 Greetings and salutations, internet friends. This is the Verge Mobile Show, where we talk about things that are mobile. And apparently, the Fast and the Furious, because we can't help ourselves. I am Dieter Baum. I am Vlad Savo. I'm Dan Seifert. And I am Chris Stigler. And I'd like to say that I'm in full support of the Fast and the Furious. Guys, just don't get me started because I'm going to spend 20 minutes talking about Fast and the Furious and nobody wants that. Or do we? Do we want that? So, it's episode 35. We are a few minutes late, but it's still a Tuesday, which is pretty impressive. Someone on Twitter said this makes three weeks in a row, what we broadcast on Tuesday. I feel like this is the third or fourth week that this has been episode 35. Is someone playing a trick on me at this point? It might be, like, yeah. I think this is the episode 35 because we actually have all four of us connected at the same time. The important thing is that it's the week of February 4th, 2013. Maybe that should be part of our shtick, where every episode from now on is episode 35. We should just decide that right now. We just don't want to turn 36. I'm in favor. Is 36 late 30s? No, that doesn't start until like 38. You can still technically count 37 as mid-30s, can't you? 37 is still 29 in my book. You can definitely count as 36. I mean, I'm mid-30s now and I don't feel good about it at all. You'll always be 29 in my heart. It's old. I am old and gray. And answering business letters from sixth graders, which is awesome. I got a letter from a sixth grader who's doing a class project learning how to write business letters. Are you going to go speak at a school? No, I mean I could. A career day? Yeah. We should talk about smartphones though instead of snail mail and what's in my inbox. And obviously, clearly, without question, the biggest news of the week is RIM. No, sorry. Not RIM. Blackberry. Blackberry. I know we've been saying for years that Blackberry has needed to do this and it's a good thing for the company and it's a good way to unify its brand because consumers don't know who the heck RIM is. But when they did it in the middle of the event and I'm live blogging, I could not have hated them more. Switching from something that is three letters and about the easiest thing to type because I've been typing it for like 10 years to something that is camel cased and 10 letters while I'm live blogging. So yeah, Dan, you were at the event. Can you tell us what this Blackberry 10, like, we called it the Blackberry 10 launch. It was definitely a device launch but they've announced Blackberry 10 so many times. I mean, well, they've shown Blackberry 10 so many times, right, in developer conferences and things like this. This was their big launch of the platform and they launched devices to go along with it. So they finally, officially showed off the Z10 which is the all touch model and the Q10 which has the proper physical keyboard that everyone thinks of when they think of a Blackberry. Correction. This is the Z10. It is absolutely, categorically the Z10 because this phone is actually available over here in the UK now. It's in stores. Whereas you American folks are still going to have to deal with your certifications and verifications and carrier checks. And Torsten Heinz referred to it as the Z10 on stage. Yes. Because they're all them Canadians up them there. So yeah, I'm totally comfortable calling it the Z10. Right, so the Z10 is the first one that's coming to market. As Vlad mentioned, it's available in the UK right now. It launched in Canada today actually and it is coming to the US at some inordinate time in March. Yeah, we had a rumor that T-Mobile was going to have it on the 27th of March with a bunch of other phones. So it'll be whatever the carriers launch it in March, they'll launch it. Yeah, and I think the only carrier in the US that hasn't committed to the Z10 is Sprint which has officially committed to the Q10 and we still don't know if it's going to pick up the Z10. Dan, stop saying Z10. I'm getting into it now. The Blackberry Z10. So I've had a Z10. Oh hang on, back up. What was the event like? You were there in person. And Vlad, you were at the event in London, right? Yes, I was at the Seth to Mike event. What was the vibe like? So this was the first event that I've been to since Blackberry World 2011 I think and that was when they launched Blackberry 7 and the 9900 and whatever else they announced there. And that was a really huge event and if you remember that Balmer came out on stage and that was like the biggest part of the event. So this was kind of similar. It was a very big venue, a very big event. There was lots of people there, lots of press. Blackberry is very active in getting a lot of press from all over the world to come to its events and this was no different. There was a lot of press there, a lot of analysts there, a lot of industry people there. And then they did this thing where they connected all of these other events around the world. So there was like 7 or 8 other events in Paris, Johannesburg, London where Vlad was. There was one I believe in Toronto as well and others that are escaping me right now and they kind of piped them all together with a video connection. Can I just say that the conceit of having a reporter start your live event by being on the floor with a microphone and talking to people needs to go away. That was the stupidest thing ever because it was literally quite boring to me. At the time of RIM, RIM did it and didn't Nokia do that with some event last year where they had a pretend reporter, pretend talking to pretend people about pretend things before the event started to try and drum up a feeling of excitement and this is an event? The structure