 Hey, it's Tuesday afternoon, which means it's time for the Verge Mobile Show, which we're actually having on Tuesday afternoon this week, unlike we've had to postpone it or move it around the past few weeks. But we are here, we are in force. This is episode 34 for the week of January 21st, 2012. I'm Dan Siefert. I'm Vlad Savov. And I'm Chris Sigler. And you guys might notice that Dieter Bohren is not with us today, but we do miss him. We are not in the bone zone this week. We're not in the bone zone. And I'm being told that I said it was January 21st, 2012, but it's not. It's January 21st. You're living in the past, man. I live in the past, man. Dude, I did the same thing. I actually wrote in an article saying that the new Kodak Micro Four Thirds camera is coming quarter free 2012. And people were like, are we going back to the past? Which is kind of fitting since Kodak is dead. Kodak is a relic of the past. Kodak is a relic of the future. And it's being resurrected. I mean, it's just branding exercise at this point because some random company called JK Imaging, which is using the Kodak name, which has already been done with Polaroid, whose cameras are utterly atrocious. But this isn't the photography show. You know why that is, Vlad? JK Imaging is short for Just Kidding Imaging. They're just kidding about all these cameras. They're trolling the public. They're trolling consumers. You know, it's actually quite funny. I was thinking about that and naturally we're starting off the show today with a massive digression on the side. But you know what, without detail, I don't even know what the topics are. It's going to be a mess. But I was thinking about this with respect to motherboards, actually. Like a lot of these Taiwanese and small Chinese companies producing motherboards, there was A-Bit, which was one of the actually premier motherboard makers a few years back. And a whole bunch of others, companies like Albatron and whatnot. I was just reminiscing on that subject. I was thinking how exactly companies like this random JK Imaging sometimes succeed and sometimes fail. It's just an oddity to me. You have these small companies and some of them turn into ASUS and just explode into a massive consumer brand. And then some of them, like Biostar for example, shrink. Maybe it's because their name is Biostar. Yeah. Although I have to say Pegatron is worse than the other ones. Pegatron is amazing. I kind of wish I owned some Pegatron product. I probably do and don't know. Right, right. So let's talk about mobile stuff. Unless you have more to say about Pegatron. Well I do. I have many thoughts on Pegatron. But no, I was just going to apologize to our dear viewers from my absence last week. My iMac, so I have a late 2009 iMac. This is by the way a completely different tangent that I'm going to go on for the next 15 minutes. Late 2009 iMac 27 inch that was eligible for the drive recall. They had a one terabyte Seagate drive recall that keeps getting extended. I think they originally put it out in 2010. And I never bothered to take it in for the recall. And finally I got my comeuppance when the drive began failing last week. So that's why it was off last week. Also because I was deathly ill. I'm still recovering from that. But the reason why this camera looks like complete garbage is because it is the built in camera on my Macbook Air. So… Chris, how far away is the nearest Apple store to where you live? About a mile. So you had to transport a 27 inch iMac through downtown Chicago about a mile. Yeah it was, believe me, it was a production. I just would love to, I'm envisioning you standing on the street with a 27 inch iMac under your arm hailing a cab. That's exactly what happened actually. And I was surprised that any cab was willing to pull over and take me. Yeah, particularly since you were in your beast headphones at the time, right? I was, I was. Plugged into the iMac listening to some music. But the worst part was that I get to the Apple store and I give them the computer and they take it out of the giant box and give me the box back. And I'm like, no you can keep that. And they're like, no we don't have room for it. So then I had to take the giant box back with me and now I'm going to have to take it back to the store to pick up the computer. It's a nightmare. Anyway, we can talk about phones now. The walks of shame that you have to go through for this iMac. Hasn't this experience maybe tempted you to just say screw it and upgrade to the extra slinky new iMac? Yes and no. I mean, I said a few weeks ago on the show that there's nothing, like spec wise there's nothing about my 27 inch iMac that feels like slower outdated. It started getting really slow lately and I finally figured, I looked at the smart status on the drive and that's how I figured out that it was failing. But apart from that it's been great. The screen's fine. So until either it just completely gives up the ghost or there's something about it that's like horribly obsolete, whether it be the processor or the total RAM I can install, I think I'm going to try and see if I can make this one last. Yeah, I'm with you. I agree. But since we're talking about extra skinny and new things, let's use that as a really flaky segue to talk about HTC. So I feel like as far as mobile news is concerned, we're in that annoying period where there isn't going to be a whole lot of major announcements and everything is just going to be kind of like leaks up until Mobile World Congress. I kind of like this time of year but I also kind of dread this time of year because you see endless leaks of Samsung things. At this time last year we were seeing leaks of the Galaxy S3 seven different ways to Sunday and it was like every other minute it was a different looking device. It was just a headache. To be honest, those weren't technically leaks because most of them turned out to be false. Yeah, the alleged leaks I should say because they turned out to be wrong. But I think the biggest news that's happened since the last time we were on the air was the HTC's alleged M7 Android device that is expected to be announced at MWC now has leaked or allegedly leaked. It's emerged. It's emerged. It's made it into the public. It is now before our eyes and it is still way too massive. So I have to say it's unusual to me that the M7 bears more than a passing resemblance to the 8X because… So wait, one second Chris because in the time since our last show it's actually emerged twice with two very different looking devices. So the exact same thing that I was just complaining about is Samsung what happened last year happened with this alleged HTC this year. So we have this first device that supposedly was the front of the new device and it looks very much like the back of an iPhone 5 and then we have this other one which is actual physical pictures of a new device that looks like the 8X. Right and that's actually a very good point. There's every reason