 I think I'm November 19th, 2012. And I am Dieter Bohm. I'm Dan Seifert. And I am Chris Sigler. Where is Vlad today? Vlad is unavailable. Just unavailable? I think Vlad is what the Europeans call on holiday. Oh, right, right, right. Yeah. Well, God bless him. He needs it. We're here on a Google Hangout again. And we're without our producer, who is currently working on the On the Verge show right now. So we're flying by the seat of our pants. And we clearly have no idea what's going on. So I don't know if I'd say that. I think that you're a fine producer, Dieter. That's very kind of you to say. Very nice of you. So I have a confession to make. I actually have not listened to last week's show. Tell me what happened. Give me the Reader's Digest version of what I missed. I believe we spent about five minutes talking about BBM. We talked a little bit about the Droid DNA. We talked a little bit about the Nexus 4 and Sanofsky. But we basically spent about 30 minutes making fun of you for buying a Cyan Lumia 920. That's fair. That's fair. Which, by the way, is no longer in my possession. I believe we made fun of him for his other purchase as well, if I remember correctly, because of the Nexus 4 purchase. I'm pretty sure we took it for granted for that. Oh, yeah. No, make fun of me all you want. I bet all y'all would love to have a Nexus 4 right about now. It's not the Nexus 4 purchase. It's the fact that you went and bought it from a T-Mobile store and paid an extra $150 for it. More than that, I believe. Yeah, because they're readily available right now, and nobody in their right mind would pay $600 for a 16-gig Nexus 4 right now. Yeah, okay. That's fair. So how are you feeling now that you currently own a Nexus 4? I really don't want it in my life. In fact, I don't have it in my life anymore. It's gone. I've got to say, Chris, it's really remarkable how quickly you're able to dispose of these devices. In one day, you're able to just shed yourself of every smartphone. How much of your time of your day, of your average week, is spent either purchasing or getting rid of smartphones? Probably somewhere between 80% and 85%, I would estimate. So I felt obligated to buy the Nexus 4 last week because it was there. And that was at a time, it was the first day of retail availability, and I knew that they were going to be in short supply because I was in New York at the time, and I called the T-Mobile store on 34th Street. It's right across the street from Macy's, I believe, in Herald Square. And they had five, but they're going fast. If you want one, you better hurry down here. I can't put one aside for you. So I ran down there, and she's like, OK, it's going to be $499 plus tax, and what's your account number? And I'm like, I don't have an account with you. And she's like, well, then I can't sell it to you. And I'm like, fine, give me an account. So I bought one month of prepaid, which the minimum for that phone is you need the $60 plan to activate that phone. So I ended up spending $500 plus $60 plus tax, and I felt very, very bad about it. But here's the thing. I was like 95% sure that I was going to take that phone back to the office and just immediately unload it. I was like, well, I did the hard work of going and getting the phone. I felt good about that, because I called them 20 minutes later, and they were all gone. But I was like, I don't want this thing. Surely somebody is going to want it and want to take it off my hands. And nobody did when they found out that I paid $600 for it. I'm sure they would love to take it off your hands for like $350 plus tax. Yeah, no doubt. No doubt. But I mean, good luck getting one for $350 right now, right? Yeah, I will say that I placed my order on the 13th, and I'm still in limbo. I haven't gotten a shipping email. I got the email saying it could be up to three weeks. And I'm just pretty sure Google is trying to ruin my Thanksgiving, possibly ruin my Christmas. And I'm afraid that by the time Google actually ships this thing, I won't want it anymore. The Nexus 5 will be out. The Nexus 5 will be out, or like CES will be here, and I'll see a whole bunch of stuff that I will want. Yeah. Okay, so you managed to offload the Nexus 4. You sold it. Yeah, the Nexus 4 is gone. The Nexus 4 is out of my life. And actually, interestingly, I was saying on Twitter this morning that I have, for the first time since I believe 2002, I don't own any smartphone right now. If you call my line right now, it'll go straight to voicemail. The SIM is sitting in my living room right now. You don't have like an old phone you can slap it in? You own literally not a single phone. There's an N79 sitting right here, which I don't actually consider a smartphone anymore by modern standards. I guess I could put it in here. But apart from that, oh no, no, that's not true. I also have this C6 that I tried to sell down a couple weeks ago, and he said no. So I do have options. I technically have options. I just choose not to exercise them. So okay, what's your plan? Because you bought a 920, no good. You bought a Nexus 4, no good. You seem to refuse to accept a Galaxy S3 or an Optimus G or an HTC One X or an HTC One X Plus. Are you going to ban an AT&T? Are you going to just give up on having a smartphone? What's your plan? I think that I snapped, to be honest. I think that I've lost it. No, because losing it would be actually going out and buying a Note 2 and using that, seriously. That's when you know you've lost it, or we know you've lost it at least. All options are on the table at this point. I am so disillusioned by the smartphone landscape right now. At no time in history have there been so many options that all shoot a glancing blow at perfection but then end up failing miserably in one way or another. Everything from the iPhone 5 to the Galaxy S3 to the One X Plus to the Nexus 4, they all have