of the event in general was very suspect to me because given the audience for this event, you should not be spending, I mean they spent a good 10 or 15 minutes playing up the fanboy angle and going to all these different events and talking to people who are allegedly excited about the phones and you're not fooling anybody. You're actually actively insulting our intelligence by wasting 15 minutes of our lives doing this. Hold up Chris. I'm sorry I interrupted you but I would say they wasted quite a few more minutes than just the first 15 because I can tell you another thing. It was somewhere around half an hour into the presentation, 40 minutes into the presentation and I was monitoring chat for our team and there was just nothing. It was dead. The thing we know during live events is we always have some messages, there's always somebody reacting to something happening on stage, studio announcements, etc. and I was just like, are we still here? Are we still alive? Am I still connected to the web? And the guys were just like, we're all just stunned into silence. But besides that, I do want to rewind back to that intro with the fanboy angle. I am just kind of freaked out and horrified by the way they treated Craigbrough Kevin because that dude apparently decided, I mean this is what it needs to be, he decided until BlackBerry10 comes out, I won't have a haircut. This has been an ongoing thing. Right, so he's built up this nice set of flow and locks, he had a ponytail going on and BlackBerry just decided to be like, hey do you want to be a good sport and let us cut off your ponytail and completely ruin your hairstyle? And what was he ever going to say? I think his name, well his name, is Craigbrough Kevin, that's his thing, he's BlackBerry's biggest fan and they put him in that situation. I think he was actually there. We've all known Kevin for a while and I'm pretty sure he couldn't have been more related to being in that position. No, I'm sure featuring him was flattering to his ego and all that stuff. I just kind of find it really weird from BlackBerry's perspective to drag out your biggest fan and be like, we're just going to cut your hair, yay. What sort of celebration, what sort of auspicious occasion does this lead into? Well he was growing it out until BlackBerry10 launched. They're the biggest BlackBerry fans. It was a rally, it was like sports fans who are growing their hair out until they get to the playoffs or until they win the championship or whatever. But again, this entire shtick is insulting to the intelligence and it's a waste of time for the analysts and media who are there. Show us what you've brought us there to announce, let us collect our review units and let us go on our way. I was expecting big surprises, well not big surprises, I was expecting a surprise at least out of this event based on everything. I heard that I was hoping that there would be something surprising and it seems like the biggest surprise besides renaming the company from RIM to BlackBerry is that they managed to secure a bigger list of big name apps than I expected. They got WhatsApp, they got a bunch of others. They got commitments from them. That's something I want to talk about. They announced these on stage and they really made it feel like all of these apps are going to be there at launch and stuff. They talked about Skype and they talked about WhatsApp and they talked about a bunch of other ones. But if you go into a UK store right now and you buy the Z10 or Z10 and you try to download any of those apps, they're not available yet. As far as I'm concerned, the phone is launched and they're not available. When I talked to them about WhatsApp, I spoke to WhatsApp and RIM at the same time and they basically said, well it's going to be out really soon and it should be out in time for the US launch and since it's a rolling launch, we're going to say it's a launch app. Yeah, I did find the whole app shtick really misleading because they came out and they were really pushing the numbers, 70,000 apps. We're coming out really strong right out of the gate. And then you actually look at the breakdown of that and then a substantial proportion of this is just Android applications wrapped up to play and to work on the BlackBerry 10 platform. Another good chunk of it is ported Android applications, then there's HTML5 applications, and then less than half, from what I understand, of all these apps are actually native BlackBerry 10 applications, which are the ones that have the most functionality, the most access to low-level resources, and the biggest chance to shine. And the really annoying thing is when you take your Z10, you start browsing around and you look for big name apps. One of the first ones that caught my eye was YouTube and I'm like, yeah, great, these guys actually have a YouTube app right out of the box. I tap into it, m.youtube.com. It's a web link. That's what Windows Phone did, right? It's exactly the same thing. It's exactly the same thing and I hate it because that is BlackBerry's choice. Well, no it's not. It's their choice to have a crappy stub app in there, I suppose. Yeah, it's actually with the shortcut. Let me just add to this. It's something that Dan's reaction after his first day or so was like, they spent two years developing this, etc. and a bunch of sensitive stuff. So he's put on with that. If you had this much time, there is a lot about the BlackBerry 10 software that is just unacceptable. And two things that really, really stand out for me. There are neat things which we may end up eventually even discussing about the software, but the two things that really annoy me are things like the settings menu is still like a white background with black text on it. There's just almost no