 So, you know the sophomore slump where a group's second effort is never as good as its first effort? Yeah, stay tuned for the Verge mobile show. Hi, I'm Dieter Bohn. I'm Vlad Savo. And I'm Chris Sigler. And this is episode two of the Verge mobile show for the week of Monday, June 4. We're sponsored by the Samsung Galaxy Note. And as I said, it is the second iteration of the show, the sophomore effort. And we're not going to slump, are we guys? I don't think, yeah, I was going to say, I don't think you have enough confidence in our ability to deliver with this show. I think that we're going to knock this one out of the park. I think we've already begun to knock this one out of the park just by talking about how we're going to knock it out of the park. Agreed. So how are you doing, Chris? You've been banging away on an article for the past while, and I don't think you've slept much. No, yeah, I've abandoned all hopes of sleep for the past week or so. It was really an amazing journey putting this piece together just from the sheer number of people that I talked to and the stories that I heard, really compelling stuff. I've been processing, oh geez, I don't know, many hours of audio. Let's just put it that way, in interviews from the past few weeks, putting this stuff together. We're talking about, of course, this Palm piece that just went live on the site a couple hours ago. If you haven't read it, please do, because that will validate my reason to exist. I'm not sure many people had the time to read it. I mean, this is an epic. It's definitely in TLDR category. Yeah. Yeah, it's a long read for sure. It's the kind of thing that you put on read it later and then never get to. But by all means, if you get a chance to read this, read it, because I think regardless of whether you're an iOS fan or an Android fan or a Windows phone fan, there seems to be, I feel like there was a period of time where webOS kind of jelled all these groups together and combined elements of all these platforms in a way that was really compelling. I think that the original pre, at least for me, and I think a lot of people felt the same way, it created the same emotion, the same feeling that the original iPhone did, the feeling that something really important was happening in mobile that you wanted to be a part of. And it was really sad to see that company decline and kind of disappear so quickly. And I like to think that I've done as good of a job as I possibly could capturing that story arc between about 2007 and this year. And of course, Palm had an amazing story before that, right? Going all the way back to 1992 with Jeff Hawkins. And there's a whole different element to that. But the last few years, there's been a lot of action. Palm tried to reinvent itself and ultimately didn't work out. And so, yeah, read it. That's about all I have to say. The other thing I really actually like and appreciate about it is the fact that it does take an inside view and it does speak to the guys who work at the company. And these are always the most fascinating storylines for me. It's not so much the CEOs and the big comings and goings, which everybody knows about. It's also on how these things impact on the guys who are down on the ground and actually doing the work. And Nokia's move away from Symbian as probably a follow up piece that will, I don't know if it will get done, but it's just as fascinating, isn't it? Because you've got all these Finnish guys and developers who consider it essentially a form of national pride to keep developing Symbian and keep developing the market name. A lot of those guys ended up getting spun off into Accenture, right? Because Nokia, so it's like a bookkeeping move basically, but they wanted to get those guys out of the company and make them a variable cost. So they moved them into Accenture. And now that's like all Symbian development, as far as I know, is actually being done by Accenture and not by Nokia. I don't think anyone inside Nokia is working on Symbian as far as I know. Except for the hard workers. Well, doesn't Nokia do some of the, I don't want to call it a skin, but I mean, weren't they a little bit involved in Anna and the most, some of the more recent iterations or was that all Accenture? I'm sure that- Wait, how weird is it that Accenture is, like we're talking about Accenture as a software anyway? Yeah, it's a little odd. But yeah, I mean, don't get me wrong, I'm sure that Nokia is involved in like setting the specifications and the requirements and the look and feel, but all the actual work, you know, the putting of the noses to the grindstones is happening at Accenture. Sure. What Nokia actually did with the Symbian updates was rename them. So with Symbian Bell, it became Nokia Bell, which was just a little branding exercise to get away from the slightly tattered reputation of Symbian. Right. But yeah, the reason I bring this up with respect to Palm is I also get the same feeling as you Chris, you know, around the original Palm Pre and you can't imagine that those kinds of aggressively modern and ambitious designs are done by people who are not passionate about their jobs, right? So as much passion as we've seen with Nokia and Symbian, and its idea that it owns something, I kind of figure the same would have happened with Palm, with webOS being developed internally and being its own baby. It's just, again, kind of from my outsider perspective, Nokia did everything it could to pass along those Symbian people and also avoid ever saying, okay, we're firing thousands and thousands of people because we don't need them anymore. So that Nokia tried to soften the blow, whereas HP seemed to just kind of hammer them and just be like, no, we don't actually care about webOS. Yeah, it was, I mean, it was a total grind. It was a total war of attrition internally. I mean, these guys, there was a very brief period of time between about, and I tried to capture this in the piece, but between about 2008 and 2010, where Palm had this incredible nexus of talent in the Valley, which, you know, is kind of really rare and extraordinary because there are so many companies there with so many interesting ideas and they're pulling people in all these different directions and poaching is rampant there, especially because of the way the laws work in California. So to have that many really important and notable people all doing something together was something that never happens. And the fact that they were able to poach pretty freely and regularly from Apple of all companies for a period of time was really remarkable. So I don't know if any of us will see something like what happened with Palm leading into 2009 and getting in our lifetimes, unfortunately, it was just a very unique thing that they did. It was a gambit and the gambit didn't pay off ultimately. But I mean, the impression that I got, what really struck me is that nobody that I talked to was a bitter or, or angry or sad. I mean, they were about some elements of the story, but at the end of the day, they, I think that they all felt genuinely enriched by what happened in the, in those few years and felt like they were better for having gone through that. And of course many, or basically all of these guys have gone on to do other really cool things at other companies. You know, most recently with Matt McNulty and his team, the, the NEO guys who are apparently going to the Chrome team inside Google. So it'll be interesting to see what they do there. But I, you know, there was just very, very little bitterness from anybody that I spoke to, which I thought was, was, was cool. Not necessarily what I expected, but yeah, they're, they're, they're all, they've all gone on and taken that, that knowledge that they've learned at Palm and, and used it. They're doing other cool things. So seriously, those guys are going to Chrome. That's the word on the, that's the word on the street. It hasn't been confirmed, but that's, that's our understanding. Which, you know, your, your initial thought is, well, obviously they'll go to the Android team. But when you think about it, what happened in the last few months was NEO became less of a web OS thing and more of this independent framework, web, open web framework. And it isn't even necessarily mobile exclusive. So from that perspective, you can see how, you know, I mean, Chrome has really been trying to push web apps and they have been for what, 12 or 18 months now. It was a big story of Google IO last year. So from that perspective, you can see how people who have a lot of expertise in, in creating a framework that supports the open web, you know, it makes sense for those people to be in, in Chrome. Of course, I'm sure that, that the Android team would probably love to have them as well. And I've always believed, I've never really had this confirmed, but I've always believed that there's a little bit of sibling rivalry between the Chrome and Android groups inside Google. Um, and I, if you work for, for Google and either one of these groups and you'd like to confirm that for me or deny it, please shoot me an email. But I strongly believe that those two groups don't always get, get along because I mean, for the simple reason that Chrome OS and Android are in many ways competitors and, and it stand to, uh, to cannibalize each other in the longterm. If Chrome OS really executes on the vision that it's trying to execute on. So there was actually a time when we didn't know what Google products would dominate on tablets, right? So we felt like, well, Chrome OS kind of fits and Android kind of fits. Neither one really fit properly. Right. And then Android took the ascendancy, but I can see, I can see a good reason why that rivalry might exist. Right. But if we can pick up on this, uh, idea of Google's acquisitions or recent acquisitions, uh, show quickly mentioned quick office because that has been. Big deal. It's a huge deal. Now it's owned by Google. So the, the, the thing that's crazy about quick office is, um, a couple of years ago, the top two mobile office suites, well, the top three where I guess, you know, Microsoft office on windows mobile, windows phone, if you want to count that, but everybody used