 Greetings, mobile accomplishers. Welcome to The Verge Mobile Show, live from New York and another city in New York and also London. I'm Dieter Bohm. I'm Chris Idler. Why did I go right after you? I was in New York. My cadence is off. Dieter said something and I just jumped right in. I was feeling it. I'm sorry, Vlad and Dan. I totally stole your thunder. Look, sometimes you just feel it. Like you feel a really good slice of pizza that you can get in New York. Don't even start with me. I'm Dan Seifert, by the way. And I'm completely out of order, so obviously I have to cut off. Vlad, that is a luxurious beard you're sporting. A luxurious and compulsory beard now. That's right. By legally binding agreement. So if you guys aren't familiar, Chris Idler started a change.org petition to prevent Vlad from shaving his beard and it worked. How many signatures did we get? 110 or so. 110 signatures. The thing to remember is it only takes 110 people to do something meaningless and trivial on the internet to make Vlad do anything. Look, can we start a petition to make Vlad permanently follow me on Twitter? Well, I don't think Vlad would... That was gonna require a thousand. I'm sorry. That's a real stretch goal right there. So Vlad, real talk, are you gonna keep the beard? People have spoken. Well, I can't let them down. I think I might have to trim it because it's like covering my lips now and it's just getting really terrible. I mean, I'm not a beard professional like you, Chris, so I'm completely out of habit of eating with so much fur on my face. I wouldn't call me a beard professional. There are people in our organization who are beard professionals. Evan Rogers has been known to sport a really, really lovely beard. You know who has the best, I think, in our organization? At least out of our New York office. Christian Mazza, one of our video producers, has like the perfect beard. It's a nice beard. This is the Verge Mobile Show where we talk about Verge staff that you may or may not be familiar with. You should be familiar with all of them though because they're all lovely people. This is our Octogenarian episode, it's episode number 80, and we are in the week before Mobile World Congress and it is sort of the calm before the storm, although there have been a bunch of leaks and rumors and very well-sourced reports on what we can expect out of Samsung. The obvious thing is the Galaxy S5, we're starting to get dribs and drabs of what to expect with that. I'm hearing 5.2 inch screen, we've already talked about how the interface should be a little bit chiller, and now there's a rumor that there's going to be a fingerprint sensor? Holy cow! No way! Apparently it will be used to unlock your phone, launch apps, authenticate yourself. Because we haven't seen that idea before. No, it's completely original. Apparently at one point people thought it would be behind the screen, which is insane, and now the rumor is it's going to be on the home button, but it's going to be a swipe. That worked out really well for the Atrix guys. And it worked out really well on, what was it, the One Max? But the position of the sensor on the Atrix was insane. Yeah, well, yeah. It was pretty insane. Also, it doubled as the power button, which was completely ridiculous. I thought it was kind of awesome. The theory of it was awesome, but it was hard to press. Literally the theory about everything with the Atrix is awesome, and the execution fell apart on almost every front. The first dual-core Android smartphone, it had the lap-dock thing that was awesome, and it had the fingerprint scanner. It was like, on paper, going to be the most awesome thing ever. It wasn't the fo'zeal core, by the way. Well, I don't think you could buy the LG in the US, so. Yet. Whatever. It was one of the first. By the way, I just want to point out that Dieter and I literally look like hostages with this blank white background. It's like, we're being treated well, we hope our government works to secure our freedom. I mean, this really does look kind of scary. We need a decoration of the camera. How can we point the camera that way with the cool poster? Yeah, we have a great e-boy poster. We're in Josh's office right now, actually, and he has a beautiful e-boy poster on the opposite wall. It looks great. You guys should see it. It's amazing. Unfortunately they can't. It's pretty obvious from your background that you're in the interrogation position opposite Josh. I'm sure there's a throne. He's standing right there, he's glowering at us, he's very mad at how unprofessional this podcast is, and I can't blame him, honestly. So S5, I mean, what else? That's pretty much everything we know. I think it's going to look the same. No, at one time there was a rumor that it was going to be made of metal this time, right? Yeah, but that's not going to happen. Maybe, I mean, they can't just put out another phone that looks like a GS5, or a GS4. Why not, Chris? Chris, I would like to introduce you to a company called Samsung. Well, yeah, but consider this. And I know that Samsung does a very good job of siloing their different divisions, but if you look at their televisions and how much they've evolved in the past five years, their ID, originally they were just a thick black bezel, and now they've moved to this insane transparent one millimeter thick bezel with the little aluminum thing at the bottom that says Samsung on it. So they know how to iterate ID. They haven't done it for a couple of years now with the Galaxy S, but maybe this is the year. In that respect, they have. The bezels on the Galaxy S4 are like the smallest, like they made the Galaxy S4 the same size as the Galaxy S3, but increased the screen size. So like, they're shrinking the bezels just like they've done on the TVs, but you know, it still has that greasy, slimy plastic back. I think that it's more likely that instead of maybe a metal phone, they'll probably apply some sort of idea of that faux leather back that they do on the Galaxy Note and those new tablets, and they even released a version of the Galaxy S4 in Korea and Russia with that faux leather back. So I'd be surprised, or not be surprised if the Galaxy S5 had that. Yeah. I mean, I am unreasonably excited for the S5. I know it just feels super iterative, but I mean, I'm using a Nexus 5 as my Android phone, I'm using an iPhone as my main phone right now, and I mean, I've seen the rumors for what HTC is probably going to do, and I'm not super excited by that. I know LG doesn't have anything in the pipeline that really gets me excited, so when it comes to like Android