 I'm Dan Sievert. I'm Chris Sigler. And actually, Dieter, I have a bone to pick with you. Are we live? I don't actually know that we're live. I think we are at the moment, yes. Yeah, no, it says on air. Well, yeah, it says that for me all the time, whether we're on air or not, which, by the way, is not confidence inspiring at all. Are we not on the air? Is that the situation? Yeah, we're on the air. Hugh Hugh Hugh in chat says that we're live. OK, so he claims. Yeah. I have a bone to pick with you. Yeah, I have a bone to pick with you, Dieter, because two weeks ago, your last program, you closed it by teasing a Christmas Day show. I did. And you didn't. I was ready to broadcast on Christmas Day. Where were you? Dan, quick typing. You caught my bluff. You caught my bluff. I actually was not ready to broadcast on Christmas Day. I was hoping you'd just accept my admonishment and move on, but you didn't. I was in Magnolia, Arkansas, and I was ready to go. Was there internet there? Yeah. Is it like satellite internet? Is it that weird? Standard cable internet. It wasn't super good, but it worked. Interesting. What kind of cell service did you have there? Terrible. AT&T is the worst. And I had to spend a significant portion of the holiday in a place where there was just zero service. But Verizon has LTE there, which is insane. That is insane. You know how every once in a while we get that list of new Verizon LTE markets, and there are like 16 cities that you've never heard of? That's the perfect example. So we're going to get started. But I do want to warn everybody that at any moment during the Verge Mobile show, Dan could just, without wanting to or meaning to, turn into like dubstep Dan. He'll just be talking, and he'll end up rep, rep, rep. It's pretty awesome. It's amazing. But yeah, it's fully unintentional. Don't take offense if that type of thing offends you. So this is our last podcast before the Consumer Electronic Show, which starts next week. And I'm basically not sleeping. I'm sick to my stomach. I'm throwing up every few hours. I am pretty sick. I have to room with you the first night we're there. And I'm not having any of this. If you're puking, I'll sleep in a car or whatever. Chris, I've been growing my hair out specifically so that you can hold it back. Remember that quote until the day I die. But what's crazy is the biggest news, mobile news, might have already happened. And it didn't happen at CES. The reason Vlad's not here is that he was at the launch event for Ubuntu OS, which has been announced. They're aiming for, I want to say, was it early 2014? Yeah, early 2014. And it's based on the Android kernel and uses, I think, Android drivers. So it should be really, really good. I think Android drivers, so it should be relatively easy to port Android phones over to it if they want to take advantage of existing hardware. But Dieter, you know what else uses the Android kernel and Android drivers? Open Web OS. Yes. It doesn't run so well. Yeah, well, what's funny, we were talking about this before we got started, that we've got Ubuntu OS, and we've got Sailfish from Yala, and we've got, what am I missing? Open Web OS, I guess. Firefox. And Firefox OS, all sort of like showing off their junk on the Galaxy Nexus. Yeah, which is great. I mean, that's actually a really promising sign that they're able to use off-the-shelf hardware and do really important and cool and unique things with it. Because none of these guys at launch are going to have the volume or the momentum or the money to commission really cool hardware independently. And in some cases, their structure doesn't even lend itself to that sort of thing. So the ability to do that is very important. And I'm sure all of these will run beautifully on the HTC HD2. No, there's already a project of Ubuntu running on the HD2 right now. There's a thread on XDA that is like, open call for beta testers, we've got to build. Let's give it a try. On the phone version already? Not the desktop version of Ubuntu, but you're far too excited about it, too. And it runs Windows RT, too, right? Yeah, that happened. We were maybe going to talk about it briefly. But yeah, no, the HD2 is running Windows RT. That's amazing. I love it. This is the phone that will never die. Yeah, it'll just never die. It's the mobile equivalent of the cockroach. It'll survive nuclear war. It'll survive all these platform battles. Even if HTC, god forbid, goes out of business, the HD2 will soldier on for decades to come. It's going to be a beautiful thing. They should just keep making it, honestly. They should just go back to the factory and do another run. You know, for a time sake. Pull out some first generation Snapdragon processors. I agree. I'd buy one. I'm just shocked you don't own one, Chris. I don't, actually. I never did. I used to. I had to give mine up. Oh, was it a review unit? It was a company unit at my former employer. I don't steal from the company. This is a good policy. Yeah, when did you start that policy? Now he's just shoveling stuff in these drawers in preparation for fleeing to Costa Rica. Check out these posters. A pile of Nexus 7s. So anyway, Avantu, are you guys excited about this? Is this something that you would seriously consider using? And if so, why would you consider it over something like Firefox OS? Well, OK. So a couple of things. One, I'm relatively excited for it because I'm always excited for new ideas of how to use a phone. And I'm excited for it because it's a phone UI that doesn't talk down. Everything's via gestures. And you swipe up from different parts of the screen to do different things. And you swipe over from the left. And there's a little peak thing with your apps. And then you swipe over more to get to the home screen. And you swipe from the right to switch apps. And so it could be a confusing mess. But it could actually work. And so I'm excited to try that. But what's really interesting to me is looking at the response on the verge of people that are excited. It is getting way more attention and way more interest than I ever would have guessed a phone OS from Ubuntu would. It's really crazy, actually. Yeah. What about you, Dan? I hear what