docs to go or quick office. And now both have been snapped up docs to go went to rim, um, of all places and a quick office has been bought up by Google. Um, and so, I mean, one, I think it's great. I'm excited for Android to have a better, uh, you know, editing experience. I find that Google docs and Android is just not really there for me. I was like too, like this is, this is going to be, um, a huge space for somebody well funded to jump in making a proper office suite for, uh, you know, arm based devices is not easy. That's why there's so few players that have got really full featured, uh, office app suites. Microsoft could seriously jump in here and, um, own this again, if they wanted to on mobile devices, depending on what Google does with, uh, with quick office. I think that they'll at least see an opportunity. Um, cause they, they said, what did Google say? They're going to integrate it with their apps team, right? Um, yeah. Bring their powerful technologies or apps product suite. So like, I don't read this as Google is interested in, uh, continuing to develop quick office for the iPad. Maybe I'm totally wrong. And then they do want to have native apps that connect to Google docs and that's the whole story. Um, and I'm sure that they're going to continue to do it. But I think that if I were, if I were Microsoft and you know, I was, you know, I were trying to make a pitch to enterprise companies be like, well, you could get the thing that remote or you could get the thing that Google owns, or you could get the thing that Microsoft owns that you feel comfortable with. And uh, I, I would be shocked if they didn't make that play at some point in the near future. Yeah. I do have a question here, um, which arises, okay, quick office, um, is still an important part of the mobile docs space, but how big is that space? Because I do plenty of my work on the move, uh, with a laptop, with my phone, uh, taking notes, et cetera. And I've been able to get away without an actual office suite to my phone for years. Now have you been able to get away without an actual office suite on your laptop? Yeah. Yeah. Now see, that's the thing is I'm with you on that. I never opened word. I rarely open Excel. Um, I'm totally happy without them. But the thing is we are, we are in the very, very tiny minority there. Uh, everybody uses word for everything all the time. And so having something that feels like word is important on mobile devices. A really funny piece of trivia for me is that dot dot doc X files, the latest version of, uh, word documents. Um, if I download one onto my Mac, I have software just in the stock Mac installation, which can open it. But if I download it on a bare bones, windows seven installation, I don't have the software for it. Yeah. That's, um, awesome. Well, if you download it on a bare bones win RT, you're going to have it on a, you're going to have it cause win RT comes with, uh, with that version of windows RT. So windows, windows RT, we're not allowed to call it win RT. That's not okay. Cause when I was using the runtime, Microsoft has really hopefully screwed us in that fashion. So you can contract to win eight, which is fine because that only means windows eight. But if you contract to windows RT to win RT, you start to confuse people. Which admittedly is Microsoft. So by the way, I'm asking with Microsoft, but that's just the way it is. Uh, by the way, I don't know. Uh, sorry, this is going to be kind of, um, I'm making the sausage situation for our readers. I'm looking through our topic list here. Um, okay. I'm actually going to, you guys are going to kill me, but I'm going to jump ahead in our topic list a little bit cause I want to address this now. Uh, Microsoft is promising a sneak peek of the future of windows phone this month. Right. At, at a summit later this month. And I just want to reiterate since we're on the topic of windows RT, I still believe as strongly as ever that we are going to see Microsoft start to merge the windows RT and windows phone stories at this event. Um, in fact, it wouldn't surprise me if Sanofsky were there and I know, but see, this is a sneak peek. I mean, how, how close do you think they are to launching this? I mean, if, if this turns out to be a blowout event, uh, I will be very surprised and very excited. Um, I just don't know that, you know, they're, they're going to show some stuff, but I don't know that we're going to get the full story on the 20. No, I, I agree. I, I, I liken it to, um, mix in 2010, which was a developer focused event, uh, where we got a lot of the pieces of the puzzle kind of called through knowledge that they were trying to give to developers to prep them for windows phone seven at that time. And I, I expect this event to be a lot like that. I think they're going to spend much of the time trying to talk to developers, not to the media or consumers because, and that makes total sense because they want to get developers up to speed. So they're ready to blow this out with apps as soon as it hit the street, hits the streets. But it just makes so much sense to me, especially, you know, we're, we're seeing all these tablets, uh, out of Computex this week, uh, many of which are running windows RT. It makes so much sense to me that they would want to merge those stories. Um, and I think that within, I don't know if we'll get all the way there with windows phone eight, but certainly, you know, in the next couple of generations of those two products, I'd be very surprised if they weren't completely merged. And beyond that, a couple more generations, it wouldn't be, it wouldn't surprise me if windows RT was windows period. Like if there's no reason that consumers, assuming they still need desktops, there's no reason to believe that those desktops won't be arm based. Dell is shipping arm based servers. Um, arm is here and they're about to ship their 64 bit architecture. So, um, yeah, I, I have every reason to believe that windows RT and windows phone are about to become very buddy buddy. This is happening and I'm excited about it. I think, I think it's great. We have a universal app that could run on, on a windows RT tablet and on Apollo or the next generation. I don't know when they're going to get there, but that idea is very, very important to the ecosystem. What does RT stand for in windows RT and when RT it stands for runtime, right? My belief, so windows RT is a lot like windows CE, which Microsoft refused to ever say what CE stood for. The common belief is that it stood for consumer electronics. But there were other possibilities too. Another one is compact embedded. There were a few different possibilities running around. RT I think stands for either runtime or real time or retweet. Um, but they won't say it's like, you know, it's a big mystery. But actually that's, um, the thing that Chris touched on the hybrid devices, I think we should, in spite of them not being phones in themselves, I think we should kind of touch on for a little bit because the really emergent theme of Computex, if you'd like to look at it that way is the fact that nobody's particularly sure about what the perfect form factor for windows 8 is yet. Yeah, there are a million different form factors that we've seen. I am so freaking excited about the Tai Chi and the only reason, look, like my initial reaction when I saw the Tai Chi was this is the stupidest thing I've ever seen in my life, but then it hit me. Hybrids are stupid because they require the existing hybrids will require a really stupid mechanism that makes the laptop unnecessarily complex and just makes you like not want it. At least that's been my experience. The beautiful thing about the Tai Chi is that it looks and feels exactly like a normal laptop, except that you still get the benefits of having a hybrid. Yeah. Brilliant. And for the future, Chris, you can't just interrupt me by naming a product I'm about to talk about. Oh, stole your mojo. What you going to do about it? Yeah, man. Um, I'm just going to keep talking. Uh, well, no, I mean, to me it's like one of the questions that I've had about windows say is the fact that it's, it has two very distinct, uh, work environments. Like you have the desktop environment, you have Metro, right? So to me, it's kind of been a hybrid OS. So you still have that legacy look and feel, and you have this really modern touch centric book and feel. And I didn't know how you would put the two together, but then what we've seen in the Computex is that they're just going to do it through hardware. So to me, it's like hybrid devices for hybrid OS. That's the way that I like to think of it. Um, at the same time, I also think like a Suze Acer and all these other companies, uh, Taiwanese and Korean are kind of throwing everything up in the air and trying to see which one gathers the most, uh, you know, interests, steam, et cetera. Um, because, because the other thing with a Suze is that it loves to blow out Computex. That's its home show. As far as it's concerned, we saw this with the path phone last year, which I believe launched like a week or two ago, actually launched it when, when I say I went stores. So Asus would take something like from way off in the future of the company's roadmap. It would just take something off the blueprint boards and do a mockup and say, yeah, we'll have a product. They didn't really have a product with the path phone. Um, things like the Tai Chi, which is essentially an ultra book with an extra display on the outside, which I agree with you is kind of nuts and crazy and off the wall. Um, oh, come on. It's essentially beautiful. It's stupid. Can we just call it stupid? It's stupid. It's only stupid if the battery life sucks, which it probably will. And it's honestly the price sucks, which the way I mean, displays aren't, they don't weigh nothing. Well, I would much rather have something where you can actually, you know, take it apart and twist it and do whatever you need to do than just, it's like glomming on an extra screen on there. I don't care about that. I don't care about the extra weight. I have to, I have to say Chris' side. The Tai Chi is. Yeah. The mechanisms on hybrids are stupid. Like what was that Dell