effort being put into making this look particularly different from BlackBerry menus from years and decades past. And secondly, email syncing is still not immediate. It's using IMAP, right? Maybe there's IMAP idle for push is how they're pushing, if they're pushing. I don't have one yet. No other platform has been so lame with email sync as BlackBerry. I don't know what the technical backend if they're using IMAP idle or not, but it receives emails push. So for my Gmail accounts, it automatically pushes to the phone. But the problem is I'll mark it red on the device and then it will be like hours later and I'll go back to my desktop and there's still all these emails sitting in my inbox on the desktop marked unread or unfiled or whatever. It crosses the whole thing again. It depends on how they implement the IMAP and let's be honest, IMAP and Gmail is not played all that nicely in general. So if we want to knock it for how it handles email, that's fine, but it's also like the same boat that everybody else is in. I disagree. Really? I don't know. All I can think of is that when you think of BlackBerry, if you're not thinking of a keyboard, you're thinking of an awesome messaging and awesome email support experience. And it does not fulfill that at all on Gmail. By default, the conversation view is turned off, which blows my mind. And so you have all these emails coming in and they're not threaded together and that's a nightmare. Then if you are a Gmail user of any sort that likes to archive things or organize them with labels, that's a very difficult thing to do, which is obviously no different than if you're using Windows phone. Dude, backup. Imagine Gmail wasn't available on the iPhone. You'd be in the exact same situation, right? But the point is it is available and the iOS's email client is way better than BlackBerry Tenants. Like the stock mail.app email client is way better. Really? Okay. I have a hard time believing that the iOS's mail app is better than anything at all ever. I really truly do. Yeah, the iOS app is not a good comparison. But Windows phone guys, seriously, I've actually been nitpicky enough to run comparisons with how quickly it syncs. It sometimes even syncs faster. Talking about Gmail account here than my Android device. Are you talking about IMAP or Exchange? Windows phone. Exchange. Yeah, see, there you go. You can. Yeah. Okay, fair enough. Fair enough. But still, I mean, as far as just the end user perspective is concerned, right? You pick up a BlackBerry 7 device. I had the misfortune of reviewing that Porsche design atrocity. So that means you picked up a BlackBerry 7 device. By the way, the dude on House of Cards on Netflix has got one of those. The bald dude. Is he in prison? Is that why he's being punished in this fashion? He's a player, man. He's a baller. That's what they use. That's the P9900. So let's talk about the other features of BlackBerry 10. BlackBerry has been touting the hub, which is like its universal inbox for organizing your notifications from everything, from messages to email to social networking, things like that, which is a great idea in theory. In concept or in execution, I guess, it kind of falls apart on BlackBerry 10 for a number of reasons. One is that I don't really always want all of my notifications all together, and it kind of just lumps me into there, and then I can, yes, break down into my various services to view them individually, but by default it just kind of throws me in there. The other problem that I have with it is when you get a notification on the device, unlike with iOS or Android where you can swipe down from the top and see what the notification is, more or less you can see who the message is from, maybe even see part of the message. And then ignore it if you want. BlackBerry 10 just gives you an icon, so it will say you have new text messages or new emails or new Twitter replies or whatever, and then I have to go into the actual messaging hub and I have to look at each one to see what they say instead of being able to glance at it and then go back to what I was doing, which defeats the whole purpose to me. And then there's also other nitpicks. You can't actually go from message to message in it. You have to look at a message, go back to the list, open a new message, go back into that, back and forth. A lot of back and forth bouncing, which is very unintuitive and slow. And it took me a long time to find it, and actually I got a little help from somebody on Twitter to find how to mark all of my Twitter notifications as read because I would get however many in a day and they would all be sitting there and I was marking them individually. So there is a way to do that, but it's very hidden. You have to long press on a thing and bring up a hidden contextual message. It's just insane. It's not just in the general pull down menu? No, the way you do it is you long press on the date. So if you're looking at your list of messages, you long press on the date, which is tiny, then it brings up a contextual menu that lets you select mark all as read. That's terrible. The thing with the hub is that BlackBerry has just really branded the notification area. They haven't added or advanced the idea of a notification aggregator anymore. I mean they're a step ahead of Windows Phone because they actually have one. But as far as the notification systems in Android and iOS are way superior as far as I'm concerned. The other thing is the lock screen is also quite confusing and intuitive with BlackBerry because you get notifications for new tweets, new messages on there and it just looks so inviting for you to swipe into them. You look at it, it's on the left side of the screen and you're like, oh, tweet notifications. And then you try and swipe