Dieter's saying. But I'm not nearly as optimistic about it as it seems that Dieter is. And I feel the same way about Firefox OS. I'm sure that they're going to bring some great ideas to the table, and there's going to be some really cool things on the mobile platform and stuff. But as far as being something that I could use on a day-to-day basis, I don't know if I could see it happening. Not with what I saw in the early demos yet. And based on our very quick. Here's the thing. And I need to preface this by disclosing that my girlfriend works for Mozilla and does work with the Firefox OS. But I think the difference between this and the Firefox OS is one, the UI looks way better. And two, I trust Ubuntu to put on a product that's, how do I put this, not really kind of crappy. What I've seen with Firefox OS so far has not been inspiring. And they're targeting the low end. It's just like, meh. And Ubuntu might actually be an interesting thing. And they might have native apps. And they set that in their little fake keynote. Which, actually, by the way, did you guys watch this little keynote for the internet thing? No, I did not. It's like a 20 minute thing. It's not fully juju fake keynote. He starts out by saying this is a keynote for the internet. It's a guy standing in front of a white background. And so it's fine. But there was still that little moment of, meh. Anyway, he said that they've got partnerships. Did it have canned laughter? That's the question. They have partnerships already set up with graphics cards makers, graphics people. And so to me, that's a dog whistle for NVIDIA. Will it support compiz is what I want to know. Can I make the apps explode in Fireballs and Jiggly Windows? Because that's what you do with Ubuntu, right? Jiggly Windows. Yeah, bear in mind, Dan, to your point, that they have a year until they're even planning on getting to 1.0. So that's something to keep in mind. I mean, it bothers me a little bit that we have all of these interesting projects that are led by really talented and smart people, even including open web OS. And there isn't any room for, well, debatably, there's not any room for even a single one of these to commercially succeed, let alone four or five or however many that are going on right now. So it would be nice to see some consolidation in this field, but I know there are some egos involved and different people, different ideas, different licensing. Or even just some failure or some sense of cross-platform development that actually creates apps that don't suck would be nice. No, honestly, these things are all based on the Android kernel or somehow related to Linux. It would be really great if we could have a good way to make native or native speed apps for all these things that are good. And I went on a tweet rampage on New Year's Day, and my New Year's resolution for web apps was I was going to continue to be disappointed with their performance for the entire year. And I don't think that it's there. But I mean, we've got Tizen. Yeah. Oh, Tizen. I forgot about it. Yeah, Tizen, Sailfish, Ubuntu, open web OS. I'm already forgetting one again. Firefox. Firefox. Firefox. Blackberry over there. They're trying to be the third place. Windows Phone over there. So it's not just the Indies. It's the difference between entrenched players and there's Indies. And all of them are desperate to build an app ecosystem. And nobody thinks that any of them have a really good chance of doing it. Right. Yeah, I mean, I don't know. I had a point about that. I give up. By the way, Dieter, I would just like to say that I find it hilarious that you prefaced your discussion on Mozilla versus Ubuntu by saying, my girlfriend works for Mozilla. And then you proceeded to trash Firefox OS. Like, normally you would expect it to go the other way, where you would be like, oh, Firefox OS is great. But no, you took it the other direction. But I mean, here's the thing, though. I believe in the principles of Firefox OS. I believe that it's possible to make web apps that are kind of native but also web-based. I want that to happen. I wanted it to happen with web OS. And somebody in the chat asked us to quit talking about OS. And that's fair. I want that to happen with BlackBerry OS. They've got a really good HTML5 engine for running HTML5 apps. But to date, it's just not there. And I don't have a whole. I mean, Facebook, they finally released a native version of Facebook for Android. Which is terrible, by the way. It's so bad. It times out all the time. Like, I have a decent connection. You can't post from it. It constantly says I have no connection, whether I'm on Wi-Fi or wireless or cellular or whatever. It constantly says I have to kill the app and then reopen it just to refresh the timeline. It drives me nuts. It's terrible. It's really bad. And still, I mean, on top of all this, we just got done saying there are all these players in an arena that has room for maybe one player. And rumors are still persisting, just like they've been persisting for the past three or four years, that Facebook is eventually going to get into this game. And Amazon. And Amazon. That's right. Well, yeah, Amazon. At least Amazon will be Android-based, right? Like, in a lot of Android apps. Yes. But then you get into the whole debate of what does it mean for something to be running Android, right? Because it will obviously be their flavor of Android. And who knows what they're doing. And they're curated apps, because it's only going to be apps that you could get through Amazon. Right. And I'm sure Google will not be including Amazon phone activations in their official activations numbers. I predict in 2013, somebody from Chrome is going to be like, screw it. We're making a Chrome phone. You're already got a Chromebook. What the hell? Just stick a little pirate flag up in their cubicle. We're doing it. I'd buy a Chrome phone. I think that the Chromebook. You'd also buy a Chromebook. I would. Look, the Chromebook is, well, that's a whole different discussion. It's a device that is near and dear to my heart. And anyone who doesn't own one is doing it wrong. Anyway. I don't know what else to say. I mean, we'll have to wait and see if