 Greetings, mobile accomplishers. Welcome to the Verge Mobile Show. I am one of your hosts, Peter Bohn. I may have started Twitch early, but we're here. Greetings, hello. I am Flat Sevov, one of your other hosts. And I'm number three, Dan Seifert. And Chris Ziegler is in the city of New York, but he is not in our offices and was unable to join us. He is currently wandering the streets. We won't say why. Well I don't know if that's a good point. It is so cold in New York today that I bet you Chris is probably like frozen to a pole right now. If you've been following ZPower on Twitter, you will note that he is currently looking for apartments. And having less than adequate luck, he was complaining about a rhombus shaped apartment earlier, a rhomboid apartment. That sounds like it would be an actually pretty roomy apartment for New York. Yeah, I mean I'm relatively happy with my apartment, but that's because I live in Brooklyn where there's just so much space, it's amazing. I'm relatively happy with my house because I don't live in New York City. No. But we're going to soldier on without Chris. Although I do have to mention that I have, he and another Virgin employee, there's currently a bet going about who's actually going to pull off their move successfully first. And I have 50 bones, 50 large ones, actually not really large ones, just $50, 50 bucks down saying that Chris will not complete his move successfully first. And the fact that his apartment search is going so badly, I feel bad for him as a human, but I feel great for myself as a person with a bank account. So I'm pretty excited. I should just point out that Chris is in fact with us. He's in the background in that Virg portrait behind you, Dieter. Oh yeah, that's true. He's right back there. Over your left shoulder. This is weird now, I feel like he's staring at me. Because in that picture he's holding a phone and he's looking directly at me. I'm sure he's staring at you anyway. How many walls would a rumboid apartment have? Four, right? Four. Isn't that the squished square? Yes. Well, not squished. Slanted square? Yeah. When you go like that. I get my geometry terminology mixed up sometimes. Well I'm a product of the North American US school system, so needless to say, I know my geometry. So weird week in mobile news. Lots of sort of random stuff. It's also earnings week, so we'll probably touch on some of those. But before we get to any of that, we want to point out that our very own Niel Atletel has reviewed this. This is the Pebble Steel. And he let me borrow it here for the mobile show. And it's a, if you look at it from the side, it looks pretty blocky. But other than that, it is a handsome little watch. If you compare it to the original Pebble, it just makes the original Pebble look like junk. I'm a terrible person. People told me I'm wrong about that, but I'm not wrong. And he likes it. I think he gave it a pretty good score, like a 8.5? Yeah. Yeah. He scored it pretty well. I'm one of those people who says you're wrong. I mean the original Pebble Steel looks and feels like a very decent watch. I'm sorry. You're so wrong, Flav. I thought that too. I mean I said steel looks so much better than the original Pebble. It feels like a million times better. No, but hang on. That's not what I said. D2 was bashing the original Pebble. I didn't say the new one isn't good. I'm just saying that it doesn't completely diminish the reason for the old one to exist. That's what I'm saying. It does. It does. Nobody should ever buy the original Pebble. I mean the Steel's going to be shipping soon. You should not buy the original Pebble. You should buy the Steel. Although it is a hundred bucks more which is a lot. But I mean I'm pulling a Vlad right now. I feel pretty good about this. Yeah. Pretty sweet. The one in the middle because I know I'm going to get questions about it is a phosphor e-ink watch, not a smart watch, just a regular watch watch. Man, this is awesome. I'm going to wear three smart watches all the time. I need to get the Gear and I need to get the MetaWatch. Nobody needs to get the Galaxy Gear. That is a categorical statement. So I don't want to steal all of the other stuff because I'm sure he's going to talk about it on the Vergecast proper. But his metaphor at the end is that this is like the Palm, the Pilot, the original Pebble and the Pebble Steel is like the Palm Five. I think that's exactly right. In terms of hardware quality and the jump and functionality and also in terms of potential to be completely destroyed by a major competitor if you don't stay on your game. So I know, I'm sure like you mentioned, Neil I don't have plenty to say on the Vergecast and he can talk about the hardware, but I've been using the new app and the app store to go with it. Yeah, what do you think? I haven't been using the app store yet. So it's greatly improved over the old app. It's much better looking. That's a lot nicer and the fact that you can download watch faces and apps using Pebble's own app and manage them. There's like a little storage space. So even with the Pebble Steel you can only store eight apps and stuff on this Pebble at one time. So it's easy to fill that up so that the mobile app on your phone gives you a place to like hold the ones that you're not using and you can easily swap them back and forth and stuff. But that's really cool. There used to be third party apps that you need to do all that stuff with. There was third party apps to find watch faces and all this other stuff. So Pebble's kind of brought all of that in house. It's a much better user experience. It's way easier for people to grasp if you're not a super nerd. For those of you watching us on, oh man I just picked the wrong question. Sorry about that everybody. I was answering a question about, I meant to answer a question about did you order the Pebble Steel. Here, this is the one. Have we ordered the Pebble Steel? Guys, if you're watching YouTube you'll see this question from Tomas. I just slaughtered your first name. Yes, I ordered the Pebble Steel. How about you guys? I did not. No? I did not. Hey, that's a mistake man. Maybe if they release a wooden one. Yeah, oh god, don't even start. I know you're desperate to talk about your wooden Motorola X. So I'm actually really excited about the app store for Pebble. I'm hoping that they can charge and the developers will be able to make money. They'll probably have to give Apple their 30% or whatever. That stinks but that's life. But finding apps right now for the Pebble without the store, it feels again like the early days of Palm of like hunting through forums and searching Google and ending up at the place. You don't know if it's sketchy or not and finding, downloading stuff from random drop boxes and other random places and not really knowing where it's coming from and not really knowing if you can trust it. I mean there's a reason that app stores are popular on phones because they're stupidly convenient and they instill a sense of trust and Pebble needed that. So I'm really excited to be able to install apps that way and not have to futz around hunting through Pebble's forums to find stuff anymore. The other interesting thing about the new software is that there are apps that Pebble is partnered with, with like Foursquare and Yelp and ESPN and I think GoPro as well. So like these apps that actually run on the watch itself as opposed to a companion app on your phone. So you can check in on Foursquare directly from your watch and look up Yelp listings and things. And Neelai mentioned in the review that it's really kind of cumbersome and I kind of have to agree. It's cool to be able to like look at my watch and be like oh I'm checking in at you know Ray's Pizza but it takes like 8 to 10 button presses. And I don't know why you would browse anything on