 Hey, and welcome to the Vergecast for the week of April 30th, 2012. I'm Josh Dapolsky. I'm Neil Haipata. We're going to digitally insert him. He's right here. Yeah. Paul is, he decided he didn't want to be on the internet either. We replaced Paul with just those beats. Okay, so he didn't actually want a representation of him on the internet. As part of his ongoing stunt, as part of the blogger's ongoing stunt, no, Paul's actually late, which works out perfectly because we have Chris Ziegler who's going to join us via satellite, aka Skype.com. And I think Skype is the internet, so I don't know that we can get his name. So we're concerned about if Paul has to talk to Chris via Skype. We're all learning together what this is like. But anyhow, Paul's on his way. Why are you starting the intro? Wow. That's, hello? That's, was that on purpose? You messing with me, Billy? Really? Oh, by the way, can I just say, oh, first off, let me just say this is the Vergecast where we discuss the week in technology, culture, technology, culture, culture, and consumer spending habits. And in horror movies, and the beginning and ending of any alien film. And we have a lot of news to talk about, but I want to say really quickly to everybody standing over there, which you guys who are watching me right now, who I'm talking to, with whom I'm speaking, I'm talking to you, the viewer, not back there, but everybody has been asking me if we can get a camera in the control room. We definitely need a camera in the control room. And I think we need one, and I'm going to tell you where I think it should go. Maybe in that corner shooting down that way, maybe a wide angle. Right here? Yeah. Through the glass. Through the glass. Yeah. You know? Yeah. Maybe get a room mic in there for you guys just so we can get a little bit of the, John likes that. He's loving it. Anyhow. Fans in there. What? Just boring fans. Oh, fans. Yeah, and you. See this right here, this is, they're mad about this because we're having an amazing conversation right now, and our viewers and our listeners can't see you. Barely hear you. And they can't hear you. We can't commit, Paul. Don't come in yet, Paul. Paul, we're going to put Chris on Skype. We're going to talk to Chris on Skype. Do you want to say hi to the people? Yeah, do you want to say hello? Sure. You seem really flustered. Come say hi to the people. You just biked like a crazy person over here, didn't you? I did. But you were at the dentist again. Can I ask you a question? This is your wall. Do you think it's smart to keep scheduling your dentist appointments right before you have to talk? Here, and then you can't see the live stream. Just have a seat. Just say hello. Paul Miller, everybody. Paul Miller, let's give him a round of applause. Back on the internet for the first time since he left the internet. Not on the internet, not using the internet. Just around. I made a wall for him. Don't... I like how you're giving me crap about taking care of myself. That's what I do. That's what I do. I want you to take care of yourself. Is your chair weirdly low? Okay. So Paul, just say hi. Hi. Say that you're live. What's going on? How are you? How's it been? You don't know, do you? What's it been like? Did you have an event today? No, I have no idea. You don't have any idea what the event was today? I was at the office and I saw somebody possibly streaming something from Samsung and I know we've been waiting for the Galaxy S3. You weren't looking at their computer, but your eyes still answered that. It's peripheral vision. It's very powerful. Yeah. Not that powerful. I've been trying to avoid the office most of the time. So you think... You know there's a Samsung event today, but you don't... Well, there's been so much buildup. So I'm assuming... You know what this is. I'm assuming it's the Galaxy S3. Yeah. They changed the name. I also read all about Blackberry 10 and the New York Times. Did you read... Oh yeah. I was on coverage. What about my... You didn't read my Washington Post article? I have to subscribe to that. Oh, that's right. I haven't subscribed yet. Yeah, you wouldn't worry about it. You're not missing anything. You don't have to read me. They changed the name of the Galaxy S3. Really? Yeah, it's called the Galaxy Z. No way. Yeah. No, I'm lying. I'm totally lying. This is amazing. This is amazing. I can tell you anything about it that I want and you have no idea. This is freaking amazing. Hold on. I'm going to tell you a couple of things about the new phone. Can I say true or false? You tell me true or false, okay? This is great. I'm excited about this. They added a feature. Okay. They added a feature that tracks your eyes and it knows whether to keep the display on or not while it's watching your eyes. If they're reading, if your eyes are going across a page, it'll keep the display on and not auto-sleep it. It won't auto-sleep. Because it has... It's not like it just turns the screen on as soon as you look away. Yes, it does that. As soon as you look away, the screen goes off? It knows that when you're looking at it, it knows what you're doing when you look at it. Is that true or false? True. Yeah, that's right. It is true. But it wouldn't just turn off as soon as you look away. I think it's... No, I think it would go to... Let's say you have a five-minute timer for the... It reactivates the timer. Right. The reason is because people are reading a book and it's like your five-minute timer goes up and you have to touch the screen. Well, it's because the screen is like seven inches, right? Do you know what size the screen is? Well, can I guess? Well, I'm gonna tell you. Tell me if it's true or false. Okay. You... No, give me like a multiple choice. Okay. Is the screen 4.5 inches, 4.8 inches, 5.2 inches, 5.5 inches, or 5.7? I wanna say 4.8. Wow. That's right. That's right. That's very good. Two for two. Very good. Someone's been reading the rumors. They made a touchstone. They made a... The only interaction I've had with like the regular news, it was just, I've been doing the weekend shift, right? They made a touchstone for the Galaxy S line. True or false? So you... Wireless charging. You put it down on a stone. True. Yeah. All right. It comes with an MP3 player called the S-Pebble. Yes. Absolutely true. It's like nothing Samsung can do. 100% true. I got one for you. I got one for you. You really like that. There's nothing we can make up. The casing... So, okay, hold on. True or false? They redesigned the casing and it's now made... It now has a metal band that's similar to the iPhone with a polycarbonate backing. Removable though. The band is removable? No, the band is... The band is... It's similar to the iPhone, but it's got a polycarbonate backing that's like kind of like the material they used in the... Oh, but you can still take it off and replace the battery if you want to. That's right. True or false? False. Man, you're so good. I thought that one was really... Didn't you think that was really believable? It was really detailed. It was really good. Well, I wanted to give you something a little bit meaty because, you know... Right. No, Samsung's learned its lesson. True or false? They introduced a Siri competitor. Definitely. Definitely true. All right. True or false? The tagline for the phone is Samsung Galaxy S3 designed for humans. You were reading that off your computer. Yeah, you really blew that. You blew it. You got to like roll your eyes. I'm reading TRS from the people, but I don't want you to know what I'm looking for. We know that... That's false. We know that... By the way. That's false? Yeah. Oh. It's true. Damn it. How many videos... Wait, am I 100% so far? Yeah, pretty much. How many video interludes did they show at the event? Let's see. Forget it. There's no... No one can count that high. Well, you know, the thing is... There's no... We're doing a super cut. I talked to Craig already about doing a super cut. I'm sure there was a lot of video... Numbers don't go that high. Was there any live performance art? Yeah. Yeah, there was. London Symphony Orchestra. No, I was going to ask him what he thought it was. Whether it was dance, music. I would have said dance. True or false? Dance was my original thought. Pentile screen. Pentile screen. Oh, that's a good one. That's a good one. That's tough because everybody keeps on getting this wrong all the time. But Samsung's all about AMOLED. Yeah. What do you think? False. No. Sadly, true. Pentile. Seriously? Exactly the same as the Galaxy Nexus. Idiots. Exactly the same as the Galaxy Nexus. Idiots. And Gadget did a microscopic comparison. And it was basically... It's bad. Actually, the Galaxy Nexus screen looked better to my eyes. Haven't they learned their lesson? They have not. Okay. Should we... Wait, hold on. You want to do one more? Wait. Yes, I know we have a guest on Skype, Creighton. Cray-Cray. Does he just chill out? He's just chill out right now. It's Chris. Let's do one more. I want to get one more. Hold on. I'm going to get one more. Hold on. Let me really think. But now I know you're making it up because you have to think really hard. No, they announced a lot of stuff. There's a lot. They announced a lot of stuff. I'm just trying to pick the next one because they had a few that I think were particularly unbelievable. Oh, deep S Cloud integration. That's no... Come on. S Cloud? S Cloud. That's not even a thing. He doesn't know. I had to think about it. You got to come up with something plausible. Well, anything is plausible in the world of Samsung. I'm pretty sure Samsung's learned its lesson about directly ripping off. I just thought of a good one. Oh, okay. The people thought of a good one, too. What is it? Go ahead. Read theirs. Does it or does it not have on-screen buttons? On-screen buttons? Yeah. Is it like the one X has physical capacitive buttons? Are they physical or are they on-screen like the Galaxy Nexus? We need music. That's what we need. Physical capacitive buttons. Oh, wait. No. Wait. Yes. That's correct. He's right. One physical button and two capacitive buttons. He's right. Well, but he's basically right. There's a home button. There's a home button. Yeah. Okay. I missed that. Last one. I'm 50% wrong. Last one. No, no, no. He was right. Last one. You're still perfect in my eyes. Samsung announced today that they are going to begin custom retail pop-up shops and they showed them and they look kind of like mini Apple cubes. Apple cubes? You know the cube? You know how it looks? Like mini Apple cubes? They announced pop-up shops they're going to put all over the world to sell their phones. Oh, my God. 100%. 100%. Is there nothing too crazy? But you admit that what I just described sounds insane, right? Well, no. I think everybody, I think what people want to do is they want to look at Apple and they're like, well, now that we know we'll get sued, we can't do it exactly like Apple so we need to try to find the core idea. And I think everybody thinks right now one of Apple's big advantage over Android is that it can show off its stuff in retail. I think their biggest announcement they made today, because I actually think the S3 was relatively disappointing, that was their biggest announcement today, that they're actually going to try to create custom Samsung retail experience for these phones. And they know, it's clear that they know this is one of Apple's advantages. I'll let you guys talk to the expert, Ruka, but it sounds like a lot of these things are around the core experience, but none of them are really about the core experience of making a better smartphone. It's like, because we're already really good at making smartphones, let's just add the frills. I just thought of a good one. Let's add wireless charging. Let me ask you one more question. Yeah. Do you think it's cheap or drop? No, let me rephrase this. What do you think the new version of touchwiz is called? You just riff on this. What was the last version called? It's called touchwiz. Touchwiz 3 or 4 or whatever it is. There's like no answer to this question. I think it has the word note in it. Nope. Touch note. Nope. It's close though. Really? It's called, it's just called touchwiz, but they call it touchwiz nature UX. Also the nature UX. Nature UX. Nature is their whole thing. And everything you do on the phone. Were there video montages of their engineers going to the jungle to be inspired? No, no, no, no, no. They were montages of the jungle. Yeah. That's not, that's not Samsung's way. They hire video producers to make surrealist art that they are then inspired by. They really, they really, by the way, when you see some of these videos, we're doing a super cut. We'll put them on a flash drive for you. Please do. Please do. Some of them were just straight up like confusing, right? They were like surreal. It was a, it was a, I felt like there was a lot of bad English. Like the English was not written by native speakers. And then there's the ones that were like a drop of water falls on a rock. The rock explodes in a waterfall. And then somebody says, I'll share. Let's get Chris out here. Cause I feel like he's waiting. I don't want to keep him hanging. Do you want to put a rifle on Paul? No. No, he'll have to sit here in the dark. Let's just let him, let's, Oh, I don't look, don't look over here. Don't get out of here. Sorry to push you. I love you. By the way, don't look, stop looking over here. What did you say? By the way, I think you're great. By the way, I think you're awesome. I miss you. Yeah, we miss you on the internet. Okay. All right. So we have Chris Ziegler here, AKA Ziggy Smalls. Hey, AKA Z Power. It's weird cause I'm looking over there to see you, but I know. He's right here. Hey, look there. Hey, how are you? It's really, I just want to say it's really upsetting to me that I'm not allowed to talk to my coworker, Paul Miller. It's like really upsetting. Call him on the phone, send a letter to his PO box. That's not an efficient, that's not a innuendo. By the way. Yeah. That's real. Chris, they're asking if you're in a dark man cave. Chris is it? That's his house. He is in a dark man cave. The Ziegler residence. Literally always comes up. This is an issue every single time I'm on a video podcast. Dude's sitting in the dark. He's got a cold whiskey next to him, a cigar on the other side. Espresso. I was like, what is that? What? Why are you thumbs up it? You like the sounds of that. You want to have a cigar and some whiskey. No, I want a cappuccino. Oh, well get one. Why don't you just sit here now? Great. Great. Chris, Sean, what did you think of the S3? I didn't even know anything about it until a while ago. He's like Paul Miller. Chris, let's talk business. Let's get down to business. Actually, I just have one more thing that I need to point out to Creighton or Billy or somebody. This entire conversation is like single, it's like half duplex. Like when I talk, I can't hear anybody over there and I don't know if the same thing is happening to you guys. You mean like, I know that's fixable. It's crazy. Are we cutting you out? Is that what you're saying? And vice versa? When I talk, you are completely inaudible. I've never experienced this on Skype before. I'll tell you what's going on. We're gating or doing some weird ducking or something. We're ducking. You should like ease that up a little bit. And finally, my years of a producer have paid off. Chris, we may have to alleviate that in a second. We're just ducking because obviously it's better for the noise factor. But