any of these are going to be successful. Specifically with Ubuntu, I want to try it. Hopefully, they'll have something at CES that I can play with and see if it's actually compelling and good. It did look really laggy. But again, it's super early, right? They probably don't have graphics acceleration yet. And they're running it on old hardware in the first place. So by the time 20, I mean, they have a full year of runway to not only resolve that through software optimization, but also to get better hardware in the pipeline, too. That should, hopefully, fingers crossed, work itself out. Then again, I'm using a Nexus 4, which even today, we keep saying that the next generation of processors is going to finally eliminate all traces of lag from Android, and it never happens. So we'll see. Well, actually, I was maybe going to have us talk about the stuff that we talked about in our year in review. But let's actually just, since you brought up the Nexus 4, let's jump into CES. And in my head, the connection here is I am not using the Nexus 4 in CES. I'm not using the iPhone. Well, I have them both in my bag. But I am planning on Galaxy S3 as my main phone at CES. I think that's a really shrewd move on your part. I support it, yes. As in, wise. Well, it basically came down to this. I needed Android for Gmail. And I prefer the way Android multitasks for IRC, which is how we communicate with each other. And I needed a phone that I could depend on the battery life, either through replacing the battery or having a super long battery life. I'm on AT&T. I want LTE as a backup solution for tethering just in case. Not that I think AT&T LTE is going to be worth a damn at CES. And it's not that, oh, how smart of me to pick the GS3. It's more like, what else is there for me to go with, given those constraints? I feel like this is going to be the first year at CES where both Verizon's and AT&T's LTE networks will be fully loaded. You know what I mean? I'm going to be using the WiMAX the whole time. You laugh. The only problem with it is that there are definitely parts of both LVCC and definitely the Venetian where you cannot get a signal. So that's always a consideration. But we're in the weeds. Yeah, I'm looking forward to seeing how those networks perform. And I'm also looking forward to seeing whether the HSPA network starts to get a little more usable. Because everybody is on an LTE-capable phone now. The thing is that none of those guys are using VoLTE. So I don't know what that means for the loading of the network. And also, there's backhaul considerations. And I'm assuming that both HSPA and LTE signals are both using the same backhaul. So who knows? We won't know until we get there. What are you guys going to use? So I've got my iPhone 5 on AT&T. So I'm going to run into the same LTE problem. I'm bringing my Nexus 4. But I really don't think I'll end up using it. I think my SIM is going to stay in the iPhone 5 just because it's no LTE. But then I've got a backup of Razer Max HD on Verizon. So that'll be my backup connection slash battery when my iPhone goes down. And then as a last resort, I also have a Note 2 that's coming with me. So I just scrounged up the biggest battery devices that I could find. Yeah, I'm taking a Nexus 4 with an AT&T SIM in it. I'm taking a Verizon Note 2. And I'll probably take some Windows phone device, either an 8X or an 822. Yeah, maybe I'll bring. I still have the 920 review unit. Maybe I'll bring that. Tom is bringing two 920s, by the way. No shortage of 920s in Vegas. So the reason I'm bringing this up, I mean, this might be really, why do I care what phone you guys are bringing into CDS? But for us, this is like when it's go time when you need to depend on a phone, when you need it to be rock solid and last forever and be awesome and save your life. These are the phones that we're picking. And it's interesting, the reason that we're picking them. I would not use a Razer Max HD as my everyday phone, just because the screen is terrible. I'm not a fan of the hardware. The camera's kind of lousy. But when a thing like CES or any trade show for that matter, my number one priority is battery life. And I can put up with a slightly lousy screen. I don't plan on taking a lot of pictures. As long as the phone is powered on and has a signal, that's the most important thing for me. Signal's good. Signal is definitely a plus. I remember I was at the, I think it was two years ago at CES. I was at the T-Mobile press conference where I met Carly and they teased the 3D LG tablet. When you said Carly, I thought you were going to talk about teasing something else. Uh-oh. No. No, Dieter. Get your mind firmly out of the gutter. Wait, did I say T? I didn't say T's Carly. Did I? I said T. Never mind. Just move on. And everything was failing. I had an AT&T hotspot. I had a Verizon hotspot on me. Neither one of those were working. I can't remember if it was just the signals were saturated or if I didn't get a signal there, what the deal was. I ended up tethering to a T-Mobile phone that I had on me, and that was the only thing that worked, which was great and very poetic that I was at the T-Mobile press conference. The only thing that worked was my T-Mobile phone. So you just don't know. CES covers so much ground between the convention center itself and the satellite events at other hotels that you definitely cannot go there with one form of connectivity. It's a recipe for disaster. Oh, I tweeted about this. I haven't put it in the forums. But if you haven't, whether you're going to CES or not, if you're using a Mac and you use an Android phone, there's an app called Horrendous, H-O-R-N-D-I-S. And it is amazing. It lets you use Android stock tethering over USB stuff. It's basically a driver for the Mac. And that tethering over USB stopped working, I think, with Android 4 when they switched to R-N-D-I-S. And they basically had to pick a tethering solution technically. And Windows supported it. And they're like, well, we've got to go with what most people use. So they use that. So the Mac hasn't. But this thing, it seems to just work. And it's great. You don't have to install extra software. You plug it in. You turn on USB