phones that are going to like float my boat, get my heart racing, it seems like for the next while the S5 is kind of going to be at the top of the list. But you're kind of achieving your excitement by process of elimination. You're saying everybody else stinks, so let's hope Samsung doesn't. I mean, can't you just be content with the Nexus 5? You know, I can be content with the Nexus 5, especially if I had the Vermillion one, but I don't. Is that the official name of it? No, it's officially Red. Great Red, I think is the official name. It's officially, hey guys, I'm Red. It's officially F you Red, is what I think it's called. No, I can't be excited about the Nexus 5 because the camera is terrible. Right. But you know, that's a, that's a really, the one thing we know nothing about with the new Samsung GS5, which is the camera. Right. And that's a big mystery. I think that might be in fact the deciding, at least hardware component for this new device. The big speculation for this year in general with smartphones and Android smartphones typically the spec race is that they'll switch to quad HD or QHD or whatever the spec is for resolution, which is like 2560 by 1440. So a 5.2 inch Galaxy S5 with that sort of resolution seems reasonable and likely, particularly for the time span that we're looking at being announced let's say a week from now and then maybe launching a month from then. But I don't think that display resolution is going to be anything like you say that floats people's boat or really differentiates it from the older devices. The other thing that has me potentially excited is Samsung reinvesting in the camera because I know with the Galaxy S2 and the Galaxy S3, it was a real differentiating feature for me. You know, that's the thing that made it stand out because if we all remember, the Galaxy S2 is the spot where Samsung really took off and split apart from HTC. Up to that point it was really either Samsung is in the ascendancy or HTC. In fact, HTC and those are the strengths on which Samsung built its great popularity. It's having an awesome camera, having its own excellent processors, etc. So we can see a processor upgrade, we can see a screen upgrade. I don't think any of us are particularly optimistic about Samsung doing an industrial design upgrade that is really special or unique. So really the thing that leaves us hopeful is the camera, which is the thing we're not laughing about. Yeah, I mean the last couple of iterations of the Galaxy, the camera has been like not bad. It's been fine, it's been pretty good, but it hasn't been ambitious or risky and I would love to see Samsung try and do something ambitious and risky. I mean they've added a million features with the core camera technology and the core image processing. Yeah, I mean everything that Samsung did with the Galaxy S4 camera was in the software and it was all these weird software features that I don't know how many people use them. I certainly never use them really. I tested them, but beyond the review I never really found a place for them in my personal life. But the Galaxy Note 3 has an excellent camera, so I think Samsung actually can do cameras pretty well. It would be great. I don't think Samsung has released a camera with like an optical stabilizer or some of these other technologies that we're seeing the other companies do, so it would be cool if they integrated that. So the other thing that we are expecting out of mobile Congress from Samsung, thanks to interpret reporting by our very own Chris Ziegler, is not just one but multiple Galaxy gears. This is the rumor. I'm looking at my post right now to familiarize myself with it. The post that you wrote 15 minutes ago. Chris, am I going to be able to buy a Galaxy Gear for each one of my limbs? Well, I mean maybe. It is Samsung. The rumor is multiple new Galaxy Gears. My gut is that they are going to release – they're going to turn Galaxy Gear into a portfolio of products and this isn't just going to be about smartphones. My guess is that they might do a fuel band type thing. They might do a clip. Who knows? But I don't think they're going to just release a bunch of smart phones. I mean smart watches. What about a ring? Why not? Again, it's Samsung. So the other rumor with the Gear is that instead of running Android, it could run Tizen. Initially I went, yeah come on, no way. But then I kind of think maybe they could do that because why not. Well, if they can optimize it better than Android for low battery and let themselves have a smaller battery on it, then not only am I like, do I not care? I'm kind of pro-Tizen. I'm pro-Tizen. I'm saying it right, I'm pro-Tizen. I think that would solidify it as only compatible with Samsung devices. I mean it's already there like the Galaxy Gear only works with Samsung phones but if they actually do move it over to a Tizen platform, that pretty much guarantees it will never work with other Android phones. Yeah. Does it? No. I mean, unless Samsung would have to release an app that would make it talk to everything. I don't know, I mean if it juices sales, maybe they would. Right. I mean the problem with anything Samsung does in wearables is that they obviously have a large enough product and app ecosystem so that they have no interest or need to make their products compatible largely with operating systems. They can just make them compatible with specific Samsung products which is what they've done with the Galaxy Gear and I have no reason to think that these will be any different. But regarding the Tizen switch, I mean we've been reporting for a long, long time that Samsung is at risk of wresting control of Android from Google, right? And I think that that danger is as real as ever and Samsung continues to try to make Tizen happen and I'd like to flash the meme picture, stop trying to make Tizen happen, it's never going to happen. So here's the thing, on a smartwatch, it's sort of contained. You want a smartwatch to be simple and to do what it does, you want it to be like the pebble, right? So if Tizen gives them the ability to have a smaller battery and just do things and not crash because they control the whole stack and they understand how the whole stack works and they can cut out extra craft more easily than they can on Android, maybe I'm not crazy to say I don't hate Tizen. But is there, first of all, is there any indication that Tizen is easier on battery than Android? Yeah, I don't know. So we'll see. I mean, frankly, it doesn't need to be either. Oh yeah, it does. Why? I mean, it was the sort of wearables we were talking about, they