all right, can you hear us now? You can hear us, right? Yes. Yes. Let's talk S3, Galaxy S3 introduced today. Tell me your raw, unadulterated thoughts. I think that it was impossible for them to live up to the extraordinary amount of buzz that has been built up over the past two or three or four months and they fell short. It's the same trap that Apple falls into and I'm sure that Samsung is going to sell a million, well not literally a million devices. They're going to sell 20 or 30 million of these things, if not more. But on paper, this is not an impressive device considering how long we had to wait for it. Are you surprised? What's the thing that you're most... What was the biggest surprise today for you? I expected better materials. I expected a better display. The display is really disappointing. I'm actually more... Because I'm a Galaxy Nexus user, I've grown accustomed to the problems with the display for the most part. And by the way, 4.04 which I just received does make some real improvements I think in the brightness stuff. I can't... By the way, you know if you... I keep on trying to get the update on mine. You know if you hit the Android version number like a hundred times in a row, you get a little picture of the Android and Ice Cream Sandwich outfit. We covered... Yeah, and if you hit that, it turns into a nigh-end Android. We covered that when the phone... I just know that they're pushing an update and I've been pushing the button a thousand times. You can't... Anyhow... The Android and Ice Cream Sandwich outfit is like... I mean, it's taunting me that I don't have 404. Anyhow, but... So I will not disappoint about the screen, but I have to say I think the physical design of this phone in the face of... Even next to the Galaxy Nexus, I think it falls short stylistically. Like I really... It looks like the original Galaxy, doesn't it? I totally agree. I don't know why they felt the need to do this whole dummy box thing where they're really building up the physical piece of this device. It could have been that thing. It looks exactly... First off, it looks kind of like... Do we have it up on screen? You wanna show it for a second? It kind of looks like a Galaxy Nexus. It's basically the same shape as a Galaxy Nexus and it's thin. I mean, the buttons are exactly like the side. I mean, look at the side of this phone. I mean, it's identical to that and it's maybe a little bit thinner at the bottom and that's it. I just... I don't see... I'm not blown. I think this is one of the least impressive looking devices we've seen, especially in the face of the Lumia 900. In the One X where they are actually going after some relatively creative manufacturing processes and some creative design. I mean, the One X isn't mind blowing, but they're at least using some new materials. I just felt like this is so boring. It's got the... What is that? The proximity sensor at the top next to the camera. They look like black holes. It's really bad. I don't want to prejudge a device, obviously. I never want to prejudge a device, but on paper and from what we've seen from Vlad's coverage and Aaron's coverage today, the One X seems to blow this thing out of the water in the best case scenario and in the worst case scenario, it holds its own. I was worried for HTC that they were going to get smacked pretty hard by Samsung today and that just didn't happen. No, I mean, I think the One X on AT&T, I mean, you're dealing with a skin one way or the other, right? I mean, the TouchWiz, which by the way, I may actually be on the side of saying TouchWiz looks more acceptable to me than Sense at this point. It looks more integrated, that's for sure. But I will say, if you're getting a phone with a skin, it's going to be the HTC One X or this. The screen looks a billion times better on the One X. The processor is plenty fast, very fast on the One X. I mean, both versions really, but I don't really see, there's not a big, to me it's like, do you like TouchWiz? Do you want Nature Ops on your phone? Well, they have a bunch. We should go down, I mean, we're joking through them with Paul, we should go down the features because they've added a bunch of stuff. I will say to the fact that all of the keyboard sounds and sound effects of the UI now are like tinkling water noises is completely unacceptable. During the presentation, that is ridiculous. During the presentation, who was it, not Lucia, it was somebody else, I think. Oh God, that whole thing was so weird. There was one part where the girl was like, one of the presenters, was like, all the sounds are inspired by nature and soothing and she touched it and made like a trickling water noise and even she seemed to be bewildered by why the phone would sound like somebody essentially urinating. Yeah. That's what it sounds like. And she was like, some may say they're odd. It's like cool intro to your new phone. Just what you want to say about your new phone. This is kind of odd, isn't it? And also, by the way, Samsung employee, way to be surprised by what the phone does. Like can you imagine, can you imagine Apple presentation where Phil Schiller does something and he's like, huh, I didn't know it did that. Would that ever happen? Huh. No, she said it was bizarre. That's what it is. Bizarre, okay, fine. Odd and bizarre. And also, when they did the camera demonstration and the phone picked the picture of her, it takes the best photo and she goes, oh, that's the best photo? Yeah. He's like, I was like, yeah, that's the best photo or whatever. I don't know. I'm doing a German accent. I don't know. So a little bit more French, kind of an accepting French. Whatever. The point is what's happening. The point is, it was, oh God, so many touch was jokes. It was a little odd and even the Samsung presenters seem to be just meeting the Galaxy S3 for the first time. You know, I would almost say that my impression of this phone right now is it's more negative than anything because of how bad Samsung is at running these presentations. They do this thing. They do this. So random, so disconnected. They do this thing and I remember you joking about it when they launched the Galaxy Nexus and Chris, you probably recall this, where they described it as like, it was like the smooth curve of a stone or something. It's like, listen, you don't need to use flowery language to describe your device, right? It's okay to just say like, we designed a really beautiful phone. You don't have to tell me what part of nature it reminds me of. They started this thing at CES with Zoll where they said they're going to go back to Zoll. But no, it started there. That was the moment when Samsung went crazy where they said, we're turning digital humanism into human digitalism. That actually happened. I sat there and watched that. I seriously almost just like choked to death. And today, they're like, we designed the Samsung Galaxy S3, the first phone designed for humans. Chris. I don't know what they're doing. We're not letting Chris get a word in edgewise. You hear us, right? Yeah. Yeah, I can hear you. So my impression of the presentation was that it was very scattershot, like you guys say. And I think that mirrors what is happening in the software of this phone. They have a bunch of really insane features that have no common bond. The thing that really stuck out to me is when you take a picture, it does the face recognition. And then it's like, oh, I can send that picture straight to, I know who that is. I'm going to send the picture to them automatically. What is that? No, they have this thing where it was like you take a picture and it does facial recognition. It goes like that's so and so. And it tags them on Facebook, I guess. That actually kind of makes sense. There was some stuff there that I didn't fully grasp what the use was. No, because the way they explained the features was being like, and we have this great new feature. And then they would show the video they showed for that feature, the automatic sharing, was a guy taking a picture with an old time camera. And then when he pressed the shutter button, the flash went off. And then like a sea of Polaroids exploded all around him. And then it said, share with whoever you like. And then the video was over. That's all that happened. It was like a minute long. And I was like, I don't know what that means at all. I think we can all agree that Neelai is at his best when insulting Samsung. I mean, there's two companies he likes to go to. Two companies I think he really relishes giving the once over. That's Samsung and Dell. And I think you let him lose on either one of those companies as long as he has a good time. Just makes sense. But just try to hold it together for two seconds. Can we talk about something, Chris? I want to talk to you about this. What is the spebble? What is the S-pebble? What is the S-pebble? What is the S-pebble? Does anybody know? What is the S-pebble? The second they said S-pebble, I'm like, oh, this is a touchstone ripoff. Like the second they said it. What is it? No, the S-pebble is an MP3 player or something. Is it a remote control for your phone? They didn't know details. Is it a headphone? Is it a Bluetooth unit? Is it a watch? It's a spebble. It's a spebble. Yeah, literally this is the only picture we have of it. It looks like an iPod Nano. Like it's a clippy MP3 player. Is it an accessory? Do I purchase it separately? I think so. What does it do? It has four gigs of storage. Oh, it's an MP3 player. Yeah. The battery lasts for 17 hours. What's the phone for? It doesn't sync with your computer. It syncs to the phone. Super useful. Yes, of course. It syncs with your phone. I get it. It's an MP3 player for your phone. I understand. So wait, what syncs with the S-Pebble then? The phone! No, after that. There's got to be something smaller that syncs with the S-Pebble. Like the S-Gravel. The S-Gravel. It's a piece of gravel that syncs with the Pebble. I will say, they announced this thing and I blew right by it. She's like, we have accessories. It literally went like tumbling down the screen. And I was like, what's this? The S-Pebble. And then they moved on to another thing. And also, we have like, what was the thing? The resonant charging? What is it? Charged through sound waves? What does that deal? No, the wireless charging. Yeah, wireless charging. They call it like resonant. Oh, I don't know. But they also said it's a world's first on a smartphone because of its proximity features. Never finished saying what the proximity features were. I was like, you know, the touchstone did all the work. What does smart stay mean? What does smart stay mean? That phrase means nothing. They had all these phrases. I know Apple likes to brand things like the retina display. But the retina display, I understand what that means. Here's a screen. Like retina, that's like the eye and display. Okay, so it means the display is really high quality, like my eyeballs. Get it. Got it. High quality eyeballs. High quality eyeballs. But, but, but. What? But, nothing. But, it's been a long freaking week, folks. Oh, Samsung Galaxy S3 accessories include C-Pen stylus. I didn't actually see that. I didn't know that. It was through. Then you didn't announce that. Oh, go ahead. Keep going. I don't know what you were going to say. Flipboard is exclusive to S3. Oh, Flipboard. That was a thing. Did they even announce that on stage? Oh, yeah. Blew right by it. Did they? Boom. Flipboard is exclusive to S3. Let's move on. I feel like just pick a few really clutch things. No. I don't know. Whatever. It's fine. It's fine. They got it out there. Was there a 12 second video where they talked about Flipboard? 12 seconds would be generous. Yeah. It's a man flipping through a magazine and then he explodes into sunlight. It's a guy flipping through a magazine and he opens one page and a bunch of magazines come out of it and surround him. Then he's sitting on a chair made of magazines and then he falls asleep and then it ends. Yeah. They just say Flipboard. It's just a man's voice. Flipboard. Yeah, Flipboard. It's very... No, it's like Flipboard. Yeah. Very monotonous. Anyhow. They should have brought out Zal and he's like this really awkward teenager now and has like kind of a scraggly beard. He's like the character from The State who's like, I'm out of here. He's like kind of angry at his dad all the time. I'm like really just dated myself. I'm like back in 1978. Okay. Can I just read the... So they put out their first commercial. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's impossible to cover this product without being as scattershot as Samsung, by the way. The phone in the commercial, the first one, the phone first recognizes who you are, then follows your every move and finally waits until you're asleep. I was gonna say, this is what they started talking about. I was thinking when they started reading this stuff where they're like it tracks your movements. It knows when you're awake. It knows when you're asleep. They said it's your best friend at one point. Yeah, they said it's your best friend. And I'm like, I was thinking like, do you know what this sounds like? Like you are aware of the fact. It's like it's watching you while you sleep. It was like that. The copy they wrote was so not comforting. What's the opposite of comforting? It was like you get into bed and you're snuggled in the soft sheets and you got your pillow and somebody dumps like ice water on you. That was like, what's the worst thing that could happen to you? I mean, I guess being killed would be the worst thing that could happen to you. It's like just don't tell me the phone's watching my every movement and waiting for me to go to sleep. No, no, no. That doesn't make me want to have the phone. S voice. S voice, Chris. What do you think? Siri competitor? You're going to hack it? They showed them demonstrating the London weather on stage and it was exactly the same workflow that you'd go through on Siri. Like exactly. It was identical. I mean, it is a little, there are some, look, I have a Samsung phone sitting here. I don't have any problem with the company. They do have a tendency to very quickly follow in the footsteps of Apple. I do feel like there's like, I know that everybody's doing it, but it's not like Microsoft when they launched the Lumia, you know, when they, it's a yes. They didn't get on stage and say, we've added this. I mean, they did talk about their voice stuff, but they didn't, it wasn't like a Siri thing, you know? It wasn't like a person who was having conversations with you. They didn't tell you that the phone was like an assistant. This was pretty much identical. But now it's like, oh, they also have the, they also have the play share to the TV. It's called the play, no, the all share play. All play share, all share play. No, no, no. It's the all share play versus the air play. I mean, they can hear how that sounds, right? It's like a box that connects to your TV and lets you stream or all share play might be their DLNA implementation. At any rate, it's like pretty clear that they want people to kind of be not sure which thing it is. Like, oh yeah. It's all share play. All share play. Or all share cast. That's the best. That's the technology. That's the box. I don't know. It's very confusing. You know, long and short of it is I just wasn't excited about the hardware. I just felt like the hardware, well, I mean, obviously I'm not going to buy any phone with touch wits on it for me. Well, you know, the thing about the