and then you try and long press, you try and do something with it, you can't. It just sits there on the lock screen. But in the camera icon, if you long press it, there's a little animation and that brings you to the camera. And if you're dragging from the top, you can access your alarm clock. If you're dragging from the bottom, you unlock the phone. It's just like swipes from the edges sometimes do you things, sometimes they don't do you things. And then sometimes you have things that look tappable or clickable or long pressable and they're not and it's just weird. Yeah, it's a very, the whole OS, there's a lot of instances where it's just not very obvious what you're supposed to do. Are you supposed to swipe back? Are you supposed to look for a back button? Are you supposed to swipe up? And you have to learn all of that for every single app that you do or every single action that you want to do, which is a learning curve with anything, but there's no consistency. How much of this do you guys think is just not having learned it, not being used to the platform? Honestly, how much of it is that you're used to iOS and Android and you're not a Blackberry person? I'll give you an example. This is like your main home screen and you swipe over and that brings up your inbox and your notifications. And so like I want to swipe back to go back and I can't, I have to swipe up to go back. And it's like... You just swipe back to go back from your... Let me do it again. See, I'm confused. You swipe back. Oh, there it is, you swiped. Oh, there it is. So, just wondering what the problem is. It made a liar out of me. But I swear, it's inconsistent in areas. I just can't prove it. But there are instances where a back button will show up on the screen. But if you swipe in the bottom in the example that Dan was giving, that will still take you back to the home screen. Yeah, right. Yeah, because you need to treat the hub as an app. And if you haven't, there's a full review that Josh wrote getting into a lot of these issues. And you definitely should check it out. What was the final score we gave it? We gave it a 7. 7, yeah. So, this seems right. And the big debate on the Vergecast, which we don't need to recapitulate in full, is, is this better than Windows Phone? Because that's really the big question, right? And I haven't used it, so I'm not going to say. I suspect the answer is Windows Phone is better. I mean, this had a faster, stronger launch out of the gate than Windows Phone did back with Windows Phone 7. Right, definitely. BlackBerry definitely has more support from carriers. It's getting global launching much faster than Microsoft did with Windows Phone. Personally, I'd rather carry a Windows Phone device at this point, just because even though Windows Phone does not have as strong an app ecosystem as iOS and Android, it's still a lot better than what BlackBerry 10 is offering. But I think what the real question is, for an average consumer, for the person going into the store that sees, you know, three or four different phones priced at $200 on a contract, does it compare with them? And no, I can't recommend it over an iOS or Android device along the same price point. Right. Although, the real question here is, is Alicia Keys better than Jessica Alba in the brand ambassador state? Well, she's actually an employee, right? She's on RIM's payroll, right? Or BlackRim's payroll. See? Ten years! Yeah, that's whatever. I don't even know what to say. Like, I saw Will.i.am at Macworld. He's also got a similar fake job at Intel. And I just have zero patience. I don't care. I love the fact that every one of these companies is completely inventing the job, the role. The whole position is invented just to satisfy the whole, we're being influenced by a cool or formerly cool or some weird people think they're cool celebrity. And cool is the key word. Russell wrote a really smart piece on this whole phenomenon of the creative director and Lady Gaga and Will.i.am, like you mentioned, Dieter and Alicia Keys. And there's this idea among these companies that they need to force some false sense of cool on their image in order to sell devices. And that's not what RIM needs to be trying to do to sell phones. The fact that they showed Alicia Keys on stage at their launch event is going to have zero impact on their bottom line. You know what else RIM, RIM, you know what else Blackberry needs to not do to sell their phones? They need to not put up a boring, middling Super Bowl commercial that, like, they basically took their phone, their Z10, and they set it on a T-ball stand, like you set a softball on when you play T-ball. And they invited everybody on the planet to just take a huge swing at it whenever they feel like it, whenever they want to complain about the platform, because the tagline for this commercial was, it'd be faster to show you what things it can't do. There are so many things that the Blackberry Z10 can't do, and there's going to always be things that this Blackberry can't do. Samsung's was way better. If they're going to keep pushing this angle on this commercial, man, so many headlines are just waiting for me to write. Just waiting. I think for the benefit, I have seen other commercials that they plan on airing that show more of the device's functions and gestures and its features and stuff. So hopefully they'll run with those in the future instead of this kind of conceptual thing that happened during the Super Bowl. Samsung's was actually way more clever, and I think that it was very important that they move away from the Apple bashing, which they finally did, thank God. Right, but as far as the product commercial, it was pretty terrible because you didn't really see the product at all. Yeah, but I felt