at least one fatal flaw. I'm just getting really sick and tired of it. I finally snapped on Twitter last night and unleashed a long rant, which I won't recount here to spare our listeners. The bottom line is that I'm so pissed that this Nexus 4 exists. All the technology, everything that is required to run this phone on LTE exists. This is not science fiction. There's nothing preventing anybody from creating this device with a functional LTE radio in it other than somebody's stubbornness and somebody else's political BS. I started flipping tables last night and I really haven't stopped since then. It's gotten to the point where my sim is sitting on a countertop. That's where I am right now in my life. Just accept, man. Accept that you're going to have to settle. No, Chris doesn't settle. No, I'm not. I'm not settling. I'm not accepting anything. You were settled before the Nexus 4 existed. This is true. He was very settled before he experimented with the 920 and before he got into the Nexus 4. He was actually quite settled from what I could understand. You were happy on the iPhone 5. Yeah, I was, but here's the thing. Everybody including you and I were like fiddling around saying, oh, this is going to be a fun summer where we get to play with all these phones before the next Nexus comes and makes all of our wildest dreams come true. Then the Nexus 4 comes and guess what? It doesn't fulfill any of our wildest fantasies because it doesn't have an LTE radio in it. I dropped it over the weekend so it was all stuffed. I'm like, I don't want this stupid thing anymore. My life is just in shambles, Dieter, and I blame Google. It's entirely Google's fault. I mean, listen, just look. You know what I've got right here? I've got an HTC One X running Android 4.1. It's pretty nice. I don't want – get your One X out of my face. Look, at this point, I don't even know – even if – I guess they think he does still sell the One X, but if I were to – I would feel really bad about not buying the One X Plus if I were to do that, if I were to get back into the HTC game right now. Then I'd have to deal with unlocking because I really can't tolerate – like of all the skins, Sense is the one that I absolutely cannot tolerate, right? So I'd have to get rid of the skin, which means I'd have to get into the whole unlocking, skinning thing, Cyanogen mod. Then on top of that is Tegra 3. I don't want a Tegra 3. I want an S4 Pro. Why don't you just get an iPhone 5? I'm done with this conversation. Can we please talk about something else? I want to help you, man. I appreciate that, but the long and the short of it is that I cannot be called or texted right now and everyone's just going to have to deal with it. Until I figure out what's going on with my smartphone life, I am unreachable. I'm off the grid. This also means you won't be able to leave your house because we can't email you either. Right. Right. I guess I can go use the computer in a public library or something, but I definitely do not have a smartphone right now. You should totally send a letter to Paul. That's what you should do. You and Paul are very close now. Yeah, that's not a bad idea. I'm going to send him a postcard. Maybe you should switch to a Droid DNA. Dan recently reviewed it. Maybe he can convince you. The Droid DNA, I reviewed this thing last week. I spent a good amount of time with it and I actually still have it and I just want you guys to notice that it's plugged in and charging right now. It's a very solidly built device. It's got the best screen on the market without a doubt. That 1080p display is phenomenal and I said this numerous times in the review. It's got HTC's 8 megapixel camera which is okay and it's got a Snapdragon S4 Pro quad core processor which benchmarks through the roof, but it really doesn't have great battery life. I'm reporting what I saw. A lot of people have reached out and said that I don't think it has as bad battery life as you say and other people maybe aren't as critical on the battery life as I was, but it's about 450 now here on the East Coast and I've had this thing on the charger for almost an hour now because it died or was very close to dying today. That's been my experience since I've had it. I ran a regular battery test, but I also did real world testing and I've been using it for quite a few days now and these results haven't changed. The battery life just really isn't that great and I don't know what more to say about that. This day and age, if a phone does not last me from 8 am to 8 pm, then I'm sorry, it's a non-starter. Bingo, bingo. You are spot on my friend. I think that's being very generous. 8 pm is super generous. I'd much rather have it go until I actually have to go to bed and charge it by my nightstand. The other things that I had an issue with, even though it's got that crazy fast processor and benchmarks through the roof, it definitely just did not feel as fast as the Nexus 4. There's some serious scrolling issues in a lot of apps including Chrome for Android which is like the browser. It just didn't feel as fast overall, opening apps, navigating the interface and things like that. It's Sense 4 Plus which is Sense 4 Plus and I don't... I really don't want to say terrible things about this because I know a lot of people do like Sense but I'm just not a fan of it and I really think it buries a lot... Show me someone who likes Sense. Show me a human being who's like, yes, I want a phone with Sense, who doesn't work for HTC. I was going to say. Probably come up with a couple of thousand people. Two or three years ago, Sense was great when Android was in version 1.6 or 2.0 and Android was really ugly and kind of clunky but now Android is not. It's a different Android than what we saw two years ago or three years ago. It's really kind of frustrating that Sense buries so much of what's good in Android 4.1. As