things that they're doing in software are they are, Chris is right, they're going to sell 20 million of these things. So there's going to be 20 million phones out there. But they're going to sell 20 million because they're Samsung and they have market penetration and they're going to put them in front of people. No, but I'm saying. And they're not going to be horrible phones. They're not like, oh my God, I can't use this. No, but like the, the features like the front facing camera watches your eyes to look at the screen to turn off. And now there's voice recognition on another huge phone. That stuff is a big deal. The problem is that Samsung doesn't seem to know why it's a big deal or why it should be a big deal or like how to present the notion that it's a big deal. It's just like, here's some stuff we're going to, we're going to just like trot into the future. Like they should have called that feature like the eye tracking feature. What do they have a name for it? Uh, stayed stop and stay, stop, stop, smart smart, say they should have called something like read on. Yeah. Like a thing that makes sense. Like it knows when you're reading something. So it won't shut the phone. It won't turn the screen off. Like call it read on there. I just made, I just did a better marketing move for you than all of your marketing. Somebody is telling me that the, uh, the voice recognition is just a blingo. I don't know if that's true because I haven't seen the phone. Well, I mean, whatever it's their branding. It is their own thing. And they're obviously tying it into their services. So maybe powered by Vlingo, just like, just like Siri is powered by, uh, dragging dictation or whatever. So one under that, but you want, thank you. Sorry. Um, anyhow, so, so my, my gripe is that, uh, uh, I mean, this is one time I can safely say like, this is not my next, I have no desire to own this phone. The galaxy nexus specs are like not that much worse. It doesn't have stock ICS, right? I didn't see a single feature there today that I was like, I really need that. One X. Yeah. One X. You know what I thought was interesting is Eric Lynn from HTC. I'm pointing again, you're over there. You're over there. Uh, Eric Lynn from HTC tweeted like what he said, you know, I know about glass houses and all, but this design looks really familiar to me because the one X really does look like the better riff on like the white body, like phone. It looks just like a stupid smartphone. They all look the same. Yeah. I mean, what's so annoying about these designers? Like you could have made the Lumia 900, but you made this piece of crap. Right. I mean, in all seriousness, it's happening. We got a situation. You seem like you pulled their 60 second commercial off YouTube. Why? I don't know. Chrashawn says they pulled their 60 second commercial. They said it was private. I mean, it could be an accident. I mean, they showed at the event. How long has it been private? I don't know. We just tried to pull it up to show here. Huh. We tried to pull it up to show here. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The one that was like romantic. Yeah. Yeah. It's in Chris's event. Huh. Well, they pulled, apparently Samsung pulled their 60 second commercial. They must have been listening to the Verge cast. Yeah. And heard that we thought it was like funny and they were like, quick, get that down. Neely, Chris and Josh don't like it. You know how much they care. Yeah. But what was I saying? I was on a, there it is. I was on a tangent. I was on a tear. Chris, what was I talking about? About the, the designs of the phones and how they're all the same. Oh yeah, right. Like your Buster phone designers made this thing that looks like your original Galaxy S. Like you could have designed anything. You could have used any material. Your Samsung, you have every resource to do an interesting design. And what you turn around is literally the most generic design you could think of. I mean, it is, it really bothers me. Like it's, it's, it's tiring to look at these phones at this point. I mean, there is no creativity going into them. It just feels like they're not even trying, you know, it's not like they designed something bad. It's so bland that you can't even have an opinion on it. My opinion is, well, if I saw it in a pile of 10 other phones, I was going to tell you what it was. What was the last phone you saw? What was the last phone you saw that was, that really blew your mind in terms of design? Lumia 900 best, best design phone on the market. It might physically, in my opinion. Yeah. I mean, you could say the, you could say the 800. You said the 800 because it's got the continuous sort of, I actually liked the display on the 900, like the way it sits a little bit above the casing, but the Lumia line, the 900, the 800 and the N9 obviously, which is basically the same phone. They're incredible. Like design wise, they're just really beautiful. They're super solid. They're, they just look and feel totally different. But, but Samsung, I mean, obviously, and then, you know, behind that would be the iPhone, the iPhone 4 and the iPhone 4S is the same as the iPhone 4. And honestly, there was a report today. I lounge said that it was, you know, they had some, they had some information about, I'm not only move on necessarily, but just on design that they were going to make a, you know, the new iPhone, the iPhone 5 or whatever we're calling it would be a longer version of the iPhone 4. I mean, if they, if it's like a longer, thinner version of the iPhone 4, I'm sure it's going to be impressive. I have no doubt. But if I have to continue to look at this band design, like if this is, if this is as far as we can take phone design, you know, this is as creative as we can be is to reiterate, you know, to just to iterate on this very similar design. Like for Apple, I'm disappointed if it does look the same. I really will be disappointed. And by the way, I say this, not just because I know the phone will be better, but I just think we need to do better in like industrial design. There's a lot more you can do. I think the Lumia proves that. And this is exactly the thing that I think we shouldn't be doing the Samsung device, which is a total step backwards. It just feels like a total, it's just boring, just boring. It just sucks. Yeah. It's like, it's like a, a Taurus. I just interviewed Al Mulally. I know it's hard to tell, but I think the Taurus is one of those boring cars in the world. Just, it looks like whatever. It's like a non a car, you know, it's like, there's a lot of those. Yeah, there's a lot of those. Or a passenger family sedan. Yeah. Like a, you know, like a, like a Nissan Sentra or something. I mean, I couldn't, if you showed me a Corolla and a Sentra and I don't know, I wouldn't be able to tell them apart. Yeah. Maybe a car actually. The Corolla is definitely better. It does. The point is, the point is like, like there's just not a lot of creative industrial design in the world. Right. And here's an opportunity to like, you have a brand new market, a brand new user base. Like do something exciting, do something different, do something crazy. I mean, try. I mean, you know, to me it all comes back to the fact that they, they put the pen tile screen in there. I don't know. Well, it's a bad part. This empty chair next to you, by the way, is really weird. By the way, it's also hot in here. What happened to the air? Do you not use it anymore? We should move on to the other thing that we have a question on to talk about. We should move on. We can keep railing on Samsung. Go ahead. I think we got to get the phone in our hands. We got to do all that. Yeah, it may be great. Yeah, maybe. Maybe. I mean, it's going to be an Android phone. Maybe it will stalk you into looking at it. Maybe. It'll wake me up in the middle of the night and force me to love it. Big event this week in mobile. Blackberry World. Oh yeah. My God. BB10. BB Ducks. BB10. BB10. Chris? Did you say a screenshot? I don't want to talk about Blackberry. You don't? Did you really just take a screenshot? Was it of us? Yes, of course. I'm trying to tweet that I'm on the Verge cast. I have priorities here, gentlemen. That's nice. That's nice of you. Let's talk about Blackberry. Blackberry 10. What do you think? I think that the three seconds we saw of it was intriguing, but the format of Blackberry World's keynote was even more infuriating than the Galaxy S3 event. Oh dude. The three seconds? They spent half an hour. I don't know. I actually would, I almost would take the Blackberry keynote over the Samsung. It had personality. No. Go ahead, Chris. No way. They spent 45 minutes talking about enterprise apps. They spent three minutes talking about specific UI features in Blackberry 10, and then they spent the next hour and a half talking about Citrix or something, and then they closed on that note. And Playbook. They had some Playbook apps too. What I can't understand is I have to say, and I mentioned this in my post article, you need to win back the consumer. The problem with, and also you need to win back enterprise, but in a situation where you're introducing this new operating system that you're showing how easy it is to use and how wonderful and pleasant and it does all this great stuff, the first people they bring out are Salesforce.com, and then the second guest to stage is Cisco. It's like, why don't you reverse it? Why don't you bring those gaming guys out? Why don't you do anything? Show the camera, show all the features and do all that stuff, and then later on, then show the Playbook gaming and then talk about your great partnerships with Salesforce and Cisco. I mean, it just felt like too long and too boring and too out of touch with the consumer market. I mean, I thought what they showed off of Blackberry 10 looked really promising, but you've got a long road to climb, to walk, and you've got to win back consumers, and it's like you're talking to the Salesforce guy. No one cares about that. Even in Blackberry world, I would imagine people didn't care about it. I mean, everybody I saw at 3AM about it was like, this is painful. Yeah, and the Salesforce guy didn't really watch the thing. We were talking about this on the mobile podcast this week, the fact that this whole bring your own device movement is the thing in enterprise right now. So it's not about what phone your company gives to you. It's about what phone you want to buy as a consumer and bring into your IT department to load whatever apps and email on. So you're absolutely right. They need to appeal to consumers. I mean, there's going to be a certain set of enterprise customers that are going to say, it's got to be Blackberry. I just trust their security. That number is dwindling for sure. It's obviously dwindling. And if somebody comes along that's big enough and says to Apple, look, we want to be on your platform, but you got to do X, Y, and Z, they'll find a way to make it work. They're not just going to go like, well, we don't care about that. So I wrote about this, but what I said is it's like they have to not only... Their competitors have a five-year head start. At this point, Blackberry 10 is a complete reboot of their phone. Whatever they did in the playbook doesn't count. Whatever they did in the playbook, it's not the same. I mean, it's obviously different. It works totally differently. Though obviously there's going to be some compatibility, but also everything up from five to seven of Blackberry OS. By the way, no eight, nine. We're not going to get eight, nine. Why not eight? Why not nine? I mean, I guess they want to make a statement with 10, but it's like those people are out. The guys who bought the latest bold aren't upgrading to 10. You've said that. Okay? So they're starting from scratch here basically. And your competition is five years ahead. The iPhone's been doing this for five years now. Android's been around for five years. They've perfected what they're doing and they're continuing to perfect it. And in fact, if Apple wanted to, they could do glance. Who knows? They may have a glance feature at WWDC. They're going to show off, presumably they're going to show off iOS 6. You're like, we're going to have these phones at the end of the year. They didn't really even show off the UI. They showed off those like four screens. It does not seem fit. And they were like. And the demo devices, the dev devices aren't running any version of, it's like not. They're running the Playbook OS. They're running the Playbook OS with some modifications. Yeah, there are no apps on it whatsoever. Yeah. So you're going to ship phones at the end of the year when? When Apple's shipping the iPhone 5 and when Google's introducing the next flagship. When did they introduce the Nexus? In November, I think. October. It was October 19th because it was my birthday. It was the day that they announced the Galaxy Nexus. Happy birthday. Thank you. And was that for the coming birthday? Yeah, for all your birthdays. Anyhow, in October, they're going to be, everybody's going to have their new flagship device. They're going to have, I mean, I assume Jelly Bean we're going to see at IO. I have to assume we're going to see it at Google IO. I mean, I'm assuming we're going to see it, but it's way too early. Well they'll show it, but it's like, that's their WWDC. Yeah, but like. They're now on like the same schedule. If they show Jelly, the thing about. You're very upset about this. It's just like, it will prove that like the Android upgrade cycle is falling ever farther behind. Right? I mean, Samsung just put out the S3 with Ice Cream Sandwich. The S2 is just. They're not selling behind people by the stock devices. Their problem is they need to sell more stock devices. Yeah, they're selling them in the store now. But like, to show off Jelly Bean when the whole world is just finally getting Ice Cream Sandwich seems like, it seems like a huge. My point is getting back to Blackberry. My point is that they're fighting this enormous uphill battle and I have, I did not see like their OS looks really cool, but I did not see a compelling feature where I was like, this is going to just completely solve some problem I have in mobile right now. So I'm going to switch. The camera is pretty cool. Oh, the, the Scolato thing where you go back in time. That demo seems fake to me. Well, I don't see any reason why. I mean, it is fake, but I don't see any reason why if it's so great, somebody can just rip it off. Right. Cause it's a company that you can partner with. Like they didn't buy Scolato. Well they might have an exclusivity, you know, for a minute, but like whatever. But the point is it's, it's a, it's a camera. It's a, it does. That's not, that's not, but that's not like a device. That's not like a, that's not like I was going to get the iPhone, but this camera functionality is so cool. Screw it. There's no apps. There's no carrier support, but I'm going to, you know, it's on one carrier or something when they were launched. This is like Palm all over again, except they have a little bit more, well, they have a lot more of a market share, but, but those people aren't going to Blackberry again. They're burned by Blackberry and they can't wait to get off, off of their Blackberry. I've talked to a lot of people, a lot of regular people who are like, I hate this thing. I can't wait to get an iPhone, you know? Yeah. So I just think that, except for the keyboard. Yeah. But I mean, that's not an issue. That's, that's