could have some really basic tailor-made software. Yeah, they could do basic tailor-made software, but I'm saying it's got to be easier on the battery than Android. Sure. Then the Galaxy Gear is right now. It needs to be better than the Galaxy Gear is now for battery life. Right. And the whole slew of other things. Yeah. Frankly, I just think if this is correct, and again, there's no reason to doubt it since I'm reading on The Verge and there's this Chris Zeekler guy who wrote it, I mean, spreading the Galaxy Gear name around to me is like a terrible idea for Samsung. You've picked up a reputation which is pretty poor, I mean, I don't know how it is with the normal humans, but at least among the people interested in technology, Samsung has kind of been laughed at for the Galaxy Gear because of all its failings and because of its gimmicks and its half-day battery life and all of these shortcomings. And its price. So trying to stretch that out across your wearables portfolio, I just don't think that's a particularly sage idea. Like, you're kind of prejudicing people against whatever else you're doing, which might actually be good, you know? I mean, I don't know. The Galaxy Gear is a very young device at this point. It's only been six months since it launched. Yeah, it came out and there's a lot of things wrong with it and we panned it pretty hard in our view as did many other people and many other viewers. But it's not like it's been established for multiple years as a brand. I think that… Well, so it's more established as a brand than it is as a product. So the fact that they've had it in AT&T stores and in Best Buy stores like being advertised is almost as important as people buying it in terms of the ability of them to sell it in the future. And so when these new gears come out, assuming they're better, people are like, oh yeah, I've heard of that. Oh, it's the new version. Oh, okay, maybe I'll try this one because the first one was too nerdy for me. It could actually help to have it out there even though it was not very well reviewed and didn't have sales that lived quite up to Samsung's original expectations. And I'd wager that most average consumers don't really know the gear name all that well. They know Galaxy very well and so they might say, I want that Galaxy watch, just like they say they have a Galaxy phone instead of an Android phone. But I mean, unless you are really in the thick of things, you're probably not calling whatever smartwatch that Samsung releases a Galaxy gear. It's a Galaxy watch or whatever. Or a Galaxy fitness tracker, Galaxy smart ring. I don't know. And so Nokia will be there. They've got the announcement where they bird whistled the X pretty loudly. Do they know that Motorola used that name already? Everybody has used that name. There's the HTC One X, Moto X, and now the Nokia X apparently. There's already the Nokia X7. That's true, but that is a completely irrelevant phone. What we need is a new alphabet with more cool looking letters. Agree, agree. Greek. Greek is, yeah. Nokia Lambda. I'd buy that. I would buy that. Hell yeah. So what do you guys think, I mean. Rho. Rubber meets the road. What do you guys think about this product? Your Rho, R-H-O. I think I might have mentioned this last week, but Tom Warren tweeted that if you don't care about Nokia's Asha lineup right now, you're not going to care about the Nokia X phone. And I think that's exactly what it's going to be like. Everything that has leaked and all the stuff that we've seen point to this being a very low end device with 512 megabytes of RAM, WVGA display, single or low power dual core processor or something. It's not going to be interesting. WVGA? Yeah. What is this, 2000, just 2000? To be honest, that's a step up from Asha phones. So if they're going for that market, which it seems to be, that's very much what they're going for, this would be a step up. But for us who might be thinking of this being a Lumia running Android, it's not. And it's not going to be. It's not going to be that particularly interesting as a device. As a concept of Nokia producing an Android phone, very interesting. As a device itself, not very interesting. This is how the announcement's going to go. Stephen Elop, current CEO of Nokia, future whatever the hell his title is going to be at Microsoft now that he's out of the CEO race there because Microsoft has a new CEO. He's going to get up on stage. He's going to kind of walk out. Well guys, a bunch of engineers made a thing, whatever. Here it is. See ya. And he'll just amble off the stage. That's how I want this announcement. He just walks out there and is like, yeah, whatever, here you go. And then he leaves. That's what I want. Do you guys remember the Lumia 1020 event when we couldn't tell for like 10 minutes whether he was really there or not? Yeah, that was on me. I was live blogging it. And I'm like, look at this projection of him. Neelai is sitting right next to me. He's like, that's actually him. I hope he does that again. There's like this period of time where it's like, is it a phantasm of Stephen Elop or is it the actual Stephen Elop? The thing is, that is the least likely thing that Stephen Elop will ever do, the scenario that Dieter painted. Because this dude has spent the past however long he's been in. He's been for years actually since February 2011. You know, trying to paint a pretty picture or an upbeat picture about a company that has been struggling so mightily. But to bring us to the device, if it really is that low spec and low end as Dan describes it, I am going to be just angry. Because to me, it feels kind of like sabotage or like intentionally ruining the dream. To me, it feels like when you had a century ago, when you had the race between electric cars and oil powered cars, you know, longer than a century ago, somebody would produce an electric car and just do a really terrible job of it and say, this is why we shouldn't have electric cars. So to me, this is what the Nokia X would be if it's really shit. If it's got really terrible specs and it runs like garbage, it's going to be like, look, if Nokia went Android, it would have looked like this and you would have hated it. Whereas I don't think that would have been a good idea. I think the dream you're referring to is the Lumia Android phone and that dream just doesn't exist. Like that's not a real thing. Exactly. Like Nokia would never produce that. Microsoft would never let Nokia produce that and never let it sell a Lumia Android phone alongside a Lumia Windows phone and have them compete head to head. I mean, that's