a matter of fact, I got so tired of the Sense launcher by Sunday that I just said, forget it and I installed the third party launcher on there. It's been a better experience but still the battery dies. I will say that the dual notification light is pretty baller. Yeah, oh yeah, that is awesome. We did talk about that a little bit last week. I gave a little preview of that. You can actually see it's on now. Let's see, where's my camera? There it is on the back because it's charging. That was like my favorite hardware feature. It's also on the front. So I think that's awesome and I would love to see that on more phones because I've never seen that before but it's not enough to make me recommend you go out and buy this phone. This phone is, I don't know if it's in the Galaxy Note 2 realm. How big is the screen again? So it's a 5-inch display and I think it feels more like a 4.7 or 4.8-inch device than a Galaxy Note. This is not, a lot of people are calling this that phablet term which I actually loathe but this is not a tablet crossover. This is just a big smartphone and I mentioned that in the review with the software that HTC put on here. It's not attempting to be a tablet. It doesn't have a stylus. It's really not competing against the Note 2 in my opinion. It's competing against the Galaxy S3 and it's competing against the Optimus G and other phones that are in the 4.7, the 4.8-inch size range. To their credit, did do a good job of fitting a 5-inch screen in what feels like a 4.7-inch phone but it's still really big. And then they also put the power button on the top which I might have complained about last week but I'm going to complain about it again because it's terrible. I was just going to say, it's impressive that it's in that body. Does it feel thick to you? Do you feel like the solution would have been to let it get just a little bit thicker and get a removable battery or just a bigger battery in there? It's not thick. That's the thing. It's actually really thin. It measures, I think it's about 9.7 millimeters at its thickest at the middle but then it tapers down to like 4 millimeters. That I got 25% more battery or whatever it might be. And I think we said the same thing with the iPhone 5. We don't need it to be thinner. We want it to be longer lasting and it would have been much more useful to me at least if the battery lasted 25% longer than it does or more because 25% is not that much more than what it does. Well it's the difference between like a non-starter and… Am I still here? Yeah, we're having lag. It's because we don't have a real producer here. You are a real producer Deater. You're giving yourself too little credit. Yeah, I apologize guys. Apologies but okay. I thought I heard you Deater. Wow, this is terrible. What else can we talk about? There's some other… So Steve Ballmer called Android wild and uncontrolled and susceptible to malware this week and you know, sure. It's kind of… Do you guys have anything that you want to say about Ballmer's thoughts on Android? Is it any surprise that he's you know, attacking it? What I would do is go back to Ballmer's comments on the iPhone… I think that's very much in Ballmer's nature. Yeah, I agree. Yeah, no, go back to what he said about the iPhone. But I mean, the thing that he's going after being wild, uncontrolled and susceptible to malware like, is that the biggest knock on Android now? Is there still like the app qualities there? When people go after Android, that's what they're going to go for now? Anything at fragmentation and you know, spreading fear about malware? Personally I think the malware thing is total fud. I've never actually known… Did we lose Dan? I think we lost Dan, yeah. I think he's straight up conned. So Dan was complaining about a really bad connection in the studio. Oh, he might be back. Yeah I think that our New York studio is suffering from a lackluster internet connection at the moment. So hopefully we can… I see his head moving. He's making a sad face. I'm trying to… I can hear you Chris. Can you guys hear me now? Yeah, yeah. I was making a sad face because I could hear you saying how I'm not there. Okay, am I back? You guys are like… It's like watching a one frame per second. Maybe you should leave and come back. I wonder if that would work. If we had a producer they could totally handle that. So the Nexus 4… Yeah, I'm going to try and leave and come back. Okay. Dieter, you and I can have a man-to-man conversation about phones while we're waiting on Dan. Well, do you want to talk about the fact that nobody seems to be able to get a Nexus 4? The orders are still delayed. I didn't have a problem. I don't know what all of you are talking about. I got one just fine. Yeah, no, I am shocked at… One of two things happened. Either LG legitimately could not produce phones fast enough or Google significantly underestimated demand. I suspect it's the latter. That's just my take. Maybe they believed the hype that it sucks without LTE and they're like, oh, nobody will want to buy this for $300 if it doesn't have LTE. No, no, actually it's a really good deal. I think John Gruber made a point that was actually really good. He said that since this is only $299, this is sort of like could be considered the iPod touch of Android. It's a top of the line Android phone, Android device you can get. You don't even necessarily have to use it as a phone. The Galaxy Player is obviously the iPod touch of the Android world. Are we really going to talk about the Galaxy Player, man? I am trolling a little bit, I admit. Dan, you're back. What did I come back into? What did I come back into? I come back in and I hear Galaxy Player talk. No, I mean we're just complaining about the Nexus 4 being unavailable. I'm trying to bring it back to trolling Chris about his lack of a smartphone, but it might be too much work. Dieter, did you