that with the stupid rotating display? It was an Inspiron netbook something. Yeah. Perfect example. I mean, admittedly that there was running on one of the slowest out of processes in the history of humanity. Yeah. So you didn't really have a chance. No, I agree. I mean, we've seen sliders. We've seen a lot of transformers, things like the transformer, D-pad transformer. We've seen one from Samsung, Acer. Everybody has a transformer nowadays. So tablet that plugs into a keyboard dock and a keyboard dock that actually is designed for that particular tablet and fits in rather than the sort of weird ones that you get for iPads. Yeah, that's, that's the form factor I want. I want, I want just a keyboard dock that's got, you know, extra processing power, maybe more battery. Um, and you know, the touch pad and just something to click it into the tablet screen. So that if I really don't want it, I can leave it behind, but if I want it, I can plug it in. They work together. That's the ideal form factor. So you want Motorola web top is what you're saying. Yeah, but actually, no, no, no. I want it. This is, this is the perfect thing. It's the thing I wanted to bring up is if we think we're seeing crazy, weird form factor innovation now, if Chris is right, that windows RT and windows phone eight are essentially the same thing, we're going to see insane, crazy, weird stuff coming very soon. Right. And that's actually pretty exciting, even though I'll mock all of it. I will tell you just the one feature that will make me happy. If I can use the two as like one cohesive OS, so I could take the phone, put it next to the tablet or laptop and have them, you know, just being able to drag things across the desktops, like have something visually correspond to them communicating with one another. Well, so for half a year now, for half a year now, Steve Ballmer has been teasing that there's some crazy integration between windows eight and windows phone that we haven't heard the full story on yet. I'm not saying that's it, but you know, we're still waiting to hear what this integration is going to be. So maybe we'll hear live tiles, man. That's that's it. I think live tiles, I am sold. So what do you mean by a sync live tiles? Just to sync live tiles from your windows device, your windows desktop device to your windows phone. So that's the only feature. Yeah. So like, you know, if I put a live tile on my phone, that live tile appears in the desktop and vice versa or just like have a little thing where you like when you, you know, rearrange your live tiles, there's a pin and then there's like a sync button. And so this one will sync to the other thing or this one won't. Like just that that feature alone. And I'm having a hard time. Like I would I would seriously consider switching away from Mac plus Android to all windows all the time for that. And I'll tell you what, there's a ton of synergy. I mean, Microsoft kind of had this planned out from the beginning. There is already a ton of synergy between windows phone development and windows development. It's all silver light and C sharp. So it's a very small logical leap to believe that they could do exactly what you're saying, Dieter. They're going to do it. They have to do it. They have to. But at the same time, I do feel like my live tiles or my home screen layout on mobile would be different from my desktop. Like there are limits to how much should be identical between the two. Like the things that I want on my four inch, four and a half inch smartphone are different from the things I want of my 27 inch desktop at home. What about your 18 inch tablet? Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Have a little six foot. 18 inch tablet, Chris. Yes. That got a lot of interest from my UK team. Tom Warren and Aaron Soporis want one of those. That's because they are insane human beings. The Asus 18 inch tablet. Doesn't Tom Warren already own like 18 computers running Windows 8? Like he's shown pictures of his setup and he's surrounded by monitors, most of which are running Windows 8. Yeah. That's just Tom Warren. Windows 8 is being just crazily ubiquitous already. It's nowhere near out. Yeah. You know, I think it's funny. I think back to like Windows 95. I was in the beta program for Windows 95. Oh, wow. And the secrecy surrounding that product, you know, back when it was code named Chicago and then in through the entire beta cycle compared to how open Microsoft is now with these products is just amazing. It's it like really speaks to the change in software culture. It's it's it's no longer about try to keep this under wraps until the day you release it. It's about here's what we're doing. Here's what we're trying to do. Here's how long it's going to take us. And I mean, there's a lot of reasons for that. One is the fact that, you know, we have the Internet now. So it's it's super easy for these rumors to spread at, you know, wildfire pace. And it didn't. But it's not just that. There's there's also benefits to the Internet and the fact you can run all these beta beaters, whichever one it was in public. And you call it a release and stick with it. You change. Yeah. Yeah, I'm completely confused about that word right now. Completely. I'm going to start saying would have V. Well, here's the problem. Beta sounds like you could be saying beater with an English accent. That's the problem. So whereas beta sounds like you're now there's nothing else unless you're talking about a fish, I guess. Right. Could be talking about the fish. But that's it. We're not talking about Microsoft fish. Right. Although there is a very nice fish on the desktop. It all comes together. Full circle. Yeah. OK. OK. So the other big show. Oh, I want I want to move on to talk about the insane crazy mobile news that happened. Was it yesterday? It was only yesterday. Yeah. But if you've got something to wrap up flat, I'm not going to stop you. That's what I'm saying. I was trying to close back to mobile and. We've run to exactly the thing you're talking about, which is E3 and the news that came out of that. Yeah. So the other big event that's going on is E3 and we've got a huge team there. Both. You know, we've got a bunch of people from the Virgin and of course, all of Polygon is over there. And so if you're not heading over to the Polygon site on the verge, you know, verge gaming, you are missing out on some incredible show coverage. But last night, it feels like it was longer ago, but I guess it wasn't. Sony announced that they're rebranding the old PlayStation suite, which was this thing where you could run old PlayStation games on Android. They're calling it PlayStation Mobile and they actually have another partner now. And the partner is HTC, at least on their one series. HTC is going to do PlayStation mobile games. Which is insane. I'm really surprised that I mean, don't get me wrong. I see the benefit. I absolutely see the benefit for HTC and other OEMs to partner with somebody like Sony on a storied gaming brand like PlayStation. But we just heard Kaz Harai just a few months ago, a few weeks ago, a few months ago, say that he's trying to pull this company together and he doesn't want it to be siloed anymore. So now you have this, this Sony that is trying to integrate Sony mobile into its mainstream operations. And you have HTC, which is a direct competitor of Sony mobile, getting in bed with the PlayStation group. So it's very the politics are starting to become very intriguing here. Right now on our site is a photo of HTC phones from the Sony booth at E3. Mind blown. Completely insane. But besides that, I also kind of think this is still very still very tepid news, actually, like in terms of substance, because, OK, PlayStation suite, ever since it was announced, I believe last year, has been a really exciting bit of potential. And ever since it's been announced, it has delivered absolutely none of that potential. It came out with the. Was a code, the Xperia play, don't know why that escaped my mind. I do because nobody bought one. That's why the Xperia play was going to be such a huge device. I mean, that was a PlayStation turned out to be a huge device. Yeah. So like you say, Vlad, it was supposed to be the PlayStation phone. I mean, like people had been demanding a PSP phone for like five years. And then that's that's the steaming pile of garbage that they ended up getting from that from that whole, you know, normally like with Apple, it's like, you know, people kind of start to like an idea foments in people's minds and then it starts to pick up steam and then finally just happens. Right. Like it happened with the iPhone. People have been talking about the iPhone for iPod phone for like three or four years and the iPhone was awesome. And this TV, I'm sure, is going to materialize and it's going to be awesome. But with Sony, like people for five years have been, you know, there's so much pent up belief that they're going to make this awesome PSP phone and then you get that that piece of garbage. So it was a big letdown. Yeah. But then the size of the software. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the issue for me is this week because I mean, I reviewed the Xperia playback and gadget and I mean, one problem that I had was the display just sucked. Just straight up sucked. Yeah. You could look at the damn thing out in sunlight. So Sony went cheap on the absolute worst bit of hardware that could go cheap on. But besides the hardware, there was basically crash bandicoot that you could play from PlayStation days. And there is a fundamental issue with the PlayStation suite now, PlayStation Mobile, in the fact that original PlayStation one games are extremely low resolution, like they're so low res that they would have to appear in a tiny little window on your phone to match up to the resolution without being upscaled on your phone. And the result is, OK, you turn on crash bandicoot, you start playing it and it's one of the jaggiest, ugliest games that you could put on your phone. And it's really sad because PlayStation one games include just so much good stuff, you know, things like the Final Fantasy series, Tekken, sports games. There's just a ton of really awesome nostalgia. Destruction Derby was my jam on PlayStation. Yeah. So, I mean, Sony has failed in multiple ways. The first is that it hasn't really figured out how to upscale the really low res because we used to play it on extremely low res televisions back in PlayStation one days. So that was OK. So Sony hasn't figured out the upscaling bit. It hasn't actually licensed a whole bunch of these really fascinating games. The PlayStation Mobile library, in terms of PS one games, is just dire. It's really limited. And it's failed in actually expanding this to guys like HTC and Samsung and all the other third parties. The fact that it took Sony well over a year to sign up HTC is just bad because what do you think is going to happen with PlayStation Mobile? Like PS one games are not going to improve. All of the issues that they have today are just going to get worse tomorrow. So this kind of feels like it needed to move quicker. And I'm sorry to kind of burst the bubble, because just like the idea of a PlayStation phone, PlayStation Mobile and having a PlayStation landing spot on Android sounds awesome. But in practice so far, it's just been a complete underwhelming nothing. So I think one of the big problems that these guys face, Nintendo and Sony in particular, is that Apple has been one of the reasons that Apple has been so successful with gaming on iOS is because the hardware is static. Developers know exactly what they're going to get. They know roughly how the hardware is going to perform in any given circumstance. And so they can cut a single release and have reasonable confidence that everybody is going to play it with a high level of success. And they know what the frame rate is going to be. But with Android, it's just a total crapshoot, right? For multiple reasons. Yeah, but isn't that the whole point of certifying stuff in this whole PlayStation Mobile thing? Is that these games are not new, right? Crash Bandicoot can run just fine on really low end hardware as long as the emulator is designed well. And so all they need to do is spec out the emulator. So the problem isn't, to me, the problem isn't the technical stuff. It's not great, but it's pretty good. And it's certainly better than a lot of the games that are currently on Android right now. You know, the selection is the real thing. The reason that the PlayStation Suite or PlayStation Mobile is exciting is because there's this idea that there's this library of really good games that you could finally get on Android and they'll catch up to iOS in that department. But what's happened is it hasn't gone anywhere because nobody's buying Sony phones. Now they're on HTC. But the real question is, will they put the games on the platform? If they would just say every PS1 game that we license for PlayStation is now available to download and buy in region by region the same way it was 10 years ago with the PlayStation, that would be huge. But they're not going to do that. And Vlad's right. The addition of HTC to the mix is not going to be enough to make them do that. Now, had they teamed up with Samsung, which of course would never happen, right? That would be a totally different story because then they'd have some real numbers on this thing. Well, this is the problem with both Sony and Nintendo in general is that they continue to be so precious about their title libraries. And that works for so long. But eventually, particularly in Nintendo's case, it's going to catch up to them where we use a complete flop. I'm buying a Wii U just to play Zelda. That's it. Like I want to pretend like I'm not going to. But when they when they put when Zelda and Metroid are on that platform, I'm buying one of those, you know, giant, stupid tablet controllers, which makes me so angry because I'm going to have Project Glass on the Xbox with the tablets I already own. It's going to be great and amazing. And so like Nintendo's small glass, smart glass, excuse me, smart glass. And I'll admit I am going to buy I will buy a 3DS briefly for New Super Mario Brothers 2 and when I finish it, I'll sell the I'll sell the 3DS. But most people won't. And this is eventually going to be a huge problem for Nintendo. And they're going to have no option but to pull a Sega and become a software house. And that, by the way, has been very successful for Sega. As it but I'm being keeping track. Really, it's been really successful for Sega. Well, what was Sega's keynote like at E3 this year? Oh, wait. Look, no, no, no, I don't. Well, there's studio now, right? They're effectively a studio and a licensing house. And when Nintendo falls as far as Sega has, then they will license stuff out. It'll be very successful relative to their size. Look, I got I got news for you. It wasn't that long ago that Sega was neck and neck with Nintendo for console popularity. Genesis. Yeah, yeah. It didn't work out, Chris. Just didn't work out. And Dito's point is very solid. EA had a press conference at E3. So if Sega was big in software, it would have had a much bigger presence. OK, well, then fine. Then use EA as an example. But but the point remains the same. I mean, Nintendo has such an important library of brands and of titles that it has every opportunity right now to start to make that transition into becoming a becoming the next EA or EA is a bad example because they're they're not doing well. They have lots of problems right now. But if they want to emulate, I hesitate to say it. Zynga. Look, there's some large software house that Nintendo can emulate. I don't know who it is, but they need to start to make that transition now before it hits them on the balance sheet. Ubisoft has a lot of, you know, good IP on their books. Who does? Ubisoft. Ubisoft. Oh, yeah. Dude, I just got finished replaying Beyond Good and Evil. Such a good game. That's a newbie software. The original. Yeah, it's on it's on Xbox is downloadable in HD. If you've never played Beyond Good and Evil and you want an Xbox, go and buy it. It's like, I don't know, six, eight bucks or something. And it is worth every second. Such a good by the way, it's halfway through it and then go stuck on something and left it. But now let me ask you something. When you bought it, did you pay for it in points or dollars? Yeah, I know. Points. See, that is why you don't know how much you spent because you spent points. I'm not happy about it either. I thought they said they were switching to dollars at some point. They should switch to Bitcoins. Bitcoins. Oh, God. That would be funny. Who's high? Anyway. So one other piece of software, I guess we should we'd be remiss if we didn't mention it is that Instapaper, there's now an official Instapaper for Android version, which was developed by the same team that made the Tumblr for Android app. It looks pretty good. I mean, you know, I've been using Paper Mill and Pocket and bouncing back and forth between them. So, I mean, I guess I haven't really felt like a huge amount of pain at not having a branded Instapaper client on Android. But it's a big deal because it's a premier app, you know, it's not Marco Arment specifically behind it, but it's, you know, it's an app that's in the conversation of important apps on iOS and now, you know, it's on Android. So we've had Instagram and now Instapaper. You know, the question I have is, you know, will the next big iOS app take as long to come to Android? Will we ever see Eric Schmidt's beautiful dream of developing for Android first? I don't know about Android first, but I do feel like the distance in time is contracting. Like you were saying, Peter. Oh, Flipboard, yeah, I forgot about Flipboard. The iPhone used to have exclusives for really, really extended periods of time, whereas now everybody's pretty much accepting the fact that Android has such a massive market share that just doesn't make sense for them not to have a version on the platform. There was some... I don't know necessarily that... There's some prominent developer recently who abandoned Android and somebody will know who I'm talking about, but somebody who's had a string of successful iOS games came out with a couple Android games and decided it wasn't worth his effort and then stopped. And I'm trying to think of... There were games? Yeah, well, yeah, yeah, games. Something heart, blank heart. I don't... I can't remember. But anyway, it happened just a few weeks ago or a couple months maybe. And he kind of laid out his manifesto for why he was abandoning Android. But I still think that Android has a very big problem. Like I said before, the lack of hardware consistency just makes it physically difficult for developers to deal with this stuff. And it's not that they don't want to. It's not like they're saying F you to consumers. It's much easier to say, well, I know my app works on this one device that's in 50 million users' hands than saying, well, I know it works on this one device that's in 10,000 users' hands and then this one that's in 30,000, blah, blah, blah. I think the point is a little bit of a refined one. So the one thing is that actually over the past month or two months, we've seen a lot of the exclusive iOS apps makes a jump. The information Insta ones, you had those so draw something. Temple run has come to Android as well. But the thing that's going to hold Android back and the point that you're making, Chris, is the really high end games. So the immediate example is Infinity Blade, right? So you got Infinity Blade one massive success on iOS, Infinity Blade two, same situation. But because they have such consistent hardware, they know how to code for those at a moment with Android. Those really high end games or high end versions of games are limited to Tegra devices, really. And it's essentially just graphically turned up versions of games that are available on the platform. And it's when you see those big blockbuster games starting to become more popular, more abundant than mobile devices, the Androids hardware fragmentation is just going to rise is a bigger problem. Because right now, honestly, draw something you can actually port it to a whole bunch of devices because, you know, anything can run it. Right, right. It's when you actually want to do something