Yelp on your watch like that I'm not sold on at all but you can. I've never been sold on Yelp. Ever since the time I tried to search for carrots in Manhattan and it completely let me down. Yelp is not for me. I would just like to completely agree with Dita here in so far as, but I won't use the same palm analogy because honestly palm is one of those things that happened before I cared. But it does feel very much like this stage in the development of smart watches is very much where we were when smartphones just started to get off the ground. Exactly as Dita was saying, you go and you scout around and you scram around for apps and you find the ones that really appeal to you and are neat and whatever. And I think that's part of what builds enthusiasm for these platforms and for these you know things that develop over time and things that get the grassroots support. It's being able to find some good ones. And I think that's been the case with Pebble. I'm still a huge fan of that piney wings one that was shown to us at CES which was simulated tiny wings on Pebble which was made by a fan and a user. So that's the beginning stage but as Dita says, in order for things to mature and for them to coalesce and for more serious developers to invest more serious time into it, you need this sort of an app store. So I haven't been using it and I'm encouraged by what Dita is saying in so far as the things that Pebble wanted to achieve are happening. And finally I would like to point out that it seems like all of us are wearing a Pebble at the moment. I am not wearing a Pebble at the moment. I put mine on for the show. You're wearing two. No I took them off, now I'm just wearing a dumb watch. Although I need to ask you guys a question. This is the review unit and it's paired to Neelai's phone and he's next door. Uh oh. Can I check him in to Dunkin' Donuts because I totally can right now. Yeah, well see the thing is like nothing will happen on his phone. The Pebble will pull all the data using the data connection on the phone and it will find the location data and stuff like that but when you're interacting with it, nothing changes on the phone screen or anything like that. Yeah I tried to open Pebble Snap and it says that he needs to open an app on the phone so I won't be able to take creep shots of Neelai. Which would be amazing right now if I could do that. Well it must be pretty close by right because it's a Bluetooth connection. So okay, questions coming in. I'm not going to do this all show but I think it is kind of fun. So here's one, will you wear Pebble Steel daily? And yeah, probably, we'll see. I know there was an earlier question, is 250 bucks a lot? I mean if you're going to spend 250 bucks on a smart watch you better wear the damn thing right? So yeah and what I feel about the cost of this is like the Pebble Steel is a greatly improved hardware over the regular Pebble but if it wasn't a smart watch, it would be grossly overpriced. It's like the hardware that you get on like a $70 to $90 fossil watch right? It's not exactly a high end watch, it doesn't quite match a citizen or a psycho that can command $300 to $500. It's certainly not a watch that's multiple thousands of dollars. So the reason that it's 250 bucks is because you're getting this like $80 to $90 watch with the smart guts of the Pebble. So the reason it's 250 bucks is because Pebble wants to make a profit. Well that's what I mean. You wouldn't pay 250 bucks for this if it was just an LCD display that displayed the time. I think they could justify the cost based on those things but don't expect to get a watch caliber of a few hundred dollars out of it. No I expect to wear it every day. Now what I might do is wear it but every now and then snooze my alarms because I do have a lot of stuff going to it. And that's actually one of the hassles with using it with an iPhone which I've now switched back to is you know, you kind of are all or nothing with what goes to the watch right? Yeah, I mean either if you have it show up on your phone and it goes to the watch and if you don't want it on the watch you have to turn it off on the phone. So the other wearable in the news this week is Google Glass. They have released four frames. They're just glasses frames and they've got lenses in them and you can get your own prescription so you can actually use glass if you wear glasses. And I got a chance to play around with them and put them on and they're fine. They're light, they're thin. They're $225 which is like I would have spent a really long time saying whoa. I mean there are glasses that cost that and way more especially once you factor in the cost of the lenses which these don't by the way. So I know all sorts of people that will spend that much money on fancy frames or just good looking frames. I don't obviously but you're already spending $1500 on Google Glass so I kind of have to assume that the $225 is going to be a sticker shock. But wait, this is $225 for essentially a middleman so it doesn't include the lenses for your prescription glass wear and it doesn't include the Google Glass, it's just a frame to put the two together. Is that correct? That's correct, yep. It's a piece of metal with a special mount for the Google Glass. Yeah, but it's a stylish piece of metal. This is true. And it's titanium right? Like it's actual titanium. I don't think titanium is anything special anymore. I had a titanium wristwatch that was really cool and I got a few years ago because it was so incredibly light and it was like people would pick it up and they were just shocked that it was metal because it was so light. No I had a buddy who was a road biker and he would piece by piece like scavenge together the money to buy titanium parts to lighten his bike up and he would say titanium. And we had like part time jobs, he worked as a bike mechanic, I worked at a photo lab and so it was like every month he could buy like one more screw for his bike. Isn't that what makes it special and what makes you appreciate it at the end? Is that you worked hard for it? Yeah and you can just get little bits by bits by bits and at the end feel like you've built something. Yeah, I mean I don't know whatever. So I'm going to keep going with this, this is super fun. Derek wants to know if I'm going to wear the glass or if any of us will. So I said they look pretty good on Twitter and I do think they look pretty good in the context of like wearing glass. And at the end of the day you're still a glass hole. It looks way better and it looks way more integrated compared to just glass on its own with the headband, but you're still deep in the uncanny valley of gadget weirdness when you're wearing this thing. And I think, sorry I got to finish. How long does a battery life last on glass? It's not all day right? And you can't like wear the frames without glass and it's not easily modular. I mean there's a little screw and you can take them off but then the stem is too short. So basically like you need to carry around your regular glasses anyway unless you want to be walking around with an inoperable set of glass. Well I have another rant about glass. Writing this article is super hard because when you refer to glasses you refer to a pair of them right? One, two, and then you refer to them in the plural like oh where are my glasses? Oh they are over there, I need a pair of glasses. And so that's fine. And then glass is singular. So you have a pair of glasses with a singular glass on them. And I want to refer to glass, it's an it, but my glasses which is a singular containing glass is a they and I lose my mind. So I'm done talking. Well I think I just wanted to make the point that I don't think anybody on our staff has actually paid $1500 to buy Google Glass for their own personal wants and needs. And even though a lot of us