order one? No, not going to do it. Let him be pretty real. Really? No, not at this juncture. So I don't know why you're breaking into a George HW Bush impression. No, no, an impression of Dana Carvey's impression of George HW Bush. This is like an impression twice removed. Yes, yes it is. That's a very good point. And it's also like two decades old. Yeah, this is not a current political reference, Dieter. Whatever. You guys are the worst. Yeah, no, I'm not going to do it. I want LTE and as much as I want a Nexus 4 and think it would be really cool and it would be nice to get up on Android 4.2 right away and have a pure stock Android experience, you're suffering by not owning a phone at all. I am quote unquote suffering by not getting a phone that's really interesting and compelling me because it doesn't have a feature that I want. I'm taking a principled stand. We both are. The difference is that I can't receive text messages or calls. The difference is that I decided to take the stand and I stuck to it, whereas you went out and bought every phone on the planet and then returned. Yeah. I mean, the 920, I think of all the phones that I've owned in the past week, I was the closest to keeping the 920, believe it or not. And there were just a couple things that were really killing me. One is that, so Justin Rubio, a valued member of our team, now owns a Windows phone. And I was just observing today, I mean, I've known this for a while, but I was really noticing today that if he participates in a Gmail thread, he A, breaks the thread, and B, uses this really silly font in his email reply. And I don't know who at Microsoft is responsible for this debacle, but it needs to stop right now. So that's an issue. But the app gap is still very much a problem for Windows phone. I complain about this on the best two or three shows, but that ultimately did in the 920 for me, was the app situation. I need a Starbucks app. Dan, I know you're with me on that. If Dan's still alive, he may not be. Oh, he's dead again. Yes, the Starbucks app is like, without that, it's a non-starter. That's more important than battery life. Yeah. You need the Starbucks app. I'm trying here. I need Uber in Chicago. I use Uber all the time. And the Uber mobile web interface is a joke. So you need the app. Don't they have a text message interface? You can use it with your feature phone? Didn't they start with that? Yeah, they did, but the problem is that at least the one that I was using, m.uber.com, you need to enter an address. It doesn't have any location finding. And half the time, I'm like, OK, what is this building number, where am I? So it's not worth the trouble. OK. We need to move on from your phone. But we should keep talking about Windows phones. We reviewed the Lumia 820, which I guess, how do you put this? It was no great shakes. Yeah, Tom did not love that phone. Yeah. Yeah, I think, yeah, 6.8. Not good. Which is a bummer, but I guess it's not really a huge surprise, right? I feel like Nokia, I mean, I understand the need to create products that fit different arbitrary slots in carrier lineups. But I think the 820 was an example where they did themselves a disservice because there wasn't enough differentiation between that and the 920. Like if you look at HTC's 8X versus 8S, those are pretty fairly different products that look different, and they're very different sizes. And I just don't really get that same feel comparing the 920 with the 820. And I kind of feel, and also when they announced those phones, the 820 was really marginalized. It was just barely mentioned, and the 920 got all the attention. And if you're going to, if the 820 is going to have any relevance whatsoever, you need to treat it like a valued member of your portfolio. They're not doing that right now. The only thing I can think is that they created it because Vodafone or somebody was like, we must have this phone. They're like, OK, we'll just make a bunch of them for everybody. Yeah, and I mean, you're right. It's phoned in. The thing I expect is, I don't know what they're charging for it, but it's going to be, I don't know, virtually free in very short order. And it could make some sense there, right? Because the nice thing about Windows Phone is there's always sort of a baseline experience, right? Like there's not a significant delta of performance from the low end to the top of the line in terms of the core OS and scrolling and other stuff like that. The other thing, I guess this isn't Windows Phone, but Nokia's Hear Maps is out for iOS. I haven't had a chance to try this yet. But it doesn't look like it is the utter and complete salvation from people who have been hating Apple's Maps that we may have been hoping for. Right. And all signs are still pointing to Google Maps in the next few weeks here. So iOS users can keep their fingers crossed for that. Although I have to say, although I'm not using an iPhone 5 at the moment, when I disposed of my iPhone 5, I felt, this might have been psychological, but I felt like the Maps were getting marginally better than when I first took the iPhone 5 out of the box on day one. So maybe I'm crazy. No, Chris, I think you're right. Oh my God, he's back. I'm back. Back and better than ever. He looks like a Photoshop mosaic, but that's okay. At least he's here. I've connected to our faster Wi-Fi network in the studio. They wouldn't give you access to the real network before you had to beg for it? I had to ask. And the password for it is rather amusing. Well, don't say it. I'm not going to say it, but Chris would appreciate it. That's all I have to say. Oh man, now I really want to know. The password is obviously rage quit all phones. So anyway, I think that the long and short of it, to close the loop on A20, which we spent far too long talking about, don't buy this phone. There you go. We're telling people to not