 Hey, welcome to the Verge Mobile Show. We're back. It's exciting. And I am Dieter Bohm. I'm Dan Seifert. And I'm Chris Ziegler. And this is episode 34, if you're wondering, and I know you were. It's the week of January 28, 2013. I know you cared a lot about that information as well. And we are in the post-CES, pre-Mobile World Congress, I would say doldrums, but we've got a ton of stuff that has popped this week. And I'm actually kind of surprised. We've got BlackBerry hitting tomorrow. We've got Nokia rumors. We've got HTC rumors. We've got an HTC event. We've got just a ton of stuff to talk about. Actually, Dieter, I'm going to challenge your statement that this is episode 34. I believe that I misread that. I believe that I misread. I just read whoever handled the show notes. I believe this is episode 35. I believe. Don't quote me on that, but I think, yeah. You weren't here last week. To you it is episode 34. Well, why did somebody not update the show notes? Our notes are- This is really important for all our listeners. Our notes are counting CES as not a number. The show we did on CES. That's garbage. That's ridiculous. We need to fix that. We would have all of our live listeners complaining to us, but we're not running the chat this week. It also isn't running, I believe, on the Verge cast. There's problems with that chat. You can still email us, vergemobileshow at theverge.com. You can also tweet at us, or you can post comments. Don't go crazy, guys. Come on. You don't have that much to say, really. You know what they should do? You know what our listeners should do is they should start their own Google Hangout in parallel to ours. Whoa. And they all hang out and chat and video chat with one another while we're doing the show live. A shadow hangout? Yeah, a shadow hangout. That'd be pretty insane. Pretty awesome idea. Anyway, yeah. So it's a surprisingly busy week in news, and we've got a lot of stuff to talk about, which I've said like eight times. So I don't see why we don't just start doing that unless we want to hear Chris talk about how he sucks at getting his computer fixed. No, I don't suck at getting my computer fixed. It is fixed. I was just explaining before the show that I meant to pick it up. It's ready for pickup at the Apple Store. I meant to pick it up last night, and so I started wandering through Chicago on my way to the Apple Store, and I got sidetracked by one of my favorite coffee shops, Intelligentsia. Was it open? Yes, it was open. It was open. For those of you who live in LA or Chicago, you know that Intelligentsia is some of the finest coffee in the world. So I stopped in and then started working on a review that I can't talk about with you, unfortunately. And then, next thing you know, a couple hours pass, and the Apple Store closes. What is going on? Is that a pre-three? Nothing. Maybe. What's happening? I'm just trolling you. I showed up the mirror on a pre-three on my camera here. Oh my god. Raised it up a little bit. Get that pre-three out of my face. I have not put pieces in it. I was thinking about it, but I haven't done it yet. I don't even know if the services still work. I probably need to do a doctor on it to get it going properly. Every year you should review the pre-three. Just pretend like it's a new phone. Just be like, pre-three review. Well, WebOS Nation did a state of open WebOS after a year last week, and it's a pretty solid state of affairs. I would imagine. They're running on some Galaxy Nexus hardware, but they don't have 3D acceleration going. They can't get it buffers right yet. So they're working on it, but HP's not doing anything. Anyway, we should talk about new stuff, stuff that actually is going to be relevant and important ever. Burn. Yeah. So HTC just today invited us to go to an event on the 19th of February in both New York and London, I believe simultaneously. Is that right? Yeah. They should be concurrent. Yep. Yeah. And so, I mean, there's two really big interesting things about that. One is whatever the big, huge, interesting thing is that they're going to announce. For the first time I can remember in a while, HTC isn't trying to make a big announcement at World Congress. I mean, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe they've got plenty that they're saving up for World Congress that I'm just not expecting. But they're going the Samsung route. They're going the Apple route. They're trying to stand on their own two feet and announce a big old product without a trade show surrounding it. Yeah. No, it's good. Look, I think that HTC has reached the point where they are more than entitled to do that. I just fear, as an MWC goer and Dieter as a goer and Dan, you're a goer, I'm starting to fear for the quality of the announcements that we're going to get out of that show. And it's a little bit different from CES where you know that you're going to be able to still cobble together a really fascinating narrative about the goings on and consuming electronics. MWC is so phone focused that without these anchor announcements it makes you wonder what the show is going to become. And I think that what is going to happen in the short term is it's going to be seeded to the Chinese companies and the Taiwanese companies. You're going to see Huawei and ZTE do interesting things, right? So it's interesting that HTC is deciding to, what we're presuming is separating itself from the main MWC event because last year they had their big one series announcement and that was really everything that a lot of people took out of MWC last year. Even though the event happened early on in the show, there wasn't anything else that really detracted from that. The big news was HTC's big announcement and HTC made the show its own. So it's interesting to see that this year HTC feels compelled enough to separate itself a week ahead of the event and do its own thing even though it's apparently going to be quite big as it's in both New York and London. Yeah, I can't imagine that they'll circle back and do another big announcement at MWC but maybe they want to do some big one-two punch. I don't know, I don't see that happening. Well I mean neither do I. To be perfectly blunt, we've only seen leaks of one important device, right? That's HTC M7. We've seen, let's see, most recently it seems to share a lot of DNA with the Droid