an issue from five years ago. People love that keyboard, man. Yeah. I know people love it, but it's in, but, but it's clear that as people, as the market share has grown for smartphones, people have started to adopt virtual keyboards and they don't, and they believe in them. Yeah. It's not like they're not, they aren't working. They're getting better. The soft keyboards are getting better all the time. They're getting a lot better. And, and by the way, the Blackberry 10 soft keyboard looks insane. Well, you know, Matt Buchanan did this great post on, on a Buzzfeed about how it's, they created the slowest keyboard in the world because they have a video where somebody is typing a short message and it's like, it takes. What it does is as you're typing, it tries to guess what letter you're using or what word you're going to type next. Yeah. And it puts that letter above the, it puts that word above the first letter on the keyboard. So you can just go and swipe up. I thought it puts it above the, what the next letter would be in the word that it thinks you're typing. I think it's, well, it's both. Whatever. It's very confusing. Yeah. And so you like, it's like, it's like, put them all over the place. So your eye has to be darting around. Yeah. Instead of it in one place, like on Android, it does that, but it's in one, you can just swipe up. And you don't have to swipe up. And so like the video is like, it takes 15 seconds for them to be like, hello, how are you? And then Matt timed it. On Android it was like seven seconds and iOS was like 6.5. And on the Blackberry, current physical Blackberry keyboard is lower too. Yeah. Anyhow, it's, it's, it's a Blackberry 10. I mean, I think they showed some cool stuff, but I just don't see. Where are they going to discuss? What's your, what's your, what's your take? Yeah, I want to hear your take on it. Cause I have my take. What do you think is the outcome here? Do you think they're going to launch and be, and have some success? You guys want to show that video? Let's show the typing video. I think that it's going to be impossible for them to convert. You know, you have this huge legacy base of Blackberry 7 customers. And just like you say, Josh, they have no interest. It's not like they're, they're chomping at the bit to upgrade to the next gen Blackberry. They just want to get off the platform and get onto a real smartphone platform. Right. And that's the thing I just feel like what is the hook? You've got to have a hook, you know, what is the hook for Blackberry now? Security, stability. No one, no one's walking around with an iPhone going like, I don't feel this is stable and secure. No one. You're not a Blackberry person. You're not a Blackberry person. That's the problem. Oh, right. That's right. Torsten Heinz kept talking about Blackberry people. Then he ended his presentation by going, let's rock and roll this. And then he said, let's rock and roll this. That was basically the same thing. He also said, did he make some weird comment about going on the tweet all the time? He said something like that. And then he did, he did a Howard Stringer. He ended one part of his presentation and there's no applause and he goes, come on. I don't know. I don't know. I'm sorry. I know, I know. I'm sure he's a fine man, but all, every time I heard him speak, all I could think of was the villain from Die Hard. Oh yeah. He's, he actually sounds kind of like Alan Rickman doing a German accent. If you close your eyes. And so I think honestly, can we get the, can we punch up the audio of Torsten Heinz talking? Do we have that? Yeah, you could look for it. But if you just hear it. Let's take some calls. Yeah, let's take some calls actually. On the S3 and Blackberry. What do you want to, on anything. What headphones Chris is wearing. One or the other. What did you think of the S3 announcement or what did you think of Blackberry? I'd actually like to hear about, I'm more interested about Blackberry because you know kind of what Samsung is doing with S3. It's like another Android device. It's in a, you know, it's a part of a lineage. I'd like to hear what are your thoughts on RIM's state? Are you a Blackberry, a current Blackberry user? Do you want to upgrade to 10? Are you an Android or iPhone user that wants to go to Blackberry 10? Do you, what do you think? I want to hear your thoughts. Call us now. The number is, somebody's going to put the number on the screen. There it is. It's 888-418-4074. I was like how come no one's calling? It's because no one knew the number. 888-418-4074. We're going to take some calls. Yeah. And then I think after the calls, yeah just align that. That's perfect. Yeah just get it right. One pixel, one pixel down I think. No one more. One more. There you go. No one more. I think one more. Nope. Oh boy. It's getting real weird over there. What's happening Chris? You want to fix that? Anyhow we're just waiting for a call in. No one. Call in's on the tell us. Hey Michael. Take a break here. Michael's taking calls right now. Chris what's the weather like in Chicago? It's hot and muggy today. Oh nice. It was just there. I hate humidity. That's the problem with New York in the summer. Alright looks like we have a caller. Let me grab this lovely human being. Low caller you're on the verge Kaz. What's your name and don't swear and what do you have to say? My name's David and I wanted to call and talk about the Blackberry 10. Okay. What do you want to talk about? Well I'm talking about what I wanted to say is I feel like I'm kind of pulling for them even though there wasn't really anything compelling for it and I'm sure it's probably when it comes to the ecosystem that will probably be the weak link in that chain but I kind of liked what I saw. I found it intriguing. So I agree with you. I have this and I think this is what happened with Palm. When I saw WebOS for the first time I got really psyched and I thought this is an alternative. This is something that's different. It's really intuitive and I actually feel like they've gone a very similar route with Blackberry 10. Are you a current Blackberry user? I'm curious to know what do you use and what is it specifically that you saw that you thought well this is compelling enough to make me want to either switch or upgrade. What's your current platform and what's the specific stuff that you're thinking that you like? Well I have an iPhone now but I've owned two Blackberries in the past and I absolutely detested the operating system but I thought it was some of the best hardware I've ever owned. In terms of call quality and reception and the build quality I thought it was excellent. They do make good hardware. They make really nice hardware. I mean I love their hardware. Yeah I mean all the bolds are nice. The bold is beautiful. It's bold and beautiful really when you think about it. So you think you'll switch when it comes out or is there going to be something that's going to be a deal breaker? I don't know. I kind of look at it as buying the first version of any new car model. Don't do it. So you're not going to switch? I don't imagine that I'd switch immediately but I would certainly be open to it if it ends up having something compelling. Yeah. But the problem is like if enough people feel that way that first version will fail miserably. Right. No. I mean that's the problem. You don't want to wait for the next one. All right. Well look thank you very much for calling in. I appreciate the thoughts and I'd be very interested to know. We should check back. Let us know when the new device comes out if you decide to go for it. Do you want to bring in Paul? Do you want to bring him in or call him? Oh you want to call him? What line is he on? You want me to call him? I don't know how to use this. We can call him. I'm going to take another call. Caller you're on the verge. Cast don't swear. What are you thinking? What's on your mind? Hey. How's it going? And what's your name? My name is Chang. Did you just make that up? You sounded like you just made that up. I'm going to go with Chang today. Let's call me Chang. What's up? All right. For your purposes that's all you needed to know. Yeah. All right Chang what's up? What's happening? All right. Well I guess I wanted to talk about Blackberry. So I seem to be going from loser platform to loser platform. I started on Windows Mobile. I had the HTC original thing on T-Mobile. Then I went to Blackberry with the Pearl. I got the Curve. And then I jumped onto the Palm Pre. I knew you were going to say WebOS. As soon as you said loser platform. Yeah I knew you were going to say WebOS. So wait wait wait. What do you have now? You know I actually had my phone stolen so I am rocking the original Evo. Oh wow. That's a pretty good phone. I thought you were going to say you got a Windows phone and then you were going to lament some problem with it. Yeah there is only so much punishment I can take. Oh Chang. Good thing you don't have comments on your life. But I'll get them for you. So that's the important thing. So you like 10? You like the looks of it Blackberry 10? I think it has potential but so far it looks awful. I mean like are you kidding. The reason why I love Blackberry. Why I love the Pearl and the Curve. The keyboard was so good. You could just crank out an SMS message without even thinking about it. You really? Now I have to turn it on. You like the physical keyboard? I don't know if I can ever go back to it but I miss the ability to just do it super quickly without even having to look at it. But won't you always have that feeling forever until they invent a keyboard that feels like a physical keyboard but is virtual. I mean aren't you stuck with that no matter what you use if you're not going back to a physical keyboard. Well there is a technology called the slider so if you can make a slider phone that's like thin and it looks good. You mean like a phone with a keyboard. Is that what you're saying? That's what I was saying but it was such a crappy keyboard. They said they're going to make Blackberry's they're still going to make them with Blackberry 10 devices with physical keyboards so maybe that's the device you're looking for. I mean they made the torch which is basically what you're talking about. Did you ever try the torch? No. I read a couple of things about that and I was like why would I go near that thing. Yeah sure that's understandable. But I mean hey if Blackberry comes out with a device and it has a great keyboard and maybe a slider maybe not but it's like the operating system works they have like a cards type windowing switching where it works very smoothly I would reconsider them but right now they have a lot to prove and I have not seen that much. Right but you don't want to stay on Android? No I love Android. I mean like you know. You're kind of on the hunt for the next thing. Is that it? Well I'm getting tied I'm getting locked into Android right now. Yeah that's what they want. I don't have to really blow my socks off for my switch back. That's what they want. They got you man they got you. Alright thanks so much for calling in really appreciate it and again we'll check back with you I'd like to hear if you do end up with the 10 device. Thanks a lot man. We can't get in touch with Paul. Is he here? Let's bring him in. Let's get Paul in. Christopher. Chris. You're just sitting there in silence anyhow. Do we need to turn him off? Paul can't see you. Chris we're gonna let you go. I'm not gonna blindfold Paul. No no we're gonna keep Chris. We're gonna keep you Chris. And we're gonna blindfold Paul. And we're gonna blindfold Paul. But he can't hear me. I was just like he's not supposed to be able to hear me. Alright Chris we got an impossible situation here we gotta let you go. Yeah I'm sorry. Any closing thoughts? Don't buy a BlackBerry 10 device. I implore you. Wow. Wow. And GS3. Closing thoughts on the GS3. Alright Chris thanks for joining us and we'll have you back next time when Paul isn't even stopping by and then we can just talk freely and not have to worry about this the tyranny of no internet invading our broadcast. Sounds good thanks guys. Alright thanks man. While we wait for Paul let's take a caller. We got a caller here. Hello caller you're on the line. What's your name? Don't swear. And are you getting a BlackBerry 10 device when they're available? My name is Austin. I'm probably not getting a BlackBerry 10 device. I haven't been very happy with them lately and it doesn't seem to do enough to catch up to the other operating systems. Is that all you wanted to say? No not really. I mean I actually work for a mobile phone carrier. I sell the phone. What carrier? Can you name the carrier? Are you red? Or are you blue? AT&T. Oh AT&T. I was just going to say what does it rhyme with? But that's fine too. Oh I had a cool prop. So you work for AT&T. Oh my goodness. So you just wanted to say you're not going to get a BlackBerry 10 device? It seems almost confusing to actually sell to customers because if I read correctly you swipe from the right side of the screen to the left to go to your notifications. You swipe from left to right to go back. Well it's one direction is like a peak. I think you keep your finger down and the other is like you swipe the card actually. And you go back through apps. Oh and all the apps are always running. They're very high on this. Well it's Kunix. Yeah but that seems like a terrible idea. Well not for Kunix. You don't want all of your apps. It's powerful enough for a car. Cars have engines with gas tanks. Phones have like 2000 milliamp hour batteries. It's powerful enough to run our electrical grids here in America. I don't care if it's powerful enough. I just don't want all the apps sucking my battery all the time. You're not going to run all the houses at once? You won't get power? You'll have to like choose which... Are you going to put your headphones on? Paul's back by the way. Paul's here everybody. Paul. Paul. By the way, Creighton is obsessed with putting a blindfold on me. It's getting a little creepy to be honest. Not surprising honestly. I had a feeling about him. Would it count if we had Chris on Skype and you were wearing a blindfold? No because you can still hear him. I can hear him in that audio. That's what I thought. It's kind of weird. Austin. I also bought ear plugs. Austin. Paul, please sit down with the ear plugs. What kind of phone do you currently use? Currently have a Lumia 900 and an iPhone. Did you call in last week? I did not. Two weeks ago? Nope. I haven't called in before. Are you lying to me? I'm absolutely positive. Don't lie to me Austin. I'm serious. I'm not lying. So you use both the Lumia and the iPhone. You have two separate accounts? I have two separate accounts for each device. One is like the girlfriend phone and the other one is the wife phone. Is that how it works? You got a wife phone or a slice phone? Girlfriend or wife is in the room right now. Slice phone by the way. Is there a phone? I mean you saw the Galaxy S3 today I assume. Is that something you're interested in? Or you're not into Android? I am into Android. I'm actually looking at the HC1X. Yeah. You have to. You're in AT&T. Yeah you're in AT&T. So you're like in the store, you're like selling these phones to people? Yeah. You're on the front lines. Now is it true? Have you seen people in your store, and I mean maybe you do this, are people, what do they push people towards? Like what do you see the other employees pushing people towards? Is there a push