like it was funny enough so that it would cause you to look up Samsung Galaxy, if for whatever reason you didn't know what Samsung Galaxy was. That commercial wasn't about selling phones anymore. It's about establishing Samsung as a brand, basic brand building. In that context, I think it worked really well. It was just sort of, oh, I have warm, fuzzy feelings about Samsung now. Hooray. That's all they needed to pull off there. The real superstar of that commercial, by the way, was Bob Odenkirk. Don't get me wrong, Paul Rudd, Seth Rogen are great, but Bob Odenkirk is top notch in my book. Hang on, did you just know that actor's name off the top of your head? You didn't know that, Peter? Mr. Show, dude. This is what people who don't watch Fast and the Furious are like. Remember, I'm in my 30s. Here we go. So guys, seriously, we don't have that long of a podcast so far. Before we talk about BlackBerry, let's just make a very quick mention, because BlackBerry is trying to talk up the sales for the Z10. Wow, let's also mention that the Q10 has no release date, no availability information or pricing or anything. Yeah, actually, the Q10 I felt really like, oh yeah, it's great, Q10 is coming, everything is going to be fine. But after this launch event, I'm feeling nervous. I mean, it's going to come and whatever, but I'm nervous about it in the way that I wasn't before the launch event. Anyway, sorry. I think that they're going to have, they're going to go through the exact same cycle of agony that Nokia is currently going through. I don't think that this device, devices, plural, Z10 and Q10 are going to do enough to pull them out of their nosedive. And I think that they're going to do several more rapid cycles. Vlad, you and I talked about this on the show last week, the fact that Nokia's failures have forced them into this faster cycle than they're comfortable with. And I think we're going to see that with RIM too, and it's going to be pretty painful to watch. I'm not sure how we talked about it when I wasn't on last week's podcast. Oh, maybe, who did I talk about with? Was it you, Dan? I don't know. I talked about it with somebody. I feel like we have a conversation. Did I have this in my head? No, this conversation happened. I either listened or participated. I don't remember which. Okay. Welcome to the Verge Mobile Show, everybody. Anyway, anyway. Episode 35. It was episode 35, so. I just want to give Dan the opportunity to interrupt as well, because I was doing this quick wrap up and then he just kind of spired out of control. Okay, very quickly. RIM, okay, there you go. Actually, wait, Instagram. Instagram's coming. Yes, we do know that. Big deal. I don't give a damn. I downloaded Instagram to my iPhone and I can't use it now without logging into Facebook. It's really wacky and weird, and I'm not logging into Facebook. Anyway, so BlackBerry is still giving up the idea that the Z10 is selling out and selling really well. But we've had zero numbers in terms of sales, so this is why you haven't seen us covering it as news because it's a load of complete PR. Because what I can say is I can take my Z10 review unit and if I'm successful in selling it, I can say I'm completely sold out, guys, and it's completely blown away all of my podcasts. They've exceeded your expectations. Totally. Yeah. So if we don't know how many they had in stock, guys like the Carphone Warehouse or Phones4U, they're resellers. They might have a limited stock. They might have low expectations. We know nothing about sales so far. So that's the situation with BlackBerry. What's next on our list of topics? So moving on, we've been talking about HTC for the last seven iterations of episode 35. But there's more to talk about because HTC's big event has yet to happen, so there's going to be more leaks and things like that. And so HTC itself put out this teaser yesterday where it teased a new sound and camera experience at the end of a long timeline of camera technology. Which if you look very closely at the original version of the timeline, you might see some errors. Anyway, them going after Nokia's PureView implementation. Yeah, that was like, really? To be fair, Nokia has been the one mobile company that just keeps talking trash. Particularly on Twitter and just being snarky and being a smart ass to its fellow competitors. Well, they're big fans of their own products. Yeah, they are. Yeah, the 610. 620, wasn't it? Or 620, excuse me, or whatever it was. It passed with flying colors. The long awaited Nokia Conversations review of the Nokia 620. That went up this week, ladies and gentlemen. Nokia Conversations is not an outside blog or site, it is Nokia's own site. But to be fair, they actually did respond pretty quickly and changed it from a review to a hands-on. Oh, did they really? Yeah, they updated it. So, HTC at the end of this long timeline teases a new sound and camera experience for 2013. The exact same thing is set for 2012 and also in 2011 when it bought Beats. So, you can read into that all you want, but it doesn't seem to be like HTC is really changing its narrative there. The rumor is that they're going to stack a bunch of sensors, right? Yeah. Yeah, it's a very strange rumor that they're going to stop calling things megapixels and call them ultrapixels. But we'll have to see what they do. Well, I mean, if they're making fun of Nokia, they might be able to do something interesting here. I mean, I anticipate finding out on the 19th, I guess. I don't know which day it happened, but Peter Chow did run around yelling M7, M7, M7 and thrusting the phone into the air. So, I'm pretty sure February 19th is kind of a lot by this point for us to see this new Android flagship. Yeah, well, I mean, we've seen it, right? We've got