DNA, which is not a surprise at all. I think we can fully expect a 1080p screen on this thing and I think we can fully, I'm hoping that they're managing to reduce the size of the bezel even further so that they can make it a smaller phone overall. And a 4.7 inch screen at 1080p is pretty crazy. That's crazy. Crazy. So yeah, I'm excited. I hope that it is available as more than just a Droid or whatever. I also hope that it doesn't just get put on Sprint. And we've talked Sense to death and so I really don't want to get into my hopes for Sense 5, but we talked about it last week and I'm hoping it looks good. So I'm actually really interested to see what HTC has here. I feel like everything we have to say about them we've said, right? Hopefully they'll manage to get some traction with this, but the thing that's interesting to me about can HTC get traction is there's a lot less traction available to a company like HTC. We know that RIM is announcing Black Bray 10 tomorrow. We know that all four US carriers are going to support it. We also have something else from Nokia that we're expecting soon and we've got a post from Tom which we'll talk about in a minute about it maybe being a hero device for Verizon. You guys know my pet theory that the phone that wins that's not called the iPhone is whatever phone Verizon decides to throw its marketing weight behind. I mean we saw AT&T try to do it with 920 and it did fine, but it wasn't a barn burner. So even if HTC managed to score major coups and got a bunch of support from carriers, especially in the US, there's only so much support to go around. So HTC really has to completely knock us off our feet for this thing to have a huge impact, especially going up against the Galaxy S3 and the iPhone 5. So I think that with this device, let's assume that what they announced on the 19th is going to be this M7 that's been leaked and let's assume that they can get it onto carrier shelves in a reasonable period of time. They might actually be opening up a nice little window between that launch and the GS4 which gives them, of course I guess the same thing happened last year too. So realistically we don't know how much of a window they're going to have and how much of a financial impact that's going to have for them. But if they can get that lead, that might be what they need to make a splash with this thing because that is the elephant in the room, in the Android room, is the GS4 and that product is obviously going to have a big impact and I'm sure it's going to be available in all four US Nationals. So even if this M7 also is, the most they can hope for going up against the GS4 is a Samsung alternative which is going to be interesting to some people but not everyone. And the thing to point out is if Samsung does what it did with the GS3 and the GS2 is like HTC's phone is probably going to look and feel nicer, nicer, more better, happier timer designed. I'm totally sorry. A happier design, yes. Yeah, but Samsung just, I mean we've seen, there was a story a couple weeks ago or three weeks ago about how much, just how much marketing money Samsung throws behind the Galaxy S3. It's insane and against that juggernaut, I mean there's only so much that HTC can do and the best thing they can do is have an amazing device and that's what they need to show us on the 19th. So it needs to be an amazing device and amazing software because with all things considered last year with the One X we all pretty much agreed that it was an amazing device hardware wise but we were let down by the software. So if HTC is able to improve Sense enough with this Sense 5 that we've seen leaked numerous times now to bring the software up to the level that the hardware is likely going to be at based on history then that would be its best fighting chance for sure. Yeah I remain cautiously optimistic that Sense 5 is going to be a very compelling skin and I know that Vlad disagrees with me but he's not on the show this week so he can stop it. I think that Sense 5, the leaks we've seen, we've seen precious little of this UI but from what I've seen I'm cautiously optimistic that they're moving in the right direction. I know that I've said that before, I said it was Sense 4 but this is definitely a noted improvement and it looks the most different, it looks like the biggest evolutionary jump in Sense since the introduction of Sense on Android with 1.6 I think. Yeah okay. I don't know, obviously we'll have to see when it's launched but I think that might be a stretch to say Chris. Yeah well put your money where your mouth is. $5 says that Sense 5 is better than Sense 4. $5 American dollars. $5 American dollars. I should say that Sense 5 is better than Sense 4. I don't know if I'll take that bet. Oh snap, okay that's… I'll say, no no because you're saying that Sense 5 is going to be the biggest evolutionary leap since the original Sense and I think Sense 3.6 to Sense 4 was a huge difference, like a huge dramatic leap. Listen, you guys, we're not talking about the most important software and UI design story that we have right now with regard to HTC. We really need to because it's a huge, it's a titanic shift in my thinking about how phones work and that's this new HTC mini Bluetooth phone. Maybe as Chris mentioned earlier, there's this HTC is planning a one two punch, maybe this is the two punch coming to NWC. If you're not familiar with what we're talking about, they're listed in China, right? They're bundling it with the butterfly in China and it is a little tiny phone with a little keypad and a little tiny screen and send and end things. It's basically just a Bluetooth headset that has got some controls for like dialing and answering calls and what not. And a display. And a display. It pairs up over NFC and it probably gets your contacts and stuff from the phone. So the phone probably, you can send your contacts over Bluetooth, so it's basically like a Bluetooth car stereo basically. And I mean, this is just, okay, there must be, there is some cultural context on it. Look if the phone docked, you remember that old Verizon phone that had like an internal headset that you could pop out of it? Yeah. If this HTC Mini docked inside the butterfly, I would be cool with it. Which arguably enough, the butterfly is probably big enough to do this. Yeah. I would be able to get down