 Greetings, mobile accomplishers. Welcome to the Verge Mobile Show. This is episode number 73. Does anybody care what episode number it is? It's 73, whatever. It's week of December 16th, 2013. I am a very laggy Deater Bone. I am Vlad Sabo. I'm Dan Seifert. My name is Chris Ziegler. And this is most likely going to be our final mobile show of the year. And maybe ever, because whatever, that's not true. We will do it again at some point, someday. We feel like it. Maybe CES, it might be that long. Maybe if all of us could get a couch like you do. I want to say that it may be that long, but CES is literally two weeks away. That's depressing. It's got to be more than that. Two and a half? We fly out in two and a half weeks, I think. Guys, you realize that being like, dreading Vegas and dreading CES is a completely played out trope. Like getting excited about CES is the new hotness. Look, Chris, just because it sucked, or just because people have said it sucked for years doesn't make it not suck. No, actually we just had this conversation today here in London where all the happening things are happening. I was talking to Zen, our former intern in the UK, and this was a conversation we had. And the fact is, CES does actually kind of suck for those of us who are there because we eat a ton of really shitty food, and we don't sleep, and we crush into event venues and all of these things. But on the other hand, CES is exciting for the audience. We just get nice clean announcements of new products and new fun bits. So yeah, I mean, that's just what happens with it. CES is amazing. Look, think of it as like, it's a week of like, just insanity, and everybody needs a week of insanity a year. And that is our week of insanity, and that's okay. And it's the best kind of insanity because you're surrounded by robots that you're never going to see again in your entire life, and weird plastic things that will never appear in stores. So your only opportunity to play with these things is in the beautiful shining diamond in the desert, Las Vegas, Nevada. I just don't see it. Plus, plus, plus, plus, plus, plus, plus, plus, plus, plus, plus, plus, plus, plus, plus, plus, plus, plus, plus, plus, plus, plus, plus, plus, plus, plus, plus, plus, plus, plus, plus, plus, plus. Carrot Top and Gallagher. Carrot Top, who gets more ripped each and every year. I'm just wondering, Dino, is that? Is Carrot Top going to be part of the WWE press conference that's happening at CES? I hope so. I am signed up for that one. I will be there. I'll be covering it live. You know, you're actually not the biggest WWE fan at The Verge. You know that's true, Casey Newton is six foot 12. We might be revealing his secret shame right now live on the air. I don't know if he wants that. We have, I mean I think Casey Newton holds down the West Coast side of things for the WWE representation but there are at least one, maybe even more very hardcore WWE fans in New York too. Look, I've been to New York, I've met people in New York, I've seen everybody's desk in New York and none of them have a championship WWE replica belt on their desk. No but Chris Welch does have a signed, yeah Chris Welch has to bring his belt to the Hogan poster on his desk. So I would say that he is at least par with Casey on the WWE front. So while talking about people that you've never met is totally fun, welcome to the Verge Mobile Show where we talk about CES and wrestling. Wait, wait, wait, wait. Oh man, come on, I was totally going to start talking about phones. Wait, one hot second. I just put up, I feel like this is relevant enough to our viewership and our listenership so that I should get this out there. I'm pretty proud of it, I just put up this amazing life hack in our forums. It is a life hack. Don't blow up my spot. Can you do it from a phone or a tablet? No you do it from your PC. Well then why are we talking about it? Because people are ordering phones from Amazon. Just hear me out. So if you go to Amazon. Our producer is with me by the way, Evan, he's shaking his head. I don't care what Evan has to say on the subject of Amazon because the dude owns, his main phone is like a Cyanogen Mod G2 or something. I don't know what it is at this point. Look, so if you go to Amazon. It's an HD2. Yes, it's probably an HD2. Running Sailfish. So if you go to Amazon and this time of year they quite frequently prevent you from selecting overnight shipping or same day shipping and presumably that's just because they are slammed and they don't want people selecting those options. But if you order something and then immediately go to your orders and then find your order in that list, there is a button next to it that says change shipping speed and if you click on that there you can change the shipping speed overnight or same day. Which I've done successfully twice this week so I know it works. That's great. Now we can talk about hacking the Amazon. Can you hack Moto Maker in the same way to actually get the bamboo Moto X? Transition. What? What? Transition. Transition. Do not ever do that again. For the audio listeners of the show, I just want to say you're welcome for not seeing what we just saw. Chris Eagle just raged the roof over a transition. It was not good luck. No, it was a good transition. I was just celebrating it. No, it wasn't good. It was glorious. I just kind of want to say that I bought a Moto X with my own money a week ago and now you're going to buy another one. And you're