buy a lot of phones lately. Look, buy a Nexus 4 if you don't need LTE. I wanted to say this earlier before I went into bandwidth nightmare. The reason that I'm buying a Nexus 4 or trying to buy a Nexus 4 is because it's unlocked and I can use it overseas and I actually don't have any unlocked phones in my possession at the current moment. That's a really good point. I guess I'll be using a Galaxy Nexus for my overseas stuff. Which has 4.2, may I add. I had two unlocked phones with me at Mobile World Congress last year and both of them got stolen. Don't check any electronics in your luggage. Don't check, period. We were there for like a week. You can't carry on a week's worth of stuff. I'll never forget this year at Mobile World Congress when Dieter pulled me aside and taught me how to pack a bag so that I didn't have to bring a big bag with me on trips. It was a really humbling moment for me. Did it change your life? No. I've yet to be able to replicate – I still don't know. You're using some black magic to pack that many things and do a bag that small. It doesn't make any sense. It makes no sense. It's really simple. You just fold and roll. You just roll it up into a tight little ball. Here, I'll show you right now. On air, you just take your clothing, whatever it is, and you fold it like you would if you were just going to put it on your shelf. Then the trick is – the trick – Dieter, I have to say – I'm sorry. I have to interrupt you. The most amazing thing just happened on my screen. The video frame rate is low enough so that you were there talking to me with a coat on and all of a sudden, you didn't have a coat on. It literally looked like magic. It was amazing. It looked like CGI. Then you just roll it up. You've got this whole sweater in this tiny little package. Good to go. But no, you're using black magic because you do that with suits. They come out perfectly pressed. Wow. No, I mean, I've had coworkers who've had luggage lost on the way to Barcelona. Not having luggage in Barcelona really sucks. Yeah, I'm pretty sure that mine was stolen either in Barcelona or I had a layover from my flight back in Portugal so it might have been stolen there. But what's crazy is I had a camcorder and a digital camera in that bag as well and they didn't touch that but they took the two phones I had in there which were like garbage phones. Did they take your clothes too because that would be creepy. No, they left my dirty drawers. All right, let's move on before this gets really, really weird. We've got a bunch of random carrier news. AT&T managed to get LTE in 100 markets ahead of schedule. That's great. US Cellular is offering an unlimited LTE plan but of course, it's time limited and who knows what other secret limitations are on it. I think the most interesting thing is who was it from T-Mobile? Was it their COO, their chief operating officer basically admitted that they're going to die. He said that four major US carriers won't last, that they're quote likely be reduced to three in the longer term. So that sucks. I mean, I guess it could be Sprint that dies but… I think this is T-Mobile trying to make it a plea to regulators that put a kibosh on its merger with AT&T that it's eventually going to have to do this again and it's going to have to go through the same process. I think it's already just starting its plea right now. Man, yeah, I guess. I don't know. Chris, what do you think? What's weird to me is that T-Mobile is just coming off this PR cycle where they're like celebrating, they're patting themselves on the back for this Metro PCS thing and they're claiming that between that and the Verizon spectrum that they just acquired as a result of the Spectrum Co. thing, they're set. They're looking strong. And of course, what people fail to give T-Mobile USA enough credit for is that they are a profitable division of Deutsche Telekom. They're not losing money. So I don't know what these guys' deals really are. I don't know if they're legitimately hurting anymore or if they're just, I don't know. Of course, Sprint just tied up with Softbank. I don't know what he was driving at with that statement. I don't know who he thinks is going to merge with who or who's going to die. It's not entirely clear to me. I think four is a good number. I think three just basically means that's going to end up being two. I think we want four. I'm really comfortable with that. I wish that they all shared Spectrum better so that there could be more competition amongst them. But the thing about T-Mobile is how long are they going to take to get their LTE network rolled out. Right. I mean, 2013 sounds doable for them. I was actually just looking at their HSPA coverage map last night, and I was shocked to find that it has expanded significantly in not totally populated areas since last time I looked. I mean, T-Mobile, not long ago, even when they started rolling out 21 megabit or even 42 megabit, they were still in pockets, very urban pockets around the country, and everything else was edge. That appears to no longer be the case. My classic test is always driving from Chicago to Detroit on I-94, which goes through some pretty rural areas. Last year, maybe 18 months ago, AT&T was edge for most of that drive, and now they're 4G the entire, or I can't believe I just said 4G, they're HSPA the entire way. Can I object to you? I am the producer. I could just kick you right out of the show. He doesn't know the difference anymore. He doesn't have a smartphone. Yeah. And it's really all the same to Chris. Actually, I can mute him just in the middle of him talking. That would work. So yeah, I think that T-Mobile might be the same way now, too. I should test that. I was going to say that in my experience, T-Mobile outside of metro areas doesn't really compare to the other three carriers, but that really depends on where you live. It's