to believe that HTC has adopted Samsung's strategy last year of encasing its new flagship devices in dummy cases and maybe they're doing something like that here. Although the second device that emerged, the physical pictures, by all accounts that looks like a real phone. I'm looking at the pictures now. So it would be a very elaborate disguise if it is in fact a disguise. But at any rate what I was saying is that the 8X, you know both HTC and Microsoft made a point of saying that the industrial design of that device was kind of like designed from the ground up to complement Windows phone. And now HTC, if this phone is in fact real, appears to be repurposing portions of that industrial design for Android. We saw some of this design on the DNA already in the JButterfly. Like if you look at the back of this one, the camera's in the same spot, it's kind of that matte finish with the curve to it. So the front is a bit more like the 8X but the back is very kind of familiar for the DNA. Yep, that's fair. And it also, it's worth mentioning that anytime anybody says the hardware and the software were tailored for one another, that's basically BS. The touch screens guys, the touch screens, the bezel, like if you think about your list of design priorities when you're putting together an iPhone, an Android phone, Windows phone, even Blackberry nowadays, it's a case of minimize the bezel, maximize the touch screen area, do something fancy that makes you stand out. That's it. It's not software dependent at all. And in fact the only device that I can think of that had any sort of connotation of being really connected on the hardware and software front was Nokia's N9, which is perfectly ironic because the N9 was put together to work with Nokia's MeeGo Harman 10 and you can kind of see the curvature of the icons, the squirckles as Nokia's designers called them. Which they took from the Zune. I don't know if Microsoft ever called it a squircle on the Zune, but everyone else did. I'm trying to think back to that. But anyway, the Zune was also another awesome device. The Zune's control pad below the screen was a squircle and I think that's where everyone started using that phrase, squircle. That's as zero as I can remember. Okay, I'm not crediting Nokia would invent the word, but the point is that the industrial design of the N9 and its curvature kind of echoed the icons and just the consistency of the UI. And then Microsoft and Nokia turned around and said, well this is the best hardware with Vivo 800 for Windows Phone, yada yada yada, they're perfectly matched. And they weren't actually. And it's just marketing when they said the 8X is specifically tailored to Windows Phone. It's not. If you have a straight line in any phone, it's specifically tailored to Windows Phone because it has squares. Do you remember the first prototype of the 800 that Elop showed didn't even have capacitive buttons at the bottom? It was a virtual arrangement. Because they were obviously just using an N9 with different guts inside of it, so they didn't have that manufactured yet. Which I think was codenamed C-Ray, was it? Yeah, C-Ray. That sounds familiar. Okay, that was one of the most obviously self-engineered leaks in the history of leaks. That was about the time when I published our N9 review and everybody else was just gushing about it. People were like, what is Nokia doing not giving this device a legitimate future? And then Steve and Elop and company decided, you know what, we'll just shoot our own video. God, I remember the video now that you're talking about. That internal meeting event. And multiple angles. And Elop's like, don't take pictures. And then he goes around. Don't take pictures, let me just hold this up. Did you not take a picture of this? Did you not get that shot? Why are you guys using your flash? You should be using your flash. That's the best way to take a picture. I mean, don't take a picture. But back to the M7, I think that maybe the bigger news than the industrial design of the hardware is the Sense 5, which is a dramatic departure. I mean, going all the way back to the original HTC, was it the Hero or the Magic? No, no, it was Windows Mobile phone. No, no, but I mean, I mean, Rosie on Android 1.0. Was that the Hero? The first chin device? Yeah, the Hero, yep. Yeah, I would say this is the most dramatic departure for Sense since then. If it is in fact real, which I think a lot of evidence has grown in the past 24 hours to suggest that it is, because we've seen some ROM links for other devices. What do you guys think? Oh, dude, I need to opine on this. I looked at it, and yes, it's a departure, but it's a departure in basically the wrong direction. Really? Well, no. It's sort of in the right direction, but off to the side, and it's not far enough. It's a lateral move is what you're saying. Yeah, yeah, so here's the thing. They've cut down the Chrome again. So thumbs up for that. But it's the same sort of thumbs up that Dan will recall from last week's podcast that he was giving me, and that I was giving people at CES when they try and pimp out a feature which is completely tepid and uninspiring. It's like, hey, well done. You took off some Chrome. So you had crap in your software, and you took it out, and now we're supposed to applaud you guys. Well done. So they took off some Chrome. They went to a more two-dimensional look with their icons. They simplified them. So again, that's kind of neat, kind of good. But at this rate of improvement, at this rate of change, it's really going to be like 20-something before we have a sense that we actually really want to use. This might be dramatic by sense standards, but it's still not. I can still feel underneath this stuff that HTC is just clinging onto, just dearly clinging onto. There's no reason for HTC to stick with us. You can be just completely revolutionary as far as I'm concerned. Your sales are going down. You need to do something to kick start things. We've had this discussion a whole bunch of times with One Series. We had no complaints about the industrial design, about the specs, about the displays, etc. The problem is in the software. And HTC needs to face that and really make a leap with its next version of CES. It's not doing that. It's just like, what is it doing? It's messing around with the edges instead of fundamentally changing the software. Again, we've only seen some screenshots, so maybe I'm completely wrong. And maybe you see some important stuff. Very limited screenshots. We've got a shot of what we suppose is the lock screen, the home screen, and then a couple versions, software version screens. But we don't see what the launcher is like yet. We don't know what the notifications are. The notification part was the biggest pain point for me every time I picked up a Sense phone. According to this device, it still has capacitive buttons for home, back, and multitasking. And they're in a really weird position on this