a picture of Peter Chow holding it up, taking it out of the phone. Right, but when I see it, I mean, learn about it as well and learn about these ultrapixels and all this other madness. Just a quick note, I was taking a look just before the podcast and I'm taking a look at it now. This is why I'm doing these motions with my head on Twitter. Anyhow, the Z10 is actually, in terms of physical dimensions, is actually not that much smaller than the HT1X, which is disappointing to me. Yeah, considering it's a 4.2 inch display as opposed to a 4.7. I actually penned this 500 or 600 word rant about sizes and saying that Android needs some 4 to 4.3 inch devices, which was trying to also give voice to the same concern and issue that we've given voice to in previous podcasts and the thing that Chris has been ranting about previously. But what I would say with that is when we demand these 4 to 4.3 inch devices, we want them to actually be physically smaller, to be legitimately smaller as opposed to we'll put a 4.2 inch screen on there and we'll keep it the same size as the 1X. That isn't really the point. But anyhow, that was it. Back to HT's next big focus. I think we're done talking about HTC. We're not done talking about HTC until next episode 35. Yes. So Microsoft confirmed that CardDav and CalDav support are definitely coming to Windows Phone and they got a little support from Google in that it is extending its support of Exchange Active Sync so that Windows Phone users are not left in the lurch come the end of January, which is nice to see. So if you are a Windows Phone user, go ahead, Chris. So two things I want to point out here. One, it is patently obvious that this was the plan all along, that Google was going to watch Microsoft stew in its own juices for a few weeks before looking the hero and announcing that it was going to extend it for a few months. Two, I guarantee you that they are getting this extension for free from Microsoft. They are not paying a dime for this license until June. Yeah, I agree with both of those points. Although it's still the thing you wrote back when this news first broke that they were going to be dropping Exchange Active Sync. What was it you said? That Microsoft is either incompetent or lying? Right. By saying they were surprised by this news? Yeah, right. Yeah. So I mean, that's good. If I could pay Google to get Exchange, I guess I am for Google Apps, right? Because they are going to continue that support for Enterprise accounts and Google Apps accounts. So in a sense, I am paying Google to have... And they don't have any more free Google Apps accounts as far as I know. Right. So my whole point was that if I could pay Google for that, I would. If I could pay Google for that for my personal account, I would. It should come free if you buy the extra storage. Oh, yeah. If I'm not mistaken, Paul, who has no use for it, says he pays for... I think that he...like his personal setup is on Google Apps, which has always been intriguing to me. But I don't know if I would pay for it. It used to be for Google Apps that you could have like five or ten accounts for free or something like that. And they recently changed. I want to say like last year they changed it that there's no longer a free account option. Yeah, and it also used to be...I don't know if this is still the case, but it used to be that a lot of like really cool Google features would be rolled out on Google Apps accounts like long after they were on like regular Gmail accounts. Definitely. So that's something to consider, too. I don't know if that's still the case. We also should point out that Windows Phone 7.8 is actually happening on Nokia's devices at least. Oh, you know what else it's happening on? The Dell Venue Pro. No way. Yeah. You're lying. No, look it up. How did I miss this? That's amazing. Two days ago, it got 7.8. Yep. It's official, too. It's not a hack. I want a Dell Venue Pro now. And that is a fine phone. Dude, you just got finished complaining about phones that are way too big for their screen size and now you're going to praise the Dell Venue Pro? Come on. Well, because it's kind of creepy. It's kind of creepy. Yeah, it's true. It's true. I hang my hand in shame. But let me actually switch up before our UK audience goes to sleep, like me, because I'm really sleepy. It's late. There's actually some really huge news in terms of the UK LTE market. And it came out about half an hour into the Super Bowl. It's like the company that announced it wanted to bury it or something. In any case, midnight on Monday, Free UK announced that it would add LTE to its packages without a price premium. And that is just humongously massive. I'm reading it and I'm just trying to find where is the small print? Where are these guys qualifying this statement? Because so far, LTE has just been this super premium, EE only offering. And EE is treating it like this especially special thing, even though it isn't on the best frequency and it doesn't have all that great building penetration. The thing with Free in the UK is that they've consistently had the absolute best prices among the local carriers. Particularly with London, they have some of the best 3G coverage. So if you want data in London, Free is the best value by a mile. I think the last time I was in London, I bought a 3 data only SIM because it was cheap and fast. Yeah, I mean, it's both cheap and fast. And now all of a sudden, they're going to stage D, which is going to LTE speeds. I mean, that's brilliant. Everybody else is either going to have to come down in price and compete with Free or lose a ton of customers. So this is a big promise. I don't know how the company is going to manage it financially. I don't know how they're working through that hump, through