with that. You have nothing, there's nothing else to say about the Mini other than that. Oh, and also if it played like the original Snake, that would be huge. But I don't know if they'd be able to secure the rights from Nokia for that. I mean it's, man, so many things that are wrong. Another thing to charge, does it have a camera on it too? No. It's got a hole that looks like a camera. Can you use it as a remote control to control the main camera? Yes. It doubles as a remote shutter trigger for the butterfly's camera. According to our coverage. I want this thing in my life. You know, it can't cost, as an accessory, it can't possibly cost more than like a hundred bucks, right? So you buy it at the same time that you buy your on-contract Droid DNA, for instance. I'm down. Count me in. I'm on board this crazy train that HTC is pulling up to the station. Count me in. I have nothing else to say other than Godspeed you crazy train rider. So RIM tomorrow, it's happening. They're announcing BlackBerry 10. They promised to have a couple more surprises. They have a Super Bowl ad that they've teased. They've already talked about the fact that they've got a bunch of movie studios on board to sell movies and rent movies. We had a leak that it looks like, and this is the most interesting part, it looks like Vodafone in the UK might be selling this thing right away, the Z10. That would be good. That would be very good for them. The last thing they need to do is to do a Microsoft Surface style announcement where they show a phone without any date or price and say, eh, this will come eventually. They need to strike while the iron is hot. Yes. Yeah, I mean, they need to release it on all the carriers. Have they set a carrier number? I can't remember. I know RIM has said that over 150 carriers have it in testing. So they're definitely pushing that it's going to be available worldwide on as many carriers as possible. Do you think there's any chance that they'll show a tablet tomorrow? No, I don't. I'll tell you why. Everything has leaked, I would say no, whereas the Z10 has leaked to high heaven. I don't think there's anything we don't know about it. The only RIM device that I can remember in the past literally eight years that hasn't leaked was whatever the last phone was that got released on T-Mobile because literally nobody cared. The Curve whatever whatever. I think it was in 2015. I try to remember the name of this phone every single week and I can never remember it and I never bothered looking it up afterwards. We see Apple stuff leak, we see Android stuff leak, we see everything leak these days and RIM sort of led the charge on that stuff back in the day. They get their stuff out to testers, they get their stuff out to their corporate partners and it leaks. Did the Playbook leak? Well, they announced that one really early. They showed the Playbook off. They showed it off a dozen times before it officially announced. If they mentioned it, it's a really bad idea for them to even mention a tablet because if they tease it like, hey, in six months you'll have this, then we'll just be all standing around talking about when's the tablet coming, who's going to care about the tablet and we won't be talking about the phones which presumably are coming much, much sooner. It's still pretty crazy that all things point to RIM releasing an all touchscreen version way ahead of a keyboard model. Well, not way ahead, right? It's still going to be in the same quarter or half of the year. I suppose, yeah. I guess it's supposed to be. We've seen very few leaks of the keyboard model. We've seen it on camera a couple times but nothing like we've seen of the Z10 itself. It's just kind of interesting that, you know. You know what I want? What do you want? A portable slider. I don't want a pre-3. I mean, I do. But I want them to do the torch right with this new OS. I want a portrait slider. I really do. I'm willing to have a fat phone in order to have a visible keyboard and a big screen. I've got to be honest with you. I'm on the exact opposite end. And I know that there's writers... No, you're wrong. I'm on the end of right and you're on the end of stupid. I mean, a couple of years ago I would have totally agreed with you that a portrait keyboard is like the best thing ever for text input. But today's phones are so much more responsive that you can't even tell if you're on the phone. They're so much more responsive. The autocorrect is so much better. I'm so much faster on a touchscreen keyboard than I am with a physical keyboard. While you were just soliloquizing there, I just tapped out the Gettysburg address on the physical keyboard on this pre-3. I just want to... No, you didn't because the space bar probably wasn't responding. So it's all one big word. Inserts.comment about thinking the Venue Pro is the greatest portrait slider. Seriously, they need to take the chassis of that phone and just upgrade the... I mean, if they can keep the HD2 alive for a decade, they can certainly upgrade the Venue Pro. Just drop whatever on it. Put a jelly bean or put BlackBerry 10, I don't care. Just put something on it. Listen, RIM is the only company that cares about physical keyboards, period. Right, which is what's so crazy about them releasing the touchscreen model first. Especially given that all of their other touchscreen phones have been miserable, nightmarish pieces. Dieter, I'm going to send you a link to Steve Jobs' keynote from Macworld 2007 when he introduced the iPhone. Oh, really? I've never seen that. Was it good? Did he... Well, he made some very interesting and I think important points about why physical keyboards are stupid. Right, but what about the portrait slider, man? None of those points about having more screen real estate apply when you've got a magic keyboard that can slide out from underneath your screen. I guess if you want... If I had a 4.7 inch device like a Nexus 4 here and I slide the keyboard, you know how massive that would be? It would be like the most unwieldy thing ever. I mean, it's already pretty unwieldy. I mean, look, there is nothing cooler than getting done with the call and hanging it up. Just slamming the phone closed. The weird thing about answering the phone and just popping it open, when you pop open a portrait slider, you're like, I'm going to get stuff done now. I