just kind of like never going to happen. Might as well get that out of your ideas now. It's not today's dream. I'm talking about something that we wanted to see previously, you know, quite a long while ago. The problem that I have, or the thing that this Nokia Android phone reveals is an interesting failure of Microsoft to build software. Because the whole point of this phone is to target the low end and to make the phones cheap and have them run on low spec hardware and you know, sell gazillions of them across the globe for next to nothing. Microsoft should have tried to do that, they did try to do that with Windows phone. And that was one of the points, was it the 7.8 update where they tried to trim the fat and push it down and work in the low end. I mean if Nokia, Microsoft's core hardware partner on a track to getting acquired by them, doesn't believe that Microsoft can push Windows phone down quickly enough in order to work on those lower end phones, you know, it's either Microsoft made a strategic decision that they would try and make Windows phone more high end and they wouldn't bother trying to reduce the software down to there again, or they tried and failed and Nokia said, you know what, we're doing it. So considering that some of Microsoft's biggest wins with Windows phone have been in emerging markets, my belief is that this project started as an exploration by Nokia as a plan B if the Windows phone deal failed. And it, you know, parts of that project continued on to this very day and we're ending up with an OSH replacement. So you know, I think that this has been a constantly shifting exploration for a very long time inside the company, but I don't think it started as Nokia saying, well we need something that can push lower than Windows phone can that needs to succeed OSH. I don't think that's how that, my gut is that that's not how that conversation started. We all know Nokia's not very good at canning projects once it's started. Yeah. The engineers that work on a project will work on that until there's a product on the market and then they'll give up. Or until they suddenly find themselves working at a company called Yalla. So let's talk about the Nokia Lumia icon, the new phone that's out on Verizon, which is the successor to the, this is the 925 I believe. Is that right? Sounds right. 928. 928. And then it is the horrible ugly version of the 925 which is a beautiful, amazing, well designed, feels great in the hand, feels solid, feels like it's of this age or slightly ahead of its age phone. And Nokia can make great phones, but as David said in his review, instead of making a great phone, they made this. Yeah, I couldn't. Can someone explain to me why it's like an inch thick? First of all. Why it looks like the battery has bulged, like exploded. Yeah. And why the camera button actually shakes and why the plastic back came off of its clips a little bit ago. Yeah, this is the worst. No, the worst about it is we know that Nokia can do better. Right. And they're not. Chris, can you pull your laptop screen down? It's like you're just hiding it right behind your laptop. Yeah, the camera's far away, but like… I'm the worst hand model ever. It's pretty bad. I know what I'm doing. You can see like they tried, I guess you could say they tried to keep the industrial design of their last phone, but it's not good. To me, what this reeks of is Verizon meddling. Exactly. No, this has Verizon written all over it, literally, multiple times. And you know, it's a shame, but they essentially… Oh my god, the phone is hovering mysteriously in front of the camera. So you can see those beautiful Verizon… What is going on? There's this floating hand. That's actually my hand. Like my right hand. I think Verizon saw Nokia release the I25. Thank you. Everybody, Evan Rogers, our esteemed producer. I think Nokia saw, or Verizon saw Nokia release the I25 with this beautiful metal band and this great design and stuff like that. And they're like, we've got the I28, can you put a metal band on that and make it a new phone and throw some more logos on it and take away some features? Like everything, if the phone looked good and wasn't so heavy and bricky… No, you stop right there. Don't continue that sentence any further. No, you would not buy it. No one would buy it. It doesn't matter if it looks good. That's Windows phone's problem right now. That could be the best looking phone in the universe. And you know how many people would buy it? Three. I wasn't going to end with buy, I was going to end with good phone, but okay. Yeah, but there you go. You're like, if it wasn't this phone, it would be a good phone. I just wanted to say earlier on, with respect to Nokia and Microsoft dragging Windows phone down, I just wanted to agree with Chris because it was maybe not this summer, maybe the previous summer where one of Nokia's developer chiefs was saying Microsoft isn't being quick enough dragging Windows phone down into lower price points. We're disappointed. That was a quote from him. By the pace at which Microsoft is doing this, I absolutely think the Android experiment, let's call it, has been an ongoing investigation, exploration like Chris was saying. It isn't something that just got sprung up in the past few months. And as Dan was saying, they invested that much time, the company and its phone division is going away, they might as well put something out there in the market. I think what solidifies that is the fact that you can buy a Nokia Lumia 520 unlocked in the US for like $69. That is a low end Windows phone and it runs like every other Windows phone pretty much. The camera might not be as good and it might not be quite as fast and the screen is probably WVGA, but that's a $69 unlocked smartphone. That's about as low end as smartphones are today. And you know, another point I just wanted to make. In terms of Vermillion Red phones, I have a Red 720, Lumia 720, which I don't use because Windows phone, but that is one of the most beautiful phones ever. I was thinking about the Red Nexus and I remember the Red Lumia 720 and to me that is so much nicer. And it just shows Nokia, like DT was saying, Nokia has no problems with design, it only screws it up when Verizon tells it to. And that's the disappointing thing. Because that 720 with a nice camera, battery life and Android, forget about it. I'm not going to be interested in phones for a couple of years if I had one of those. Well Nokia is hurtling Pelmel to its purchase by Microsoft which is moving along just fine and you know, Satya Nadella is going to fix everything. Of course, of