going to buy it again. So the deal is it's just the bamboo and they haven't actually set a ship date for it yet, correct? No, there are blog posts on it that says January delivery but it doesn't say specific. I think I've heard if you order one it says January 6th is when it's expected to deliver. What I want to know is why is it so hard for them to bring the engraving option back? The engraving option is back dude. Oh is it? Can you engrave the wood? I don't know. I haven't actually gone through the whole process. You can engrave the wood yourself as well because it's wood. You get one of those kits that you use and like… Oh the wood burning kit. Yes. I totally burned the hell out of the wood. Actually that would be a pretty killer like little cottage industry for these. If these things become popular. Like you know how Dieter got his orange iPhone 5 from a company that – or what is that other company that's been painting phones for years? Colourware has been painting phones in an anode style. Right right right but like you know the same concept except you could get like you know something burned into the back of the wood. That would be crazy. It's $100 more. That seems a little bit out of bounds to me. Yeah it's expensive. Where else are you going to get a wood phone bro? How much would you pay for a good wood case for say an iPhone? You'd probably pay like $70 to $100 right? I guess for a really good one. Also can I just say that I'm pretty sure the reason that the engraving option was originally removed was because Josh successfully ordered a Moto X with the engraving powered by web OS. To this day he has that phone. Which is amazing. Yeah I don't know what – there's nothing else to say. You can get the Moto X in bamboo. No there is something to say. You can get the Moto X in bamboo in the United States. The rest of the world is bummed about that. Have fun with your Moto G. You can get the G all day long. Well, you got that on us. Well I think we can order the G now too. I was just contemplating burdening you guys about the fact that you can't get Moto G deliveries in the States because every little gust of wind gets a name in the United States and things get shut down. I guess I just did that anyway. Yeah but Vlad you can get like the Galaxy Mega. You can probably get like eight or ten different mid-range Galaxies. You have that on us. Before we move on to Sprint and T-Mobile, I want to point out I asked on Twitter what we should talk about on the show because there wasn't a ton of news. And a bunch of suggestions and we might touch on some of them. But the main thing I want to say is a core component of the show is us trolling each other and we got nothing on our listeners. You guys are amazing. No, no, no, no, no, no. These are great. No, a main component of the show is you guys all trolling me. Not everybody trolling each other. Stop making it sound like it's equal give and take around here. It's not. Some of these I can't tell if they are legit or not legit trolls. We suggest we talk about the Dots holiday theme which I have feelings about. It slows things down. It's a little bit harder to see. But the main thing is I no longer have the high score on the Dots move mode, the 30 moves mode. I had the high score. I beat Chris. But now somebody else is higher than me. I'm very unhappy about it. Is it Sam Sheffer? No, it is Scott Kellum. Oh. So. Anyway, so okay. There's a rumor that Sprint is thinking about putting in a bid to buy T-Mobile. Wait, I have some real news. Okay. Some real actual news. We have a merch mobile show where we don't allow a leader to ever move on to the next topic ever. Well, come on. Who even cares about the next topic? On the topic about Galaxy Magus and whatnot, there's a new Galaxy Advanced Hyper something whatever which is absolutely. That sounds like a type of street fighter. No, seriously. It's a Samsung Galaxy Advanced and then some other noun that Samsung wants to attach. Galaxy Advanced, the movie, the game. Turbo. Yeah. Inspired by the book. And it's a 4.7 inch WVGA display. Completely forgettable apart from the fact that it has a side mounted voice recorder button. So I just wanted to let our listeners know that this thing exists. So now we can bury it and move on with it. What's the pricing? No, I'm actually genuinely curious. How does the pricing on that device compare to the Moto G? Which if I'm not mistaken, has a QHD display. No, Moto G is 720p. Yeah. Oh, 720p. Well, even better. So yeah, what's the pricing on this? I would tell you the pricing if Samsung actually did comprehensive press releases which they absolutely do not believe it's against their religion. So they give you a spec sheet for every single aspect of the phone but actual distribution markets and pricing is forbidden. Weak. I mean, the thing is, they actually pitched this phone as something for people who are not used to touch screens which is just completely not a nonsense to me because if I'm used to pressing buttons at the front of a device, a side mounted button is going to do absolutely nothing for me. Even just for voice recording, right? Yeah, and we also have a camera button and a volume rocker or whatever. Did you guys kick start that Android headphone jack button? What? Pressy. It's called Pressy. Pressy, yeah. So it's a thing. It's basically literally just the headphone jack with a little tiny rubber button on the top and you slap it into your headphone jack and then you just got