to use Nvidia's favorite terminology, console quality gaming, and you want to do that on your phone. That's when you have an issue. And that's when maybe things like Tegra Zone will take off. I don't know. It depends on how much actual interest there is. Because with Tegra Zone, you do get to code to a consistent platform. But then at the same time, a whole bunch of people have been complaining about Tegra's graphics drivers and how they're nonstandard and how much work you have to do to play along with Nvidia's way of coding for its GPUs. So that part of the Android future is the one that's probably the most problematic, in my opinion. So I mean, but so this issue is not going to get better, right? Because we've got now Intel based Android chips coming or Android phones coming. Right. We did a hands on with what used to be the Santa Clara, but now it's the San Diego. Yes, that was a really necessary renaming right there. Like California, one place, California, another place. Wait, I know exactly why they renamed it. And I don't know if anybody picked up on this. Yes, exactly. It's a shot across the bow of Qualcomm. That's what I was thinking, too. Yes, because Qualcomm is based in San Diego, if you weren't aware. Yeah. That would actually be really funny. I saw somebody picked up on that on Twitter and was like, ha ha. It's totally it. I would like to believe that Intel isn't that petty, but then I'm more inclined to actually believe that it is. Yeah. But I mean, the Orange San Diego is essentially the Lava Zolo, which is launching, if it hasn't launched already, over in India. Orange has pretty much nothing to do with this phone, apart from slapping down one of the most horrible, disgusting, annoying Android skins you've ever seen. We've bitched and moaned about Android skins. This orange one is amazingly probably the worst I've seen, because it's all orange. It's monochromatically orange and there's just different shades. It's just disgusting. I really like orange. But besides that, super skin, which- How bad could it be? Okay, you're right. It's pretty bad. Well, I don't know. For starters, I'm not a huge fan of the color, but the second thing is, it's just so monochromatic. It's so consistently there. There's no break from the freaking orange. Everything is orange. But besides that, besides that skin, which Orange probably outsourced to somebody, this is an Intel phone. Through and through. Intel designed it. Intel put it together. This is essentially the metfield development platform that we'll be seeing for ages. It does actually mark, to be honest, Intel's most significant entry into the mobile space. After Intel has had all these false starts and false starts. The really appealing thing with San Diego, which is launching tomorrow, in fact, here in the UK, and I think this month also in France, UK and France are the major launch markets for this, is the fact that it's priced really affordably. This is priced as a budget phone, and yet it has really decent specs. The 1.6 gigahertz, add-on processor, the metfield processor, we've seen benchmarks, is very good. You've got Intel's HSPA plus modem in there for some faster connectivity. Some fake 4G, if you like. 8 megapixel camera, there's HD voice with orange, there's NFC in this phone. It's really quite a stacked spec sheet. Four inch display, 1024 by 600 resolution, I believe, so the resolution isn't backwards like QHD. It's not the best display in the world, but it's kind of decently built. It is the size that you want. Yeah, it is. It is actually. When you pick it up, it feels really light, which might be a good thing for a whole bunch of people. The back cover is plastic. There's not too much special about this phone. You can tell that it's been made cheaply, let's say, but it's also kind of a nice plastic on the back. Again, over here in the US, in the UK, it's 200 pounds with 10 pounds of credit from orange. Okay, actually, I need to interrupt you. The technical specs and the fact that it's running Intel and blah, blah, blah, it's all very interesting. But the thing that I need to know is how do you compare phone prices in the UK? I don't get it. Well, you don't. Okay, I get that you have a totally different system wherein there's a certain price with a pay as you go, and then a lot of phones can just be free with an increased monthly price. I actually think for consumers, it's a better system because you can choose the way that you're paying for the phone more freely. But in terms of comparison shopping, it's completely crazy to me, and I don't understand how you compare the relative cost of phones across carriers. Do you just look at like, is there a standard price that's roughly equivalent to the American two-year contract price? Or do you just sort of throw your hands up, yeah, phones cost what they cost. Who knows? I'm going to be able to afford this plan this time around? Well, yes and no to both questions. Well, okay, the first thing is, yeah, there is no real standardized method. Nowadays, everybody has pushed to standardize it on two-year contracts, which I hate and loathe as to remember when the standard contract was a year, but it is what it is. There are still some 18-month contract options. So I think most people probably look for the contract that they like, like they know which phone they want, then they look for the contract that they like, how much data they want, how many minutes, et cetera, and then they compare the monthly cost. Because for the most part, phones, not so much anymore, because nowadays with smartphones, you do pay some upfront cost, but phones do come for free with most contracts. So essentially, it would be things like, here's a Galaxy S3, you can get it from 36 pounds a month or higher onto your contracts. So it's the per month price at which the phone is free. And then you can lower the per month price in order to have a better contract and pay less or rather pay more for the phone upfront. All of which is like a really complex calculation, which never really helps the consumer. Like my absolute best advice is buy the phone by yourself, get yourself a data deal separately. Because the minimum term of the contract, if it's two years, once it expires, your price of the contract doesn't diminish, it stays absolutely the same. So let's say it's 36 pounds per month, it stays the same. But that still includes the subsidy that you are paying off for the phone. So if you're paying, let's say, five pounds per month to pay off your Galaxy S3 for the first two years, as soon as that contract expires, you're still paying that five pounds per month subsidy for absolutely no benefit to yourself. So if you actually pay the data calls price separately and then buy the phone by itself, let's say on Amazon, or play.com or any one of these services that will sell it to you, you're better off. I did some statistical research with the iPhone 4 and that was definitely the case. Companies try and rip you off, it's just the way that it is. That's one aspect in which the UK and the US are identical. But with the Orange San Diego, in general, you can say that it's very cheaply priced for the spec sheet. And that's the biggest selling point. It has quick performance, it does well, and Intel has been working with Google to make sure that pretty much every Android app runs on this x86 phone. So you have to sit down and actually use the phone and find out if that's true when you use every single app that you actually want to use, but it sounds promising. Now here's my question. Whatever happened to Motorola's commitment to deliver Medfield, presumably in the US, but at all? Both for devices over most of the years, yeah. I don't know. It hasn't materialized yet. Yeah. It's a long delay. Maybe they'll announce it at I.O. That would be kind of a strange place to do it, but maybe. Does Intel have any events coming up? When's the next IDF? September? I want to say September, yeah. I guess they could do it there. We should actually talk about I.O. It's coming up very soon, actually. And I mean, what are we expecting? We're expecting Jelly Bean, right? Basically, I hope. Yeah. Presumably Google tablet or two or three. And the Google tablet. Can I tell you guys why I hope they don't do it? Because I want to see Ice Cream Sandwich happen. I actually want to see the damn thing distributed on devices and people enjoying Ice Cream Sandwich. And if I can just take a moment- You've written an editorial about this, right? About exactly this. About the fact that Ice Cream Sandwich is an app? Yeah, I wrote it like months ago and it's still valid today, which is depressing. Yeah. Yeah, so we got the latest numbers from Google Play. So just to put the numbers where Android 4.0 is right now, it's on 7.1% of devices that access Google Play. So in terms of actual Android devices, the number is probably a little bit lower because it doesn't include the Kindle and it doesn't include a whole bunch of, you know, I don't know, random Chinese and Indian devices that don't have Google Play access. And you know, some US devices too. And MG Siegler actually, he basically said, look, it took them seven months to get this far and there's a good chance that they're going to release the next version of Android before Ice Cream Sandwich even hits 10% of the install base. Yeah. Or they're going to announce, rather. Just a quick thing I wanted to mention was I've spent some time with LG's Optimus UI 3.0, which is its new skin for Android 4.0. That just got updated this weekend, in fact, the Optimus LTE over in Korea and probably going to get the update in Canada soon and all the other markets for it. So this time, hopefully, guys, with the Nitro HD and the Spectrum in the US. But besides that, the Optimus UI 3.0 is actually good. Just stop and think about that for a second. LG has an Android skin, which is nice. No, I don't believe you. It's shocking to me. So, yeah, I know. But, okay, but here's the other thing. Aaron is reviewing another phone with this OS and he likes it too. So I'm not all alone on this one. I like the Prada 3.0 skin. Why can't we just have more of that? Because it's a gingerbread, Chris. You're not allowed anything on