tethering. And voila. Yeah, it works great. And I will say that I'm a much bigger fan of tethering over a USB connection than using a Wi-Fi hotspot for a variety of reasons, mostly being battery life and interference. Interference is the one that most people don't think of as being an issue. But at CES, it's a huge issue. So here, I'll drop a link into chat. We'll make sure and put it in the show notes, too. And while I am looking that up, can somebody start talking about what they're expecting at CES? So we've gotten quite a few leaks of Sony's rumored devices. And I think we haven't heard anything as far as leaks from Samsung. There was a minor rumor that hit today that HTC might announce something. And then obviously, we haven't heard anything from Motorola. So for those three manufacturers, we haven't heard anything. But we have seen this device a couple of times now, the Sony 5-inch 1080p display, smartphone tablet hybrid, whatever you want to call it these days, that is allegedly going to be debuting at CES. And that might be the big mobile news. And then we've got a couple of things from Huawei and ZTE, also with big screens, 1080p displays, quad core processors. So it'll be interesting. Last year, Sony announced the ION at CES. And that was their big deal, which didn't turn out to be a hugely successful product or even a decent product. But they also announced the Xperia S there, right? Yes. Which was the more interesting device visually. But in the US, it didn't really have any relevance because it came to AT&T as the ION. But the ION didn't have that cool, transparent bar. I think the ION was a completely different device. The ION supported LTE, had a different hardware design and chassis. I mean, it was like open. Might have even been a different processor. Yeah, well it did because it had to support LTE. So it had the S3 Snapdragon, which is, I can't stand that chip. I have chip rage against it. I don't really want to go into all the bad things with the ION because that was one of the worst devices of 2012. But hopefully this new Xperia Z and ZL that's supposedly going to come this year will be a much better version. Hopefully we'll have a better screen. It's going to allegedly have a much higher resolution. But hopefully it also has better color and better viewing angles and stuff. Every single Sony screen I saw in 2012 had terrible viewing angles and just kind of washed out colors. And even though they had high resolution for the time that 720p displays, they just were not as good. Especially if you put it next to a 1x or anything. But Dan, you're forgetting about Bravia Engine. Bravia Engine and Reality Display and Elite Magic. I guess maybe my better judgment, I am hopeful for Sony. We've talked a few times about them making the right moves in supporting open source and custom ROMs. And there was even that project that was briefly hosted by Google, and now I think Sony's taken it up about getting AOSP on a Sony device. So if they can nail the industrial design and not let AT&T ruin it and get something close to stock software out there, I would be really interested in that. They still have a shot at my heart. So Sony always comes out with like, they're one of the first manufacturers usually to have a high end spec, like a 12 megapixel camera. And they were one of the first on the market with the 720p display. Well, they weren't the first. They were a couple late on that. But the high res camera, the dual core processors back then, but it was like, even with all those high end specs that I would normally drool over, and I was really excited to see just the whole sum of its parts just has not come together on any Sony device that I've used. So yeah, hopefully they get that right. Not only the design, but the hardware execution, where it works and is reliable and has good quality. And that's where they've missed in my experience. And I still think, I know that this is kind of like a shattered dream now, thanks to the Xperia Play, but I do still think that there is room for synergy between the other two. No, there's not. Between the, yes there is. There's no room. There's. By the way, Dan, I hope you saw the picture of you as Skrillex. I'm looking right now. OK. Oh god. No, but I do think, so Dieter, imagine an Xperia Play executed correctly. And I mean correctly. No futzing around the real deal. I can imagine a car designed by Homer Simpson. And it sounds amazing, but in execution, it would be terrible. No, no dude. Look, the Vita, for what it is, is a great gaming device. The problem is that dedicated mobile gaming is a dead segment. And Sony and Nintendo are going to find that out more and more and more over the next few years. So if they can take the magic that they've funneled into the PSP and the Vita over the past 10 years and rechannel that energy into mobile, I think that there's still something very cool that they can do. But they need to approach it very differently than they approached the Xperia Play. I mean, end to end. They did almost nothing right with the Xperia Play. Whatever happened to HTC being PlayStation certified? That is a good question. That happened at E3, right? I don't know. It's hanging out with the Open Handset Alliance and the upgrade thing, whatever that was called. They're off partying in lands of unknown origins. So did we mention Huawei and its 6.1 inch thing? We haven't. This thing is insane. There's rumors that they're going to. So CES, typically HTC has been taking mobile to Congress lately. Samsung does it whenever. It seems like every big trade show, Samsung's deal is, yeah, we're not going to be there. They have to sit out a press release saying, no, the Galaxy S insert number here will not be announced at insert trade show here. And to be clear, CES has never been a huge deal for mobile. Sony's always trying to do a little bit of something there alongside everything else that they do at CES. And now it looks like maybe Huawei is trying to get some attention there. I mean, I remember at Mobile World Congress last year, they promised that they were going to be huge and they were going to be number three on the planet. Don't know that they managed to pull that off. But