a little extra button that you can do stuff with. It'll hook up to Tasker or launch an app or whatever. It's kind of cool. Okay, so what? Did you actually get it delivered? Did you recognize that something is plugging into the headphone jack and then reacts? Is that what's happening? Yeah, it just listens, I guess. Did you hear it? Because I'd want to put my headphones on. Yeah, that's the issue. Well, just do Bluetooth headphones. That's where it's at. Everybody loves Bluetooth headphones. Bluetooth headphones are the worst. Actually no, no, no. All kidding aside, I used to hate, I hate basically all stereo Bluetooth headphones but the S11HD is like genuinely good. It doesn't have the range issues that I've had with every other pair I've ever tried. It sounds decent. It's sweat proof. Yeah, there's one scenario where I think Bluetooth headphones make sense and that's like when you're running at the gym or whatever, wherever you actually run and you don't want to wire tangling around. My jam when I commuted on my bike was I used a Plantronics Voyager. It had a huge battery life and it would only go in one ear but it would still play stereo so I could actually hear traffic and stuff around me and I could listen to music while I was riding into work. That was pretty cool. I wouldn't have to deal with cables like tucking them in my shirt and whatever. Doesn't that have one of those boom mics too? Yeah, it's actually really awesome. Wow. I could see that could work really well for like podcasts. Music I don't know if I'd want to listen to it in one ear but I think I have one of those Plantronics. Okay, so apparently SoftBank, so we've got foreign powers like trying to do stuff to the US wireless sensory SoftBank. Who's their CEO? What's his name? Matsuyoshi-san. Yeah, I was just about to call him something else entirely. Apparently he, now that he's got Sprint, is interested in like increasing power and buying up T-Mobile. Meanwhile, this is from a WSJ report, meanwhile we've known that Deutsche Telekom is really not that interested in hanging out in the US market so they might be interested in loading it. So there's this speculation that Sprint is looking to buy out T-Mobile and man there's a lot of issues to talk about here. I don't even know where to start. I will start with, like competitively speaking, my feeling on it is at first it seems, oh yeah, a stronger third player would actually give competition to the other two but I really don't think that would happen. I think that instead of having a duopoly, we'd have a triopoly and there'd be no pressure. The reason I feel like that is I feel like T-Mobile has actually managed to change some things by acting like everybody's wild crazy uncle. We've got AT&T at least giving a little bit of credit to the idea that you shouldn't pay your full subsidy price even after you paid your phone off. We've got these jump and next plans and yes they're a hassle but the mobile plans seem to be shaken up a little bit and I feel like T-Mobile deserves at least some of the credit for it. I don't have any kind of faith that a combined sprint and T-Mobile would have that same kind of wild crazy uncle John Legere impact. Not to mention that a combined sprint and T-Mobile is still not as big as Verizon or AT&T. Right. Right. But yeah, I think ultimately, so yes, Dieter, I totally agree with you. I think that if you were looking at this merger two years ago, there's a good chance the regulators would have smiled warmly upon it or at least the idea of it but things have changed significantly since the AT&T deal fell through. And believe it or not, I think one of the biggest nails in the coffin for this deal, if it does come to fruition and Sprint tries to pull it off, one of the biggest sticking points is going to be the fact that Sprint itself launched 1up in direct response to T-Mobile. And Sprint is going to do, they will lay out the same arguments that AT&T laid out. And you remember AT&T put out this long list of like, they published like a 100 page document or something of reasons why T-Mobile couldn't survive on its own and why it wasn't competitive in the marketplace and they didn't offer any good smartphones, blah, blah, blah. And now you have this situation where Sprint was forced, not forced but they did respond to what T-Mobile was doing in the marketplace. So Sprint tries to argue that T-Mobile alone is not competitive in the marketplace, they're going to have a very, very hard time making that argument. Right. Well and on top of that, you would think that Sprint would have enough work on its hands dealing with the spectrum issues that it has now. Right, like they've got this whole thing, they've got this whole Spark plan, a three tiered system, they finally are like getting Nextel's band spectrum in there. This huge mess that they've had with the different ways they're trying to cobble together a nationwide LTE network and like all the different equipment they've tried and yada, yada, yada, yada. I mean throwing T-Mobile's assets into the mix, I mean it puts them another like 4 or 5 years out from having a coherent network at best, doesn't it? In a way, yes. I mean in my opinion, and Sasha Stegen at PC Magazine has written some good stuff on this the past couple of days too, but in my opinion the biggest challenge they face if they were to try to combine technically is the fact that they are running voice on two bands and two technologies. They would be