that hurdle. Minor details. I'm a Free subscriber myself and I'm paying almost nothing. So just getting LTE on top of that is going to be a beauty. It's awesome news. So yeah, we still don't know when it's going to happen. It will probably be like November time or whatever. But at least it's something really good and worthwhile to look forward to. So yay for us. Cool. You're so envious you can't even say anything. It's funny, we got LTE theoretically without price increases on all the carriers in the US, although they've been messing around with their data plans so much. Probably part of that was because of LTE I guess. But the idea that you would just assume you'd be paying an extra however much a month just to get LTE, people would be storming the gates here if that were the case. Well yeah, but at the same time you guys pay hundreds of dollars per month. Whereas the UK subscriptions are much, much cheaper on a regular basis. So the only thing that I'm really bummed about is the next time I go to London, I won't be able to use that LTE if 3 has enabled its cheap LTE because my device won't be compatible. Boo. Yeah, that's true. Do you want to talk about the X-Phone from Motorola? I mean, do we know any specifics about it? No, this job listing allegedly confirmed its name. An X-Phone project is in the works for sure, which was reported by the Wall Street Journal. And the way Motorola handled that after that leaves me to believe that it was not a fake listing. Right. It was originally a listing on LinkedIn that included the X-Phone name. And if you look for it on Motorola's career site, you could find the exact same listing minus the X-Phone name, and then a couple hours later it was gone from LinkedIn. Yeah. Well, speaking of pooled documents and things, again, I don't know if this happened before last week's podcast, but there was a Qualcomm document. Remember the one pointing to Keyline Pi coming out in the second quarter of the year? Oh, yeah, yeah. It was a huge document dump for Qualcomm. Slide deck, yeah. And, well, Qualcomm's thing is, Qualcomm has leaks that happen seemingly every year, and every year it issues takedown notices for them. And the interesting part of this leak was that there was one slide that said, Android Keyline Pi may tentatively be launched in the spring of 2013, which is like a very broad estimate, and even the slide itself said it was just an estimate. But it does line up with when Google I.O. is supposed to happen in May. If we don't see Keyline Pi or whatever it's going to be called then, it would be a big surprise. Well, I also think that there are some issues with Jelly Bean, particularly 4.2, which people have been encountering, so that's something to kind of look forward to, I guess. Such as? Well, I mean, Dita had complained with the Nexus 7 that he would have preferred to keep it at 4.1, and I did find it, like the Nexus 7 that Dita handed off to me, I do find it a bit more sluggish, and behaved a bit more oddly than stock ones. I know Bluetooth streaming is totally not a stock on the Nexus 7. Oh, yeah, I mean, yeah, it's stock 4.2, but I mean, stock when you buy a 4.1 Nexus 7. Right. Or a Nexus 7 with 4.1. I'm not expressing myself very well. So I have a crazy theory that I'm going to throw out. I think, first of all, I think that it's completely insane to believe that Google will have the successor to the Nexus 4 ready in time for Google I.O. I agree. But I do think that they will debut the white Nexus 4 at Google I.O. as an option. I bet they'll probably give it to all the attendees. That could be. But either way, I think that'll somehow be tied into the launch of Key Lime Pie. Secondly, this is less a prediction and more of a gloat. I just want to point out that The Verge called the Key Lime Pie name like a year ago. What else would it have been? We were first. It could be... hold on. I don't know. I'm not Googling this. I mean, I don't know. It's not your... Klondike bars. It's not your... yeah, it could be Klondike bar. That's a good one. But I do think that it's going to be Key Lime Pie. No, it could have been K.O. Cake. Only for you, Vlad. Not for anybody else. K.O. Quiche. That is not a dessert in anyone's household except yours. That's like a punishment food. That's not a dessert. That's not a reward. Listen, when I cook K.O. Cake and when I write my reviews the way Nokia does, it's amazing. Man. What else is there that happened this week? I feel like we could go back to the BlackBerry Wells some more. There's a rumor that Vertu might launch an Android phone, which is kind of crazy, if you ask me. Of course they're going to launch an Android phone. What would you expect them to do? They're still launching anything. They're not even owned by Nokia anymore. How is it that they're still in business? Right, but keep in mind that Vertu, I believe... I might be making this up, but I think that Nokia has said in the past that Vertu has been a profitable division for them. Oh, yeah. And that makes sense because they charge completely asinine amounts of money for these devices. They sell one phone, turn a profitable quarter. Right. Their cheapest models are like $4,500 or $5,000 and that's for devices that don't have any precious metal at all. And then you can go up to $100,000 for a solid gold phone. But what's interesting to me about this is that, yes, I totally agree with you guys that an Android Vertu is inevitable, but Nokia does still have a stake in Vertu. So you could say... you wouldn't be entirely wrong in saying that Nokia is going to make an Android phone, despite Stevie's promises to the contrary. No, Nokia still owns like what, 10 or 20% of Vertu or something like that? Well, Nokia should have held on to all of that actually because