling really fast. So there's just not that many fans. That's a sad story. Endangered species. Yeah. Have you guys heard that you can buy a fake Apple watch like here? Yes. Here? Yeah. It's like 35 bucks. I think it's somewhere. Like a dummy? Yeah. Is it functional? Yeah. Well, no, it's like, it like tells the time. I don't know. I haven't had a chance to go see it. We're actually going to put a story up about, there's a few of them out there. Yeah. We're going to hunt one down. Yeah. Should do a video about it. Yeah. Maybe. Oh wait. Craziest gadget. So my craziest gadget, I didn't get to see it, but it was, it's a bandaid that you put on a baby and then it tells the temperature of what the baby is over the course of like 24 hours. So if your kid has a fever, instead of like freaking out and checking the baby's temperature every five minutes, you can freak out every three seconds. It has a battery? Does it have a battery in it? Yeah. It's like a usable thermometer that you stick to a kid and it will last for 24 hours. Whoa. All right. It's like kind of a good idea, but also kind of a freaky idea because the kid will become obsessed with the kid. Okay. But I suppose it's better than like, you know, having a thermometer all the time. So I was about to say we were over, we were at Marquesa night just like an hour ago. Yeah. So you know those telepresence robots that are like, can you go around? Well, there's like a 20 foot tall one of those driving around their booth. It was good though, because you didn't notice it at first. There was all these telepresence robots that are like five feet tall and you're kind of talking to these people or they have the webcams and you're rolling around like, all right, I guess I kind of understand this booth. And then you hear a voice from like the ceiling and you look and you just see these big wheels and there's a gigantic one rolling around, I guess, just like the jolly green telepresence robot. It was weird. The most ridiculous thing I may have ever seen at CES period. Wow. Like there was a guy looking up and it was like, and then like there's a camera like facing down so like the guy like you see he's like on the screen up top. He's looking down at you and he's like moving towards you and you're just like, there's a giant robot coming towards you. It sounds terrifying. It's weird. That wins for me. You see anything wild Jonathan? Crazy wild. They have vibrating blue suits controlled underwear. Does that do for what I think it does in this floor? Yes. And also a couple's ring. Tell me that they didn't have like a demo station. The lady was straight faced like giving you the talk like you can apparently control it halfway around the world. So but three quarters of the way around the world not so much. No, I get it. So that was definitely the craziest weirdest thing but like they're selling that stuff. Yeah. All right. Wow. CES. No gadgets are back. There's all kinds of weird gadgets. Just like people have figured out that they can like cram things together, put a tiny little chip on it, have it talk to the cloud and just make weird stuff again. It's kind of exciting. Yeah. And terrifying. So what's your guys' strategy for covering the show? Like for The Verge it's shock and awe. We've got a huge team. We've got a huge great video team. And so we just descend upon the show and go every which way. But you know you guys don't have huge teams. So I'm sure everybody is really curious to know like when you come in at the show what's your tactics for you know finding the thing you want to find, showing your fans things they want to see. Yeah. So yeah as far as I know most of us shoot our videos by ourselves. So we're used to being a one man crew. So you come out here and there's a ton of stuff to shoot. You have to find other ways to do it. So we're collaborating with each other. We're each other's cameraman. We're each other's sound guy. We give each other ideas. We collaborate on other stuff like that. So it kind of works. Helps to have other people who are like minded. Maybe now we don't work for the same company and are part of a video team. But it kind of works that way where we know what each other likes because we make tech videos all the time. Right. Yeah. So we're like the same company. We're all the same. We're all the same. So we went and we pretty much spent all day shooting a couple of videos on your channel. Like it's nice to be able to have some backup you know. Like usually we're all by ourselves and it's like oh I've got to go focus the camera. But like we're all just roaming around looking for cool stuff to do. I think for me especially considering that we are by ourselves and that we're having to do everything ourselves it's like there's very limited times. It's like okay try to find those few things that are worth doing the videos because it's like I can't do. I mean I still one editor. Yeah. This is day three and I have one video up. So it's like. And hotel Wi-Fi. And hotel Wi-Fi. Oh yeah. We should talk about that. You should mention what happened. What it took to get that MKBHD video up last night. Well it wasn't that bad of a story. Basically I had a 900 megabyte file to upload and the hotel internet is three down one up on Wi-Fi if it's working well. So I got I started uploading this file and it said something like 99 minutes left and then I tethered on Lou's iPhone for a while which was getting like seven down and up on T-Mobile. Oh wow. So that shortened the process by a lot. But it also took 10 hours to render that video. It did take 10 hours to render that video on a dual core MacBook. Wow. Worth it. So the trick I've learned is get if you can get into the press room or you can wheedle your way into the press room which is the thing I did the first my first year. Get there at like 7 a.m. which is when it opens and they probably still have it. You know they've got laptop stations. They've got a printer which is insane. But there you go if you need to print something. But