terrible here where I live. It's pretty terrible. Explain this story to me. Google and Dish Network in talks to launch a wireless service. I can't wrap my head around why Dish has such a jones to be in the wireless industry. I guess maybe they're assuming that satellites are going to die and be overtaken by the internet TV, so they need to come up with a new business model. They've got a bunch of spectrum and blah, blah, blah. But I don't know what is going to happen with them, and the idea that Google might hook up and try to launch something with them is intriguing. It kind of reminds me of the old story that Apple was thinking about launching the iPhone on its own network instead of just going with Singular at the time. On the one hand, I feel like Dish may not fully appreciate the hell that it's diving into. On the other hand, they have been locking horns with the FCC for over a year now trying to convert satellite spectrum to terrestrial use. They have a taste for what they're going to have to go through, and they don't seem to be backing down. Obviously a partner like Google would really make that entire process go a lot smoother. But don't they also have, isn't the FCC looking into making sure that they're restricted in certain ways so it doesn't interfere with adjacent spectrum? It seems like what this Dish chairman needs is to get taken out to lunch, literally, not metaphorically, by the guys at Ram Light Square just so that he can receive education on just what's in store for him if he keeps moving forward the way he is. I'm not sure the guys from Light Square are going to give a whole lot of useful advice. As far as last I knew, Light Square is still clawing and is still convinced that it will launch its network. Yeah, they're trying to exchange spectrum. They're basically telling the FCC that they got, it's like they bought a sweater with like a pulled yarn in it from Target and they're trying to return it for another sweater. Spectrum doesn't work that way. For a nicer sweater. Yeah, it's like the book that George Costanza took him to the bathroom at the bookstore and then it got flagged. Never mind. Dieter is throwing out these 20-year-old references like left and right. What can I say, I'm living in the 90s. You're assuming that our viewers are aged, Dieter. Yeah, they're really not. Our demographic research tells us that our average viewer is nine years old. Nine years old and very opinionated about smartphones. We're about a year away from people that were born when I was in high school being able to drink. It's messed up. Not cool at all. It's pretty messed up. Whatever. So I wrote this article about, Facebook had this mobile developer day where they invited a whole bunch of developers of mobile apps to their campus and they let us show up. I wrote this article how every phone could become a Facebook phone and I make a couple of related arguments in it. We don't need to talk about it at length unless you guys want to. I basically want to throw it out there that Facebook could seriously, if they get their act together, know more about you than Google does and be more important to your phone and what happens on it than either Apple or Android or Samsung or whoever is making the phone itself. They will be plugged in so deeply to so much stuff that happens on it as a utility on the back end. Yeah, I think even without any developer infrastructure whatsoever, Facebook is already in that position for many if not most of its users. The entire third party framework is just icing on the cake for them. The argument I'm making is that it's not icing on the cake. It's sort of a defensive move because if the internet is as much about apps as it is about the web now, Facebook needs to make sure that it's hooked into that just like it's hooked into the web. It seems like they're being pretty successful with it. What surprised me, well I guess it didn't surprise me, but reading through the comments on the story, nobody wants to live in a future where Facebook knows a lot about you and is plugged into your phone. I kind of feel like it's a little late to be making that complaint. If you're on Facebook and you're using Facebook, which a billion people are, Facebook already knows a lot about you regardless of how you set your privacy settings and what you do and don't share. The fact is Facebook knows a lot about you. I think it's for average users or your average Facebook user, which I guess is average people these days. I would argue that Facebook probably knows more about you than Google does just because people like us are plugged into the Google ecosystem full stop. We use Google Calendar, we use Google Mail, we use Google Search Service. A lot of us use Google Voice and things like that. But for your average user that just does Google searches and then their whole life is in Facebook, Facebook probably knows more about them than Google does. When you look at it that perspective, Google Plus starts to make a lot more sense. People are like, why is Google leading into social? Who cares? Why not just leave it to Facebook? Because knowing demographic information about you, knowing what you're interested in, knowing what you're going to be interested in, potentially makes advertising way more lucrative. If Facebook can actually leverage that advantage, then Google is in trouble. What can Google do to counter that other than to try and have a social network that also collects that information? The counter argument though, Dan, your point is taken about most users, or many users not being as plugged into Google as we are, and many of our listeners are. But I mean, when I use Google now, I mean use Google now for 10 minutes and tell me that we're not already living in the effed up future. Whenever I go to any city now, it just knows where I want to be next. But that's because you're telling Google