it was recently... I don't know where I came across it, but there was a statement from Vertu saying that they're actually growing and their profits are expanding and improving and things like that. And I was asking the exact same question as Dan. How are these guys still in business, whereas they are thriving? They're improving. Well, I guess when you manufacture things that are three years behind the development cycle of everyone else, it's pretty cheap to do. The one thing, I mean, although it's not surprising that they're going the Android route, you have to think about the clientele. The people that are using Vertu devices don't really care. I mean, they're the kinds of people where instead of wanting to check the weather on their phone, they press the concierge button on the side of the phone, which connects them to a Vertu concierge, and then they ask what the weather is going to be. That's like the ultimate weather app, by the way. Yeah, they actually... I would fill out my weather app collection and I'd be done. I just want to point out that of all my predictions of what we talked about today, we've covered all of them but one. I'm really excited. Which is? I'm not saying. See if you guys can just come to it organically. Oh, God. So what I was going to say is that in that respect, it doesn't really matter... I think it matters very little what operating system a Vertu phone runs compared to other platforms because keep in mind, Vertu still makes the signature, I think, which is a dumb phone. It's like running S30 or S40. And Gwyneth Paltrow is still buying them by the dozens. Gwyneth Paltrow, really? So a future... Yeah, she's a huge Vertu fan. So the... She's single-handedly keeping the company afloat. So a future Vertu could very easily run Windows Phone, just stay in lockstep with its part owner, Nokia. And I don't think that its clients would be any of the wiser. As long as they can figure out how to make a phone call and there's still the button on the side that immediately connects them to a concierge, they would be all set. I love this concierge thing. It's basically like a real-life human Siri. That's exactly what it is! That's exactly what it is! It's a real-life virtual assistant! Vertu had this figured out years before Apple. Now all I want to know is what Dieter's last thing is. That's consuming me. Why are you thinking about that? Let's make a quick mention about Lenovo, because this company is really intriguing me. This week they reported their revenues and contrary to every other PC maker, including Apple with its Macs, they're actually growing in terms of sales, in terms of profits. They broke all of their records. Revenues, profits, sales, shipments, yada yada yada. Their smartphone division, exactly as the CEO promised less than six months ago, has turned profitable for the first time in the last quarter. Lenovo is actually doing well, which to me is really amazing. It's obviously, all of this growth is China-centric and it's the one area where all of us are perhaps less informed than we should be. So we're not perfectly clear on what particular part of it is growing. But to me, when I think Lenovo and smartphones, I think misguided Intel devices. So it's just really odd to me how this company just keeps pushing ahead. Do you think it's selling all these Intel devices? Well, we've got to remember that the Chinese market where Lenovo actually offers its products for sale is enormous. And there's a huge pool of customers to tap into. And even if they're only tapping into a small fraction of it, there's well over a billion cell phone customers, there's cell phone connections in China. And something like a few hundred thousand smartphone owners, which is insane. That's all of the US. So there's a huge market to tap there for Lenovo. And Lenovo, as I understand it, is a well-loved company in China. But that was the other thing. Actually, looking at the breakdown, the growth wasn't just in China. It's actually growing really healthily all over the place. Probably Latin America, I would guess. Southeast Asia, right? More or less everywhere but here. Africa. Yeah, there's a huge market for devices in China and in Africa that very few companies have really sold. That's one of Nokia's traditional strong suits, and that's something that they sell into with the Asha line. And some of their very low-end Windows phones. And that's obviously Lenovo's strength too. But I don't want to read into it too much in terms of their ability to penetrate into entrenched markets. I don't see a Lenovo phone launching anytime soon in the US. I don't see one really taking Europe by storm, at least Western Europe. Do you think that's going to happen? Vlad, what was that orange phone with the Intel processor? That was not a Lenovo, right? No, no, no, it wasn't. That whole thing was designed in San Diego and then it got renamed into the San Francisco. Oh, because of Qualcomm, right? That's the theory anyway. That was just an Intel phone. But wasn't that built by Zolo or something like that? YOLO with an X? Or is that the same chassis? I think it's pretty much the same design and device. But the Zolo launched in India and other places that we're not anywhere near to. So I need to run, guys. Dan, do you want to do the wrap-up? I think you can handle it. Sure. So I guess that's episode 35 for this week, which is February 4th, 2013. It's episode 35 this week and every week. This week and every week, yes. So tune in next week for episode 35. If you want to follow us on Twitter, I'm dccferd with an EI. Dieter, who just left, is at backlon. Vlad is Vlad Savov. And Chris is zpower. And be sure to leave a comment on the post if you want to give us feedback. And that's it. Thanks for watching, guys. Bye-bye.