or do you just let the customer guide? It's almost kind of my way is the customer comes in asking for an iPhone, show them the iPhone, go straight to the iPhone. They come in not sure what they're looking for. Show them two or three different devices. Show them a Windows phone, show them the iPhone, show them an Android and let them decide which they prefer as far as layout and whatnot. And what do you see, I mean I think I know the answer, but what's the most common, if you put all three phones in front of them, what do you feel is the one they most commonly leave with? Well the iPhone is definitely by far the most popular choice. But interestingly enough, I seem to get a lot of customers who prefer Windows phone versus Android if they don't know anything about the two. Because Windows phone is a lot simpler to get up and running, especially if you're coming from a dumb phone. Yeah, I mean that is one thing that when you look at Android, even ICS, I mean you have the HTC, you have the One X, but it's not, it's still like all sensed up. And ICS is complex, it's very complicated. It's very computer-y in a lot of ways. And I will say Windows phone, man, I mean you put that in front of someone who doesn't really know anything, but it's going to be between the iPhone and Windows phone in terms of ease of use. They do almost have that quality of the big button telephones, whereas it is just bigger. You want to feel that way? Exactly. Anyhow, alright Austin, we're going to move on, but thank you so much for calling in and I hope we hear from you again soon. Right? Off. Nope, cut them off. Paul, you're back. Yep. Let's talk. Alright. Let's talk about the lack of the internet for you. So you read about BlackBerry 10 yesterday. Yeah, in the newspaper. And what do they have? A detailed description of how it functioned? It was pretty high level. Do you have any idea how it actually functions? You haven't seen a video of it. No, they mentioned that they use the tablet UI, but that's not final. They mentioned that it has none of the phone software for making calls or using any wireless internet. This is the alpha device. Right. The alpha device has like nothing going on. But they didn't talk about BlackBerry 10 as a platform? Because that isn't what they showed on stage. They showed like a new... So they showed where it would go. They showed like a new operating system. Okay. And should I describe it to you? Yeah, please. So my only rule is you guys can describe anything factual to me. I just don't... The main thing I don't want to know from the internet is like is comments. I'm still avoiding that. You're not going to know any comments. Believe me, I'm not going to... Why would I force you to know comments if you don't have to? You know, I mean, because there's a lot of negativity out there. Let's bury you from that. So the new BlackBerry OS, BlackBerry 10 is you start with a screen that has like four big tiles on it. And what's this? Are you supposed to read the site? I'm reading the site. And now I have to see what the site is. RevCron1, which if you don't know, that's the first slot in our reverse chronological... It's an amazing piece of news. We'll get there. Wait, what? Oh, wow. Yeah. I'm sorry. I can't read this out loud, can I? Because you're here. We want to go full screen. It's going to show up here. Paul, close your eyes for a second. Can we just show... This story just broke? No, it broke up a while ago. We just published this? All right, close your eyes, Paul. I mean... Do you want me to read it? Okay, yeah. Go ahead and read it. So this story has been building for a couple of days. But Yahoo admits CEO falsely claims to have computer science degree, calls it an inadvertent error. Inadvertent, like I lied about having a computer science degree. Yeah, and he's been lying about it for years. So he got caught today because one of their shareholders has been on a tear to prove that he's been lying about this. No, isn't this the guy who like... The Wall Street Journaler. This is the guy who was like a middle manager of the company or something. He was at PayPal. Oh, he's at PayPal. But he was like a middle manager of PayPal, I was thinking. Yeah, and Yahoo's statement to All Things D earlier today was like, this in no way changes the fact that he's been successful before. Did you see like Leonardo DiCaprio and he's like been like, you know, faking his way onto airplanes. It would be exactly like that if in that movie, Leonardo DiCaprio was an accountant who pretended to have a computer science degree. Yes, just like that. All right, so let me get back to Blackberry 10. That's a great story. So the home screen of it has four tiles. And there's an app in each of the tiles. It's like Windows Phone. Yeah, but it wasn't clear if it scrolled or not because they didn't show it scrolling. And then you tap on one of them to open the app. And the apps look kind of a lot like Blackberry apps. I mean, they show like email and it kind of looks like an email. It's amazing to tell this to you because you don't know anything about it. I know this might sound frustrating for some listeners, but I do think this could broaden our audience by the fact that you do have to explain what's actually going on to me. Well, I mean, forget about that. I think it's just an interesting experiment. But if it broadens our audience, that's cool, too. So it looks a lot like Blackberry, the messaging, and they showed... So on the screen, you can swipe a little bit... Not swipe, but pull the card aside of the app and you can see your notifications behind it. If you pull it in one direction, you see your notifications. If you pull it... So this is the lock screen? No, no, no, no. This is the home screen. So you've already unlocked your phone. The phone's unlocked. I don't know if they show it unlock or not. The phone's unlocked. You get four tiles. They're live tiles with apps in them. And they show weather and it's got a little weather display and there's one that's calendar and it's got something. But they don't show you any actual live information until you swipe the moment? Yes, they show you live information in one of the four tiles for that app. And then you tap into it. But why do you swipe if there's already live information? Hold on, I'm gonna tell you. This is all called flow. Flow. Okay, you tap... You flow through the app. Oh, that's the home screen. That's just like... That's what you see when you turn on the device. Well, we think it's... We think it is. We don't know. Sure. Anyhow, you tap into an app, it opens the app, and you got your calendar up or whatever. And you can swipe... You can hold... Pull that app to the side and you see like... You can see... If you pull it one direction, you see notifications behind it. If you swipe it in that direction, you get to your message list, which has all of your notifications in it and your messages. It's, I guess, unified notifications and messages. Don't show that. Don't show... Don't look over there. So you get to the universal messages? Yeah, but they describe it as... From any app? Yeah, I think it's from any app in a certain direction. And then in the other direction, and correct me if I'm wrong, and the other... Neelay, correct me if I'm wrong. So it's basically instead of having a pull down notification drawer... It has, I guess, pull aside notification drawer, which is actually a lot like MeeGo. Yeah. Okay. Now, there's a lot of... If you combined web OS with Windows phone... And MeeGo. With a couple remnants of MeeGo ideas... And a car operating system. And a car operating system. Yeah. And then if you pull the other side, you go through your applications, right? If you swipe to the other direction, you go through your applications. So kind of for multitasking. And if you swipe up, you go back to your home screen. Yeah. I like this. And it's always multitasking. Sounds great. And it was all built by the Astonishing Tribes. It's like very flashy. Well, it wasn't all built by them, but it's... Well, they're calling that whole thing Cascades, which was their... But has Astonishing Tribe toned it down a little bit? No. They've toned it down a little bit. Well, so the whole thing is called... There's not like rubbery 3D things that pop up. The whole thing is called Cascades. Yeah. Which is the name of... Well, I thought you said it was Flow. Yeah, Flow is like the... Flow is the verb? Yeah. Okay. So Flow essentially looks like... You know how on the touchpad, they had the multi-pane email thing? And you could close a pane and just see one view? It kind of does that. Okay. I think it specifically does that in the email app. So does it allow you to do a little bit of side-by-side stuff? No. Yeah. Well, it does in the sense that you can kind of glance. They call it a glance. And you can glance at something without leaving the app or getting... No, but you can do that on Android where you kind of pull down the window shade and you see your notifications. Well, something I really like to do on Mac OS in Safari is that the two finger back and forward, you can kind of... Yeah, you kind of look. You can kind of look to see where you are. That's exactly what it's like. I would love to be able to do that, especially because loading things can sometimes be slow on mobile. What's happening? I ordered a beer. Don't worry about it. That is kind of what it's like. That's cool. And then they showed... I think it was The New York Times that mentioned this in their detailed report. No, no, no. It sounds like they completely missed... They just talked about the developer. No, no. They specifically showed a non-developer version of something that was not what they were giving to developers. And they had a device that was like this developer device they probably talked about, which is just a slab. Right. It looks like... It actually looks kind of identical to the iPhone. Okay. I mean, it actually was really... But it's non-final hardware. It's non-final hardware. It's essentially like a... Like they did with Windows Phone with the developer preview. Yeah. The developer one was... Wasn't it like the focus? Wasn't it? I guess it kind of was. Yeah. Yeah. It might have been what they showed at the event. I don't remember. At any rate... I mean, it's a mashup of ideas. Well, I like that they did something a little different. You know? Yeah. That sounds cool. I was actually thinking... You know, because they were talking about the fact that they're not even mentioning a hardware keyboard right now. No, they said... They said they'll have one. No, no. See, The New York Times is really missing a lot of information. They said, Torsten Heinz, I believe, said on stage that they would continue to make hardware keyboard devices. Okay. And that... Oh, so I should tell you about the keyboard. Did you read about the keyboard? The New York Times mentioned that they were gonna try to do some predictive stuff and it would adapt to you eventually. Well, yes. But the way it does it is when you're typing on it, as you type, the words that it thinks you're trying to type appear above, I think, the next letter you're gonna type. Above the next letter? Yeah. So, if you type H and then above E, it shows hey. So, instead of a bar across the top... That's right. It shows like little words above the letters. That's cool. And it will dot. And it may be like hey over here and maybe another word over here. Like if it's like you're going to high or something, you know, and it shows the... Above the I, it shows the word. I've been working on my T9 skills. So... Yeah, I bet you have. And this sounds very exciting to me. So you swipe up to put the word into your thing. And if you wanna erase, you just swipe back across the keyboard and it deletes, like, you know, you just go like that and it just deletes. This is so weird that you're saying this because I was like sitting there in the dentist chair waiting for 45 minutes for my dentist who did not show up, by the way. It was very disappointing. Your dentist flaked on you? Yeah. Well, he had a... He was in a surgery. But I was reading about this and I was like, you know what you don't use on the... The keyboards are all tapping. Why don't you use any swipe? Because I was like, how does Blackberry bring back the jog dial? And I was thinking that it would be cool, you know, instead of having this tap to switch through keyboard modes, you could swipe... Well, some keyboards do that. Where if you're tapping a letter, you swipe up for the number or down for the punctuation. For Android, you can get keyboards that do all kinds of gesture stuff like that. Like you can swipe up and get your numbers. And this thing is like you swipe up and you get your... Well, but swipe up per key. Oh. Well, this is like swipe up and it changes. But anyhow, then you swipe backwards to delete and it's like really fluid. I like that. That sounds really nice. But it's funny, Matthew Cannon wrote something, we were just talking about this. I like how I'm recounting things that I just talked about. Matthew Cannon wrote something on BuzzFeed and it was about how slow they show... They have a video that's a demo video of it and it really takes them forever to type a really short message. And he's like, RIM just invented the slowest virtual keyboard in history. And he timed it against like the iPhone, Android, and in a physical Blackberry keyboard. Those were all faster than the demo they showed somebody typing. But I think that's the extent of it. What else did they show? I want... I mean... For the phone. Catching Paul up is great, but I wanna hear about life on the... Yeah, we're gonna get to that. I'm just trying to... I just wanna make sure that he's fully versed on this Blackberry stuff. The big news of this week is the Galaxy S3 and the Blackberry 10. And Blackberry 10. Oh, there's one thing that we didn't ask you that they wanted to ask you. True or false? Mm-hmm. You can take a video on the Galaxy S3 and do picture in picture while you do other stuff on the phone. Picture in picture. Yeah, no, no, no, no. Describe it. Describe it further. I don't understand. You're describing... I think you're trying to say something else. Picture in picture on the phone. Like a TV. Like on a TV, you can do picture in picture. You can watch video in a small window while you're doing all kinds of other apps. Yeah. Anybody on the phone. This is a pretty good one. No. True. Wrong. True. And you move the window. And you move the window around while you're in a browser. It's really bad. It looks ridiculous. It's gonna like destroy your UI and whatever. But every touch screen app is designed to use the entire screen. Well, guess what? So now if you cover up a part of a screen, you're disabling the ability of that. I know that you can't watch the demo, but that is... It is like a floating... No, no, no. Imagine... It's like a box. It's a box. Have you ever had an app... It's like a whack-a-mole where you keep on moving it around so that you can... Have you ever had an app that glitched out on you and it left a video player over top of another app? Yeah. That's exactly what it looks like. Oh, it's great. But you can move the video player around the screen. But it doesn't go away. QuickTime used to be really good at that. Yes, yes. It's just like breaking through every part of your... Yeah, it was just like a more persistent element than everything else. Oh, and one more thing from the event that I just wanna tell you just so you know how crazy this Samsung event was. I