course. I can't believe how thick this phone is. It's outrageous. Like this was acceptable in like 2008. So before the show started I had pulled this out of a drawer. It's a Nokia trio, I mean a Palm trio 650 from 2006 I believe. Dieter can correct me if I'm wrong. I don't know. Is that thicker than your headphones then? It's probably thicker than my headphones, yes. But you know, it's not that much thicker than the Icon. Oh, come on. I mean if you're on Verizon and you want Windows Phone then go to town. And you'll suffer through the brickiness of it but you know, apps are way better on Windows Phone and the screen I think is fine and the camera is totally passable. You know, it's a solid Nokia camera that does all the most, yeah we'll say all the Nokia tricks, all the ones that's not like a 1020 madness. It's the same camera as the 1520 as far as I understand. Yeah, and of course it feels fast because Windows Phone always does. So you know, just have fun carrying this around. Sorry. Just don't sit down when it's in your pocket. If you're going to go for like a massive, you know, crazy Nokia phone, just go for the Lumia 1520. At least that thing has an amazing… But you can't get that on Verizon. Verizon, bro. Yeah, if you're on Verizon, this is your only choice. Yeah. I forgot about your capitalist ways. Okay, can't help you. Sorry. Deal with it. Yeah. Okay, so HTC is not expected to launch their next phone at Mobile World Congress but they have announced, when they will announce, their next phone which is with the save the date thing for March 25th. Yay. That is almost exactly one month after Samsung's Galaxy S5. Right, it's a while after. This is always a chess match between those two. Like, well, I don't know that it is but like I can only assume that it is. I think it's more of a chess match for HTC. I think Samsung does its thing and HTC… Right. …moves. Right. The most disappointing thing is that the save the date invitation doesn't have anything, any hints that we can like try and parse out. It's just the date. No, it's on the 25th which is a 2 and a 5. So there should be two cameras. Oh my god. And a 5 inch screen and maybe, you know, it's going to be called the HTC One 2. And because it's in March, Marching is like walking which means it will have like some fitness features in it. Dude! Half-Life 3 confirmed, right Dan? Yes, Half-Life 3 confirmed. Dan, what was that thing you tweeted this morning about it? I pretty much just said it. March 25th, 2.5, two cameras, 5 inches. No, no, no, you had something about like a new movie or something. Oh, it was Half-Life 3. Yes. Yes, that's why I was reciting it and quoting Dan. Do you think this thing is going to support PlayStation Mobile? I mean Sony's supposed to support PlayStation Mobile. It's very possible because HTC already do. That's what I'm saying. Look, you guys trolled me with this. I had to have something. That's fair, that's fair. But guys, you know what's cool here? They can call it, I mean the rumor, the Bloomberg report from January which actually pinpointed the launch from March and I think that Bloomberg report is basically as factual as we've had and it mentions the dual sensor camera. That said, that is basically going to be called the HTC One again. What I'm thinking is… Wait, is it literally going to be called the One again? Because that would be amazing. The HTC One again. That would be a fun one. The One, again. See, I would actually like, if Peter Chow ever has a YOLO moment, I would love to see that happen, you know, just again. But what they can do is they can call it the HTC One squared, right? They can put the Two in superscript after the One because One squared is One. Justin, like, I always get published in journalism, journalists all the time. I like it. Vlad, you've convinced me that's a really good idea. Yeah. You see? What about a subscript Two? What does that do mathematically? Guys, can we not give them these ideas because I'm going to have to write about this phone for the next year? One prime. I don't want to have to put superscripts and subscripts into every article that I write about it. Ah, but wait, Dan, you will have to. You have to because all of a sudden now there's a trend happening. Because Samsung's Galaxy S5 teaser had everything to the power of five. And it's very possible that Samsung's branding is going to be Galaxy S5 as a superscript on top of the S, which is like, how the hell do you write that in an article? You ignore it and just write S5. But at the same time, LG pre-announced one of its MWC launches, which is going to do the L series, that mid-range Android nondescript series of handsets. And it's called the L series Three, where the Three is in Roman numerals as a superscript of the series. A superscript Roman numeral. That's amazing. Yeah. Just kill me. Just kill me now. Look, guys, at least there's fewer than ten words in these phone names. Like, we've moved ahead. We're approaching the point where they're going to start pulling an artist formerly known as Prince. Where it's a completely unpronounceable… It's just a glyph. Yeah. That's where we're going. No, we already had that. We had the smile. That's right. The smiley phone. It was the smiley first one. So, yay. Where? It was in the US only, I think. Yeah. They made a Samsung smiley. It was literally the smiley emoticon was the name of the phone. So the other thing… Just to point out here. I'm sorry, guys. Just to point out, I do feel like we need to give LG and Samsung a bit of a break because they don't use the Latin alphabet the way that we do. So when they decided to get, let's call it creative with that placement of Roman numerals and whatever, to them, I guess it's just more artistry with the language, which we're uncomfortable with, but then they're more flexible with because it's foreign to them. I go back to my earlier point that we should start using Greek letters. Yeah. Absolutely. You can't use alpha and beta because that denotes things about the quality of the product. But from there on, man, I would buy the hell out of a Samsung gamma. Yeah. Think about it. Absolutely. Epsilon, everything. And dude… Samsung Epsilon, dude. The LG Delta, come on. I like it. I like it. The other thing that HTT… I would buy three lambdas. Oh my god. Whoever makes the money, I would buy three of them. That is a great joke. If you guys get that joke, kudos to you, nerds. The only trouble with the Greek alphabet is that there's going to be a bunch of math nerds who will be like, no, no, that's been used for something else. We're already using that for… Yeah, but