almost swore there. And like, you know, slide to unlock, tap your little code in. No, I just want to be like pow. I guess that's all cool until the thing starts Oreo rotating on you. No, but they did okay with the torch hardware, right? They did all right. I mean, it wasn't the sexiest thing ever, but they did okay. I guess the hardware was all right. I mean, the screen was terribly, terrible. And the software was obviously a nightmare. The weird thing to me is that every carrier seems intent on offering one like crappy, low to mid range landscape slider, but no one cares about the portrait slider. Yeah, but who's doing that anymore? That's the last time you saw the crappy landscape slider. I guarantee you that if you're T-Mobile and you go to Samsung and say, crap us out a landscape Android phone, Samsung is going to say, excuse me, I need to use the bathroom. And they're going to come back five minutes later with a mid range landscape. With the smiley. Exactly. Because that is the kind of service Samsung offers. And the tragic thing about this is that at four inches or higher, landscape keyboards are just stupid. There's no way to use them. Yeah, I mean, a four inch landscape keyboard phone, man. I mean, you got to take a lot of fiber to pull that off. Exactly. I mean, squeezing out, yeah, okay. We can use the smiley. I just. You're talking about the emoticon. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. That was amazing. That was an Android, right? That was just running whatever. That was an RTOS. I think. It probably has chat on it though. Yeah, probably. I'm just really proud that we brought Dan to tears. That makes me. What else? Nexus 4 is actually on sale for really real. Dan mentioned before the show. Tell us the joke you said because it was a funny joke. I'm just double checking my sources here. And my sources being the Play Store. But as of the time that we went on air, you could still buy the Nexus 4 in the Play Store, which means that it has been over four hours in a row that you've been able to place in order for the Nexus 4, which might be a new record by about three and a half hours. Longest continuous availability of the Nexus 4 in the US ever. And it is still available. Yes. Yes. But it's like they must have been stockpiling inventory for the past 12 weeks. I mean it had been so long since you could buy a Nexus 4 online that they must have just waited until they had an entire warehouse piled to the ceiling with these things and then they flipped the switch. That's my only guess. And you can buy the bumper now and obviously 8 and 16 gigabyte variations. You still can't get the touchstone. No. And there's no charging orb. You can 3D print your own charging orb dock. It's not the full magnetic charge. Instead of calling it the touchstone, they should have called it the Feel Rock. They didn't call it a touchstone. I know, I know, but I'm saying that they could have called it the Feel Rock and then it would have been like a synonym thing. Never mind. That just makes me think of LG and the Y screen, which is its variation of Samsung's Smart Stay. We also saw a leak of a white Nexus 4, which looks fine. I think all of us want it. Yeah, we'd buy that. Can you imagine if that had LTE, I would die on this phone. I would just die. I would perish. I'm back on the Nexus 4 this week after having used the iPhone 5 for a couple of weeks. The battery life isn't quite as ridiculously bad as I remember, but it's still not great. I gave up and went down that dark hole of rooting it and putting a custom ROM on it just because of that. Did you really? Yeah. Did it help? Yeah. I'm not sure what I got today. I'm at 69%. It's been off of the charger for 10 hours. It sounds like you have a Nexus 4 Max. Yeah, I'm at 69%. I've been off since 6 a.m., so that's six, seven, eight hours. Yeah, so you didn't have the same issues. Mine would be dead by 3 p.m. if I hadn't done that. I just want to point out that I was up at 6 a.m. yet again today. I believe I called you. You called me at 7. I was already awake. Oh, OK. I called you at 6 though. Right, yes. You called me at 6 a.m. Yeah. They just don't talk about the Nexus 4. No, like Android OS, 24%. What does that mean? What is doing it? I don't know. Same thing. Maps. Well, maps I know because latitude is the worst. You can't turn it off. I turned it on. No, but if you turn it off, then Google Now is not as good as it ought to be. Wait, Google Latitude still exists? Yeah, I know, right? Well, it's like the keep track of your location over time feature and whatever. Anyway, man, we are just jamming through topics. We haven't even been on the air for half an hour. About the white Nexus 4, I really want it. I have no hopes that it will ever be available for sale just because we saw the white Galaxy Nexus as well and Google never sold that directly. I don't know where you could even get one. You could buy that. The white Galaxy Nexus was one of those phones where if you knew somebody, you knew somebody who knew a guy who stood in some dark alley, you could go talk to him and he would open his trench coat and he would be, one, he would be nude, but then two, he would have some white Galaxy Nexuses under his trench coat and you could buy one for $1,200. It was that kind of phone. I have a feeling this is going to be the same thing. Which means that I need to have one. I just need to have it. It's like the white Sega Game Gear when I was 12 years old. It was the same situation. You had to import one from Japan. It was insane. Also with the Galaxy Nexus, you couldn't get the stupid extended battery for the GSM version unless you went to Korea and had a dinner with an LG or a Samsung executive. It was the exact same situation. The thing that I want the Unicorn Nexus for that I want, even not counting LTE, is replace the glass back with the ridiculously thin plastic back from the Galaxy Nexus or some other phone and just use that extra space for battery. Give me an extra couple hundred milliamps. That would be awesome. I'd be down with that. To be fair, the battery in it is already pretty big. It's 2100 or something. Just make the software more efficient. There's no reason that a 2100 milliamp hour battery not running on LTE can't last the whole day and beyond. Here's what sucks. I picked up my parents' iPhone 4S recently. I