particular device that has emerged. So it doesn't look like they're moving to software buttons for those, which is a little bit of a disappointment. But to your point, Vlad, it seems like the only changes are very surface level as opposed to the radical change. Let me just back myself up here, because I'm saying they're clinging on to things. The perfect example is they still have that full screen weather animation stuff going on. Do they? Yes. There's one screenshot where you have a full screen of a starlit sky and the weather, and it just kills me. I mean, look, I'm happy that they finally accepted that they can have a clock widget without the flipping stuff going on, and without the whole animated thing, just having numbers so we can see a digital reading of time without being bombarded with animations. I'm happy with that. I just feel like it's all very superficial. I feel like it's not pushing boundaries enough. It's not doing anything to excite me anyway. So Dan, I'm actually going to challenge your notion that it's a disappointment that they're not going with soft buttons. Six months ago I would have agreed with you, but what I've realized is, I realized two things. One, on Android, there isn't enough that they're doing with those soft buttons to really make them worthwhile. And about all they do is disappear when you're looking at a picture or something. So all you're doing is eating up pixels at the bottom of the screen that could be used for doing actual things with. And two, we're a year removed, or more than a year removed now, from the Google edict to get away from the menu button. So that becomes less of an issue as time goes by. Well I agree with you there that they definitely could be better used. And I know the whole Android development community and custom ROMs and stuff like that, they're doing some really crazy stuff with the virtual buttons. But no standard manufacturer unfortunately is, and Google certainly isn't doing anything interesting with it yet. As far as the menu button goes though, but for the big apps that matter, it's still there. So Facebook and Twitter and these major apps, you still have that stupid menu bar that's sucking up your screen real estate anyways. And HTC sort of fixed it on the One X with that option that you could configure the capacitive buttons to hold down the multitasking button to bring up the menu instead. So it got rid of it, but they didn't extend that across their line because you don't have that option on the joint DNA. So I'm not confident that it will be on any new devices unless someone complains about it and HTC just puts it in there. Which is annoying. But yeah. I mean, listen guys, I again, I'm expressing disappointment based on very little information and I'm willing to believe, and I'm interested to hear actually from Chris what he thinks is such a dramatic departure that he's noticing in Sense 5 or the leak of Sense 5. But hang on Chris, before we do that though, yeah I had a point and then I lost it. And I think it's because my pet peeves with HTC devices and Android devices, probably in general now, are two. One is size that are too large and the other is the software that they don't improve it and they bloat it out. And with HTC that's a case of tuning radio and Facebook app and all of these things that I can't even install. I wish Vlad had to use a Verizon phone one day. Like if Vlad had to use a Verizon phone for a week it would make him absolutely insane. I know, and AT&T, I know they load up crap as well. The only reason we don't get that in the UK is probably because our carriers aren't that savvy. They aren't savvy enough to do that. They're not savvy enough to screw in the customer. And I'm quite happy to level the same accusation with Samsung. In fact, Samsung's Galaxy devices are a guaranteed minimum half hour of just cleaning stuff out. Cleaning widgets off the home screens. That's the other thing. I don't use seven home screens with a million widgets on them, so don't preload them. HTC and Samsung do that all the time. So my pet peeves are the size of the devices, there's no choice. They always weigh too large and the software is never clean enough to the point where now there's enough room for Google to be doing quote unquote signature devices with the Nexuses where there's no bloatware, there's no whatever. You know, the way Microsoft is doing with Microsoft signature Windows laptops and devices previously. So that's it. So as far as I'm concerned, the M7 fixes none of that stuff. But now I can hand it over to Chris and he can tell us what he does fix. So look, call me superficial. So first of all, I will agree with you, Vlad, and you, Dan. I mean, we've seen very little of this interface, assuming it's even real, which like I said, I think we can probably safely assume it is. But we don't know how far along they are in the design process, how early this ROM is. There are lots of things we don't know. You've seen very little of the revised UI and UX. But one of my biggest complaints with Sense has been the amount of Chrome. Like I don't want 3D anything. And that's one of the most powerful, that's why I keep getting drawn to Windows, well, one of the reasons I keep getting drawn to Windows Phone with each new release of the platform is because it is a very visually appealing UI. And that's something that Sense is not. And even as Google has tried to make Android more beautiful, starting with 3, really, and then 4, and 4.1, 4.2, that's a message that OEMs and HTC in particular with Sense have not really taken to heart, I don't think. And this is the first time I've seen an HTC Android device where I say, yes, wow, they get it. I really understand that a UI should not have artificial lens flares and weird shadow elements. It's very 2D, which is where that is the state of modern design, is very 2D and very simple and very monochromatic. And it looks like they're adopting those principles. And hopefully, what we don't know, the unanswered question is whether that principle will carry through not just the superficial things like the clock widget and the icons, but will it carry through the way the entire UI works. And we don't know that yet. We probably won't until MWC or sometime between now and MWC. Agreed. Totally. So, I mean, I guess it's just a matter of how much of an optimist or pessimist you are. The thing with me is also I feel a little bit burned by Sense 4 because HTC said, streamline everything about Sense 4. So all of those superfluous things that you were annoyed by, we listened to you guys, we got rid of them. And then a couple of months passed, we got the review devices, we settled in, and then we figured out that Sense 4, no, wasn't all that streamlined after all. Well, in relative to Sense 3.6, it was. But relative to Android 4, it wasn't. That's the point we just started off with. If you just go into every single year, tell us we're trilling off the Chrome, we're trilling off the crap that we've added ourselves, I'm not going to give you much credit for that. Yeah. That's fair enough. I'm done talking about the M7. I have nothing more to say until it's announced. Until the next leak that we're talking about next week. Right. Let's have a quick mention for, I mean, how big do we expect the M7 to be? A 4.7 inch with a 1080p display, I believe, is what it's been said to be. 6.4 inches. Actually, this is something... 