might have been able to get, I am? Because I don't know anybody in our office that wears them. Well I'm not telling you that. They don't wear them to the office because they don't want you to tease them. I think that speaks to where we are at with glass. I mean like you know if it's going to be acceptable to be wearing a computer on your face it's probably going to be acceptable in our office one of the first places. And if people are too shy to wear that in our office where there's like literally gadgets all over the place and our job is to like try these gadgets out and like you know somebody, you'll walk by somebody like deep in an Oculus Rift at any given point in the day. I think that really speaks to where the social acceptability of glasses at this point. I don't think adding a prescription lenses changes that at all. It just makes it so that people like Dieter could possibly embarrass themselves in our office with it if they wanted to. It doesn't really like make it socially more acceptable or anything. The thing for me with glass is and I totally agree with you guys, the social aspect though I think it can be overcome if it actually was really useful. So if wearing glass was really something that improved your life, it really gave you something unique that you couldn't get from your smart phone or your smart watch. Some sort of alert, some sort of information, some extra awesomeness that just enhanced your life to a point where you just didn't give a damn about the embarrassment, people would be using it. But what's happening is that people are finding it's got a tiny battery like Dieter was just saying. It's got kind of a crummy camera which is a gimmick which wears off after a while and you do look really rather like an asshole. I absolutely hate the glass whole term but most people who are running around with Google Glass on them do behave either smugly or as you guys are saying, they're too embarrassed and they just don't wear them. So it's kind of really terrible. And the thing that I would say is I've seen one of those like future scenario videos where everybody is wearing glass and it's kind of simulating information about who is this person and whatever and people are meeting each other at a party and what not. And that's just like a terrible dystopian vision of the future to me. It's like forget the personal contact, you just have all this information flowing in front of your face and you can just act like you're a social human being. Yeah, so here's the thing. Google's counter argument to that is 50 years ago if you had seen people walking around with phones, you would think oh my god, the end of society has come. Everybody is just listening to music and not interacting and listening to each other instead. Well that's not mentality folks. And you know this like Twitter is ruining our brains, the internet is ruining our brains, novels are ruining our brains, the written word is ruining our brains. There's truth to some of these arguments and then there's a line of like being afraid to these arguments and the question is like we would be okay if we turned into that society and we would still maintain our humanity but the question that we need to decide is not is it horrible or is it okay, it's like what kind of society do we want to form around the fact that eventually they're going to be able to build a version of Google Glass that looks like this and is relatively discreet and how will that change this because it's happening, it's coming, get ready. So yeah but by that standard of retaining our humanity, anything that happens in the future will be just fine because we'll still be human. Yeah. Right. That's what I'm saying, it's a very low standard and the thing that I would say is actually the headphones point is a good one but not in the angle that you and others are pushing it because I do find this. I wasn't pushing it, I was saying Google's argument. Hang on. Oh yeah, that's valid. But what I would say is you get on the train and you see everybody with their ears plugged up and isolated and not trying to communicate, I mean that is a consistent issue particularly in these big cities and guys from smaller towns and cities are like I just don't understand this because in those communities, you actually have communities and you actually have people knowing each other even if they don't love or have the greatest relationships, they at least communicate. They're some sort of society and in the big cities that we live in, New York and London and San Francisco, there's more isolation and this technology helps it and the thing is okay we have headphones that isolates your sound and now you might start wearing glass and it isolates your vision. I mean ultimately we're just going to end up with a big freaking helmet on our heads and just commute everywhere and just ignore everybody. That sounds awesome. God that would be such a wonderful time. Come on, I just won the Grammy's, I want to live in that future. On a self-driving Segway. Yeah of course. I mean I hear what you're saying Vlad but I also like you know that is not, people not communicating with each other is not a new thing at all. It's funny because like every once in a while people find these pictures of like the subways from like 60 years ago and nobody is looking at each other and talking because they're all face deep in the newspaper and like it's like today we're just facing in our smart phones and we have headphones on. You know people in big cities aren't going to suddenly be more communicative and want to talk to each other and things like that just because they don't have something entertaining them. Like I don't know. That's a very fair point. That's a very fair point. I'm just saying that this is one aspect of technology that is kind of assisting that trend which might have as you say lost it for a long time and it doesn't make me happy. I mean there's a lot of reasons why technology makes me happy, I'm just saying this is not one of them. So this question is like gaining all the upvotes so I got to ask it. This is Luke. What's missing from Glass that if it had it you would actually want it? And then Vlad I think you're the best person to answer this. What would make you actually be like yeah, I really want Glass? Carrot facts. Carrot? Carrot facts. I think the thing that's missing is making the features that it has now but just making it so much more robust. So actually having a camera that kicked ass and actually having a better life that lasted and actually not heating the side of your temple when it operates is actually just making it better. Not like this better rather than beater. Make it really good and then we can talk. But the camera is a gimmick. Whereas if you had one, I would just say it right now, if you had a really kick ass camera I would wear Glass. If you had a good battery that let me use the camera I would totally wear Glass. I would pay the money for it. I think for me personally it would have to be way more discreet. Like if it was something like Deeter's glasses that he has on now or just like a regular pair of sunglasses. Don't even bother me. What's that? If you can't creep shot somebody, if you can't surreptitiously record movies without getting arrested and questioned by the FBI. Well hang on, that is the other thing. When you're taking a creep shot with Glass you look at the thing that you're looking at with your eyes. Right. You're not really creep shooting anybody. You're like, it's your eyes. Yeah. You're still a creep though. It's still really creepy. Alright, so in a break from Verge Mobile Show tradition, the next thing that I want to talk about is the thing that we usually wait until the very end to talk about. And that is Blackberry. Whoa, really? Did I guess correctly? Yeah dude. Version 10.2.1 was released. And it's