was like, holy crap, this is a really thick phone. That pisses me off because three or four months ago or five months ago, I would have never dreamed that thought. Now I've become accustomed to these stupid seven millimeter thick phones and now I can't use a nine millimeter thick phone? Just go back to the tank. You used to be the guy that was all about the resound. You thought that that was OK. Oh my god. Resound was awesome. Resound, ugh. It was great. First 720p phone in the US. Resound was awesome. I'm just saying they should have never gone from nine to seven-ish. Who hit 900 grams? I'm going to read through the screen. I'm going to be in California. I like my phones. Forty millimeter thick, 100,000 grams. Yeah, you're going to be in California on Friday. I'm going to be in California, but you're going to be too afraid to come to the city. You're going to stay a couple hours south just to be safe. No, I'm going to come to California on Friday and I'm going to personally see to it that I slap you with a glove. A gentleman's fight. I have gloves for you, Chris, by the way. I'm going to use studded gloves. Just so to keep our readers in the loop, you guys are going to find out eventually on the website at theverge.com, but I'm super jealous of why Chris is going to California. You guys are going to find out in the near future. I actually have a cameo in Terminator 5. Are you sure it's not Fast 6? I was going to say. Hang on. Imagine a Terminator Fast mashup. My face is going to melt off, Peter. Stop. The Fast 6 trailer premieres this Sunday and I'm like, I can barely contain myself during the Super Bowl. It was just confirmed last week that Arnold is going to be in Terminator 5, which is also pretty exciting. This is the full disclosure, Chris is going to California to see a screening of Fast 6. That would make my life. But no, anyway, back to my original point. I don't know how we ended up on this tangent. All I'm saying is they should have never gone below 9 millimeters and they should have just making the inside of the phone thinner and used that remaining space for battery and everyone would have been happy. Fine. It's hard to sell a new phone. I can totally see where they're coming from though. It's a lot easier to sell a new phone as it's new and thinner and lighter. Didn't the 920 try the tank angle? We kind of panned it. But the 920 doesn't even have great battery. It's not bad battery life, but it's not great. It's not particularly amazing. So didn't we kind of tear it apart for being heavy and thick? Yeah. Should I do the full weightlifter squat? Anyway, let's talk Nokia. The Nokia Laser. Lasers. Flagship Windows Phone on Verizon. What do we know about the Laser? So it sounds like the Laser is going to be basically a CDMA slash LTE 700 block C slash AWS, well presumably AWS version of the Catwalk. Just definitely just keep talking about the Spectrum. All the interesting things that we know about the Laser just like suck them all out. F all y'all. We definitely have people listening to this show right now who appreciate Spectrum the way I appreciate it. Why did this turn into the Troll Chris Show? I don't understand. He doesn't deserve it. He does make it easy though. So the Laser will probably be a carrier variant of the Catwalk which is expected to be the successor to the 920 which I believe we're expecting to see announced at MWC. So the Catwalk could actually end up being the most interesting thing to happen in Barcelona. It sounds like Nokia is going to go back to aluminum construction which is something they haven't really done since the N8. I guess that's exciting news. I thought that Nokia has done a really amazing job with their polycarbonate shells but I can see why they would want, they probably feel left out by the aluminum trend. You could definitely make a phone thinner with aluminum than you can with polycarbonate. Poly's got to have some thickness for rigidness. I'm with you Chris. I love the polycarbonate shell. Does anyone think it's kind of crazy that Nokia just announced the 920 in October and here we are in February and expecting to see the successor announced? That is four months. I do think it's a little bit crazy but let's not forget that there's Apple and there's everybody else and everybody else is on the faster cycle. They know when they release a new phone they bump sales. I think that we can expect it from RIM to be perfectly honest. They're using off the shelf parts. It's not fair to say HTC is or Nokia is or even RIM is. But let's be honest, the chips are the chips and they don't need to spend a year developing this stuff. They can put it together, put a body on it, design it well and put it out there. I think it's just par for the course now that we should expect that everybody but Apple is going to be on a faster cycle. Samsung is the only company to really buck that trend and it's doing quite well for them. I think everybody else can't compete on marketing dollars. Samsung is doing quite well with that because A, it's doing that on the high end but it's also just like spraying the market with everything at every price point and every size and everything like that. Do you think that if the 920 had actually taken off and done better that they would spend more time on the catwalk as replacement? They basically put these things out there, see if they catch fire and if they don't, they're like, well, let's not try and let this one burn for much longer, let's replace it. Yeah, I have to believe that's the philosophy. If the 920 was a runaway hit and they were selling by the tens of millions, I doubt that they would be. Look at the GS3. It's been on a slow burn for the past year. Well, it will have been on a slow burn for a year by the time the GS4 comes around. I don't know why Nokia wouldn't like to be on that. I'm sure that that's every OEM's dream is to be on that cycle. And I guess depending on how things go for Nokia, it doesn't have a... Nokia's dream was to have high-end phones on every single carrier in the US at least, and right now it's just AT&T. And speaking of AT&T, we've got the EOS, which is apparently going to be a quote-unquote true PureView handset for AT&T. Is that right? That's what our guy Tom Warren is saying, and he knows his things. This actually makes me excited because I would love to... I'm sure