6.45 inches. They're going to one up Sony with a 6.45 inch device. Yeah, actually, is now a good time for me to go on my weekly rant about phone sizes? Is that okay with everyone? Yeah, yeah. We should. I know that we weren't necessarily planning on talking about it, but I have to invoke this absurd leak of a Sony panel that's allegedly for a 6.44 inch phone that would probably be introduced to the MWC if it isn't factorial. I think I totally get why every OEM right now wants to ride on the coattails of Samsung's success with the Galaxy Note. I get it. But that is not a blank check to keep going to bigger and bigger. There is an infinite runway to make phones bigger and bigger. Yes, 5.5 might be okay for some people. 6.44 is not. We played with... Vlad, I think it was you that played with the Huawei as CES, right? Yeah, I played with it and Vlad played with it, yeah. And it was insane, right? Yes. Yes. So, and this is bigger. In a good way. Yeah. So the problem I had with the Huawei was the first thing I did, I put it in my hand and I'll put my Nexus 4 and my Nexus 4, I can touch my other finger with my thumb. So like, you know, I can't reach the top that comfortably, but at least I can horizontally reach across it. And I could not do that with the Huawei. Like I just could not reach across with my thumb. And I was like, this is the worst thing ever. Oh yeah, so Vlad's got a Nexus 7. No, this is an iPad mini. So I'm stretching my thumb to try and reach. Here's the thing, you know how they said initially when the iPad mini was introduced that you really have to stretch your hand in order to grip it in one hand and Apple was kind of pushing it? That much is true, but I guess I have big hands. I can kind of do that. But yeah, I mean the Huawei, that's the thing, is closer to this than it is to any phone in terms of ergonomics. It's just a nonsense. If the spread continues, we're going to be talking about a rumored 8-inch phone by Christmas. You know, the thing is it really doesn't actually matter if the software is good enough. If it's a 6.1 or 6.4, you can just use it as a good tablet. But that is actually Google's biggest problem because at the moment I'm thinking the most exciting industrial design isn't actually happening with mobile phones just because we're kind of stuck for dimensions and every single millimeter has been sliced off devices. You still need some space for cameras, you still need space for batteries, LTE, etc. Whereas things like the iPod Touch, things like the iPod mini, iPad mini rather, have more room for those things because cameras and LTE are not such big priorities as with phones or they don't expect the same quality to say. So industrial design innovation as far as I'm concerned is coming in other areas. So we mentioned the new iMac which again is just really gorgeous to look at if nothing else. I agree with Chris, there's no reason to upgrade the specs but it's just really nice. The iPad mini and iPod Touch, this new generation design, the more time I spend with it, the more I love it. I think it's really, really awesome. And I'm really actually excited by the Xperia Tablet Z that Sony just introduced which is a 10 inch tablet and it's even thinner than the iPad mini. But then you turn the tablet on and it's Android on a tablet and I just like, I just have a lot of enthusiasm. Tablet P. Sony's tablet ambitions peak with the Tablet P. It's been all downhill. Am I alone in this? Don't you guys feel underwhelmed when you realize it's an Android tablet, yet another Android tablet? There's something about, I've never really been able to put my finger on it, I'm sure that other people have done a better job of it than I have. But there's something fundamental about the Android UI that is not conducive to tablet use. I think that the Nexus 7 came the closest to solving that problem but the way they solved it is by making the screen small enough so that you can kind of handle it the same way you handle a big phone. Not by making a really tablet appropriate UI. So I think that they're really struggling between 9 and 10 inches and they don't have an answer for that yet. And of course, the way iOS solves it is two ways. One with a ridiculously simple and arguably outdated home screen that's just literally like a grid of icons and a great app design. You have this giant phalanx of amazing app developers on iOS who are really obsessed with design and have found ways to optimize tablet UI on iPad in ways that frankly Android developers do not. So between those two things, they still have the advantage. While we're on our crazy phone size rant, can we talk about what was announced in Japan today? I mean, I don't think we added it to our official list but NEC is releasing the Echo again, if you remember the QoSr Echo. You're kidding. I do. Wait, wait, wait. Are they re-releasing the QoSr Echo or are they doing their attempt? They're doing a dual screen smartphone that you can connect together into one giant screen. But it's their own design, it's their own product. It's their own design. It's the same idea. So you can... You're a terrible intro then. I'm terrible. Yeah, yeah. So it's two 4.3 inch displays that you can connect together that are like one is on the front and one is on the back and you can flip them horizontally so you've got one almost square display that you can do two things at once or view the webpage on the full screen as well. It's a little bit of a twist, but our guy in Japan, Sam Byford, who got hands on with this seemed to be pretty impressed with it in the video but I just kept thinking about that poor QoSr Echo and the death that it suffered because it was such a poorly executed idea. For some reason every time you say Echo, Dan, I think not of ECHO but of Echo the Dolphin, the video game. Echo the designer. No, I don't know what that is. One thing to keep in mind is that the needs and wants and desires of the Japanese market are still somewhat different than they are elsewhere in the world and maybe this form factor is going to go over very well. Who knows? We just know that the Echo was not received with much love in the US. But yeah. Actually, that reminds me, there's something really peculiar about the Japanese market, peculiar from a Western perspective anyway, which again is about size. And that is that they sell drinks, they sell soft drinks in different sizes, so there's like 100mm cans and then 330mm cans but they sell them at the same price from vending machines. And they're