don't wanna answer any questions that are gonna lower my average. They won't. No, I'm just gonna tell you that. You got that one wrong. Because this was like an amazing... Yeah, you're like... You're nine for 10 or something. Nine for 10. Horrible. So they had the London Symphony Orchestra there, and they were gonna... They did one more thing. They literally did one more. And the orchestra swelled, and the stage started to rise to show off their new stores, and then the stage broke. Oh, it did break. And it just sat there. No way. Yeah. And the orchestra got swelling. I was confused. Swelling. And then finally, they just put up a picture of the store and the orchestra stopped. I was thinking... I was getting the events conflated, and I was like, what if at the Blackberry event, the orchestra's playing, and then this huge hand is like... A holographic Tupac hand is projected in front of the orchestra, and it just swipes them away. That'd be great. Wouldn't that be great? But then they'd have to be a hologram as well. Well, they could be on a moving stage. Yeah. Or on a moving stage. Like on Les Mis. Or you could just put a black curtain in front of them along with the hand. Oh, that's true. And it just looks like they're being swept away. That's a little bit cheap alternative. Or then there was an animation of them being swept over the hand. Or what if you peek, and it's like a hip-hop group, and then you peek the other way... It's an orchestra. And it's like... And then they jam, then they get together. Yeah. Yes. We should go into business designing stage things. Stage things. Stage things. Okay. Let's talk about... Let's get to you. Okay. Life without the internet. You've been off since midnight on... Monday night. Monday night. So I started May 1st. And you already wrote something about your first day off of the internet, which I thought was great. What do you think? It's been a few days. It's really calming. I really like it. The biggest gotcha so far, and I'm gonna write something about this, but by limiting my avenues of communication to only phone calls, I'm getting a lot of phone calls. It's kind of starting to stress me. I really... That's what it used to be in the old days. I hate phone calls. Well, you know, olden, olden days, your phone was at home. And there was no call waiting. Well, right. No call waiting. No, this... Oh, right. I see you're out. You're... On May 1st, I was getting a lot of two calls at once. For some reason, people call at the same time often. And yeah, there used to be no call waiting. But for the most part, you get all your phone calls at home, and then you go home and deal with them. So they couldn't interrupt you. So if I'm at dinner with somebody and this phone call happens... Oh, you can put it on silent. You can put it on silent. You can screen them. But it's a lot easier to do that with text messaging, where you can just glance... So while I thought I was avoiding the distraction of text messaging, I've actually introduced a greater distraction. So I've been thinking about the text messaging piece, because I feel like it may go... This is just me, and I'm not telling you that you have to listen to me. But I've been thinking about it, and I think that the no text messaging might go one... But I think the thing is the internet is really just a proxy for the distractions of a digital lifestyle. You're trying to live an analog life, which is a life where you aren't constantly connected. And I do think that the ding of a text message is part of that culture. But I do think, honestly, it would be much easier to tell you things about work if I was able to text message you things, and it was a message waiting for you as opposed to a call that had to be done at that moment. Well, I think what I might do is just start turning my phone off. So go to voicemail very quickly. People can leave me voicemails, and then I'll... You're gonna turn your phone off. And then I'll deal with them at a different time. At the time and place of your choosing. Right. If I'm with somebody, I just want my phone to be off, so I can't interrupt that time. Well, that's what you should do. You should have... And I'll have my phone on at certain times where people know they can get a hold of me, and to sort through messages. Yeah, that doesn't sound that great to me, but for me... It's a big problem right now that I'm trying to solve. But other than that, I find this really peaceful, and I really like this idea... I was talking to Joshua Koffstein about it. He mentioned Programmer Be Programmed, a book I really wanna read. And I've also been reading You Are Not A Gadget, and this idea that computers are designed for basically how many operations per second they can execute, and the more the merrier as far as computers are concerned. So humans can really only do one thing at a time. Computers exist in linear time, and computers don't really. And so now that I'm... Humans exist in linear time. Yes, did I say it the wrong way? You said computers. Two computers. I said there's computers, yes. There's a lot of computers here. No, no, no. But humans exist in linear time, computers don't. And by not being as beholden to computers, now I can't get an email and an IM and a tweet all at the same time. If I'm in a human interaction, it's in linear time. The phone calls being the one exception right now. But they are largely, except for voicemail, they are linear in the sense that they either happen in real time or they don't. Or maybe the two of them happen at the same time. But yes, they do happen. They're still both real time events. They're not like... It's not like they're... I mean, yes, they're happening. And they can't... It's harder for them to pile up. Well, you can't talk to two people at one time, unless you're conference calling. You can't pretend to be multitasking conversations. That's right. No, you can't. Well, on a computer, you're always like kind of... You're answering one thing over here and then answering something over here. And you think you might be multitasking, but I don't think you really can. So in terms of your creative output, your writing, your thinking, I know you did a video thing yesterday. How'd that go, by the way? I think it went really good. Yeah, how was it? Was it good? I'm not gonna say yet, because I don't know what we're doing with it, but it was cool, right? I think you guys do. Don't tell me. Tell me later. Okay. Well, I didn't know if there was like an activity. How has it been like researching sources and doing your reporting? Well, so far, I've been finishing... Everything's really outdated. Yeah. It's really weird. The Encyclopedia... I can't say a word. Encyclopedia Britannica. I forgot how to talk. I forgot how to talk. The Encyclopedia Britannica from 1985 is not helping me very much. No. I'm not sure how to talk about that much, although I thought it would be funny to start writing articles where I'm making references to the Soviet Union. Yeah. I've been trying to find a set of Encyclopedia Britannicas that are really old, so that it has a Soviet Union in it. I was talking to you about that. I have a very old set of Encyclopedia Britannica. I mean, I used to have one. I grew up with really old ones. We have a set from 1918 or something. They're 1920 or something. That's pretty old. It's old. They're really old. They're falling apart. So anyways... I don't know if they're... They're in Encyclopedia. I don't know if they're Britannica. I mean, is that the first Encyclopedia? Yeah. Yeah. I've been wrapping up a feature that I started researching before I left the Internet. So I have a ton of material on my computer. Oh, I know this feature. This is a cool feature. It's a really cool feature. It's been taking me a long time. I have been able to work faster and more on it. You're unimpeded at this point. I'm unimpeded, but obviously, I've heavily relied on the Internet for that research. So after this, I'm on my own. And I'll have to see what happens. Oh, like you had all that stuff on your computer. Yeah, I had a ton of stuff. You're all set. Like read later. Yeah. Your challenge for the next piece will be you got to start from scratch. You got to go to read a magazine or something. I assume if you want to research a current event, let's say Blackberry 10, you got to buy Bloomberg and Wired and whatever print magazines exist that may cover that stuff, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and get your kind of background from that. Well, I also want to talk to people a lot. Yeah. I want to talk to people a lot. And I also want to talk to people. Oh, yeah. Sure, you can call people. Talk to people who are at things firsthand. Right. So you talk to our dudes and have a conversation. I heard you were at this event. Can I talk to you? You'll talk to Deidre and David or whoever. Right. And I think that could be interesting at a different angle. It's easy, I think, on the Internet for me to think that I've done all my research because I read all the articles about the topic on the Internet. But really, if that's all I do and then I write an article, it's not really adding anything new to the Internet. It's just remixing what's already on the Internet. Right. Everything is remixed. Everything is remixed. By the way, I hate that phrase. I hate that entire thing. So have you been... So I'm happy. I mean, I think you're still in the honeymoon period of this. I don't feel like we really have this lot of meaty conversation we can have about how it's going because I think you're probably really enjoying it. I am really enjoying it. In some ways, it's probably a little bit like a vacation right now. It is. But you've reached the point where you're gonna start to struggle. And I think there will be a point where you struggle a little bit. I'm pretty sure. The one thing I'll say is that... And I'm not gonna go into too much great of detail, but I think there's a... So first off, you were on the front page of CNN. You don't know this. I've heard... You were told. You were on the front page of CNN. They wrote an article about you. You talked to John Sutter over there. And there's clearly very... I mean, we've gotten emails from people, from book people. There's a lot of interest in this crazy story of the guy who worked on... Prominent blogger. Paul Miller. Yeah, prominent blogger, right. But one thing I'll say is when Paul first told me this idea, there's this... So one of the things that I've seen this sentiment that it's a stunt, that this is a stunt for you. And I was talking to Neelai about this in the car ride over here. And there was a Gruber link to something today about the guy mocking you. I'm gonna start freaking out if we talk about it. No, no, hold on. But I wanna say what I told you in the car and I think it's really interesting. So when Paul first told me this idea, it was 100% from... Very much from the heart. I felt that Paul has felt an agitation with his life on... Lived on the internet for a while. And mostly a dissatisfaction with my level of productivity, which I feel was impeded by the internet. Right. And I was saying to Neelai when we were riding over, because he was angry about this thing that this guy wrote. And, you know, because it was mean, it was very cynical, very mean-spirited. And I've heard other people say like, oh, it's a stunt, it's this, it's that. But the funny thing is when you told me the idea, I didn't... But the first thing that crossed my mind wasn't like, people will... There'll be media attention or this is like, you can... Everybody's gonna wanna know, talk to you or whatever. I just thought like, that's a really crazy idea. What if Paul Miller went off the internet for a year? What if he really did it and wrote about it? How interesting would that be? And you guys don't... I don't wanna go into a you don't know what I know situation, but people don't know Paul Miller. I know Paul Miller and Neelai knows Paul Miller. And we were... You came to us with the idea and we're like, yes, that's cool. But also... But beyond... It wasn't a surprise. No, beyond us, right. It wasn't a surprise, but beyond us... And by the way, people are like, they're just trying to give publicity, but we didn't really until the last day or two beforehand actually come up with a strategy of how are we gonna tell... We had Paul do a post. It was very casual. It was only when we did it that people were like, what the hell's going on that I realized it was such a big deal to a lot of people. But what I wanna say is that Paul is a really... You're a very genuine, sweet guy. You're one of the most genuine people I've ever met. And I don't feel like anything you do is a stunt. I don't even think that is like your brain works like that. Maybe it does. Maybe you've been lying to me this whole time. Yeah. But the genuine thing was a stunt. But I... Yes. But I guess... You fell for it. Look at you. I really did. Hook line at Saker. But I do think it's interesting when I hear people talk about you, these people who definitely don't know you at all. And I think if you knew this guy, if you knew Paul Miller, this would never occur to you that he would try to do some publicity stunt, that this was some sort of cheesy attention grab. Because it's just not your nature. You're just not like that. And I think it's really... So my observation has been I've been really angry at people for not for saying that it's a stunt, but for really, truly I can see at the core of what they're writing about. No. Misunderstanding. I'm mad at people. Misunderstanding about what kind of person you are, that you would be a person who would do a stunt. I get that you think it's a stunt, but knowing you, I just think it just doesn't match up to me at all. And so it's been upsetting to me to see people accuse us of doing some sort of publicity stunt when the things that I know are true are we didn't really actually realize how much anybody would pay attention to it at all when we talked about it. And that you genuinely want to do it. It was something you actually really... You're not even trying to make a stand. I think a lot of people also think you've got your grandstanding. The internet's not cool. Or like, I'm post internet. That's not it. Biggest thing, I've tried to clarify that and I can understand how people could... There's something... I try not to drink and it's a very personal decision and I don't think it works very well for me. And there's something about not drinking that a lot of people feel judged just because maybe there's a history of being judged for not drinking. It's like when I talk about not eating meat. People get very touchy. Oh, oh, so you're pissed at me for eating meat right now. Yeah. Or they have to show off that they eat more meat. They're like, I love meat. And they start eating a hamburger and a hot dog at the same time. Or at dinner they feel bad about ordering meat in front of you. You notice, right? There's a restaurant in Madison called State Street Brats that will serve you a hamburger with a bratwurst on it. That sounds delicious. And a bratwurst with a bratwurst on it. I'm just letting you know. You're talking to a guy who had the double down or whatever it's called from when he ate meat, had the double down. I'm just saying. Yeah, and I just, I think that's the disconnect with someone who feels offended by it or, or, or, you know, that I'm saying something, you know, bad about the internet or that, um, you know, that it's a stunt. It's a disconnect because it's something that I want to do for the personal exploration of how it would help me deal with, you know, my productivity, my creativity and figuring out how the internet's impacting me. And it's not immoral. I mean, the internet is, is the most amazing thing and I, you know, I owe my whole career to it. So I don't dislike the internet. I just want to understand how it interacts with me. And uh, so if doing this grabs the sort of tension that looks like a publicity stunt, I can understand and I could understand how someone might do it from that motivation. But my motivation was very personal. Like what's weird for me is we should, by the way, we should take some calls. Let's start getting some calls in the line here to talk to Paul about his experience. The number is 888-418-4074. If you want to, if you want to talk to Paul, oh, you got it. Paul got his, uh, this is the, I had this phone. So this is the 3360 I think is the T-Mobile version. The 3310, 6090. There's a bunch of them. I got the, I have an AT&T version which doesn't have a SIM slot. It was AT&T pre-SIM. Oh, they were TDMA. Oh, gee. You're screwed. So this, this one has a CDMA slot and I was thinking about switching. Sorry, what did I say? You said it had a CDMA slot. That doesn't mean anything. One week without the internet. It doesn't have a SIM slot. Man, if I can't look at Wikipedia, I just don't know. Yeah, you can't, you don't know what these are. But this has a SIM slot and I was thinking. It does not have a SIM slot. This does. Oh, it does. My AT&T one doesn't. And I also have one coming from like a UK version, which has one of the AT&T bands. Show the phone to the camera. So this has snake. Right. Oh, yeah. I know this phone. Can I see it? I remember playing snake on this phone. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, these buttons are. And the battery came fully charged. Also feel how heavy and robust that is. You could, I'll tell you man, you could really kill another man with this. Can I turn it on? I found out there's a whole meme about the durability of this phone. Oh, yeah. This is a tank. It says insert SIM card. Can I get to the menu though? I don't know. It won't even let me into the, oh, here we go. Got the volume. Did you get it? It really wants that SIM card. It really does. It won't. You can type a number. Probably for emergencies. Oh, I don't know. You should call 911. I actually, that did occur to me for a second. Does it have a goodbye? It's cool that it came charged though. Oh, hold on. The power button is there. For some reason I didn't think of this. I don't buy a lot of phones on eBay. I should have talked to Chris, but neither phone came with a charger. Seems kind of a bogus thing. But it's fully charged. Yeah. Weirdly. I probably have a charger for that phone. We got calls for Paul. Call Paul. Hold on. One of these calls is, I can see where these are coming from. Is that correct? One of these calls is coming from Pittsburgh. I'm going to take the Pittsburgher. Hello. You're on the line. You may be from Pittsburgh. Don't swear. What's your name and what do you want to talk to Paul about? My name is John and I got a couple of questions for him about how this experiment works. First off, I noticed you still use your iPad. So obviously you have devices that the only way to get apps is from the Internet. So are you just cutting yourself off from new applications or updates thereof? Yes. Can I answer for you? It's in airplane mode. Yeah. He's not, in fact you deleted some of your apps that were, because you said you had left it on. You forgot to turn it on. I don't let you delete Safari for instance, but it's hidden in an Internet folder. And you have it set to airplane mode at this point. I think it might just be Wi-Fi off, but yes basically. So he's not updating any apps. He's not getting any new apps. It kind of sucks. I was thinking about this. I forgot to put, I started using Byword on the Mac because I already had that on the Mac, but I don't have Byword on here, which is kind of a bummer. And if any of my apps. You flipped the page. Sorry, go ahead. If any of my apps improve. I like how whenever I start talking Creighton shows up with something he drew on his. No, it's pretty good. Did you read that? I did. I did. It said the guy online three things Paul's thing is a stunt and we're going to get to him. But I want you to answer this question. My apps will definitely improve while I'm away and I can't update them. And also if I have a crash. Oh yeah. If it bugs out, you're screwed. I'm screwed and I've been wanting to get a MacBook air, but now I can't really because it's impossible to set up a new computer by the time and it's impossible to sync a new computer with an iPad without redownloading everything. If you make it all the way through to the year, just think about how much crazy new technology you'll have to buy. Just so you know, if you wait till it's a, it is may. So you'll have a, well, there'll be a brand new, you'll almost be, I mean, well, there'll be rumors about the iPhone seven or I'm sorry, I said iPhone six. The next time you come online, if you make it a whole year, we'll be rumoring, we'll be writing about iPhone six rumors. How great is that? I get to skip a whole generation. It's crazy. You'll see them on the street. I already skipped the four S. I would go from, if I, if I waited to buy the iPhone six, I'd go from the iPhone four, skip the four S and the five and go to the six. Well, if you make it the whole year, you definitely won't buy an iPhone five or whatever it's called. Right. Right. All right. So caller, any other questions for Paul? Yeah, actually, I wanted to know if he's actively trying to stay away from the internet. Like because I noticed because of the Skype call, he left the room and that kind of seems like counterproductive to the reason he's leaving the internet. I mean, he's leaving the internet so that he can become a more productive person. So it kind of seems counterintuitive that he would actively stay away from anything internet related. Let me respond. Let me respond to that. I think that we may be over cause we don't know yet. We may have been filling it out. We're still filling it out here. Like I, that was kind of us doing that. Like I, we're being overly, we're being overly sensitive because we don't want to like push Paul into a situation where we're forcing him to use the internet that he's uncomfortable with that. Do you care if we have a Skype call on here? Is that a, I hadn't even thought it through. So I need to just make a call on that and it's not you using the internet necessarily. You didn't go and dial something up and you're not, you're not making the call and it's like a voice is here. I thought one thing I could do is I can mute Chris. But that doesn't, I would just hear you guys talking. Yeah. I think that becomes, I do agree though with the caller that that becomes like counter ridiculous. I mean it's like you're, it's like you're going out of your way to not just not use the internet, but like not even be near people who are using the internet, which is like very unrealistic. Obviously you guys are implementing the internet in this scenario. I think it's about you actually using it. Right. And it is important though. I just don't, well I could do that little thing or this is so blocking my, for instance, like it's so hard to do research. Even what I was saying, I want to interview people. It's really hard to track people down, you know, but as soon as the, well I can use the internet for that, then you know, you definitely can't use the internet for that. Right. And so I just, I don't want to, I want to, I don't want to solve it. But I think to, to, to respond to that for us, I think we're being just a little bit careful cause we don't, this is the first podcast we've done since Paul's been off the internet and I didn't want to do something that it was going to be like jarring. Like, oh, I'm not, I didn't want to use Skype at all. Like we haven't gone over every rule. The CNN headline prominent blogger fails on third day. I mean, and that's the other thing is that like you do have a responsibility that you want to do this thing and you want to carry it out and not have people go like, well, he was doing this or that. A lot of people ask me, you know, how are you going to like, you know, are people going to be there to check on you? You know, and I have things like, you know, my roommate upset, reset the password on the router so I don't know what the wifi. So you know, there's things I do to try to mitigate it, but for the most part it's on me. It's not cheating myself. If I, if I want to, one more question and then I want to jump, get to this guy on line three who thinks that this is a stunt. I'll go ahead and let you get to the question, but thank you Paul. Um, and good luck. Thank you very much. Thanks for the questions. They're really good. I appreciate it. Okay. Uh, all right, call you're on the air. Now hang on. Uh, we need to know your name. Don't swear and, and tell us, we've been told that, uh, anyhow, I'll just let you, what's your name and tell us what you're thinking about what Paul's doing. Um, it's Dr. Brad and my feeling is that chances are he's looking to just write a book about his experience and maybe just cash in on it. I love, I love these guys by the way. I'm like one of their biggest fans. So I'm just trying to put a double gap. These guys being us, these guys meaning us right here. He loves publicity stuff. Hey, how you guys doing? Hey, how are you? Um, I mean, Paul, I mean, Paul, there is, you would like to write a book about this. I do want to write a book about this if I have anything to say, I might, if I don't come up with any conclusions and I just put myself through hell for a year, it might not be a very good book, but I do want to write a book. I do want to make money because you know, part of what? How to get out. Part of being money, part, part of being, part of being productive for me is that I want my career to, to be a writer. You know, I like writing and I want to be really good at writing. And so I want to, to eventually be good enough at writing. I can make an entire career of writing and not just, but was your, but was your, a technology blogger that burned bright and burned out. So here's the question though, was your impulse when you thought right and burned out when you, would you, fair enough, but you don't feel that this is, that this can kind of come off as sort of a contrived sort of stunt that you're sort of fabricating a concept to write about. Well, hold on a second. Hold on a second. Wait a minute. So wait, let me ask you first, first off, quick, two questions. I want to ask Paul a question that I have you a question for you, Paul. And I want you to answer that. But when you first conceived, when this thought entered your brain, and I'm curious to know was your first thing like, I want to write a book about something. What could I write a book about? No, cause I've, I've had a sci-fi novel that I've been working on for a long time and I was like, you know, I'm a lot more productive when I'm off the internet. So if it took a year off for also I've, I've wanted to, like I never went to college, so I've wanted to do some like school style reading to kind of support things that I'll write later so I can be more thoughtful in what I write. So it's like, if I take a year off, I could finish that, that sci-fi novel, do a lot of self education and I could come out of the year as a much better writer. And then I was like, you know, if that might be a pretty cool experience to be out without the internet for a year and I could write a book about it. So I did have that thought pretty early on. Right. So, so, and I, for what he was saying, yes, it's exactly the definition of contrived. You know, it's a, it's a false thing. You know, it's not like I'm seeing what it's like to, you know live in a developing nation and struggle for survival. You know, it's I'm forcing pretty arbitrary constraints upon myself. Right. And it might be a little silly and I, and like I said, I see how people could see it as a stump, but where I'm coming from is, is I want to do this. Well, here's my question for the caller. I mean, it's, it's if he had the idea, like what would it be like? Well, I'm just saying like the idea popped into his head one day. What would it be like if I didn't, if I wasn't on the internet, how could he do it in a way? Like there's no way to actually do it. It's not like, I mean, you could go move to a country that has no internet access at all or something, I guess. I mean, it has to be somewhat, you know, I'm not, I'm not trying to challenge what you're saying, but I mean, I think that like, I don't think it's, I don't think it's phony to have an idea and then act on it. You know, like I think it's, I think it's, sorry to cut you off, but the reason why I guess people could see it as being contrived is that you are a tech blogger. I mean, you're, you're, this is your, no, he's not. No. Hey, Dr. Brad, no, he's not. And I will say this, and I get more mad about this. You unleash, you unleash the fury now, Dr. Brad. This pisses me off to no end. Yes. You know what? Paul is not a technology blogger and we are, we are, the whole conceit of our site is that we are moving beyond. I'm not going to spend the rest of my life. It's not just that we're moving beyond. Writing about iterative Android phones. Yeah. We are trying to write about how technology is changing the world around us. Yeah. And if Paul's project is to distance himself from the biggest thing in our lives to see how that affects him, then I'm interested in him publishing that writer. I mean. Because what he is is a writer. What I'll say, so. And the medium that we work in doesn't actually matter. So what I'll say, okay, but let's just, but let's. And I'm like, I'm pretty tired of people saying how can he do his job. But let's give Dr. Brad, hold on, let's give Dr. Brad some, let's give him a break. Just a point. I think he gets a point for the fact is Paul's, our background is in being tech bloggers. We came, we all came from Engadget writing about like quick hits about Android upgrades. Okay. There's no question about it. I love that. You know, well, but you know, but what we're trying to do at the verge and I, and I hope that people are paying attention is, I mean, we made, we were, as we were growing, you know, what we were doing at Engadget, we started to feel these things like we have value to add to this conversation that goes beyond writing a quick post about Android updates. And we have ideas and things that we want to talk about and, and, and, and work on that go beyond that. And we want to be involved with other people who are doing other things that are beyond what that is. And, and, and I realized that, you know, as we were competing with, you know, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal on, on scoops at Engadget, it became very clear that what a blogger was and what we were, we're becoming very different things. I believe, I believe. And when we started the verge, our goal wasn't to just simply recreate another blog. And I think that you can see in the things that we do that we have not recreated a blog and that, and that as we experiment and grow what we are trying to grow, it becomes less and less of that every day. I don't consider our site a blog. I consider it a news site. And I think that what we write about is technology news and technology