got a bunch of crazy features. They fixed the incoming call screen. They've got this weird pinch. Okay, they've added a bunch of features but the two headline features to me are completely insane. Dan, you pick one and I'll pick the other one because I'm betting you agree with that. The headline feature to me wasn't even mentioned by Blackberry in its announcement. And that's the fact that you can install Android apps without any conversions. So you can just download an Android app and press install and it installs on the phone. Tom Warren has a Blackberry Z10 in the UK that got the update because my poor American model doesn't have the update or whatever. And he tested it out. He was able to install Instagram right on the phone without having to do any of the conversions he used to have to do in order to get them on the phone. And that's kind of a big deal. The problem of course is the distribution. The distribution is still a problem but the idea that they advertised Android apps but did all this crap to make you do work arounds is annoying. And I get maybe they're trying to stop piracy. Maybe they couldn't figure it out but look, where you're at and what you're trying to do with this platform and this device, yeah guys, just let us install APKs. So thank god they finally got there. Yeah, I mean the thing is you can't really get the APKs for the apps that you really want in an above board way. Like there's apps that you can download from the Play Store that will extract APKs and then you can like get that file and install it and things like that. But you can't just go to the Play Store and be like, give me the APK file from this and I'll install it on wherever. So I know there are third party app stores and things like that but if you want to get Instagram on your BlackBerry phone, you kind of have to go through a few shady steps to get there. We just made that very important with respect to the Pebble, the whole utility of a centralized app store and that is the case with the Play Store. The difference is that people were publishing their Pebble apps outside and wanted you to get them whereas like Instagram is not publishing its app outside of the Google Play Store. Right, yeah, exactly so. Okay so they added the ability to finally do some filtering on the BlackBerry hub but they did it via like a pinch gesture where like you go in and custom set what the pinch gesture does and then you do the pinch gesture and that creates your filter. Come on. You don't have to describe it with such a cringe detail. I know it's weird and everything. That's not even the worst part. Like that's actually really useful and I've been waiting for them. I mean I'm not a heavy BlackBerry 10 user to say the least because Chris Ziegler has mine and so I haven't been able to use it. And I'm sure you've been banging down his door to get it back. The hilarious feature is their new lock screen. Have you seen how this thing works? I actually haven't but the way they describe it. Yeah, no I went like you can go and find like a N4BB put up a little video showing it. Basically you have a picture, you set your picture so it's like Windows. You get to like have a picture be your lock screen. Hooray! And on Windows you can like pick the thing that you want to draw to unlock your screen, right? On BlackBerry what they do is every time you unlock your phone it displays a random grid of numbers. Like just random numbers across the front of your screen. So you get your pretty picture and then you've just got a bunch of numbers on top of it. And then you need to search for your unlock number which you pick ahead of time. So say you pick five and then you drag the whole screen across so the five is resting upon your unlock position on the picture. So like if I had a picture of Ladd for example as my lock screen because why wouldn't I? I would have to take the five and like drag a five so that the five is resting over his right eyeball and that unlocks the phone. God that's so weird. It's just madness. It's just complete and utter insanity. And like okay so it's a number you need to guess that and it's position you need to guess that. I can see how that's relatively secure. At least as secure as like the pattern unlock on an Android phone. But also like the whole point of having a picture on your lock screen is being able to see the picture on your lock screen of your kid or the sunset or whatever. And instead you've got the picture with a bunch of numbers on top of it. Like who thought of this feature? I'm really confused. I'm really confused. I'm sure that there's a BlackBerry fan who is writing angry questions. It's just really, really unnecessary. I mean the point we'll be making is that these guys need to catch up with the rest of the market and just get into step with it. And what they're doing is they're trying to do unique stuff. And it's like no. Because like you were saying, this isn't really enhancing security to such a degree that you want to teach people and you want to make them learn a new thing because they're using your device. But the other thing about the lock screen which actually was interesting to me is they claim to have actionable lock screen items. You guys seen that? Yeah, so you can go directly into stuff. So that's all the actionable elements? It just means that you can open a notification directly into like a message or an app or whatever. Okay, so exactly like OG and Samsung were doing in their skins in like 2010. And like iOS does and Android does. That's not much of an action. I was really hoping for, because look, you can differentiate. We've been talking about the fact that you can go into your notifications in Android but that only really gets you to go into Gmail or messages or whatever. Whereas a lot of us would like more of the capability of like you can with Gmail and Android now to delete or archive a message right from notification, right? And particularly if we could do that from the lock screen as well, actually take action with a message or a notification, that'd be great. As opposed to just opening it up. So there's a trending question right now that I have to put up from Derek. Why are you talking about Blackberry? It's just like shot to the top of our list in terms of pluses. I can change the subject really quickly. Okay, that's fine. But like it's funny, it's worth noting that they're still trying and this Android thing is pretty crazy. If you're a guy or gal who got stuck with a Q10 or a Z10, you should try and get a hold of this update if you can't unload your phone. And you know, they're still going to sell this in enterprise. I just find it funny that… Fifth platform, what do you want? They're calling this like 10.2.1, so it seems like a really minor update, but it's like got a whole bunch of crap. Yeah, yeah. Alright, Vlad, you were going to move us away. I'm teaming you up for the transition. Make it a good one. It was actually going back to Glass for a moment. This week… Reverse segue. Reverse segue, I like that. It's true. But this week we got a report, not a rumor, but a report out of the Korea Times citing unnamed Samsung officials who say they're working on a, wait for it, Galaxy Glass. That's the tentative name. Yeah. So all of the rumors we do about it are going to be fixed by Samsung. Of course they are. Name a single category of consumer electronics that Samsung isn't in or trying to get in, a rumor to be in. Name it. Foot massagers? I bet you five bucks if there's such a thing as a Samsung foot massager. What about those little bulbs at Panasonic and other Japanese? They do? They have them? The foot massagers? No, but they have professional foot massagers at Samsung stores. I know at Samsung call centers they give them foot massagers. They've got foot massagers. But there are those little air humidifiers that