able to sell both because people in Japan seem to have the self-control to decide whether they need 100mm of a drink or 330. And they're like, some people actually buy a smaller portion because they don't need that much. Either that flat or they're ripping off the people that want the 100mm. That's the other possibility. There's like gas stations here in the US where they'll say like, any size coffee is 99 cents and I guarantee you that the vast majority of people buy the biggest coffee they can get for 99 cents. Right, I mean that's the whole idea that we have, broadly speaking, and this isn't just like drinks or food or anything else, or tech devices, everywhere. It's like more quantity equals more value, most people think. Yeah. Although by the same, I don't know if that analogy really converts to what we're talking about here with phones because it's not, with these quote-unquote flagship devices, it's not about value, right? It's about what makes a flagship device. And there's a very strong association with many OEMs and presumably with many consumers that bigger is better. And it's the exact same thing that's been happening in the car industry for the past 50 years. More so in the US than in Europe and Japan. But we talked about it two weeks ago. Someone, I don't know who, I'm dying to find out who, someone in the Verge trailer at CES had Nexus One. That was Evan Rogers. Oh, Evan, who brought like 20 phones with him including a T-Mobile Galaxy S that was glued to a tablet. No, no, no, it was glued to a battery pack that he was using. Evan is insane. Evan, if you're watching, I love you, but you're insane. Anyway, so he had a Nexus One there and we all picked it up and it felt and looked like a child's toy. It was so small. I'm sure that if you used it for a while you'd get used to it and you might even come to prefer it. But it just struck me, that for me really was the moment that I realized how far we've come in terms of our perception of phone screen size in the past two years. Here we look at this Nexus One now and it just looks tiny. So also announced in Japan is LG's Optimus G Pro, which was rumored this week and then it was officially unveiled by NTT DoCoMo, which is a 5-inch version of the Optimus G that has a 1080p display and chances are we will see the global version of this announced at NWC. So it's just yet another 5-inch phone on the market. So that's what we've got the J-Butterfly Droid DNA, the Sony Xperia Z and the LG Optimus Z. So those are all in the 5-inch 1080p. Yeah, then there's the ZTE and the Oppo Find 5. Don't include the Oppo in the same conversation as the rest of these. Oh dude, you've got to see the UI on that thing. That's my regret from CES is not seeing the Oppo. Animations and madness. If we think the Japanese are slightly different from us, the Koreans and the software that they load on their devices are just like a whole other planet. Do you guys remember three or four years ago there was that fake Oppo phone going around and they reversed letters and it was the poop phone? It was the Oppo logo but they just switched the P's to it. It was being sold in China and presumably they didn't realize what poop meant. It was definitely one of my favorite posts that I wrote at Engadget. It was a very special moment for me. We have to look that up. I vaguely remember that. Yeah, just Google the poop phone and it'll come up. You own the Google juice on the poop phone. I'm Googling it right now. I'm sure it'll be on page one. Maybe they were faking the Oppo as the brand because that was the way that HTC was branding its phones in China for a long time. No, but the Dope Pod logo was different. It looked like the Oppo. It was the Oppo logo. It was the same typeface. Yeah, shoot, I'm not on page one. But John Biggs of Crunchyrolls.com, yeah, he's got it on lockdown. Yep, there it is, the poop phone. Anyway, sorry to derail the conversation. Any time that you want to derail the conversation and talk about the poop phone, it's OK with me. I just don't think that Oppo has earned the right yet to be included in the same conversation as the rest of these brands. The gold standard for me, and I know that this is a very American thing to say, but for me the gold standard is if you can convince an American carrier to carry a device of yours, then you deserve to be included in that conversation. Otherwise you're just a second tier OEM. Well, yeah. A second tier is actually being charitable to Oppo. Yeah, yeah. Come on, they're on an upward trajectory. That's what we can say. They're going up, we're just jumping on their bandwagon nice and early, so in like 10 years' time when they finally catch up and they get this stuff together and they're right there with Sense 15. Then we'll know, yeah, I call these guys. About a dozen years ago I called it. If Sense continues on the same trajectory that we're seeing in Sense 5, there's just going to come a point in time where it's indistinguishable from stock Android. They'll brand it in some way so that it sounds like super advanced when in reality it's just super fast. Last thing I'm going to say about Sense. Give us a freaking option, man. Give us a toggle. Stock or Sense. Make sense to default, that's fine. I'll find the option. I'll dig up the freaking option and I'll just toggle it and switch to stock. He's not going to kill anybody. I guarantee you people will not die. It might kill HTC's engineers because that's an entirely new round of validation that they need to go through to make sure that they have the phone working 100% with stock just as they do with Sense. That's why it takes the signage and guys so long to ship a stable ROM for new devices is because it isn't as simple as compiling AOSP and dropping it on a new phone. There are drivers that you need to compile into the kernel. It's a huge nightmare. Okay. Well, I said that was the last thing I'm going to say about it so I'm not going to talk about it anymore. Quick mention, going back to the LG. That phone was one of the quickest to go from being rumored, which actually happened last week or maybe the week before, the Optimus G Pro and then boom, it's announced in Japan. This is kind of a funny story because the same exact thing happened with LG and the Optimus G last year. That's true. The Japanese carrier partners were like, well, we're showing it off now. Here you go. Then LG has its big event weeks later that unveils it for the rest of the world even though everybody, if you've been paying attention, had seen it already. That's the thing. You can't just foresee the event at MWC where this really straight-laced Korean executive steps up to the stage and he's really nervous. It's like one of the biggest moments of his life and he's playing it completely straight and he's like, the Optimus G Pro, five inches, 1080p display, IPS, it has an RGB. It's no bullshit AMOLED. Excuse me. It's a real IPS display, guys. This is really awesome. Everyone