trademark law doesn't apply to mathematics as far as I know. Maybe it does. Maybe you can trademark a digit. Trademark law is all like, screw you math nerds. Yeah. The other thing that HTC… They just announced this thing called Advantage, which is US only. For six months after you buy an HTC One, if you crack your screen, they'll replace it. They'll even do like send a one to you ahead of time and you send your broken one back for I forget what the fee is. They're committing to using Google Drive to get free storage. I think it's Macs get 50 gigs, the other guys get 25 gig. And the third part of this is they're promising, I think you swear, I think you swear that they're going to update Android for at least two years on these models. Oh, please. How many times have we heard that? Excuse me. Just regarding the capacity promotion, the cloud storage, this is interesting timing because HTC's… Promotion with Dropbox with the, I believe it was the One X or was it the One? It's the One X. It's just now expiring for people. There's a two year deal where you got 25 gig if you bought a One X. So those people are going to start losing that storage now they're moving to Google Drive. Yeah, the screen replacement thing is clever. Yeah, it is. I mean it's a nice like free like add-on. The six months number is a little like… Kind of random. Yeah. But still it's a really good, because you know every single day of my life I'm walking down the street I see somebody holding a broken, a phone with a broken screen. Yeah. So people are breaking their phones left and right. This is a good way to like kind of encourage people to move over to HTC. HTC needs to get creative, right? Like they're not getting the market share that they need. So I think we're going to start to see more and more of these kind of creative solutions to the problem. Yeah, but I mean honestly do you think that this is going to sell a single more extra phone? It might only because broken displays are such a huge problem. I don't know if this is a global problem or if it's just Americans who can't hold their phones. But literally every day I see smart phones on the street with broken displays and it's a major problem. You can cut your hand on these things. So there might be people who say you know what, I drop my phone all the time. I'm now going to get an HTC because of this promotion. I mean… I think people should buy a Jiz One or whatever. Casio Commando, man. Casio Commando, I'm sorry where you're going with that. No, those are G-Zones, man. Yeah, the G-Zone, the Jiz One. Okay, no I wanted to take the opposite position where the guy said that this offer is clever and said it's completely and utterly dumb. Because it creates a moral hazard. Like I'm going to buy your brand new phone. I'm going to use it for five months and 29 days and then I'm just going to whoops, drop it. No, it doesn't work that way in practice because all you get in return is a refurbished one that is no better or worse than the one that you had before. And you're out of phone for a couple of days so you're just inconveniencing yourself. Okay, fair enough. But still it kind of makes you reckless. You essentially have a six month insurance for any weird damage that you do to it. Okay, unless you drown it. I don't know, it's no different than the insurances that carriers have sold for years except that you get it free for six months. I mean that's like you can pay Verizon or whoever $8 a month for the same type of insurance and they'll replace your phone if you drop it and break it. You probably have to pay a $50 or $100 deductible. But they're just offering this for free for six months. Exactly. Because it's free people are more reckless with it. There's more of a moral hazard. If you only spend like $8 on your Verizon insurance, you still kind of feel like you spent money. So I don't know. I mean look, to me I think that's a good gesture, a positive gesture. If you're going to try and get people to use your devices, this is really a useful bit of security, hardware security. And people invest money. People who don't review phones every day actually spend money on them. So I appreciate that. I'm just saying that every time we've seen companies do this kind of forgiven thing, the end result has tended to be that the company really just hemorrhages a ton of money because people exploit it. I don't think that many people would exploit it to be honest. I think that's a fringe case and there will be those people that do that, sure, but the vast majority of people aren't going to bother with that. I mean I'm hopeful that's the case. I would be happy if everybody does this. I think that's a good thing, giving you six months of security that you won't just lose all your money down the drain when you crack your screen. Should I care about the LG G Pro 2 at all? It's up to 5.9 inch display now. It's a little bit thinner. It has a cool like metal mesh back, but I just have a really hard time going, oh yeah, I can't wait for this to come to the US. 5.9 inches is like, I've actually unfortunately handled or reviewed a number of 5.9 inch phones already. And it's just like, it's at this size where it is, nobody can manage this size and not call it unwieldy. Well I mean so if you're going to have a phone that big, like Samsung handles it really well with the Note. It's just unapologetically like a little kind of mini tablet and they put a stylus in it and they like customize software. The software customization that LG seems to be offering is an option to literally shrink the display size down so that half the screen is unused so you can reach stuff with one finger. Seriously? Yeah. Yeah. Does it have? And nobody sees that and thinks maybe we should try making smaller devices sometime? Nope. I think these devices are made for a very specific market and that market demands bigger screens. I don't think they're made for the western markets at all. LG for a little bit, I have heard a rumor and I can't for the life of me remember where of a G2 mini. That excites me. I think LG itself said that, that they will be announcing a G2 mini at Mobile World Congress. Well that excites me because if it's like the Xperia Z1 Compact rather than the Samsung Galaxy S crap minis, that is something that I'm not sure. Except it will be running LG software which is like abysmal. Which we can fix then. Routing is not the answer to bad software, come on. Oh it always is. Because there's good people out there who can do this stuff for free. I call them angels. You know what I would like? I would like for Android to not require