I could see Huawei trying to be like, well, nobody else is at CES. We're going to put out something ridiculous and maybe see if we can get some attention. And a 6.1 inch phone is, I think, the definition of 6.3 inch. They're going to immediately get eclipsed by the 6.3 inch Note 3. I mean, seriously, it's going to be a matter of weeks before Samsung teases. They'll come up with some almost clever teaser campaign that isn't actually clever, but almost is. It's something about filling the biggest gap in their lineup, and then, you know. It's absurd. So I have the Note 2 with me right here. And people keep tweeting at me. You know, when I tweet about the Note 2, they're like, oh, used it for a few weeks. And then you'll be like, how did I ever use something smaller? No, you're wrong. That's completely absurd. I've had this sitting on my desk, and I touch it once or twice a day, just to remind myself of how ridiculous it is. And I could not get used to this thing. And stepping up to 6.3, I mean, I can't even imagine. Dieter, I know you and I were talking about this before, and I may have mentioned it on the show, too, that the problem with the Note 2 is that you need to handle it like a tablet, not like a phone. Because it's too big to, you know, it's just big enough so that if you try to handle it with one hand, like you would a phone, you will drop it. And it will break, because it weighs like three pounds. But that's because it has a massive battery in it, right? Yeah. So stepping up to 6.3 is just going to be a complete recipe for disaster. And they're no longer going to be able to do that kind of wishy-washy, is it a phone, is it a tablet? They're just going to have to be like, look, we made a tablet that you can hold up to your face. They won't be able to beat around the bush anymore. We made a tablet that runs phone software. Right. And then I hope that somebody, I'm not looking at our chat, but I hope that somebody is posting the gif of David Pierce holding the pad phone through his face. If ever a time is right for that gif, it's right now. So I'm really, like, I can't find it. And for some reason, Phil Nickinson at Android Central, if you're listening, you need to find this picture for me. The very first picture of a person holding up a seven-inch tablet to their head as what is going on with this was me with the original Galaxy Tab. And I can't find it now. It makes me really unhappy. So you're saying that you set the precedent. I did. And I was like, so why are we talking about, oh, the 6.1 inch Huawei phone. Yeah. Is Huawei going to get any traction in the US? But it's just like, what are they racing toward? What kind of insane pissing contest is this? What is the end game? You can't just keep making phones bigger. Like, at what point do they say, OK, we maxed out? Do they say that? Do they just keep going until finally they realize that they're up to seven inches, and then they have to co-brand their seven-inch tablet to phone? It just really makes me mad. It really grinds your gears, huh? Yes, it grinds my gears. I can't deal with it. It's funny. When I was using an iPhone 5 for a while, I got so used to the size and shape of that phone that when I first picked up a Galaxy Nexus after a couple weeks using the iPhone 5, I was like, holy crap, how did I ever use this? This is ridiculously big. The image has been found in chat by HughieHugh. But is it time stamped? If it's not, I mean, who knows? You could have taken it yesterday. Dude. No way knowing. Anyway. Not with that haircut. You could have taken it yesterday. I look like 10 years younger in this image. Matt, if you're watching or listening to the podcast right now, you must be really, really excited. Tweet it now. Tweet it right now. Fine. Are we expecting anything else at CES? I mean, I'm sure that my guess is that ZTE will do something. I don't know what. But yeah, ZTE will probably do something. Motorola, for as long as I can remember. They've already said that they're, they've like confirmed that they're announcing. Oh, right. Yeah. The 5-inch. Yeah. Yeah, the Grand X. Yeah. And Motorola historically has always had very boring presences at major tours. I remember in the early days of Engadget, Motorola had this weird thing where if you wandered into their booth and started taking pictures of the phones that were out on display, they would get all up in your face and send security over. It was insane. I'm taking a picture of a Razr that's been out for six months. Settle down, bro. Dieter, I'm glad to know it wasn't just me. No, it was you. It was you. I'm glad to know it wasn't just me. I assumed that it was just me because I figured, oh, they would never do that to Chris Zeke. No, as far as I know, they did that to everyone. And then I had to explain what was going on. And I'd explain what a website was and how you publish news to a website. But so anyway, back to my point, Motorola typically doesn't do things of importance at these shows. They have a big booth, a big pretty booth usually. There's just nothing new or interesting there. A lot of the manufacturers tend to leave CES to the carriers. So Motorola might not announce something, but Verizon might announce something like the Droid Bionic, which will look totally different 10 months later when it gets released. Well, HTC always did that, like the Evo 4G, the Evo 3D, whatever the, I guess the last Evo was at the last CTIA. But they like giving that over to Sprint. Was that at CES, the Evo? Or was that at CTIA? CTIA. That was CTIA? The 4G LTE Evo, yeah. Never mind. No, I meant the previous, the WiMAX Evo. The first Evo 4G, I think, was CES. OK. God. HP used to be at CES. They'd have some random, blocking Windows phone. And you'd go and they'd have it literally in a drawer. I'd roll up and I'd be like, I want to see your Windows phone as HP. And they'd be like, yeah, where are they? And they'd pull out a drawer. Like, oh, here it is. I think that the Evo 4G was CTIA. Yeah, it was. It was CTIA. All right. Disregard. Yeah. So I always have the Palm Pre at CES to remember. So I want to talk about the Palm Pre, just because we were talking about how it's C. We were told we have to stop talking