gingerbread anymore. I forbid it. Yeah. And the sad thing about that is that the Prada 3.0 was released, what, like two months ago or something? Well into the ICS life cycle. Yeah. I mean, this is just a depressing aspect for me. LG is straightening out its skin. Samsung is straightening out TouchWiz. HTC has a lot of catching up to do. HTC doesn't get credit in this part of the discussion. HTC tried. Yeah, they tried, but they failed. Let's be honest. But LG and Samsung are straightening out their skins. They're making ice cream sandwich, skinned ice cream sandwich, feel good to use. And they haven't distributed those updates to their phones and now Google is coming out with the next version. This is a recipe for customer dissatisfaction. Even if ice cream sandwich drops a month after Google I.O., if we've seen Jelly Bean, if we've seen the future after ice cream sandwich, we'll be dissatisfied again. What if Jelly Bean is just another honeycomb? What if it's a tablet only? I don't think they're going to do that anymore. I think they learned their lesson that that's not a winning strategy. I hope so. The only point I'm making is that Android has extremely wide market share now in smartphones and if it doesn't make people happy, it actually has impact on the global happiness quotient. And I don't think we need that from Google. I think Google needs to think about that impact and the ways to satisfy people. And it should just not show off Jelly Bean at all until it reaches like 20%. This goes back to an age old argument about Android. It's a very depressing argument, but it's an argument nonetheless, which is that the average human being literally does not care what version of Android their device is running. It doesn't factor into the equation or the argument. They look at the hardware, they look at what the software looks like, can it run Android apps? Yes. Boom. Sold. It has nothing to do with 2.3 versus 4.0. And that sucks and that's an argument, I mean that's a conversation that I would like to change, but I think that as it stands today, the average consumer really doesn't care. I think they're starting to care. A little bit more. They might care. I mean people are growing more savvy. I'll tell you this much, okay. My mother who I finally managed to get her to jump on Android, now she's really enjoying her Android phone, she doesn't care, granted, okay. So our parents don't care about that. But you know, people in their 20s, 30s, 40s are just a lot savvier about these things. You can't just treat them as completely ignorant about the technology they're using. I mean a lot of people, I mean pretty much everybody who's, okay not pretty much everybody, but a lot of people know that they're actually using an Android phone nowadays. Yeah, so I think that the reason that people don't care about the version of Android that they have is with the ice cream sandwich upgrade, the tangible benefits to the consumer aren't completely in your face unless you're on a stock Android device because the skinning has occluded sort of the benefits that you get from ICS. And so like it's faster, I think it's a little stabler. There's some updates to some of the apps that aren't there on the older versions and the multitasking. So all the goodness that comes with ice cream sandwich just doesn't seem that obvious and in your face. So it doesn't seem like it's that big a deal. So the question is, can Google put out a version of Android that is very compelling, that has consumers demanding it from OEMs instead of OEMs saying, yeah, yeah, we'll put it on the next version when we get our skin done for it. That's their challenge. That's what that's what Matthias has to pull off. Yeah, I totally agree. And we're still waiting for them to make good on their commitment from a year ago to kind of band all these OEMs together and have a cohesive upgrade strategy. I was just going to say, I don't know how you necessarily do that. People again, go back to the regular consumer, they tend to chase features and things that are readily identifiable with a title. So if Jelly Bean just has faster, neater, more intuitive, more helpful UI, you know, the subtle things which actually improve user experience. If you can't put that in a single marketing or branding message, I don't know that, again, regular consumers would demand that version from the OEMs. And even if they do, I don't think that OEMs necessarily care. They are a little bit stuck in their ways. They are, you know. Well, certainly in the US, certainly in the US, the message is still more about how as an OEM, how do I get the carrier to want to sell this phone? How do I get the consumer to want this phone? Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. If you're looking for a good follow up on this conversation, you definitely should go read Vlad's editorial from June 1st about how mobile hardware and software are in fact separable no matter what manufacturers tell you. Because you know, we've heard this line from a whole lot of companies that we're special because we control both the hardware and the software. I think that only, I mean, only Apple is really doing it that these days now. And I mean, I totally blame Apple for this phenomenon. I just don't buy it anymore. I mean, the thing is Apple has been successful because of its combination of hardware and software. I don't argue that at all. But the issue is that you have all these copycat companies who think they're doing the same thing and they're not. Some companies just make really awesome hardware. Most don't make really awesome software. Google does, so just use the Google software. But that's kind of rehashing the old gold stock argument, which isn't necessarily the thing that I wanted to or the point that I was trying to make there. The point was that if me as an informed consumer, and again, I do feel like the informed consumer group is growing, like, ignorance about technology is kind of like literacy way back in the day. Okay. So only a few people knew how to write. But then we got education. We spread the word. We spread the ability to read and write. And that's how now we have like 99% literacy in most countries. I feel like digital literacy, if I can use a horrible cliche term, is growing, particularly with- Gadget literacy? So yeah, I guess so. So I feel like, I mean, the general thrust of my editorial was that companies should let those technically literate users go and do what they want with their devices. Because after all, you buy the device, you should have more control over it than we currently get. So the other big thing this week, oh, go ahead, Chris. We need to talk about the Galaxy S3, though, in the worst way. But I'll let you finish. I just want to mention one more thing, which is that Microsoft has this really insulting program called the Signature Program, where you can go into a Microsoft store and spend, I want to say it's $99, it might be $50, I don't know. There's some amount of money you can spend to get the same computer that you would get elsewhere, but with an undestroyed experience. Like it's just stock Windows out of the box. Can't you take your destroyed computer in and they will fix it up for you with stock Windows? Yes, you can. And I'm not suggesting that Google or OEMs offer this, because again, I think the program is very insulting. Oh, I am. That'd be awesome. No, but I'm saying the basis of it, the philosophy behind it is flawed. The fact that I need to spend money to get the experience that they wanted consumers to have in the first place is absurd. It's an absurd notion. The fact that you can do it is cool. I mean, it's great that the option exists, I guess, but the philosophy behind it is fatally flawed. Fair enough. But if OEMs could say, look, there's this dual boot option, or if you just want to swap from our skin to stock, something. I don't understand. There are so few devices that are using stock Android that it's actually a differentiator, which is messed up. It is absolutely insane to me that that's the case. It is. It is. And if I can just throw in an extra little bit of information here. Sorry to delay Dieter's love affair with the Galaxy S3. Part of my motivation for that editorial was actually trying to get stock Android on the HTC One X, which was a mission and a half and not one that actually succeeded that. And the amazing thing about it is all I'm actually trying to do is claw back HTC's modifications on top of Android. So I don't want to enhance it. I don't want to improve it. I'm just trying to take the crap off. And it's a nightmare. And there were multiple ROMs that I loaded. Again, I think I mentioned this in the last podcast about routing and the bootloader and all of that mess. Okay, fine. But then I loaded up multiple ROMs and none of them were perfect. Like none of them were totally devoid of sense skinning. None of them were perfectly stable. And I do have to admit, I kind of screwed up with my CMG mod 9 installation. So now the phone is a tiny bit bricked. That's my fault. A tiny bit brick doesn't make any sense. That's like a little pregnant. It doesn't work that way. I have two thoughts on this. What I mean is it's temporary. Actually, because I also have been loading custom ROMs. And I'll say two things. One, if you find a developer or even better, a group of developers that are making a ROM for your Android device that are doing a really good job and they have a donate button, click it because it takes time to make these ROMs. It takes time to figure out how to make software run better on these devices. And these guys are just doing it in their spare time for the most part. So kicking a little money their way is not a terrible idea. And I would like to see a little bit more organization in the Android space like there used to be in the webOS space with webOS internals where there was just one group that's never going to happen on Android. But just a little bit more group effort from all these smart people to band together in the way Cyanogen does honestly. So what I'm saying, I'm happy to pay for fixing a phone and getting the software I want on there. I guess I was thinking more in terms of paying community