you to have to root your phone in order to do this kind of customization. Or just you know, I would really like for manufacturers not to release crap software that needs to be accessed. You know what, I can deal with it. Guys I'm feeling much more upbeat and positive about this than you are because Android is still pretty kick ass. Like the things that we can do with a phone nowadays are crazy. Just compared to a few years ago. And we are actually moving fast. We're looking at the nitty gritty detail and as usual we kind of lose track of how much things have advanced. But you can do a ton of things with Android. But having to flash the entire ROM, I mean isn't that kind of nuts? I'm trying to cram in a webOS reference here guys. Because you don't have to do this shit on webOS. You could just patch stuff directly. Well you still needed to break out a command line though. No you didn't. Really? You did not. Oh right you had to do up down left right left right. Yeah you type in the Konami code or the launch date. And then there was an app for Mac and PC that you would just load on the onboard software pre-ware. And then you would just browse the galleries. The repositories. The repositories. One of which I built. That's the thing with technology. And this is a great example. I've got here the Nikon DF. Oh let's see it. Instead of my face. Yeah. Every time I pick up a Nikon DSLR, particularly the professional ones, I have to go remind myself how to get it to use all of its focus points. So this thing is 39 focus points. It only uses the central one by default. So I need to find a setting where I can tweak them. I'm running around the menu. I can't find it anywhere. I'm looking around on Google. And finally I find it. And here's how you do it. You have to get. You have this little switch here between auto and manual focus. You have to press the button there and then use the toggle here to switch between focus emotes, which is like there is no way to intuit that. There is no way to guess that. To me it's exactly like economic code. Either you know it or you don't. Or you read the interstick manual. So a lot of technology has these. Yeah, because rooting an Android phone and installing a custom ROM is way easier. No, I'm not saying it's easier. What I'm saying is a lot of technology has these really weird hurdles that we have to overcome. But at the same time, would I use a Nikon Pro DSLR? Something like the D4 or the DF, of course. I'm just saying these are things. That's why I don't like using Nikons because they're such a pain to use. I feel like that whole sidebar, Vlad, was really just an excuse to brag that you have a DF. You know what? And I respect that. All I'm saying is that this is friction in our interaction and relationship with technology. And absolutely we need to get over it. We need to move beyond it. But the important thing is that these things are adding good things to our lives. As far as I'm concerned, Android is far and away the best operating system that I can have on a phone. Forget iOS. I'm just broken up with iOS until somebody fixes a ton of things with it. And Windows Phone hasn't grown up. So Android is so much stronger than everything else. And LG just does really good hardware. And that double tap to wake thing, screw you guys, I love it. So if LG does another really nice phone, makes it smaller, and keeps those things, I will deal with the... You know what's better than double tap to wake, Vlad? Is when you pull your phone out of your pocket and it's already awake, like with the Motorola. Okay, yeah, the Moto X is good things. I'm not going to argue. So the last thing I want to talk about today is this cat fight between the CEO of T-Mobile, John Legere. And, well, I don't know, is it really John Legere? No, not really. It's just T-Mobile. And they ran a promotion, get a new phone. If you have a Blackberry, they sent out the Blackberry users because they're obvious targets to upgrade their phone. And the Blackberry community got very unhappy about this. And it escalated to the point where the new CEO of Blackberry, John Chen, has written an open letter to T-Mobile wherein he, like, thanks his customers for tweeting angry things at their CEO. And I can assure you that we are outraged too. What puzzles me more is that T-Mobile did not speak with us before or after they launched this clearly inappropriate and ill-conceived marketing promotion. Because he has nothing better to do? Like, I don't understand this. Like, he's the CEO of a company that's like in a tailspin. Don't you have like more important things to do than like worry about this promotion, this like limited time promotion that T-Mobile tried to sell its own customers a phone and it doesn't sell any Blackberry phones, so it can't offer them new Blackberry phones. Like, I mean... Wait, T-Mobile doesn't sell any Blackberry phones? The only Blackberry phones that you can buy on T-Mobile's website right now are Furbish models. Interesting. It's just such a weird move. Like, finally to T-Mobile, I would like to remind you that our longstanding partnership was once productive and profitable for both Blackberry and T-Mobile. I hope that we can find a way forward that allows us to serve our shared customers once again. Not withstanding the current challenge, we remain very excited about Blackberry's future. Like... You know what would help is... Okay. T-Mobile needs to sell the Panana 982. Yeah. And then everything will be good to go. Hey, you Blackberry Curve 83 or... Blackberry, what is their low end curve? Was it like a 9320 or something like that? We think this would be a really great phone for you. It's $2500, the new Panana. With our T-Mobile Flex Pay program, it's only $79 a month. Blackberry is still... If I ever win the lottery, if I ever get some random person to invest in my mobile startup, if I ever get to make a phone, it will be called the Panana-nanana. Something. One to the power of two. Did you guys realize that Blackberry still sells seven Blackberry 7 models? Yes, it sells more Blackberry 7 models than it sells Blackberry 10 every quarter. Oh, God, it's so sad. Every quarter that it releases smartphone sales figures, it sells three times as many Blackberry 7 models as it does for Blackberry 10. Can you still get the Z30 from, what is it, Verizon? So, yeah, why isn't Blackberry mad at Verizon? Verizon won't even stock the Z30 in its storage. Yeah, the thing that John Chen, CEO of Blackberry, needs to do is grit his teeth, take his lumps, and move on, and not let the insane people that are mad at T-Mobile about a little