about WebOS. We're not talking about WebOS. We're talking about the Palm Pre. OK. Because we were just talking about how insane Motorola is at CES with, don't look at that Razr the wrong way. But when Palm announced the Pre, it was the weirdest thing ever for you, because they wouldn't let anyone touch it. They hurried a couple people off into a back room to show it off. And then they wouldn't let you touch it. And this went on for like six months until they released the thing. So Motorola's not alone in kind of those things. Well, so there's this great piece on a website called The Verge, where we talked about the back story behind the creation of the Palm Pre. And I can't remember the author of that piece, but it was really well written. I don't think he's with that site anymore. And there's actually some discussion on the lead up to that and how they didn't allow journalists to touch the phone. I highly recommend you read the piece if you haven't. It was one of Pocket's 10 most pocketed pieces of 2012. Again, not sure who the author was. Anyway. It was probably because it was way too long. I had that coming. Yeah. I think that many factors have learned the lesson that they shouldn't do that, because it's very hostile, not just to the media, but then in turn to the readers who are trying to devour as much information on these unreleased devices that they can. So. That's mobile at CES. Maybe we'll be surprised by something. But Microsoft's not even going to have a booth there, right? No. No. They're going to have a presence, but it's going to be entirely off floor. So yeah. We'll see what happens. You know what, Dieter? We should probably spend a really long time right now talking about BlackBerry. So will RIM have a booth at CES? They usually do, yeah. But I don't think that they're going to be showing off BlackBerry 10 devices. They may have some dev alpha devices sitting out. They better. I want to say that they did at the last show I was at. MobileCon? I can't remember. Yeah. If they put out a CES booth with just a bunch of bolds, people would be like, oh, I'm going to be in the booth. I'm going to be flipping the kiosks. You know, tearing up the chairs. I would actually love to see that. Just to see the vastity of them to have a booth at CES and just have a bunch of 9900s. So what's insane to me is just how thoroughly all of the Z10 and what's the other, what's the keyboard one that you called? X10. X10. By the way, terrible names. You don't go straight to Z and X. I'm sorry. Isn't the X10 like this crappy home security camera thing? Yes. Exactly. Like everything about them. There have been videos and pictures. And it's like, what else? They might as well put them out of the booth at CES because we've seen everything. Except what apps they're going to have. I think that's the one thing that's left is they're going to announce what build up ecosystem. They're going to have whatever apps they write. That's how that's going to work. Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare. Yeah, pretty much. I don't know. I guess I'm looking for, I mean, the gestures, the way they've implemented gestures in BlackBerry 10 is just interesting enough so that I'm really interested in trying it. But the hardware does not look that interesting. This QWERTY keyboard thing, I think it's a little bit different. You know me. I love the idea of going back to a trio form factor, a candy bar QWERTY. Still? Oh, dude. Heck yeah. Even with innovations like SwiftKey and the gesture keyboard in 4.1, you would still prefer a physical keyboard. I think I would. Or at least it would be in the running. It would still make me. I think I'm over that hump. I'm so much faster with a virtual keyboard. So the reason I like having a physical keyboard isn't just typing speed and accuracy. It's also getting crap done, speed and accuracy. Because if there's a physical keyboard there, you can just start typing what it is you want to do. If I want to call Dan, I'd DA, Enter, and I'm calling Dan. If I want to open up an app or whatever, I can just better open it. You can see me. I'm doing it. I'm really excited about holding this in my hand. But this QWERTY one does not look very high end relative to what the non-QWERTY one does. And I'm hoping these are just developer devices. The specs are going to be basically the same, right? Yeah. But looking at the back of it, it just, I don't know. They're very boring looking devices. I mean, it's obvious that they're still trying to appeal to the classical BlackBerry user, which is a shrinking market when you consider that a lot of these guys have long since moved to iPhones. And so Torsten Heinz has been talking about the fact that their market is now split into two pieces. They're attacking the hardware side, and then they're also attacking the BYOD movement, which I think is more of a movement now and is now rapidly becoming the norm. And that makes RIMS hardware much less relevant. And if they make devices that look like this, that's just going to speed that push into irrelevance, I think. Yeah. I mean, the thing to remember about RIM is that we just had their last quarterly results, and it was literally the first time that their subscriber base went down. So we've been talking about RIM going off a cliff, but the graph of their subscriber base has been going up this whole time, this whole past two years we've been complaining about RIM not knowing what they're doing and not developing an OS and blah, blah, blah. It's still been going up. So it's just now that they're finally having people realize in, yes, it's internationally, and in the US it's totally for market. The thing is it's going up, but their revenues and their profits have been the opposite. So they could always boast about big numbers, but the financial results weren't lining up with it. By the way, our own Tom Warren is trolling me on Twitter right now, and he's asking me to keep pushing you on RIM, Dieter. He doesn't want us to talk about anything else. Just go ahead. I mean, what else is there? I want to try the hub. I want to see if their multitasking paradigm actually works. I don't know. You're going to be talking to me in March about