developers, donating a little bit of money so that they can take the time to improve this stuff. And then the other thing I was going to mention and not losing it, it was really smart though. I did get a custom ROM on my One X and so I'm playing around with that and it's fine. But it's still really hard to get off of. Yeah. Well, that's the other thing is with Android, we're still in this world of custom ROMs instead of Android being built in such a way where it's extensible and modular where you can easily take stuff off. When HTC customizes a phone, it's not really a skin. Sense isn't a skin. It's built way down into custom kernels and that's one of the reasons that the multitasking has a different behavior on the One X. At least I'm pretty sure that's part of the reason. And so it's not a simple endeavor to just say, no, stick Cyanogen mod on it because it's not just taking stock Android and slapping it on there. There's a whole bunch of stuff that goes on there. One of the things I would like to see in Jelly Bean is to make Android more modular and make it, make have Google's, you know, they're going to admit you guys are going to do your custom stuff on top of it. That's fine. Here's how to do it the right way. And if you do it the right way, you get the Google Play Store. And if you don't do it the right way and it's not easy for developers to remove your stuff when they want to do custom stuff, then sorry, no Google Play for you. It'll never happen. But that's my dream. It's a nice dream. And speaking of dreams. Beautiful dreams. Galaxy S3. I don't know. That was just the random segue. So Galaxy S3 got announced. It got announced the same day for like literally every major carrier. By the big four plus US cellular. So that's interesting. US cellular gets mentioned along with T-Mobile and Sprint and Verizon and AT&T. But what's crazy is it's called the Galaxy S3 on all five carriers. No custom versions, no custom names, no fascinate, no epic 4G touch, LT, blah, blah, blah. And Samsung is keeping its international button layout, the physical home button flanked by the back of the menu button, which Samsung finally put its foot down. Yep. They finally put their foot down. I cannot wait for the lawsuits that will ensue on this. I mean, it's great. It's going to be so much fun to watch. And it's also like we were wondering if the Galaxy S3 was going to have the same influence and be the same kind of hit that the Galaxy S2 was. And to my mind, the answer is now yes. Even if it doesn't sell quite as well. The bottom line is it's the same name on all four plus one, all five big US carriers. And that means it's going to be an influential device that everywhere in the world this phone is called the exact same thing. And maybe Samsung will make a thousand crazy variants like they did with the GS2. I mean, we'll have to see if they can hold themselves back from that or not. I guess it doesn't really matter. But the bottom line is like people are going to know Galaxy S3. Like regular humans will know what that is. Samsung really deserves a high five for that one. That is definitely moving in the right direction. Yeah. And the way the American carriers work, the fact that they were able to over three generations of devices shoehorn their way into the iPhone model of this is my device, you can't mess with it, you're going to take it, you're going to like it. And by the way, it's going to be called this. It's very impressive. And of course, that's something that HTC is trying very hard to do with the One Series. They don't have a ton of success yet in the US because we still have the Evo 4G LTE. But I think that within a couple of generations, we'll probably get there. And I mean, when the original Galaxy S, at their original launch for that device, they had the four different versions from the four different carriers. But everybody at that event in New York was just blown away and super impressed that Samsung managed to get all four carriers and all four of their PR teams in the same room at the same time for a unified launch. Yeah, they got released at different times, whatever, whatever. But they had a unified launch of one phone with lots of different variants and different names at one time. And we thought that was unprecedented and could never happen. They've managed to top that. And the thing that surprises me is if I had been Samsung, I would have done a huge event for this. Like the only olive branch they gave to the carriers is they didn't have a huge blowout US launch event to rub their noses in the fact that they just got owned. Sure. That's a very good point. What I was just going to say is Samsung is picking his bat as well, because today we also saw the Samsung something something exhilarate announced by AT&T. So the crazy, stupid naming schemes from carriers do still exist. It's just that Samsung is willing to tolerate them on lower end devices. Right. Yeah, that's a very good point. And that trend is probably going to continue ad nauseam, unfortunately. And why is AT&T so addicted to verbs? Like really long policy-labic verbs. So I can't remember who told me this, but somebody recounted this to me at some point and it was an aha moment where there is actually a theme for all four carriers about the kinds of words they use to describe their branded devices. I think sprints, I want to guess sprints is as many as possible. Right. No, no. Sprint is like aspirational or something. Like there's a whole science to it. Like they all have their like, you know, sort of themes that all the words need to be around. And it's like it's actually segmented between the four major carriers. I would imagine they're all kind of aspirational. Well it wasn't aspirational. I'm just making, I'm making that up. But it was something like that. And all four had their own segment. And I can understand why those segments exist because you go to a company like Samsung prior to the Galaxy S3, the Galaxy S2 or the original Galaxy S, you had, you know, you were launching this device on three or four different carriers and you're trying to come up with names for them. And I'm sure that the carriers want to differentiate as much as they possibly can. So they probably part of that is there's probably some science. They're probably people who their only job is to come up with these names. Right. And there's probably a whole science to the philosophy of the philosophy behind the naming. Okay. But I would just like to point out as many people as they are who work in this industry, they're all wrong. They're all terribly, horribly wrong. Like I can never fathom a situation and never fathom a culture in which two people will have the conversation where one says, oh, what phone is that that you carry in there? Oh, this? This is the exhilarate. This is the eviscerate. No, nobody's ever going to say that and just be proud of it. This is the verb. I'll say this is my Android phone. Why don't they borrow from car names? I think car names, you know, particularly American brands, there's some really iconic car names like the Mustang, the Charger, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah, but they've had they, you know, 60 years to get rid of a lot of bad car names. The Germans, the Germans have the Germans have car naming figured out because everybody knows the Mercedes has the A C E S BMW. Yeah. That makes no sense. I don't know any of that. The Audi's I guess. Yeah. The Audi is, you know, a four a six, right? So it's three series five series seven series that I get. Right. And it's very consistent from generation to generation. BMW is actually like time after time after time. I'm not making this up. I know I'm a BMW fan boy, but every time I talk to a designer, they cite BMW as a source of inspiration for them because their designs are so iconic and because they are so consistent in their in their in their branding. And part of that has to do with the fact that. Speaking of design issues in Europe. Wait, wait, wait, fresh this out. I mean, Germans actually. What's trying to get to the. What was that, Vlad? Oh, I think German people, they actually consider Mercedes a higher order brand than BMW. So it's fascinating to me that designers say that they take more inspiration from BMW designs. But BMW, with the exception of the the Galway, BMW has a much stronger branding message through its history than than Mercedes does. And I will fight anybody tooth and nail on that. Come at me, bros. Anyway, we're getting my hand. I have had an attempt to the transition was to talk about the fact that we now have a nano SIM card standard. Yes, we do. And I would like to point out that. Well, no, we should talk about the nano SIM. So, yeah, the nano SIM is a thing. Allegedly, G&D says that it's it's going to be the Apple standard, which shouldn't really come as a surprise to anybody. This is the least revolutionary of the standards that were on the table. And it's going to make designing a quote unquote push push SIM card slot very difficult, where you would you know, it's a spring loaded mechanism like a micro SD slot where you you push it in and it like locks into place and you push it again to pop back out. That type of design will be very difficult because the Apple standard was ratified. And that's because the design doesn't have any sort of notch on it that, you know, something inside the phone can latch on to. So it's necessitates a tray, which, by the way, I think that tray is a misnomer. The term tray has been bandied about a lot over the past few months. But what tray really means is that the it can be a physical tray or it can go it can be like a pan under the battery like you get now. It just needs to rest somewhere instead of being popped into a slot. But anyway, I think the more interesting news here is actually the fact that Etsy is also deep in negotiations right now on hashing out the embedded UIC standard, which, although it's focused on industrial devices right now, Apple has voiced an interest in Etsy meetings regarding UIC. And that makes a lot of sense because we've heard rumors for a good two, two and a half years now that Apple is looking into embedded Sims. This is happening. Etsy is standardizing like