promotion have him writing an open letter to another company like this. You get on the phone, you call T-Mobile and go, dude, seriously, dude? And T-Mobile goes, yeah, sorry, my bad. And then it's over. But instead, it escalated. They're openly beefing with the major US carrier. It just reeks of Blackberry hubris. Like, Blackberry hubris forever, and it still has it, even under a new CEO. It's the same company. I'm just saying, the last CEO on the planet that you want to start a public fight with is John Legend. That's true. He is not going to take this quietly, and it's going to be kind of amazing. I do love the fact that John Chen is stretching the definition of current challenge to its absolute limits. The challenge we've been facing since 2008. Yeah. I mean, look, just to kind of try and play devil's advocate and present his perspective, maybe from Blackberry's point of view, it feels like it has a very low community of followers and users. And by putting out this open letter, it's giving them a collective voice. It shows that it's on their side, et cetera, et cetera. And maybe he considers that part of user engagement. Yeah, that's fair. And that works for those people. But it's not a good look, man. I mean, we'll never know the answer to this, but I would wager that more people bought new iPhones based on this promotion than there were a number of people that complained about it publicly. Ouch. Ouch. Yeah, but right, but that's not a good look for Blackberry. No, it's not. That's kind of my point. Why draw attention to this? Why even acknowledge it as Blackberry? Well, because advertising costs money, Dan, and this is cheaper. Why does Evernote have a Blackberry version? Why not? Evernote is integrated in the Blackberry hub. The other thing I was reminded of here is HTC's two-year promise for Android updates. If HTC is at the sort of desperation point where we all kind of think that it is and we're struggling so mightily, I think it might as well make these bold promises because within two years, either the company was trading its shit out and it will be able to support devices or it won't and it would have failed anyway. So I kind of feel like Blackberry is in the same position. It's like you can just talk trash, you can do whatever you want because ultimately the fate of both of these companies, HTC and Blackberry, seems like it's going to be resolved over the next year or so. Yeah. They do not sustain the way that they've been going for much longer than that. No, Blackberry is going to be in a very similar position but with less cash in a year from now than it is today. I don't think that Blackberry is going to fold that quickly. I think their sales are going to continue to decline but they're going to be chasing after their new strategy and they're just going to keep chugging along. And they still have a ton of cash. They're like $2 billion or something. Yeah, they're bleeding through it very quickly though. Every quarter they're bleeding through a lot of that cash. I think it's going to be very dire in a year for them but I don't think that the cliff is around the corner. I don't think it's like next month. It does feel like they need to, I didn't mean to turn this into a Blackberry podcast, but it does feel like they need to do something a little more drastic than what they're doing right now, which is just redoubling down on QWERTY phones. No, it's the right thing to do. I mean, I'd like to see them do something more drastic but I mean, we need to lower our expectations of Blackberry. That's the thing that by going back to QWERTY phones and talking about enterprise so much, they're basically saying, hey guys, don't expect us to be so awesome anymore. We're going to be this size company. That's the saddest message for a company to ever deliver. I think that's a message they had to deliver and I also think it's a true message. You shouldn't be disappointed by Blackberry anymore because you shouldn't be expecting so much from them. Right. I guess maybe they're going to retrench to the enterprise the way that Dell did. Like, Dell kind of quietly pulled out of the consumer market after it failed, which was really a disappointment to me because, and this is an opinion that Neil shares with me, Dell's hardware designs on their Windows phone and Android phones, the Venue and Venue Pro, were really nice actually. They showed some progress. The story of Blackberry is the story of the coach who stops yelling. Like, when the coach yells at you, you feel really bad and then he pulls you aside and says, no, he yells because he cares. But it's when he stops yelling that means he's written you off. Like, it's time to stop yelling at Blackberry. And just let them do their thing. Well, that's all well and good, but that doesn't translate into profit, right? Like, I mean, just because we can all agree that Blackberry shouldn't be awesome, doesn't mean they can survive. That's the next trick. There were a lot of very drastic ideas that came up over the past 18 months from spinning off various divisions like BBM and their secure back end and all this, and none of that panned out, of course. And now they are still one company. Kynix, I think, or Kynix, however it's pronounced, if you were to take that as a separate unit, I think it's still profitable. On its own. Yes, but that ends up weighing down the rest of the company weighs down Kynix. So, yeah, who knows? They need another playbook is what they need. Man, just ultra burn. Listen, they need to realize amateur hour is over. Ah, yes, yes they do. They need to bring back, here's what they need to do. Okay, men's warehouse needs to bring back George Zimmer and Blackberry needs to bring back Lazaridis to bundle around on stage and talk about amateur hour being over and then you can pull out a new playbook. That's the key to Blackberry's success. I've solved all of Chen's problems on this podcast. That, ladies and gentlemen, is The Verge mobile show. If you want other sterling genius pieces of advice like that, you can follow Chris on Twitter. He's Zpower. If you want less sterling pieces of advice, you can follow the rest of us too. I am Bacalan. Dan is DC Seifert with an EI. Vlad is Vlad Savov. We are all at Verge. You can leave a comment on the post in which this podcast appears. You can also hop into our forum so you can shoot us an email, all kinds of stuff. Next week, Mobile World Congress, who knows if you'll see us. It's a mystery, but it will be fun. So keep an eye for live coverage, live blogs, live video, all kinds of stuff. Until then, thanks for watching. Cheerio.