will be like, yeah, dude, we saw that in Japan last month. You just single-handedly took the Verge Mobile show from a G-rated podcast to a PG-rated podcast, lad. While quoting a future. I think that's okay. I think that's allowed. Look, I still don't think, I know the Droid DNA is a pretty baller phone, I get it. I still don't believe in the five-inch 1080p panel. I don't need that dot pitch and I don't need a five-inch device. People keep telling me, just carry the Note 2 around for a week and you'll love it. No, I won't. I just returned my Note 2 review unit. I couldn't wait to get that out of my office. I hear you. You know what's really funny to me is that Samsung, there have been these rumors of the Galaxy Note 3 moving to 6.3 inches, which makes a lot of sense if the Galaxy S4 is going to be a 5-inch or 4.99-inch 1080p device. Here they're going to probably announce it at IFA, just like they normally do. They will have already been bested by Sony's 6.44-inch device. They're just going to look like complete busters. The Korean manufacturers, Samsung and LG, for years and years and years have been known for really pushing numbers as being very mean. The world's best or the world's biggest or the world's brightest. Those kinds of superlatives are very important to their marketing. That's not something they're going to be able to push with the Galaxy Note 3, at least in terms of styles. If it is, in fact, 6.3. In fact, I bet Samsung is going back to the labs right now and make it get 6.5. I have been on to do that before. 6.45. Yeah. Samsung did take their very first 10-inch Galaxy Tab. They saw the iPad get refreshed and they were like, actually, our thing is garbage. We need to make this thing thinner, so we'll just reintroduce it. They have done that in the past, but at the same time, it's such a meaningless and random thing to claim. It's the biggest. It's the biggest until the 7-inch devices come along. Right. Honestly, it's like... Somebody once again tweeted Samsung's display... Samsung's coverage of the display range, the display plethora. It was like 2.8, 3.1, 3.3, 3.7, 3.9, 4, et cetera, et cetera. If you notice, and if you follow that, there's a giant gap between 5.5 and 7.0. I'm tired. You didn't do it, man. The sad thing is it will probably sell again because people are people and we don't understand them. Yeah. It'll sell like gangbusters, man. To use a term from the 1920s, because I don't know better what to use. We won't get it because we just don't get it, man. We just don't get it. Okay, but let's not make this an entire show about size. The last thing I just want to mention is I do want to cast doubt on the idea of a 4.7-inch 1080p display on the HCM7. Because nobody has done 1080p at 4.7 inches. That's the densest we would have had. No one has shown a sample? Not to my knowledge. Not even the display makers. I'm challenging your notion on the Googles right now. All right. Why do that? We can switch it up and talk about RIM. Yeah. Speaking of leaks, obviously RIM's got its big event next week. We talked about this a little bit last week. More stuff continues to flood the Internet with what the device looks like, what the operating system looks like, and things like that. We just saw this past week, we saw a Verizon's promo page that leaked that was talking about the Z10, as Vlad would like to say. It shows it in white, so it looks like Verizon will be carrying it in white. We also had a whole rash of screenshots leak earlier this week that go through the whole setup of a new device and various settings menus on BlackBerry 10. It's out there if you want to know what it's going to be like. What are your thoughts on it, Dan? Looking at the screenshots. They look very BlackBerry to me. The screenshots really don't get me that excited for a couple of reasons. One, they're very much, they look like BlackBerry to me. They don't have that polish and that design aesthetic and sharpness that I see even with Android 4.2 and certainly with iOS and with Windows Phone, which has always been kind of like a bummer for me for BlackBerry. The other problem with the screenshots is they're just like a whole bunch of settings screenshots, and they're not loaded with data or with information, so it's really hard to get a feel of what it'll be like using the thing in day-to-day use. So I don't want to be too judgmental based on those screenshots. Chris, how's the search going? I cannot find any 4.7 or 1080p panels that have been shown. Dude, this is my realm. You have it on lockdown. Displays. You have it on lockdown. I admit. I mean, it's the truth though, isn't it? Displays are basically the one spec that remains that matters in devices nowadays. Like if you're going to get one thing right, get your display right first. Get the dimensions right, get the technology right, and then go from there. Yeah, I feel like we're kind of at the point now where it's hard to screw up a display because there are so many really good technologies out there for making them gapless and for not having a really crappy like pentile appearance. They kind of have all their bases covered. That wasn't necessarily the case a year ago, but we're at the point now where there's just no excuse. And that's something that, Dan, I think you've probably had the most experience for some reason with the Razer Max HD. And would you say that they've kind of gotten the display thing figured out now? Save for the Max HD, sure. I can't look at that display. It just hurts my eyes. Really? The Max HD's display is so oversaturated, it's like you're on a mushroom trip every time that you look at it. It drives me nuts. And it's like over sharp. You know when someone went into Photoshop with an image and they just like way overdid the sharpness and it just hurts your eyes to look at it. That's exactly how I feel about the Razer Max HD display. And the Razer M display to an even greater extent. Funny enough, as soon as Chris said Pentile, the only thing that popped into my mind was Motorola. That's just bad form for a phone. Galaxy Nexus said Pentile. Yeah, I was going to say, the funniest thing about that is that Pentile is literally a Samsung trademark. Like they own that trademark. And the technology behind it. So it's funny that Motorola is the first thing that pops into your mind. Well, Motorola is a good company for Google. Someone on Twitter is telling me that this NEC Medius X has a 4.7 inch 1080p display. NEC Medius S? X as in Xavier. Somebody is tweeting the same thing at me as well. It's the N07D. Is this for NTT.com or? I don't know. That's old. That's from like a year ago. 4.3 inches. 