all that information, right? So I checked Google now this morning and it's like, oh hey, look at that, my package shipped from Amazon. But that's because Google's reading your Gmail, which you are giving to Google. And Google knows that you're going to be 10 minutes late to your appointment because it's in your Google calendar. So if that was in your Facebook calendar and all your messages were done through Facebook's awful messaging system, Google wouldn't have any of that data, right? Because it's all siloed over into Facebook. But the point is, people are giving that to Facebook too, right? How do you participate in the internet today and share stuff if you're not sharing it on Twitter or Facebook or wherever? Or even Tumblr is doing this kind of stuff. I'm going to host my own blog and try and share stuff that way? That's so 2002, man. There's always MySpace. There's always MySpace. Oh my god. They made a comeback. Yeah, they made a comeback. I'm just like made of rough transitions today, but I don't care because I'm going to roughly transition. Have we talked about the Qi wireless stuff? No, and I want Chris to talk about this. I feel like Chris Rand is burgeoning here. Yeah. So I should temper this. I mentioned this in my report as well. People are not universally having trouble with the Nexus 4 connecting to the Nokia DT900, which are probably the two most public facing Qi compatible devices right now, right? Because both the 920 and the Nexus 4 have gotten a lot of play, and the DT900 is the charging plate that AT&T is giving away with the 920 for free. But the gist of the story is that I had both of these devices, put the Nexus 4 on the DT900, the charging plate, and it was doing this thing where it would start charging and then stop charging, then start charging and stop charging every second or two seconds, which rendered it completely useless. For one thing, it probably wasn't taking any charge at all, or it was taking more energy to charge and uncharge and charge and uncharge that it was actually discharging net over time. But some people have had success, and we spoke to the chairman of the Wireless Power Consortium, which is an organization responsible for the Qi standard. And he says that the Nexus 4 and DT900 have been validated to work with one another. And Gadget, in their review of the Nexus 4, tried DT900. They didn't have any problems. But that DT900 I did use with two different Lumion 920s, and it worked fine. In fact, Dieter, it's the charging pad that's in your possession now. So we know that the charging pad works. But anyway, the concern is that Qi is about to go into this fight against PMA, which is the standard put forth by Power Mat, and it was recently endorsed by both Google and Starbucks, which is a big one. That's a way we know how important Starbucks is. Was Google like, we're throwing some money or some kind of backing behind this test thing by Starbucks to put it in? Or is this like a full-on endorsement? Well I mean, call it whatever you want. The fact is that they are putting money and effort and their name into a standard that is not Qi. And you know, which is, I mean it's a classic Google move. They love to, you know, de-Google. But regardless, wireless charging is a very new technology, right? And nobody, I mean nobody has a house full of Qi accessories. I have a house full of touchstones, unfortunately. Yeah, well. Which is very sad. Yes, and Dieter, thank you. If I was in my home office, I'd pull my touchstone off of my desk and hold it up to the camera as well. But Dieter and many others have had much success hacking touchstones in the years since the Hedy Palm days to work with other devices. But Qi is trying to become like this global standard where you'll be able to just drop any device on any surface and it will just miraculously charge, which is a very, very good goal to have. Because you don't realize, and Dieter, I know you'll back me up on this, you don't realize how awesome it is to just be able to drop a device anywhere and have it charge until you actually have it set up. And then your phone is just always charged, which is awesome. But you have these two standards, both of which have the backing to potentially be the ultimate winner. And Dieter, I think that you said it best, you gave me this great analogy, which is that it's exactly like Blu-ray versus HD DVD. Both of these standards have all this backing, but only one can win. There can be only one, in the words of Highlander. And it's going to be the one that the porn industry adopts. I really wanted to troll you in the comments on that, but I decided not to. The devices are recharging wirelessly. The thing I was going to say is it's also like this thing, because I've talked to the PowerBat guys years ago, back when it was them and Palm with the Touchstone. And I'd be like, what do you guys think of the Touchstone? And they would just rail about how it was technically inferior, and PMA is so much better, and blah blah blah. I'm sure that if you were to have a conversation with them about Qi for wireless charging, they would tell you the same thing. And I'm sure if you talk to the Qi people, they would also, there would be these technical debates about which standard is better. But they both basically, as far as I know, aren't that different in a way that actually matters to consumers. So what is really going to happen is we're just going to see these big companies form these alliances, and then they're going to fight it out until one thing wins or one thing doesn't. And I had kind of thought that Qi won. We saw it on Nokias, and then we saw it on the Nexus 4, and Verizon's got all of their stuff on it, and I thought that was the end of it. So this Starbucks thing, I don't know, makes me crazy. If PMA is better, PowerMAT is better, then fine. Just win. So I can treat wireless charging