Canon is really excited about that code name too. I really loved the 808's camera when I reviewed it. I mean, it was absolutely mind-blowing what you could do with the video and the pictures and stuff like that. So having that in a much more capable smartphone would be quite a treat. And that's a dream that everyone's been waiting for when we learned that PureView was coming to the Lumia line. So one problem here, and we knew this was going to happen, Nokia has already diluted the PureView brand, right? Because they called the camera on the 900 a PureView, I think? No, the 920 they did. 920 was the first one. Right, okay. So they've all... I don't know how they go back to... Like when this comes out, do they say, no, really, for real this time it's a PureView? Or are they going to come out with another name for it? How are they going to reestablish the uniqueness of that device? PureView Plus. PureView Plus, I like it. Yes. PurePlusView. PureView Plus. That's exactly what they need to do. I want to go back to one thing you were saying a minute ago about the chips are out there for the BlackBerrys. You guys remember a couple years ago when Mike Lazaridis was at D8 or D9, and he was like, oh, we can't do a BlackBerry 10 phone until they have dual-core chips. Well here we are like 18 months or 24 months later, they missed an entire cycle on that. We're into quad-core now. I mean, come on. They also tried to say that BlackBerry 10 was delayed because LTE wasn't available with the chips that they wanted and things like that. They were issuing a lot of blame to their component suppliers, which frankly did not deserve the blame. Right. I've got nothing else to say about Nokia. I hope we see this stuff at Mobile World Congress, otherwise I don't know how we're going to see it at Mobile World Congress. We're going to see ZTE releasing a 6.2 inch phone. Oh my god. And if we're lucky, no, we won't see the Note 3 there. That's going to be IFA. Yeah, that's going to be IFA. I mean, the only chance of any, I mean, there's the Note 8.0 or whatever that we've seen leaked a couple times. It's a tablet. I wish that was a phone. I really wish that was going to be a phone. I just hope that we see a Beam 2. Beam 2, yeah. So Samsung can follow up last year's awesome MWC announcements. Yeah, Blockbuster. But obviously Samsung does its own thing and we don't really expect to see anything huge there. Yeah. Pebble. We reviewed it. Neal and I reviewed it. He likes it. And I think we all want one. Yeah. I mean, yes and no. I just don't think, I think the Pebble is a really exciting product and I'm really happy to see that somebody has finally pushed the notion of a smartphone into the mainstream headspace or at least the mainstream nerd headspace. Smartwatch. Smartwatch, yes. So, but the thing with the Pebble is I'm happy with what it is now, but in six months, I anticipate being unhappy with, you know, it hasn't kept up with development. And I really think that if Apple or Google decide they want to get into the space because they control the platforms directly, they can do much more interesting things. They control the platforms and they also have gobs and gobs of leverage with manufacturers and component suppliers at their disposal. So either one of those companies could, you know, on a whim turn around the most amazing smartwatch anyone has ever seen. Yeah. So like Pebble's great. And you know, the thing that I said in our best of CES thing was that, you know, sometimes you need to remove the bell so you can make a better whistle. And they did that. Like they made it work for the things that it does as best as they could and they didn't overshoot what they were trying to do and that'll come later, hopefully. And we've actually seen a lot of other smartwatches be way too ambitious. So this is crazy but I'm going to draw this parallel anyways. But Pebble is to the smartwatch what the original iPhone was to the smartphone. In that the original iPhone when it was first released was really kind of a dumbed down thing just like you were saying that Pebble is. There was a lot of features missing but the features that it had worked very well and it was very accessible to a larger number of people than what had come previous. We've seen a lot of smartwatches on the market. Chris has reviewed I think every single one of them or at least used every single one of them. And all of them tried to do a lot of things and they all kind of failed because either they're too cumbersome to use or their hardware doesn't live up to their expectations and things like that. Whereas the Pebble is more or less if you're into, if you're a type of person that would actually think about wearing a smartwatch you can probably use the Pebble without any issues as far as getting it set up and working and things like that. Even though it doesn't have all of the features that you might want eventually. If your smartwatch runs Android you blew it. That is so true. And I feel like the end game for all of these guys and I said this in my MetaWatch review last year. I think that the end game, the only way to really make this a successful industry is to target the very same clientele that wristwatches have been targeting for a century which is you know people who are looking for a fashion accessory and it's just that this happens to be a very smart fashion accessory. In order to do that you need to take the core, you need to take the guts of something like a Pebble and make it available in literally 75 or 100 different styles. You need to be able to walk into the Fossil Store in your local mall and they have an entire case of smartwatches that all look completely different because people don't want a single wristwatch. They want one that looks good to them and works for their style and we're a long way from that. The only way to make this a viable ecosystem is if the gatekeepers want there to be a viable ecosystem. The Pebble does okay with what's supported by Bluetooth and what's supported by iOS and by Android, but where is the motivation other than us clamoring for there to be an ecosystem for either of these companies to improve that? Especially if they are working on their own watches right? Why would Apple work to develop a vibrant multi-manufacturer smartwatch ecosystem when they could just own the entire thing? This is