4.3? I don't know. Surely that would have been 4.3 and 720. Yeah this has to be 720. Oh, you know what? I think I saw, oh maybe not. I may have seen this phone at SeaTac when I was there. Well in any case, let's actually drag this back to BackBerry because there was really a truly hilarious moment that happened with RIM when Thorsten Heinz noted that the company is willing to consider selling off its hardware unit and just becoming a software and services company. And then its stock price shot up. I mean that's how bad RIM is doing. You say you're considering selling off and then your stock price shoots up because people don't trust you to manage your resources and what you have properly. Yeah, but I think that's kind of always true. It's pretty common for a company to say that it's exploring selling off a unit and its stock price goes up. And to be fair, I think it's like a universal, it's a truism in the entire technology industry that software and services are much more profitable than hardware is, which is why IBM is primary. Except for Apple. Apple is like the one thing that proves that rule. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, but then Apple makes stuff like this and stuff that you want to rub on your face. So I see for this NO7D, I see a mention in the text of 1920 by 1080, but I think that might be video recording. Anyway, I'm done with you this thing. You just see the numbers in a bunch of Japanese, aren't you, Chris? Yeah, yeah. That's exactly what I think. No, but to me it's a perfect storm with RIM because it's a double whammy of no confidence. So RIM itself is saying we're not confident that we can continue operating the company that we're operating, even though that's what we're building up to on January 30th, hardware, software, selling devices. So as soon as we launch this massive new revolution, which everything is being bet on, we're going to start looking into selling it all off because we're not confident that we'll make profitability out of it. So that's number one. And then the market itself says, you know what, we agree with you guys and we think if you set everything up and split it up, it will be better than if you just keep running it. So it's like number two with the no confidence. So basically the market is doing the whole Michael Dell thing, saying give the money back to shareholders. Yeah. And the question is, who would be, with all due respect, who would be dumb enough to pick up RIM's hardware business and agree to shoulder the cost of designing, hopefully, you know, revenue generating slash profitable new phones running completely unproven platform in Blackberry 10. I have no idea who, unless it was like just a complete fire sale, I don't understand who would pick that up and why. Amazon and Facebook just for the hardware designers? I guess, but if you look at the Z... And I'm not really talking about industrial designers because RIM hasn't done industrial design for, I don't know, two decades? Yeah, the Z10 is not an impressive piece of industrial design. But, you know, this is the thing, this is the expertise that we keep talking about with Nokia Motorola, you know, the internal stuff, the antenna, engineering, the stuff under the hood. That can be valuable and the staff that RIM has can be valuable to somebody like Amazon trying to build a smartphone. That's true. Yeah, I can see that. I can see that. But it would really have to be like one of those Amazon Today special value discount sales, you know? Like, buy this hardware unit, we did it next hour. Gold box sale, RIM's hardware unit. Basically, yeah. 10% claimed. Yeah, I mean, I don't know. What hasn't Heinz said that RIM might sell? I mean, it's just... Yeah, I mean, it's been the company line for the past year. Like, no options are off the table, has basically been his message. So and I think that... These couplings, guys, are really nice. My wife got them for me last year. They're silver, you know, silver's coming back to style. And I'm not saying that we won't sell these. Yeah, I can't imagine this being the way that RIM separates its hardware and software divisions. I could possibly see a sale or licensing of the software to other manufacturers, assuming that it's able to prove itself on the market. Oh yeah, I think RIM will be desperate to license it to somebody. Somebody signs up for it, RIM will be like, wait, you want this stuff? Okay, done. They have no interest in being exclusive on the software. They want to spread out as much as they can. I just don't think that they will. I still think it's really, really gloomy as far as RIM is concerned. Yeah. Well, as far as... We talk about apps all the time with RIM and indeed there's written three reports on RIM's getting apps. But it seems like every week, RIM announces that they've got more and more apps ready to go and more and more apps are being ported to BlackBerry 10. It's looking like they will hit their goal of 70,000 available by launch. Whether there will be 70,000 apps you want, that's another story. Right. That's the million dollar, or in RIM's case, the billion dollar question. Yeah. So, I'm sure we'll be talking about RIM a whole heck of a lot more next week and probably the week after that once their event hits. What else do you guys want to talk about today? We've got a little bit of exciting financial news, as they say very sarcastically. Oh, Chris, this is up your alley about AT&T finally is letting FaceTime on the iPhone 4S. Whoop-de-doo. Yeah, this really comes down to... It's a continuation of the efforts of public interest groups like Public Knowledge and FreePress to work with AT&T and FCC to kind of like push back on this notion that it's okay to just fly in the face of the tenets of net neutrality. To be fair, the FCC's rules around net neutrality on wireless are practically non-existent. They're very, very weak compared to the rules that they're trying to put... They're in court right now. They're tied up in court, but there is an active effort on the part of the FCC to impose some pretty reasonable rules across the board on landline, but they are much weaker on mobile. I think that AT&T recognized privately that this was a battle not worth fighting considering the PR nightmare that it was becoming for them because it was a very arbitrary decision. This all being said, even though you can do FaceTime on the 4S now over cellular, I don't know if I'd want to. HSPA still sucks in many areas, although for the first time ever last week, I was at O'Hare at a very, very busy time. The airport was completely jam-packed, and AT&T LTE was slower than AT&T HSPA. So I think that by quite a bit, on my speed test, I was only getting about 0.05 megabits down on LTE and about 0.5, half a megabit down on HSPA. So the tide is turning in some markets at some times of day, I think, and that's going to create an interesting dynamic over the course of the next year or two as more people ditch their HSPA devices for LTE. But yeah, the practical implication of this FaceTime move is virtually nil, but from a PR perspective and the aggressiveness to which they are being pursued by these public interest groups, I think that it was the right move for them to make. I just want to say, since AT&T and FaceTime fiasco has