how these embedded Sims will be provisioned and how you'll change owners and how you'll change service providers. This is all being hashed out as we speak. Once that is a standard, it's just a matter of time before our phones are using embedded Sims, particularly the iPhone, because we know that Apple has an interest in this. That's fine. As long as Etsy's standard is ironclad, open and can't be screwed with by carriers and manufacturers, because unlocking Sims is a pain now. Switching Sims is kind of a pain now. But if all the world looks like CDMA in terms of device portability and number portability and SIM portability, that's not a world I want to live in. I think that's exactly the barrel we're staring down right now. This only looks to me like it's going to take away GSM's advantage of having replaceable SIM cards. I would love the dream that Dieter just painted of you having the SIM card in the phone. There's absolutely no reason why we couldn't have integrated those things in the phone if you could then alter what that SIM card actually does. When you go to, let's say, Taipei for Computex right now, you go into a store and you say, I want my SIM card to be switched to a local contract for a week and limited data, yada, yada, yada. Then people do it, snap of the fingers, and then you're on your way. I don't think that's going to happen at all. You'll be like, you go there, you need to get an old-fashioned phone that actually needs a SIM to slide into it, or you get a disposable $20 Nokia phone or something. It'll be a complete nightmare. The bottom line is that in the best case scenario, you're still going to need to either call your carrier or log into your carrier's online service portal to initiate the process of changing your service between phones. Best case scenario. This only points to more carrier control. Can't wait for that. Makes me really excited. Sorry to be a downer, guys, but this is happening. Okay. Is there anything else we want to talk about? We saw that maybe the iPhone's glass, the front, and it seems to confirm if it's real that it's a taller iPhone, the new aspect ratio, which is exciting and interesting. We also have got yet more evidence that Apple's dropping Google Maps and moving to its own system. The Wall Street Journal confirmed it after we've seen it on a whole bunch of other sites. Wall Street Journal also has a really good history of the battle between Apple and Google and the history on how they've dealt with maps. The only question in my mind is, does there anybody that really believes that they're going to talk about this thing at WWDC? Are they going to hint at the different aspect ratio at WWDC? Or are we just going to wait until September? Because I don't think they're actually going to announce this thing this month. Everybody seems to think that the new iPhone is being announced in the fall. Obviously I think that's a possibility, but I think that considering the rapidity with which we're seeing leaks right now, that would certainly line up with the possibility of an earlier announcement. I'll leave it at that. There are a lot of sessions at the Worldwide Developer Conference for developers that are TBD. I know John Gruber had linked to some analysis on this and maybe had done some of his own. That was, well, okay, there's obviously going to be an iOS 6 announcement. There's going to be new iOS 6 features that they're going to talk about. The question is, is some of this TBD stuff about, say, aspect ratios, in which case, you know, cats out of the bag. It seems to me that Apple can't even whisper a hint of different aspect ratios or support for different screen sizes or anything like that at iOS without letting the cat out of the bag. At WWDC. And just announce the phone. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. But, you know, this is also the other thing. Maybe Apple's hand maybe falls here because if you recall a day or two ago, the Microsoft smart glass rumors burst out, right? It came out, I think a day or two ahead of the actual E4 announcement yesterday. So Microsoft's immediate reaction was to go out and register all of the smart glass URLs on the internet. So essentially, Microsoft was saying, okay, you got our news. Now we might as well go out and actually register all the domains that we need. So I mean, it's kind of a conundrum for Apple, I think, with the iPhone because if it isn't ready to be sold in July, let's say, it'll be very much unlike Apple to just announce it in the middle of June and then wait until August or September when it actually puts it on sale. But then exactly as you say, you can't really discuss iOS 6 without discussing this new screen resolution and this new aspect ratio. But the problem is they need to start putting in support for this larger size into iOS 6. So it's eventually going to get out. Yeah. Right. So that's an issue. I mean, the other thing I'm noticing with Apple is Mountain Lion isn't ready to be released yet. But at the same time, all the Ivy Bridge refreshes are happening. So I kind of feel like Apple right now has this consistent disjointedness between its hardware and software roadmap. And I don't think it's necessarily the company's fault, but things aren't aligning the way you would want them to perfectly align. Like if you wanted to have a perfect alignment for the refresh on laptops and desktops, you would want Mountain Lion to be ready to be released in June this month. If you wanted to do the same with the iPhone 4 and... Well, why do I keep calling it the iPhone 4? The iPhone whatever, the next one. And the next version of iOS, you would probably want the hardware to be ready to go on sale this month or next month. But it doesn't seem like that's the case. If anything, Apple's problem is that they have too much that they could announce, right? Because Mountain Lion, to your point, is going to be just about ready to be released. It'll be close. You have an entire line of laptops and desktops and all-in-ones that can and should and probably will be refreshed. And those refreshes will be in many cases significant because retina displays are probably on tap. And then you have, of course, the iPhone and iOS 6. So I mean, is Tim Cook going to be on stage for three hours? They're going to have to pick and choose, right? They're not going to drop all of this at once. It just doesn't make any sense. Well, they're going to do their standard Apple thing with the MacBooks. They're going to announce the MacBooks the day before. That's my prediction. No, the MacBooks are going to be... If the MacBooks are retina, that's going to be a big deal. You're right. Good point. I was just going to say that Apple has been refreshing its MacBook Pros without actually calling them out in events. They've just done it directly in the store a couple of times. But yeah, if you're going to stick a retina display in there, which everybody expects, this high DPI code in Mountain Lion, I think even Lion, there are hints that these retina displays are coming from all over the place. So they're probably coming. This is just going to screw over everybody who's launched something in Computex or anything else recent. Because everybody's still kind of using the same old resolutions. And now you come out with a 2000 by 1000 madness laptop. It's going to be really hard for me to not want one of those. I'm telling you. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. And it's the usual situation. In fact, I touched on this in the poem piece, the fact that when Apple decides it wants something, it sucks all of that out of the entire supply chain. So I'm sure that Apple, if these retina MacBooks exist and they're going to announce that at WWDC, they've probably been manufacturing them for two, three months now. And they know what their demand is going to be. So I'm sure that they've been buying every single retina laptop display that's been coming off of the assembly lines from every conceivable supplier. None of those displays have been going to anyone else, I guarantee you. So that's a huge problem for the Dells and the HPs and the Asus and the Acer's of the world. There's just no way for them to get their hands on these components in the early days until the suppliers ramp up or the demand for the MacBooks diminishes, which doesn't happen. Well, and to bring it back to our earlier conversation about Computex is that it sucks the wind out of this innovation in form factors, right? You can get a crazy form factor that'll run Windows 8, or you can get the laptop with the best screen imaginable that nobody else will have. Sure, it's not a crazy transformer, but look at the screen. It totally cuts the legs out from that form factor argument if, in fact, Apple does maintain exclusivity on it. And just to bring this back to the iPhone, Chris's point is very solid about the fact that Apple wants to have production already happening with displays and other components before it announces devices. The speculation with the iPhone 4 display, this enlarged, taller display, it's four inch, probably four inch display, has always been that the manufacturers that Apple has contracted are building prototypes, and they haven't really settled on the final design for the product. So if that's the thing that's happening right now, they've signed the contracts, they're building prototypes, they're testing things out, it's probably, yeah, I mean, I would say it's almost definitely too late if those are the facts for this to be a product that gets launched at WWDC. Like, we really would be looking at September-ish launch time. That's true, yeah. Well, I think with that, it's time to wrap up the Verge Mobile show. We've been going for an hour and a half, a long, forever. We've basically been podcasting since I was born. I'm going to be in during this podcast. That happened. If you want to email us, you can. We've got a fancy new email address, it's mobileshow at theverge.com. We are also on Twitter. I am at backlawn, Chris is at zpower, Vlad is at Vlad Sabov, or you can leave a comment on this post when it goes up, or you can talk to us on the forums, because we deeply love to see that. We will catch you guys next week.