the way that I treat Bluetooth now, or Wi-Fi, on a phone. I just assume it's there. The idea that I would be like, does this phone have Bluetooth? I need to make sure. Hmm, that's insane, right? And it should be the same with wireless charging. Or will this work with my random Bluetooth headset? We don't worry about those things anymore. We're right. I just wish that one of them would have mandated magnets in them, because that was where Palm got it 100% right. The magnets held the thing on, and it didn't slide off. If the phone vibrated, it didn't suddenly scoot to the side and be off of the charging dock. So that's a fail on both Qi and PMA, I guess, that neither of them mandated magnets to hold the phone in place. Yeah, I do agree. But yeah, overall, the real problem, the one thing where this is unlike HD DVD versus Blu-ray, is that wireless charging is not a feature that any consumer thinks that they need. Nobody is going to say, well, I'm not going to buy this phone because it doesn't have wireless charging. Whereas, at least up until right about now when everybody is going to the cloud, everybody needed some form of video player in their entertainment stack. So there is a very real possibility that this battle of attrition could ultimately result in nobody winning. There will be no dominant standard, and then you just end up having to buy, when you buy your phone from Verizon or AT&T, you'll just have to buy a bunch of proprietary wireless charging devices to go with it. One for your car, one for your house. Which let's be honest, is probably the way the carriers would like it anyway, because the accessory margins are 100%. I think the deals like the Starbucks deal are pretty big for the wireless charging. Because once people can see it out there and they can see what it does, and if it's in places that they regularly go, or if you can buy a car with it built in, they're going to want their phone to work with that. And if PMA is able to get more endorsements like that where it's in more places and you don't have to buy special accessories for it and it's just there, then I think it will become more of a must-have feature than it is right now. Oh, and once Apple supports one of the standards, then it would be a must-have feature. I hate to say that, and I say that about NFC too, but that's really what it's going to come down to. Once it's in the iPhone, then it becomes table stakes. Hey, do you guys remember when Apple made a Bluetooth headset? That didn't work out too well for them. And their giant speakers. Bluetooth was already a standard by then, right? Yeah, it was a standard. But then they had some giant speaker too, right? Oh yeah, I forgot about that. The iPod Hi-Fi? Yeah. That was just a speaker dock. Yeah, that thing was the worst. I will say that there was one really good thing to come out of that stupid Apple Bluetooth headset, which is that several manufacturers, including Motorola and I think Jabone, hacked their way into the battery level communication for that. So if you use your Bluetooth headset with an iPhone to this day, it'll still show the Bluetooth battery level in the status bar, which is kind of cool. Yeah, I think it's a Jabone Bluetooth device in my car that's a Bluetooth FM transmitter, and I can see the battery status on my iPhone, which is pretty novel and useful. So there's a bunch of legal stuff that happened, and I don't care about any of it. Maybe you guys are interested in talking, but ACC is not paying $6 to $8 per phone to Apple as part of their settlement. Because ACC settled with Apple, Samsung is hoping to get an advantage in their case, which is obvious. Of course, Samsung is looking for every advantage that it can possibly get. And iPhone 5 and Android 4.1 Jelly Bean are getting caught up in this legal fight. So same as usual, everybody's suing everybody, and it's great. Actually, no, that's a lie. It's only Apple and Samsung and a little bit of Motorola. Apple and Google, and no longer Apple and HCC. HCC's out. Yeah, that's one less lawsuit that we have to write about and complain about. And by the way, of all the companies that needed to get out of that game, HCC was probably at the top of that list. HCC has enough to worry about right now. The last thing they need is Apple riding their behind for royalty payments. So I want to say, I don't know if, I can't remember if we even talked about this last week, but Neelai wrote a really great piece when the HCC settlement happened about what could possibly turn out from that. And it'd be really, really funny to see the next version of Sense to have Apple's slide to unlock feature and the bounce scrolling features. Just straight up identical? Yeah, I mean, that would be, it would make sense better, I guess. But yeah, that would be very funny to see. Well, I tell you what, their solution for bounce scroll is terrible. It's the worst. The elements start separating and that weird, I don't know, it just- Accordion type of thing, yeah. It's accordion, but it's not even accordion because they're like separate elements, they're not connected to each other. And it's just, it looks terrible. And I hope they get rid of it. And what are we on now? Sense 4 Plus? 4 Plus, yeah. 4 Plus. Whatever. Is the DNA 4 Plus HD? So that's Dieter's talking about. What is that? I don't even, that's whatever. On that note, I'm ending this podcast. If you want to follow us on Twitter, you should. I'm at Backlant, Chris is at ZPower, Dan is at DC, Seifert with an EI. We're all at Verge. On the Verge, if you're watching this live, is going to be on tonight. I believe they're broadcasting it live. Am I crazy? I believe in about a half an hour. Yeah. So watch that. And they're at least doing some behind the scenes stuff. And then, we'll be back next week. Have a wonderful Thanksgiving if you celebrate that sort of thing. Later guys. Bye.