been so fragmented, I've lost track of it a long, long time ago. All I'm seeing is our head—I'm just giving you the across-the-bond perspective. All I'm seeing is headlines about, AT&T allows FaceTime, AT&T doesn't allow FaceTime, AT&T's back, AT&T changes its mind again, now is the 4S, now is there something else? I've lost track. I've just completely lost track. I think Chris nailed it in saying it's really arbitrary and annoyingly annoying. Yes, annoyingly arbitrary. I think when the announcement came initially that they were going to allow it on the iPhone 5 but not on the iPhone 4S, I just kept screaming in our chat, this is so arbitrary, this is so arbitrary. Right, because it wasn't limited to LTE at that time. It was strictly a model decision. Because the iPhone 5 could use it on HSPA+, if you were not on an LTE network, but the 4S could not, which made absolutely no sense. Right. Let me also monopolize whatever's left of the podcast with some European news and segue into the idea that AT&T is looking into expanding into Europe. You can have it. Are you excited about American Telephone and Telegraph being in Europe? Does that make you happy? Dude, I think the first target is the UK, right? It looks like UK is everything everywhere and possibly a Dutch carrier company. Everything everywhere is pretty big in the UK, right? They are T-Mobile and Orange, right? Yes. Well, I mean, everything everywhere at the moment, really trying to work out some sort of cogent strategy toward becoming one brand and one operation and killing off the Orange and T-Mobile brands and closing up the stores, which they've been doing, etc. The thing with them, and I've seen their CEO, has a beautiful, beautiful name. I think it's Olaf Swanty or something like that, but there you go. My memories and what it used to be. I've seen him do a couple of speeches and a couple of presentations, and he looks like a strained man, to be honest with you guys. Maybe that's just me reading too much into it. I feel like EE has a lot of money deeply invested into being the first 4G provider and beating everybody to the punch. The company is trying as hard as it can to get as many customers as it can during this advanced period so that it can stay afloat, basically, so that it can survive. Which is essentially the Sprint story of 2000. When was it, 2010, when the first WiMax phone launched in the US? Yeah, that's a very good analogy, actually. The only thing is that Sprint survived screwing up. Thanks to SoftBank coming in and scooping them up. Maybe AT&T will be EE's SoftBank. Think about that. No, because SoftBank isn't evil and blue and stuff. That would be just a nightmare. What I'm trying to illustrate is that it's a make or break situation. For EE, they're trying really hard and they might not have the financial resources that you might imagine with the big promotional push that they're doing right now. They might just be putting all their chips in now and saying, we either grow big now or we fail, which creates the vulnerability for a takeover by somebody like AT&T. There's potential there. I just see zero potential for consumer benefit if AT&T comes into the UK market. Nothing particularly good is really going to emerge from that, I don't think. They could do it very silently, just like Vodafone's presence via Verizon Wireless is very silent. There's no aspect of Vodafone that comes through in the way Verizon presents itself. Vodafone is a British company, AT&T is American. Vodafone being understated and AT&T not is to be expected. But Vodafone is, correct me if I'm wrong, I think that by total subscriber account, they are the second largest wireless carrier in the world. In terms of the quote unquote evil empire, it's hard to dispute that Vodafone is up in that group. Not to say I think any of these companies are evil, I just think they're aggressively capitalist. Which is evil. Says the Bulgarian. Like there's an associated political doctorate with Bulgaria. We need to spend some time not being enslaved by somebody in order to have a doctorate. This conversation is getting weird. Just to bring it back to EE, this week they're introducing a couple of new price plans. So now there's a 31 pound per month entry level price plan for the LTE service. But it's kind of daft if you sign up for that because you need to sign up for two years, SIM only so you don't get a phone with it. But you sign up for two years, you pay 31 pounds per month and you get 500 megabytes of data. So it's like you get really fast data if you're in the right area, you have the right connection and you only get half a gig of it. Really fast data for a very short amount of time. Exactly. Yeah, 500 megabytes is criminally low for LTE. You know 500 megabytes is like when we go to Barcelona for MWC and I have to buy a prepaid SIM card and we're there for a week and I'm like I don't know if 500 megabytes is enough. I always end up buying a gig if I can whenever I'm in another country for a week or whatever because I'm afraid that just my using maps and email and whatever is going to use up 500 megabytes. Yeah, 500 megabytes is just enough to get through your Twitter feed and look through the GIFs that Chris posts. When is the last time I posted a GIF on Twitter? I don't know if I ever have. It's been a long time. I think it needs to happen more often. I reject your criticism of my Twitter account. Chris, it was a flagrant accusation and I withdraw it. Thank you. With my apologies. Thank you. Also, two P's that the power users, they're also doing a 46 pound per month 20 gigabytes plan. Wait, wait, wait. 20 gig? Yeah. So you go from 31 pounds per month for 500 megabytes to 46 pounds per month for 20 gigabytes which is 40 times the amount. Right, but that's what they've done. They just introduced more extreme versions. So now they have the cheapest option and now they have the most massive option. They still have price plans in between. But it's only a 15 pound difference between the cheapest and the most expensive plan. Yeah. Okay, so just to give you a comparison with AT&T. So AT&T's mobile share plan, I think their lowest cost plan is $90 for two gigabytes and then that gets shared with whatever lines you add to it. And then it goes up to like $250 or something for 10 gigabytes. Yeah, but there's somebody coming around to your house giving you a massage every weekend, right? They're massaging your wallet. That was really, really freaking good actually. As far as imagery goes, it was like high five. On that note, I think on wallet massages we can call it a wrap for this week. What say you guys? I agree. So that's the Verge Mobile Show for this week. If you want to follow us on Twitter, I'm DC Seifert. Vlad is Vlad Savov. Chris is Zpower and he promises to post more GIFs. And Dieter is Backlon. And hopefully Dieter will be back with us next week. But who knows. So that's it. Thanks for watching guys. Thanks guys. See you next week.