I remember Panasonic and other Japanese companies do which puff out little puffs of steam. Do Samsung do those? Because I know they do kitchen sinks. That's the really fascinating thing to me. Samsung do kitchen sinks. I have a Samsung washing machine in my house. I have an LG, I think I have an LG one, it's terrible. Yeah I mean, so Samsung doing a glass like product, if they do in fact pull off their simplified UI that's supposedly coming on the next Galaxy S. And it is in fact based on the tile metaphor that we've seen on the Galaxy Note Pro which is definitely not ripped off from Windows phone. That sort of tile idea, I mean Google took it from Google now and stuck something like it on Google Glass, Samsung could easily do the same thing with S Glass, right? Galaxy Glass. Galaxy Glass. Get the name right. This is going to be such a hot selling product. Galaxy Glass with S lenses. S lenses. Okay, let's just clarify a few things. S lenses. Oh god. The way Samsung has been talking about this very much sounds like the way it had been talking in the build up to the Galaxy Gear. Everybody posting comments, we found the YouTube video of the Samsung focus. I'm sure it's fine. Continue Vlad. The boy you know man. Samsung is building up to this the same way that it builds up to the Galaxy Gear. I mean wearables are going to be the next big growth area. We want to be there, we want to have a first mover advantage and we don't care about immediate profitability. In fact, we don't care about immediately having a good product. That is true. I mean that's valid. But one of the quotes of the Korea Times is wearables aren't going to generate a profit immediately. So they're essentially saying we're going to go through all of these ugly first iteration products in order for us in a couple of years to be there, to be in the race, to be competing. Which I think is fair enough even though it's going to be rough for anybody who gets caught and actually buys one of these things, kind of like the Galaxy Gear. And the report says that this is probably going to be coming out around Ether time, so September. Okay. So that's still time. Great. So Apple sold all the iPhones and made lots of money. They sold 51 million iPhones last quarter. Is that the right number? Yep, new record. Every quarter new record. And if there's any dark downside to it, it's that the 5C didn't do so hot. Well okay, so basically Apple didn't say the iPhone 5C didn't sell. And they didn't even quite say the iPhone 5C didn't sell as well as they expected. The thing they kept saying is stuff like the mix was stronger to the 5S and it took some time to build the mix the customers were demanding. They were saying the 5S was… We got the percentages wrong, you know, stuff like that. Yeah, well they were saying the 5S was like in short supply pretty much the whole quarter, right? And they were trying to say the mix things and things like this. But it's hard not to see the 5C as like a thing that's pushing people to buy the 5S. Like a lot of people have said like the 5C is not good enough, people are just spending more money for the 5S. And it's like okay, whatever, Apple sells more iPhones so how is that not a win for Apple? Whether it sells a lot of 5Cs or a lot of 5Ss, it's still sold a ton of iPhones. Yeah. Yeah, a metric ton. Tons and tons. I think the 5C might be the higher profit margin device just because it has a cheaper parts, it doesn't have all the golden defense stuff on the 5S. Yeah I'm sure that's the case, it's probably got a slightly higher profit margin than the 5S but the iPhone is still the most profitable product in Apple's lineup. Like the profit margins of the iPhone are highest of anything that Apple sells. So if people buy a 5S or buy a 5C, I'm not sure how much Apple really cares. I appreciate that Dan, but Apple would care because they want to keep the average selling price high. And it went up. If you look at the average selling price, it went up from under, it was like $580 around there and now it's like $617 or $620. If you look at the average selling price for the iPhone, it went up in Q4 because people were buying the 5S. You're almost arguing against a fact in person here because I'm not really disagreeing with you. I'm just saying people are going to get really granular with the details with Apple's earnings and profits and they're going to be like, well this didn't match expectations and that and whatever. And it's just kind of, you shrugged. I think you're absolutely right. The headline figure is the phones are still selling like crazy, Apple is still thriving, everybody else is struggling to compete apart from Samsung and the status quo will just continue. I mean that is really the situation we're in. Anything else we want to say about it is really just picking away at the details. I mean the thing that Tim Cook said was it was the first time we'd ever run that particular play in reference to trying to sell two different models of iPhone in a single quarter instead of just last year's model as the cheap model. And the demand percentage turned out to be different than we thought. Basically like they tried a thing and it didn't work that well and they didn't quite come out and say yeah that was a miss, that was a whiff. But they didn't not say that either. And I think that if there's a downside to this, it's one they didn't get supplies in the 5S ramped up because they spent time building 5Cs. Two I bet you that the 5C could have expanded the market and they could have played around with prices more for them and that isn't happening, especially in North America. And three it just looks bad for Apple to have a product that isn't a hit when it's a new product for them. And the 5C isn't really a new product but it's kind of a new look for them and it didn't do that well and it doesn't look good and it doesn't feel good to have missed the mark on the market. And it's not going to hurt them, they're going to be doing just fine. They brought in a bunch of revenue and a bunch of profits and they're going to be able to enter new categories and they tease the fact that they're going to enter new categories this year. But it doesn't change the fact that there's a thing that Apple sold that didn't have stratospheric sales and didn't match up to what Apple was hoping it would do. Unless Apple's strategy was to drive people to drive 5S. You introduce a whole series of colorful phones, your first colorful iPhones and that's just you. The goal at the end of the day is to sell more phones or sell more product or whatever and they sold way more product last quarter than they did any other prior quarter. Dan you seem to be getting more cynical when you shave, you should rebuild your beard. Come on man, I don't care what the goal is, we're having this CFO level discussion right here which to me is just garbage frankly. Apple sells a lot of iPhones, Apple makes a lot of profit. We could be saying this for the next three years, it doesn't matter. What actually really bothers me about Apple and the reason I'm not using an iPhone right now is that there are fundamental problems with the UI which the company is not addressing. There's software. We could say that to a blue in the face and people could say that the iPhone screen is too small to their blue in the face. But at the end of the day, Apple is still selling lots of iPhones. That's right. We're still buying it. I'm in the same camp as our editor-in-chief Josh Polsky, I just switched back to an iPhone and man the screen is small and if I hadn't jailbroken this thing I would have already switched away because the transitions on the UI are just way too slow and there's significant problems with certain apps, mail in particular and you can't set your defaults if you want to switch browsers or switch email apps. I mean I agree