culture. And I think the technology culture is a part of actual culture of real popular culture. And that increasingly, and something like this actually speaks to that more than anything, which is a man, a young man who's lived with technology his entire life, who's lived on the internet his entire life trying to just experience what life would be like without it. I think that to me speaks to like the culture more than anything. I mean, it's of our time that, that a person would even have such an idea. 10 years ago, you wouldn't think what would be life be like if I didn't, wasn't, didn't, you know, on the internet because it wasn't that like everybody lived their life on the internet. You know, their life was lived elsewhere. And so I think that, and I think that to your point, the world we come from is most definitely the world of the blog. And it is, it is a very small, relatively small, narrow place at this point to exist in. And I think that when people say blog, and I'm not saying that you said it, but I think when people say blog, they're, it's, it's not, they're not talking about what we are, at least in my brain, they're not talking about what we are and it's not talking about what Paul does. He's written some really thought provoking, really insightful, really funny pieces that are just like in, have no association to what somebody might consider a blog post. And because I did come from blog, like I didn't go to journalism school. You didn't go to J school. And I didn't, you know, I don't have a liberal arts degree. Some of the stuff that I want to do as far as self education during this year is to help myself evolve as a writer, to be more than a blogger, to be more than my history of, of, of just, you know, of just being a blogger. And I think it's a really powerful point. I think for all of us, you know, it's, I've talked about this a lot with people and obviously I've had debates and I've had, you know, heated agreements, but you know, we're, we're a hybrid of something like we're something that didn't exist before. I mean, a lot of people in this industry are there are people like Paul who grew up with this stuff and basically started writing about technology as soon as he was old enough to get his first job. You know, I mean, near to it. Um, Neil, I is a guy who was a lawyer, you know, who had a passion for technology, who, who, who, who, who now bridges those gaps in a way that a person, there's a person who went to journalism school to write about, to write about the news or to do journalism would not approach it in the way that he approaches it. And certainly my background is, is, is I'm all over the place. I was a drug addict for 25 years. No, no, no, no, I wasn't, I wasn't, but, but my background is different too. And everybody, I know. Thanks really. Thank you. Uh, Dr. Brad, Dr. Brad, can I just say, I'm sorry. Y'all, but you were a proxy for a lot of, a lot of emails. No, Neil, I was very enraged earlier when we were in the car over and I was talking about Paul and these people saying it was a stunt, but I hear what you're saying and I think that it's a good, I agree with you. I think that, um, I think that, that I get how you could look at it and go like this guy's a tech blogger. So all of a sudden he's going to be like, I'm off the internet, but it, you know, it is, I think it goes beyond that. You know, first and foremost, Paul is a human being and he's a guy. And then second, second, beyond being a human being, you're, you're a writer and you're a guy who thinks and like that's your part of his job was and is, and will continue to be thinking and writing about the things he thinks about. And I did want to say, uh, maybe this will help address, uh, your, your second question is that, um, you know, I, the, the most stunt like thing I think I did was the, the Reddit AMA, you know, that was clearly an attention grab, but that came up when we were talking about how you want to go out with a bang on the internet, like you want to do as much internet stuff because I am, you know, paid to do this professionally. I think it behooves me to draw attention to the publication that's paying me full time to do this. I'm going to have, I'm going to have an intern bring a bonus check over to a physical bonus check over to your house. And he did do a, like a, we have Dr. Brad, I appreciate the questions and, and, and I think that you actually have really good points to challenge them on, but I, you know, I was going to say, I don't know. One last thing. Oh, you come to me next time. I promise I'll show up. Thank you. Are you a dentist? Oh, he's a dentist. Dr. Brad, let's take Dr. Brad's information. Are you email, email us your information. We'll get it to Paul on a post. I'm talking about your nitrous situation. Are you within a four, five minute trip from you? Okay. Thanks a lot, Dr. Brad. All right. We got one more caller. They've been waiting on hold forever. Caller you're on the line. Whoa. Oh my God. You might want to mute your, mute your audio. No, no, turn it up louder. No, don't turn, don't listen. You're on the line. What's your name? What do you want to know about Paul? And also don't swear. I just want to, I want to say that I have great respect for the guy. Because I feel like since he has a tech background, it must be a really hard thing to do. And I want to say that this thing has been done before by the BBC. How long? It was done for a week by the BBC involving a family in Korea. And they took away the internet for a week. And on the other side, on the flip side, there was a family in Africa where they gave him internet for a week. So the outcome of that was that in the end, the family in Korea, they couldn't function properly because they didn't have internet. So I'll just say, I just want to say I have great respect for you. And the family in Africa. Functioned great. Saw a ton of new porn they'd never seen before. Took the internet away from the family in Africa and they stopped functioning well. That's interesting. I think that's a little bit... Oh, and somebody at Slate did it too. For how long? For like four minutes. For four months. And that person, their stuff was interesting. But you know, somebody doing something again, like people aren't fungible. And like, you can't just replace, be like, this idea has been executed. You know what's funny is... Like, Paul is a different person. The fact that I don't even know that speaks to the idea that this is not a stunt because we didn't go... I didn't quickly go research like, well, has someone done this before? I did try to make sure it hadn't been done entirely like this before or by someone very similar to me. But I had this thought the other day, I was stepping out of the shower, completely nude and I was thinking, no cameras can be trained to putt my belly. You see the lack of port is already getting to. You know, a Samsung Galaxy S3 is just watching you during the time. Just staring at you. Watching, waiting. But I had this thought like, if I have a new idea now, what to me is a new idea and I wanna explore it, like a new sci-fi concept that I think nobody's done before and I wanna start writing it, outside of me looking around in the library, I don't really have any idea of stuff that's been done before. I wonder what it was like 50 years ago. But I think what's interesting about what you said is really interesting about the internet, which is when the internet is off, and by the way, much of the world experiences life like this. We're special in the sense that we're on the internet all the time. When the internet's off, it's not there. It doesn't change the things in real life. For instance, if you're not on Facebook and you're not on the internet, your life isn't changed somehow. You're not a different person. It's not like you can't go on living. If you quit Twitter, it doesn't change your life. The things that happen on the internet, the things like the fan fiction, you may have thought of a science fiction idea, not fan fiction, but somebody self-published something or whatever on the internet. But in the real world, where people can only buy books or download a book, I guess then you start to get into the internet if you download a book on your own. But if it's the real world where a lot of people just buy books, that stuff doesn't exist. It's not real. It's just floating somewhere in cyberspace along with Case and Wintermute. I had a friend who showed me a short film he was working on, and he used some unlicensed footage in his short film. If you put that on YouTube, it becomes piracy or copyright infringement or whatever. Patent infringement. It's not patented infringement. It's also murder. Murder. It's whatever you want it to be. But in the meatspace, while we're just hanging out in real life, he just showed me a thing. Well, also, by the way, it's still whatever those other things are, but somebody has to see it and it has to be identified. They can't prove it. They can't prove it. No, it can be proven, but you have to get it. It wasn't really a very good example. No, it's a pretty good example. But the point is, and I think we need to wrap up. Caller, do you have any other questions? I wanted to say... Is there a book in the making? I answered that before, but probably. Hopefully, if there's something interesting to say. The first thing he said, this hasn't been hard for me at all so far. I know there are definitely people who would be extremely hard for, and it might turn very hard for me, but so far, this has been the best few days of my life. I think the one thing is that if you had a job... Ever this horrible tooth pain that I've endured simultaneously? I think if you had a job that required you to be on the internet, well, our job does, but if you had a situation where your boss didn't go, I think this is a cool idea, let's try it. This would be horrendous. I'm thinking if I wanted to do it, there's no way I could do it because I have too many responsibilities and no one's gonna say, don't worry, just go do it. Something might say it, but like... It's a luxury that I get to do this. Well, it's definitely a luxury and you have an awesome boss and you should get him a nice bottle of wine, maybe... I'll do that with that bonus check, the intro. The intro was over. No, but I do think that you have to be in the right spot to do it, and I think you've got the right spot because I wanna see what happens, but I do think that there are pressures, real pressures in the world that a lot of people deal with it. It would make it either incredibly difficult or impossible. If you were in a long distance relationship, for instance, it would be really hard to go off the internet to never be able to Skype with a person or IM with them or email with them. That would be hard. You don't have that problem. No. He's single, ladies. Very single. And he's looking. I have tons of free time. Tons of free time. He wants to take you on a whirlwind date around the city of New York. He'll never text you back. Just go on. All right, caller, thanks so much for... I just had one thing. Yes, one thing, go for it. Yeah, I just wanna comment on the Galaxy S3. I just thought it was quite disappointing. You did. And the design of the... I'm not sure what it's called, but the one... It looks kind of like brushed metal, even though it isn't. I just think that kind of goes back to the past when they had those small cheap phones. Yes. Lie. Oh my God. Sorry about that. Caller, are you okay? What's happening? Caller, are you all right? Caller, are you okay? Caller, are you all right? Are you being attacked? My friend. Caller. Do we need to call 911? Does Paul need to call 911? Can I call 911? Paul can only call 911. Do you need assistance? What is your emergency? All right, I think we lost him. All right, thanks for calling in. We really appreciate it. Be safe. You just keep doing what you're doing. I know what's going on. I hope he's okay. He's just like... All right, I think we need to wrap. It's like we're at two hours here. Yeah. This is one of our longest ever. I got a great hero while you guys were talking. I just really enjoyed a meal while you guys were talking to Chris. Yeah. Oh, you got a hero sandwich. A gyro as they call them in New York. What? Did you get a hero? A hero or a gyro? Did you get a sub? No, it's like a gyro. A hero. A hero. Yeah. Yeah. But that's a hero. A hero. If you say hero, that's a hero. That's a sandwich. Well they're both sandwiches. Well, I can't roll my R's very well. You don't have to roll your R's. Roll your R's. It's an Irish. It's a Scottish. What? Why would you say that? I'm done. I'm done. I'm done. I'm done. Pointing to your watch. I know what time it is. It's time to get a hero. It's time to keep going. A gyro. A gyro. It does sound... What are you doing? All right. That's the Vergecast for this week. One week without the internet. The dude's lost his mind. You can email us at Vergecast at the Verge.com. You cannot email Paul. You cannot email Paul, so don't even bother. You can also leave a comment on the post when it goes up. We'd love that. Paul won't read any of them because he can't go on the internet. Or you can find us on Twitter. Do you have a QO box yet? I'm working on that. All right. Hold on. You got to wrap this up. We'll wrap it up. Or you can find us on Twitter. The Verge is at Verge. I'm Josh Vitopolsky. Me like is reckless. I mean, I'd say Paul is future Paul. I've been sending, I tweet at you every day. Yeah, I definitely tweet. It's going to be crazy if you go a year and try to look back at this. Yeah. Well, hopefully Twitter enables some archive features. Yeah. Hey, Twitter. Hey, Twitter. Twitter. Make sure you archive future Paul stuff so he can go back in a year. I'm sure they have a way to pull it. Oh, dude. There's another cash in book for you. Tweets at Paul. Tweets at Paul over a year. How's this a whole collection? It's like a time capsule. Yeah. Yeah, the time. Tweet, tweet, time, tweet capsule. Tweet capsule. That's great. You should patent that. I'm patent. TM right now. TM. Yeah, you still have to meet technically murder. All right. That's the show. That's the show. Thanks for tuning in. We'll be back next week. Oh, really quickly. Can I talk about the show? Can I talk about one of our guests that we're going to have on the show? You don't want to say anything yet? I don't know. Just wait. You want to wait till it happens? Wait till it happens. Okay. But I will say this. The next On The Verge is May 17th. So it's not too far off. It's Thursday, which I think will actually make it a little bit easier for people. I think Friday nights are kind of a hell on earth for a lot of people. Anyhow, we're excited. It's going to be a cool show. We have a lot of cool stuff planned. Paul will probably have some reports to file, video reports perhaps. I've been working on some really cool custom URLs, bespoke URLs. I don't know what that is. Okay. That's our show. We'll be back next week. Thanks so much for listening. And as always, I wish you and yours the very best for your life and a healthy life is what I wish for you. I'm trying to make it creepy and not good. I'm doing it on purpose. Get it close. Get it close. It's better every week. You know what I want? Every week I think I want it to be like, how can I describe it? Paul. No, like- Paul. I want to try to go to a movie tonight. Hold on a second. I'm trying to get the ending to be, to make you feel a little uncomfortable. Paul. Rock and roll. Paul. Rock and roll. Paul.