true and I think that Apple, I don't know what Apple is doing there. I want to believe that they intentionally moved the iPod Nano away from that form factor to make room for a future product. I've heard rumblings, in fact, I think we were exchanging emails about this. I've heard rumblings that third party developers are seeing some weirdness. They're seeing the scaffolding for a really full featured and rich Bluetooth low energy ecosystem inside iOS 6 but it's not fully implemented and they think that parts are kind of being kept under wraps or they're only partially exposed for exposure in say iOS 7 along with maybe the launch of something like an iWatch. That's certainly a possibility and Apple is probably the only company, well Google too, they could both create I think a very commercially successful product like that that goes under the wrist but long term I truly believe that if you're going to make a smartwatch industry, the only way to do it is to make it a wristwatch and that's something that no one has done yet except for Casio and Citizen who are of course traditional wristwatch players and Citizen has the proximity which is a gorgeous watch and from a distance you can't tell, even up close, you can't tell that it's a Bluetooth watch and it's fatal flaw is that it can't give you alerts for messages which is insane. And Casio makes a Bluetooth 4.0 G-Shock which just looks like a regular G-Shock but it also can't alert messages. So those are both Japanese companies and I don't know if there's like some, I don't know if maybe message alerts are not a big deal there maybe and so that's why they didn't think to include them but it's completely insane to me. Moving on. Awkward transition. Do you want to talk about this, the fact that if a carrier doesn't want you to, it's now technically illegal to unlock your phone if it's subsidized by a carrier thanks to lapsing of a thing that the Library of Congress did from the DMCA. Everything about this just makes me sad. You know, I don't want to advocate crime but you all should unlock your phone. So okay, it's civil disobedience, it's not a crime, it's civil disobedience. I don't know why the DMCA is part of this. I mean, is it a justification that technically the carrier owns the phone because it's subsidized and so therefore they can say what it is and it belongs to them. What's so crazy about this story is that it wasn't voted on, it wasn't vetted by anybody, it was a Librarian of Congress that read the DMCA in a certain way, interpreted it to mean this and then enacted this. That's how it got freed in the first place, it was a Librarian of Congress. So don't hate on librarians. I'm just saying not librarians as a whole but this particular judgment was maybe a lapse or maybe it was heavily influenced by lobbying which is really what I kind of think happened. And unfortunately all of us that are interested in unlocking our phones are kind of getting the raw deal on it because of this interpretation. I'm unlocking my phone right now. Yeah, I guess the idea is you can theoretically buy unlocked phones easily and so they don't need to protect consumers anymore. I mean kind of, can you? Where this really burns you though is I was actually talking about this with some friends of mine who are not like super into phones and things like that and they were like, well why do I care? If I buy a phone from AT&T I'm going to have to have service from AT&T anyways and I'd have to pay a termination fee to switch to T-Mobile and blah blah blah. And I was like, well that's all fine and dandy when you're at home but as soon as you travel into another country and you want to put a local SIM card in, you can't. And then you're stuck paying your exorbitant roving fees that are set by carriers that you might have never heard of. And that's where it really kind of gets you if you don't have the ability to unlock your phone. I unlocked phones all the time when it was illegal. I'm going to continue to do it now that it's illegal again. See you in prison bro. Yeah, we just had this nice brief six month period where we had sanity and now it's gone and that makes me sad. You have all these notorious cellphone unlockers on death row. Our prison is filled with cellphone unlockers. Cellphone unlocking is a gateway drug to something else. Jailbreaking. Well, jailbreaking is still okay. Jailbreaking is cool. Yeah, but I want the double entendre. We haven't talked, oh my god, there's a brand new version of IOS. Well, a point one update. I wouldn't call that a brand new version. Let's just say I'm not seeing Johnny Ives influence yet. In fact, it's going the opposite direction because the one design thing that I've noticed is if you are using the music player on the lock screen, the controls are different and they are aluminumized now. Oh no. There's one other design thing too. If you go into Passbook now, there's a new card that's like hey, this is Passbook, it's awesome. I suspect that no one was using Passbook so they felt compelled to put a card in there so that people know what the heck Passbook is. Isn't that something? Yeah. Who so often does not use a Passbook? It has a button in there that takes you out to the App Store with a view of all the Passbook enabled apps. Right. I use Passbook for one thing and that's Starbucks. I've actually used it quite a bit. I use it for Starbucks, I use it for United, I'll use it for Lufthansa and Walgreens. Because you fly Lufthansa all the time? Yeah, dude. When I'm flying between Chicago and New York, it's always a Lufthansa flight. But I am actually flying Lufthansa at the MWC next month so I'm looking forward to sampling their Passbook integration. I don't know who I'm flying. I'll have to look. You're flying Air France. I'm flying Air France. Oh yeah, I knew that. I sent you that email. I know more about your itinerary than you do. What plane is Dieter flying on? What kind of plane, Chris? Probably an A330 would be my guess, but I don't know that for a fact. I'm on a 767, that's all I know. All I know is it's going to be uncomfortable and I'll be cramped and unhappy. And perhaps it'll be something to write about. Indeed. So Chris wrote up this really great breakdown of Verizon sold a bunch of Spectrum to AT&T for a really exorbitant amount of money and it's pending approval. Chris broke down exactly