with you and I use an Android phone 99% of the time because of all this but those are also all power user feature things. The fact of the matter is that Apple is still selling more phones than like anybody else. Okay, yeah but Dan, that doesn't really excuse the fact of bad usability. It just doesn't. I mean, because here's the thing, we don't have stats on people satisfied with their phone 12 months down the line. Yeah they do and Apple's like satisfaction is like 90%. And that's why people keep buying iPhones. The people that are buying iPhones in America are not first time smartphone buyers. They've got really super high loyalty rates too. I will say that I am not super sympathetic to like power users don't matter because I think that like as a… Guys, let me cite you just one example and this is not at all a power user feature. If you go into… Let's have doing interruptions for like the next 20 minutes. What interruptions? I'm just joking. I blame Hangouts. Keep going. I'm sorry, maybe just lag, I don't know. But here's the thing, if you go into the Passbook app and you scroll through your apps and you want to drag one down, the action is you take a thumb and you pull it down, right? And that comes down to the bottom of your screen. So if the action to pull it down is that downward swipe, the action to pull it up naturally will be an upward swipe. But you try and do that and you bring up the control center, right? So then you pull down the control center and you're like I will do this more precisely because obviously the reverse of the initial action is… Wait, what are you talking about? If I bring down the notification center and I swipe up from the very, very bottom? No, not the notification center, the Passbook. I'm talking about Passbook. Cards in Passbook. Oh, okay. Yeah, well that's your first problem. Yeah, I'm using Apple's default apps. That's my first problem. And okay, so you keep trying to swipe up. I mean I've done this like six times and I figured it out and it's actually you tap it and then that brings the same card coming back up. And it's just things like that which is just super frustrating and you don't have to be a power user for them. Right. I mean you just got to be a user. I agree there are major problems that I would love to see addressed especially in iOS 7. You're giving a good example of that right there. But the point is that for the vast majority of people that are buying iPhones, they're not big enough problems for them to be like I'm going to buy a different phone or I want a different phone or I'm going to get rid of my iPhone. Yeah, there's a segment of the user base and the population that doesn't want to deal with that and there are plenty of other options as well. But you know, I could ask my wife, hey have you ever had a problem with the control center showing up on your iPhone when you don't want to do and she'll be like what's control center? I use Facebook. I mean it's just like the average user, the average person that's buying a smartphone which is everybody nowadays are really, really happy with their iPhones and that's why the satisfaction, user satisfaction scores are through the roof for Apple all the time and that's why people keep buying new iPhones and that's why Apple sells more and more every quarter. Well my question here would be how old is iOS 7? iOS 7? Yeah. Like the last seven years? Well it came out in the fall. Right, so I mean fair enough, Dan and I can agree to disagree but what I would say is the polls and the rankings and user satisfaction numbers that we have so far aren't for iOS 7, they're for the previous version. Yeah and I mean let's be clear like Dan, it's okay for us to say something is garbage even though it sells really well and I'm not saying that it's garbage but I am saying that like there are significant problems. And I agree with you. I just don't see, like I know I want Apple to address them and fix them and things like that but if you're just looking at like a business profitability and like success thing, like does it have to? I don't know. I mean do you guys, if we want to be equal opportunity complainers right now I could talk about my Nexus 7. Which is a beautiful wonderful device that resets itself now once a day and I don't know why. And the apps, they're like not awesome. You still have a problem? So I don't know, that's all I have to say about Apple. Unless you guys have more that you want to get into. Oh you know what we got to talk about this tease about mobile payments. So basically said Touch ID like we were thinking about mobile payments when we made it and it is like, it was the phrase, not intriguing, interesting opportunity in this space I think he mentioned. So yeah Apple like first of all thank God they're not doing NFC but second of all they might actually get into this space. Now I am nervous about actually drawing any conclusions about vague hints about being interested in a space from Tim Cook because how long has he been talking about TV and like with these kinds of words right? Yeah I mean I hope that if they do something with mobile payments that it works better than Touch ID because Touch ID does not work for me at all. I've complained about this numerous times and that's a great example of something that I'd love Apple to fix. It's not hurting sales for them apparently but I'd love for them to fix it. But you know if they do do something with it hopefully it works better than Touch ID actually works. I'm just reminded about Apple Maps and it made me sad. Just straight up trolling, just out of nowhere you know let's just bring up Maps. Let's bring up all the misses. No but frankly I do hate this thing that Dieter raised, the whole equal opportunity complainers. We shouldn't really be complainers but actually when you look at Apple's track record and software recently it just has been kind of sucky and I think there's a lot of inertia going on with the iPhone and a lot of Apple benefiting off the back of really great developers and really great apps for the iPhone and iOS. Like Dan, like really great apps like Dark Sky, it's awesome and you can only get it on iOS. That's right. Why is Dark Sky so awesome? I paid four bucks for this weather app and I don't know why. Because it's got this like pinpoint location so it not only knows that you're in New York or that you're in a specific neighborhood like Midtown, it knows that you are at this specific street address and then it tells you it's going to rain in five minutes at your street address and it's like right. And then it tells you it's going to stop in 13 minutes and then it's right. It's just like it's really hard to explain how cool Dark Sky is until someone is actually using it and then it's like it works and then like it's one of those things where it's just like oh my god, it just told me that it was going to rain for 13 minutes. I care way more about the temperature than I do about the precipitation most of the time and you have to swipe over to that screen so screw this app, why did you make me spend four bucks on it? You open it and it tells you the current temperature right away. Yeah, I don't want the current temperature, I want the temperature like over the course of the day. I have to swipe over for that? That's like one whole gesture. How many months of my life are going to be spent swiping from my thumb from the right to the left to look at these temperatures? I don't know what to say. But this is why Dark Sky is so cool. Actually it is a very pretty app. Although what is in the background that it's sort of… So if you hit the map button that's your radar. No you can keep swiping, you can just swipe right into it bro. Yeah. Yeah. This is really fascinating to our audio podcast listeners, watching you two guys swiping your app. Listen, check out this globe man. Look