you're going to be making fun of me for having given it a real try for a month and what was wrong with me. It's really going to come down to whether Gmail works with it or not. If Gmail doesn't work with it, it's going to be a non-starter for virtually all of us. Well, it's going to be IMAP, right? That's the offer. Hopefully a working IMAP, because that's better than what you get with Gmail on BlackBerry 7. Yeah, I was about to say, the ultimate troll would be that BlackBerry 10 doesn't do two-way sync with Gmail. Gmail on IMAP actually isn't that good on even an iPhone. I know Rene Rishi at iMore, I talk about all my old people, complains all the time about problems that he has. I haven't used Gmail and IMAP on an iPhone in a long time. But what I did, there were errors and timeouts and weirdness. So it's not ideal either. Yeah. Yeah, it's going to be very tough. I mean, the classic question that I keep coming back to is how do they grow their market segment with these devices? Because if you look at, I hate to keep making a comparison with Windows Phone, but you look at what Windows Phone has done between 7, 7.5, and 8, and their inability to grow market share significantly with, quite frankly, what has become a very good product. And so I keep asking myself, if BlackBerry 10 comes to market, it turns out to be just an absolutely fantastic, almost flawless operating system on very good hardware, even then, does it matter? I don't know. At best, I think that they can sell into their existing subscriber base. And like I said before, that's a base that's shrinking and a base that, even if you bring this updated hardware to the table and it's great, I still don't know if it'll save. The problem is they can sell into their existing subscriber base, that's actually not a complete, that's a more complicated statement than it seems on its face, because they can sell into their existing high-end subscriber base, and that's, there's hardly anybody there anymore. Most of their subscriber base is low-end and teenagers and messengers and whatever else internationally. And I'm sure I'm going to get an email from a PR person telling me I'm wrong about that, but it certainly seems to be the case. And they're going to keep selling those BlackBerry 7 phones for, I think it was, didn't you say like another two years they're going to coexist? Which is crazy. Yeah, they aren't going away right away. So selling into their existing subscriber base, they can only sell into a small fraction of it initially. And they need to expand that fraction really, really quickly. Yeah. Maybe long term the best play for them, assuming they're around this long, is to kind of employ the Apple model, where they keep the Generation 1 BlackBerry 10 devices around, and then those become the low-end devices when they introduce the new model. I think that that'll be difficult for them once they talk to carriers. Because carriers will want something newer, they'll want something customized and things like that. And I mean, the reason Apple's been able to do that is because of the hard hand that it's been able to hold the carriers back from demanding everything. But if they are able to pull that off, it certainly seems like a smart idea as far as to move the BlackBerry 10 devices down market. Right. So this is going to be a really short mobile show, I think, because we've got places to go and people to see and things to do. But there is one last thing I definitely want to talk about. And that's this report out of the Wall Street Journal that Google and Motorola are building an X-Phone. And part of me wants to be like, well, yes, of course they are. So the only interesting thing there is that maybe they're trying to do something different and more than just putting out something like a Nexus device. Well, the very first point I'd like to make here is that the Wall Street Journal, and I think this has frankly been under-reported. And we are as much to blame for that as anybody. But Wall Street Journal basically got their last Nexus rumor wrong. They said in spring of 2012 that a variety of Nexus phones would be released in the fall time frame, and that didn't happen. So what we know we had. We had two tablets and a phone. Yeah, yeah, fair enough. But correct me if I'm wrong, I think the original Wall Street Journal report said phones. Yeah, I think you're right. Different manufacturers. My first thing is that we can't take this Wall Street Journal report as gospel. We can certainly put a lot more weight on it than we can on some other sources. But it's still open to interpretation. So it could be some guy heard from some guy who has a friend who's an employee at the company, and game of telephone happens. And really, this just turns out to be another high-end Motorola device that's coming out later this year. There's nothing else that's special about it. So just temper. Remember, a pessimist is never disappointed, as I like to say. So temper your enthusiasm and hope for the best. But what if a pessimist ends up going into a restaurant and getting a really awesome burrito, and it's so good that they're disappointed in their pessimism, they wish they had spent more time looking forward to it? No, no. The way that would play out is they'd go into the restaurant, they'd say, this burrito's going to suck. And then they eat it, and they're like, wow, that was actually really good. And then they're pleasantly surprised. And then they'd be disappointed in themselves being a pessimist. I didn't take it that far. I didn't think about that. You're right, that is a problem. I don't know what to do about it, though. So they're saying bendable screens and ceramics around the table. They might include gesture recognition software. I want to say that I don't know if we'll ever see a bendable screen phone in our lifetime. Because it feels like we've been told that bendable screens have been coming for, I don't know, longer than the internet. Well, Samsung's going to show something to you, I'm sure. Again. Yeah, yeah, again. So people are conflating. The problem is that these manufacturers and everyone else in the world is conflating what they mean by bendable. When they're talking