what that means this week. And it means that AT&T might not be using its AWS Spectrum, right Chris? Yeah. I was really, I mean, so I'm in an AT&T LTE market where they have like very, very little bandwidth. And there are I think five or six major markets nationwide where that's the case, where they kind of got shafted in the 700 megahertz auction. So they had both 700 and AWS standing by, but they'd only rolled out 700. And the assumption for a long time now has been that they would eventually light up AWS. And indeed, all of AT&T's LTE phones support both 700 and AWS. Well what has happened, there have been two major incidents in the past year that have led everybody, including myself, to start to believe that AWS does not factor into AT&T's plans. One, the first thing that happened was the breakup, not breakup, but the failure of the AT&T T-Mobile merger. And one of the terms of that failure was that AT&T would give T-Mobile a bunch of AWS Spectrum, which coincidentally is one of the things that has really helped T-Mobile firm up its LTE plans between that and the Metro PCS purchase. And then the other thing that happened was this deal where Verizon is giving, not giving, selling a bunch of 700-megered Spectrum to AT&T. And AT&T is giving a bunch of AWS Spectrum, mostly in Western markets, to Verizon. So a couple years ago, Verizon was 100% all in on 700. AT&T was splitting its prospects between 700 and AWS. And then now Verizon bought a bunch of AWS from Spectrum Co., that cable company consortium that we wrote about last year. Gave a little bit of that to T-Mobile to get the FCC off its back. And now they're getting more from AT&T. So they've kind of flip-flopped. Verizon is going to go with two different bands. AT&T, at least in the short term, is all in on 700, it looks like. And then longer term, they'll be looking at the incentive auctions and WCS, which we wrote about. I have a report up on that. It's linked in the report I wrote last week. But yeah, it's a very dramatic time to be following the Spectrum story in the US. But Chris? I'm sorry. Imagine if we saw companies playing these kinds of shenanigans and doing this kind of horse trading with like, national parkland. Right? I mean, that's what this is. Right? Like we were like, oh yeah, you guys can go ahead and borrow the parks for a while. That's cool. You got to pay us some money for it. But you know, make sure you do some public good with it, we guess. You know, because that seems nice. And then they just are like... Just make sure you pay us some money for it. Yeah, they're like, oh, well, you want a little bit of redwood? Well, I can give you some Yellowstone, but I don't know. It's like, come on. So yeah, just regulate this stuff. I have no idea. Just be cognizant. Just internally... Just mount up and regulate. Yes, exactly. Orangey. AT&T, I would love to understand, I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall in some of these internal meetings in AT&T where they decided to not deal with AWS. Because I don't know if they just wanted to concentrate on 700 because of its superior building penetration and... It's because of you complaining about Chicago's signal, basically. Actually, you know what it is? You know what it is? You know what it is? They're in a board meeting and they talk about AWS and someone's like, AWS? It smells like T-Mobile. We hate them now. And they just said no. And they just killed it. That's entirely possible. This brings up the question for me at least. So Verizon owned the Spectrum and is in the 700 megahertz and now it's being sold to AT&T. Does that mean that I'll be able to use an AT&T phone on Verizon at some point in the future? You would like to think so, but the answer is most definitely no. Because it's illegal to unlock your phone. It's illegal to unlock your phone, A. And B, these are different blocks. So 700 is divided into five blocks of Spectrum that span a fairly significant amount of bandwidth. There's A, B, C, D, and E. Verizon occupies the nationwide C block, but they also, for god only knows what reason, had a bunch of dormant B blocks sitting around. So they were hoarding the B block. Yeah, so they could use it for the stupid national park horse trading. For the stupid national park horse trading, that's right. And AT&T, they used the B block. So it was a very convenient trade. But I do think it is, you know, these carriers are treating the Spectrum, they're basically holding it hostage as an investment in many cases and not actually deploying it and using it the way it was meant to be used. And that is one of my greatest frustrations as a writer in this industry is the fact that these guys aren't using every last drop of Spectrum that they can, while at the same time they're screaming from the highest hilltops about the, quote unquote, Spectrum patch. Yeah, I don't know why I'm all sudden hot under the collar about the Spectrum thing now, because there's certainly been worse shenanigans. But it's like, you know, OK, Nokia sold their headquarters and now they're renting it back. And you see a bunch of companies do that and it's always a really bad sign, right? Right. Well, we're selling our Spectrum and then renting it back. I mean, we could at least still manage the building, right? Nokia is still hiring the janitors and they run the building. It's our Spectrum, man. Just like the Everglades. Everybody's fucked though, so maybe. It's a swampy morass filled with crocodiles, alligators, flies. And false hopes and lies. And pythons apparently too. They're a huge python problem in the Everglades. Phones that can't work on more than one carrier. US Spectrum is the Everglades. I think we can just leave it at that. It's hot, sticky. OK. That, friends, is The Verge Mobile Show. We want to thank you so much for watching. If you want to watch us again next week, you probably can. If you want to leave a comment on the post, you can. And I believe the new plan is for it to be like one true post rule of all. So just leave it on the post you're watching now. Or if you're listening to it, go find it. You can also send us an email. It's mobile show at theverge.com. I am Baclon. Dan is DC Seifert with an EI. Chris is ePower Vlad is Vlad Savov. We're all at Verge. And we'll see you guys next week, probably. We'll see. See ya. Thanks, guys. Thanks, guys.