at that, look at it spin any direction. That's useless UI, particularly for what Dan is saying like pinpoint accuracy and you get the entire globe. It shows you an actual weather map. So like the map does default to where you actually are right. And then you can hit play and it will actually show you, you know, like there's my pin and I can zoom in right on the globe and I can hit play and then it shows me the precipitation animation. It's pretty cool. Yeah I admit that's pretty cool. I'm not paying $4 until I can actually order up the rain myself. You know, instead of forecast just be like okay we need rain now. Vlad, you are the one who said that we have to stop complaining and we're trying to be enthusiastic about a thing. Yeah this is good, this is good. I do like that and I would say particularly in places like Amsterdam where our colleague Thomas Ricker is really sensitive about the rain because it rains, actually it rains more often than not. He's been wearing stuff like 200 days a year in Amsterdam or drizzles. So he's got a radar wrap on his phone and all sorts of things to track the weather. So I'm sure for places like that this would be really, really handy. Well like I've used it, I've used it, I've used dark sky for a long time and I've used it to be like it's Sunday morning, I need to mow the lawn, is it going to rain in the next hour? And I've actually used the dark sky and it's like it's going to rain in 37 minutes. I'm like well I probably shouldn't start mowing the lawn. Yeah that's fair. All right Vlad, if you want to talk about depressing things we can do that. Nokia Lumia sales. Okay that's not true, it's not actually that depressing. They did double year over year right for their holiday quarter. It's just we're not used to seeing them go down from the third quarter to the fourth quarter. Well there is that. Fourth quarter is the money maker. No I think they doubled for the total for 2013 relative to 2012 rather than just for the fourth quarter. Ultimately it's kind of like going out with a whimper for Nokia but I think you can kind of say that was predictable because a lot of people, I mean assuming a lot of people are rational would have lost faith for the company given that it's being taken over and is going to be subject to a lot of change and tumultuous few months while Microsoft takes over. So I mean that's just not a great time to be going out and buying new advice. You know what do you hope for long term support? Yeah well in that in which case I'm going to recommend that if Nokia does in fact manage to squeak through and release this Normandy Android phone before the Microsoft acquisition, if you're hoping for future support, probably stay away. Just got to put that out there. Somebody tweeted something interesting that they might, it would be interesting if Nokia just released it like they did the N9. Like we've worked so long on this, it would be a shame for us to actually can it. We're just going to release one version of it and send it off. Yeah. That's a very likely scenario actually. I mean yeah I think that's exactly what's going to happen and that's actually I'm okay with that. Yeah I don't know. You guys want to – okay well actually I want to take a few more questions before we do. Palm is dead. Goodbye. See you later. So yeah Qualcomm bought their patents. Former Palm CEO Joe Jogger besides on Qualcomm's board and yeah they bought it from HP. There's nothing left. LG got one part. They're going to rest. Goodbye. I have nothing else to say. And when we're talking about mobile patents. Farewell mobile accomplishers. When we're talking about mobile patents, Palm owned or had a lot of patents for really obscure low level stuff. I think Dieter you've mentioned that they had the patent on airplane mode and they had the patent on really silly things like pocket sized smart computers and really low level things. I mean it's things that always worked well in Palm's advantage when it was actually making phones because nobody would sue Palm. I don't think it's something that Qualcomm will turn around and suddenly crank out a phone. No, I don't think so either. I don't know, they might license some of this technology and you know like Palm has never been sued in a major way over most of these smartphone patents in the modern era of the patent wars among smartphone makers. So these haven't been tested so we don't know for sure how strong they are. But like to the untrained eye, they look pretty strong. And so Qualcomm could make money off of these, maybe do interesting things depending on what else they got. But mainly I don't know. They can keep from getting sued. So that will be fun for them. You know if we pull these two bits of sad news together, you know the final demise of Palm and Nokia heading in the same direction, it identifies a trend for me which is that the whole independent phone maker, big time independent phone maker company is kind of dying. What do you mean like Samsung I guess, because they make washing machines too. Well that's the thing, now the guys who are selling the most phones are really big vertically and horizontally integrated companies. You know you're talking LG, Sony, Samsung, Apple. We keep thinking about this Amazon phone which seems like it might eventually happen. Again it's these companies which have these whole other businesses and then phones are just part of them. The dedicated phone maker is really left with HTC which is struggling and Blackberry which is just a zombie now. Yeah that's really depressing, thanks for that. Motorola is a dedicated phone maker right? Google, Google. El Google. I mean like if anything, Motorola shed its side businesses. It like sold off its heiress home business and Motorola solutions that made walkie talkies is like a completely different business now. So some schmuck named Tom Warren, maybe you've heard of him, I don't know, some guy. Tom Warren wants to know if Nokia releases Normandy X under the business that's not transferring to Microsoft, then what happens? Tom probably knows the answer to this question. I was going to say this sounds like a question that Tom Warren might know the answer to. This isn't actually him asking the question, this is Tom Warren asking us to see if we can get it right and then we can complain about it on Twitter or in other questions. So I'm not going to rise to your bait there Tom. No, would they, okay, if most of Nokia goes over to Microsoft, but for some reason the crazy madmen who created Normandy X managed to not be part of that acquisition and are part of the old Nokia, they would spin off and they would become what, Sailfish 2.0? That sounds like a not awesome future for that phone and that platform. What do you guys think? Do you have any other, what is the success? The thing that Microsoft is acquiring is Nokia's devices division. So I don't really see how you can, like what Nokia has left is things like Siemens Networks, and all that infrastructure stuff. Well here's a better way to ask this question. Under what scenario does an Android phone produced by Nokia have any chance of success long term? And the reason why? It depends on where Microsoft, the thing is like Nokia has its line of Asha phones right now, they do not run Microsoft's apps. It could release an Android phone that will run Microsoft's apps and it could do some really cheaply. And like so I could see that happening, I don't think it will because I think Microsoft could just be like well jam Windows phone on there because it doesn't really take that many much resources. And I think Microsoft could, if it really wanted to push Windows phone further down market to where the Ashes are. But there is that other option where if they wanted to release an Android phone it could run Bing and Outlook and all these other Microsoft apps that