about a flexible or bendable display, what they really mean is that it's mounted in some way in the phone so that it doesn't shatter. Oh, I can bend my phone like Silly Putty. We've seen concepts like that in the past. I think Nokia had one a few years ago. But it's literally just a block of bendable plastic that they're like, hey, a phone in the future might look like this. And no one has really given me a compelling reason why phones should be able to bend like that. We've seen some really cool things where they're talking about putting wearable computers on soldiers' wrists so that they can have moving maps just by looking at their arm. I'd like them to do that on my wrist. Well, yeah. The problem is that you'd look like a complete dork. And at that point, you might as well just upgrade to Google Glass. If you're willing to look like that much of a dork, just go full hog. So yeah, I don't think that the dream of a, if it's really anyone's dream, of having a fully bendable phone is anytime soon, if ever. And think about all the technologies already. If I had a fully bendable phone, I could keep it in my back pocket. Or it could be a resurrection of the flip phone. Yeah, you could keep it in your back pocket, Dieter. But then you'd pull it out, and it would be like bendy. And it would be weird. I prefer my phones al dente. Just a little bit of, you know. Can you imagine holding a phone like this, and it's drooping on one side? All I know is my phone isn't done until I can take it out and throw it against the wall, and it sticks. That's when you know that it's ready. Really what Chris is asking is, do you want a flaccid phone in your pocket? Dude, I was going for the spaghetti thing. You had to go for the other thing. Well, look, I don't put it past Samsung to develop a flaccid phone. Because they have the R&D capabilities. Certainly, they own the display. It wouldn't be flaccid if it was less flaccid. And that's flaccid phone. Yeah, they have everything they need to pursue that development path. I think what I'm saying is that they're going to find that consumer demand for something like that is virtually zero. Think about 3D displays on mobile. I mean, heck, on regular TV is much less mobile. But the EVO 3D fell flat on its face. I hope TC isn't listening to this show right now. And that is showing no signs of coming back. Remember, AT&T came out with one. I can't even remember the name of it. The Thrill. I owned one. Thrill 4G. You owned an LG Thrill. I did own one. It only was stolen. That's great. I'm going to hold that over your head for a while. I believe that's the ultimate troll, that someone stole a Thrill 4G from me and has to live with that now. The ultimate anti-theft device is 3D. So yeah, there's lots of evidence to indicate that despite all the focus grouping in the world and all the research in the world, manufacturers can still go down entirely incorrect paths. And flaccid phones might be another one of those paths. TC heard every word you said. Just the fact that he's in our chat now. Nice. Nice. Hi, TC. I hope you're enjoying your EVO 3D. Remember when TC scooped those concepts of TC making the EVO 4G LTE 3D? And the phone got canned. And here's how I think it played out. I think that TC saw that and scooped it and put it on the site. And then HTC or Sprint read the comments on that post. And they were like, oh. Never mind. We shouldn't do this. This is a bad idea. TC, don't worry, man. We're going to get you a new phone soon. Oh, man. Sorry. I remember TC gave me a very good explanation as to why he bought that when he did. It had one extra camera on it. Yeah. Reasoning at the time was that when he bought it, he needed a new phone. It was the best phone on Sprint, as far as specs wise, and when I think back to it, he's right. Which is insane, but yes, he was right. In reality, how it actually played out is TC walked into Sprint, and he's like, what phone has the most cameras? They were like, here it is. Two cameras is not enough. I need a minimum of three. Yeah. Did you know that Android phone name generator.com exists? Yeah. Yes. The computer dropped this. Yeah, this is great. This is amazing. And it works really well, too. They all sound legit. Acer Droid Neo Prime E3D. I believe that was a real phone. This is amazing. Samsung MyTouch Vibrant V. Acer Aria Optimus X2 4G Plus G1. And we broke it. It's now giving me a bad gateway. Really? We broke it already? That can't be right. We sent it. All right, we're back. Oh, Sony Ericsson Captivate Slide Z4G. I can tell you definitively that the Verge Mobile show is not sending too much traffic to the 80 site right now. You know how old this is by the fact that it doesn't have LTE anywhere. None of these have LTE in their name. This needs to be updated for 2015. So that's all I want to talk about, unless you guys have something. I'm going to wrap the show. We should wrap soon. Yeah, I think we should. But we should let our listeners know not to worry. There will be programming next week live from Vegas. There's plenty of programming. Yes. So much programming that you're going to be like, oh my gosh, this is too much programming. You're going to be programmed. We're going to reach out through the internet and tell you what to do. Yeah. You know those little bottles of five hour energy? You'll be slamming those for a week straight just to keep up with all the programming we're throwing at you, this fire hose of programming. Yeah. So we may do a mobile show. We may not. We'll see. But there will be plenty of other video to ingest. Yes. And so stay tuned for that madness. In the meantime, if you want to get a hold of us, you can. We are vergemobileshow at theverge.com, I believe, the email address is. Give it a try. See what happens. Otherwise, you can leave a comment on this post with what it goes up, and you can follow us on Twitter. Altogether, we're adverge. I'm at Backlund. Chris is at ZPower. Dan is at DC Seaford with an EI. Vlad, who is not here, is at Vlad Sabov. If you haven't checked out his hands-on of the new Ubuntu Phone OS, you really should, because it's awesome. He got to try it. And that's worth looking at. Thanks for watching, everybody.