then they usually have got at least one row of desktop computers. Walk up to one of the desktop computers and just you know steal the ethernet. Ah yeah. There you go. Don't tell anybody I said that. Usually you're finishing editing and you've done everything you're done editing and you just want to upload on the spot. Right. So wherever you are just go hit that upload button and that can put you at some weird spots. Yeah I mean I think the biggest thing too is that it's nice being able to be a little relaxed because I think so everybody out here is just like shoving videos everywhere. So it's kind of cool being able to like pick and choose and maybe not rush it out because everybody is going to see the videos from every other tech blogger on the planet. Right. Right. You can kind of pick and choose what's good and then really put the time and effort to make that worth watching. And I think that's really the approach that every single one of us takes. Yeah because I mean you look at like I was looking at your sub box the other day and it was just like there's like 500 CES videos. Well my sub box is a collection of things around CES. So if I've heard that something's at CES like LG G Flex 2 and I go to my sub box and I see that first video on it. The other nine videos about the LG G Flex 2 are probably the same video. So I'll just kind of watch the one that's there and then just leave. So when we're making content we're kind of thinking I want to add something to that but I don't want to make the same video. So we're just trying to find other ways to add value, add information, add an experience. That's why we're collaborating. Yeah. Having other opinions about stuff. So that's a lot of fun. Yeah doing the interesting unique stuff is always. I think too though like it's always that saying like surround yourself with people better than you. Like it's cool like you just want to be around talented people. Yeah. To step your game up. So I think that's the biggest thing that we've learned collaborating is like just vamp off each other and it ends up making better videos. Yeah. So I just find you're like editing differently. Like I don't know. I'd like actually let me ask a better question. How do you shoot VR and have it not just be you know dude going like this? Oh that's it. That's all it is. Yeah. I mean go wider. Just get wider. That's it. Pan out. Pan out. Yeah. For something like that you're just gonna have to talk about it. Like look this was good, this was bad, this is how it feels. I mean that's kind of a hard thing to get across on video. But yeah I mean I think people get it. I mean people have kind of got an idea of how it works and you know some people may have tried this or you know tried like Google cardboard or something. So like usually they'll have an idea of what you know VR is gonna look like but it's not the easiest thing for sure. Right. You know. Yeah. I found that all the VR stuff I've tried if it's not Oculus it's behind Oculus. Right. The Oculus stuff from his experiences were awesome and then the other stuff I think I don't even want to name drop but like Razer's demo was just not good. It was bad. Well I mean I'll give them some credit. And it's their first try. I understand that. But aren't they trying to say that like this is just like a development kit. It's a proof of concept. Right. So here's a bad one that we built. Try and build something better. And you know what it feels a lot like the original Oculus. Oh really? It feels like they're yeah like they're kind of starting from the same spot of you know where let's give this a try. The hardware is not finished and you know there's a lot still to be worked out. But yeah I mean it's decent but I mean you know it's Oculus they're massive. I mean have you seen the Oculus booth? I have not. It's huge. I've been I've been afraid to go there because I know I'll get lost and I haven't set up an appointment to see it yet. Oh yeah there's like a two hour line to play right now. Yeah like last year they were in a little tiny meeting room. I remember we took a look at it and did a little video and now it's just like they have one of the huge booths. It's like all the way up to the ceiling. It's like wow they got that Facebook money. Yeah. That's what it is. Yeah but. Well guys I think we are close to wrapping up so I wanted to give you a chance to like just talk about your channels a little bit just because you know we're going to put this out on the Vergecast and people might not be familiar with you so maybe you know plug yourself again but actually talk a little bit about the kind of stuff that you do and how to find you where you are on Twitter that whole jam. Oh me? Yeah you. Oh yeah so you guys can find me Austin Evans on YouTube. I pretty much just do videos on technology in general. I do a lot of like PC gaming stuff social like how to build computers and whatnot but I just do anything that's cool technology. I don't like to kind of like pigeonhole myself into like oh it's this or that. It's just like if I see something cool I'm going to do a video on it. It has something to do with technology so yeah. YouTube.com slash Austin Evans. Word. My name is Marquez. It's YouTube.com slash MKBHD and I do a lot of mobile videos so I talk about phones a lot phone technology but then I branch off into other cool stuff that phones remind me of. I say anything with an on button is game but headphones. Great slogan by the way. Yeah monitors TVs cameras whatever it is. If it's cool I'll check it out. They summed it up YouTube.com slash TLD tech but at the same time I try to make it not so serious. I mean we're all human we have fun. The hat shows that you don't take it very seriously. We like tech we like to have fun so that's it yeah. And if you didn't know we are YouTube.com slash the verge and you can find us on at verge on Twitter a whole bunch of other places. Hey guys this has been great thanks so much. Yeah thanks for having us. Thanks for having me.