the Asha phones don't. Right I mean that's possible. It would be a weird surreal world but we already live in a weird surreal world where Microsoft makes a bunch of money off of Android phones as it is off of patent leasing right? Yeah would it charge Nokia the patent leasing? I'm sure it already does. Yeah so there you go. Okay actually so basically there is this question that has been getting up votes from this person. Shashank? Shawshank? I'm screwing your name, I'm very sorry. So we need to address it because everybody wants to know, what do you think the future of Google's Nexus program is? This is a good spot to wrap this up because we've been waiting for at least more Nexus tablets for a while now and there's been you know, it's been a long simmering issue. We never know what the Nexus program is. I think we finally do but it's weird because of Motorola. So I don't know, lots of stuff here. What do you guys think? I don't think it's going anywhere. And you know it's like a lot of people have said that the Google Play Edition program has kind of like superseded it. You know the fact that Motorola exists you know gives a lot of reason for the Nexus program not to exist. But you know the Nexus program has always existed to give a reference platform for developers with the latest software that Google releases and it's also worked as a way to put the latest software that Google has in competent hardware at a really low price. And the Google Play Edition program doesn't do that. If you want a high end phone you're paying high end prices. Motorola does do its own thing and it's got great prices but it's got its own software on there. It's not really a reference device at all. So I think that the Nexus program is going to continue. So yeah go ahead Vlad. Well I'm the same as Dan. I saw, I mean we've all seen the past few months where Motorola introduced the Moto X and the Moto G and you still had the Nexus program going alongside it and I don't see any conflict arising between the two. I think the two can coexist. There's space in the market for both varieties. There's a lot of space for a lot of variety of Android handsets. You know such as Sony's waterproof phones and guys can find unique little selling points to distinguish between them. So I don't see why Google should feel the need to curtail the Nexus program. Yeah I mean basically Google could keep running the Nexus program for a while and it would be fine. It's a way to keep their other OEMs happy. I'm sure that they get a healthy subsidy of some kind from Google for these cheap devices. I'm sure Google pays a higher price than we're paying for this kind of stuff. I don't know what the business deals are but I'm sure that they are just as good for the manufacturer if not better as they are for Google. You know that said, if Google wanted to kill off the Nexus program it could if it were to go all in with Motorola and believe that Motorola could make the devices that it needs. But more than anything, in order for Google to make Android it needs to have cutting edge devices with the latest processors and the latest chipsets and everything else that goes along with that to develop Android against to make sure it will work on that stuff. And that is one of the reasons for the Nexus program to exist. And whether that exists as the Nexus program that means cheap devices made by a random manufacturer that can be bought by consumers or if it means they have Motorola handle that for them, that has to happen. The second part I think, I mean I think it has to happen because the way that they, I don't know, to do it any other way doesn't make sense because they end up giving away too much to other parties, right, to other manufacturers, to other carriers for control of Android. They want to have something they control that they can play around with. The other part of this question I think is, and this is the big question for me, isn't so much about the Nexus program as Nexus tablets. Because weren't we supposed to, like we didn't see the Nexus 10 get refreshed. We saw the Nexus 7 recently and I bought one and I'm nail fine about that. But yeah it's been 2012 since the Nexus 10 was refreshed. And in theory Android is a better sort of desktop get work done operating system than iOS at least if you ask Google because you can attach all sorts of crazy form factors with keyboards and other crap on it and the multitasking is different. If you are Samsung you can window stuff and you can have eight little apps running in the same screen and you know all this crap, right. There's all these possibilities and all this extensibility that you can have with a big Android tablet. And so far as I know beyond the Nexus 7, Android tablets are kind of like, I'm sure Samsung sells a bunch of every single screen size that they've got and they've got every single screen size. But I haven't seen Google have genuine success with like a 10 inch or anything bigger than the Nexus 7 when it comes to tablets. And I'm wondering if they really are going to try again with the Nexus tablet at that screen size and be serious about like having it be a bad ass device that you could use to do stuff. Well that sounds like a goal that Google would obviously be interested in but I mean how do you go about that? Because ultimately it really comes down to the apps, right. Yeah, or not good. Well the apps maybe browser performance, maybe the 10 inch Nexus tablet needs to be the long awaited time when like all the work they've been doing with Chrome OS applies to Android. Like maybe that's what we need, like proper Chrome and Chrome apps on a tablet on Android. What about just a Chrome tablet, Chrome OS tablet at 10 inches? That might be more interesting than an Android tablet at 10 inches honestly. You could play Bastion on it. Yeah, really what else would you ever want to play that, dots. Actually that's my biggest problem with dots right now on my iPhone is for some reason it won't connect to Twitter and it's super annoying because I don't want to play it on my iPhone because I won't be able to show off my high score. And then on the Nexus 7. I'm perfectly okay with you playing it on your iPhone either. On the Nexus 7. So that way I could be at the top of my score list. It's twitchy and it doesn't actually. Playing dots on a tablet doesn't make sense to me because you have to travel further to make each draw so it's like you're taking longer. You're going to be all swoopy about it. Plus I don't play the speed mode anymore. I play moves mode. I've played speed mode forever. Of course you still can beat my high score in speed mode. Listen. Listen. I don't get dots. I'm not good at it. You keep playing. I keep trying and I keep falling on my face. That's gumption man. That's the right answer. I pretty much play it just to troll our games editor Andrew because he hates the game so much. So I play it. I tweet about it. It makes him mad. Yeah. Well, you know what? We've been going an hour. I'm going to call time on the Verge Mobile show. I appreciate everybody who asked questions. I appreciate everybody who watched. I appreciate everybody who listened. And I'm pretty sure Vlad and Dan do too. Although maybe they don't. You'll have to ask them. And you can if you want to. You do it on Twitter in fact. If you want to ask Dan or talk to him in any way, shape or form on Twitter, his handle is DCCFIRT. That's with an E-I. Vlad is Vlad Savov. I am Backlund. Our esteemed missing colleague is Zpower. We are all at Verge. If you don't want to talk to us on Twitter, there's other ways. You can email us. It's the Verge Mobile Show or VergeMobileShow at Verge.com. Or just leave a comment on this post. You can do it right now. You can do it when it goes up. Whatever you feel like really. So that's it. Thanks for watching everybody. See ya. See ya.