running voice on CDMA and they'd be running voice on GSM UMTS and I'm not so worried about them having, it sounds ridiculous even going back two or three years to just think about this, but nowadays the fact that they would have a combined total of four bands and four distinct network technologies from a handset perspective is actually not that big of a deal. If you look at the Nexus 5, believe it or not, it supports literally every single one of that theoretical combined organizations, bands and technologies. It even supports TDLTE, which is brand new. I didn't realize this when I was writing my report on Friday, the commenter pointed it out, but if you look at Sprint's press release for the Nexus 5, they actually call out the Nexus 5 as being Sprint Spark compatible. It's tri-band and of course, ClearWire is running TDLTE and 2.6. So it's like, it's kind of insane actually. Like it blew my mind when I read that. Sprint has also released updated versions of other phones to be Spark compatible. So like the Galaxy S4 has been updated to be Spark compatible. If you bought an older Galaxy S4, tough noogies, but if you buy one I think, probably I think starting now or going forward it will be compatible with Spark and if it has all the Spark bands, I haven't looked into it, but there's a good chance it will also support the necessary bands for T-Mobile. You know, interestingly, Galaxy Noogies is the next version of their tablet and then there's Galaxy Tough Noogies, which is a ruggedized version. You know, it's funny you should say that Dieter, because there was a rumor this week that Sprint would be announcing I think a total of four tablets between CES and MWC. So... You mean Transprint, Chris? What did I say? Sprint. Sprint. Yeah, Samsung, excuse me. Now when you say between, do you mean combined or in between those two events? Combined. Combined. Although with Samsung you never know. But I suspect we're going to see some tablets and CES from them and we're going to see... If I remember correctly they announced the Galaxy Note 8 at MWC this year. So I imagine that they will refresh that at MWC 2014. I would just like to point this out in advance before Samsung reaches out to us to do like embargo briefings and whatever, I'm going to be busy at that time. I just don't want any part of this. Samsung refreshes its mediocre tablets that nobody in their right mind should be buying is a long story to me. The Note 8 is actually legitimately interesting for a number of reasons. I don't really want to get into a whole debate about it right now, but I could see why somebody would choose to buy a Note 8. Because it has an earpiece and not like a phone? No because it's like it actually has software that takes advantage of the fact that it's a big tablet or bigger than a smartphone and it's got the stylus that works well for note taking and you can get it with LTE and a couple of other reasons. I can also think of just as many if not more reasons not to buy it or to buy something else but I could... Well here's the question then. If somebody chooses to buy the Note 8 I can see why. Fair enough but the question for me and it's actually an interesting one because I haven't spent that much time with the Note 8 because as I say I've been dodging Samsung's tablets. Bad experiences I'm sorry to say. You've got a Nexus 7 available now and you've got the Google Play edition of the G Pad 8.3 which we just reviewed and as it turns out shockingly the Google Play edition is so much better than the LG skin version. My question is if you have the Google Play edition G Pad 8.3 and the Nexus 7 does the Note 8 make sense? So it's funny because I talked with David about this quite a bit when we were discussing and working on this review and honestly the Note 8 is a compelling alternative to the G Pad 8.3. The G Pad 8.3 is a very solid device in a vacuum and it's a really great tablet in a vacuum by itself but when you open up to what's available in that price range and from competitors it's a hard sell in my opinion. Yeah I actually think the G Pad 8.3 either it's Google Play or it's LG skin edition like Dan says it's fine on its own but I would be much more likely to recommend a Nexus 7 or a Note 8. Right like you could get a Nexus 7 or just because the Nexus 7 is a little bit smaller. The Nexus 7 it's been all over this holiday season you've been able to get it for like $180 for the 16GB version which is almost half of what the equivalent storage size option on the 8.3 is. So it's like $180 for Nexus 7 or $350 for the Note 8.3 which is arguably just giving you a bigger screen and slightly nicer build quality but many of us felt that the Nexus 7 feels better to hold on to because it's soft touch and a little bit smaller and stuff like that. So I think that if you're going for the Note 8 you're going for the Note 8 for very specific reasons and they make sense. And by specific reasons you mean the stylus. Right and also the Nexus 7 is available in white that's the X factor. The white one is really bad. No I'm not a fan of it. White everything, everything should be white. No it's just like the white Nexus 5 the soft touch has got a slightly different feel to it. It's like a harder plastic and I'm not a fan of it. Well today I actually managed to finally get my hands on a black Nexus 5 and I get what you guys are getting at. It's got a more rubbery texture on the back and in the hand it feels better. But I'm still a fan of the white one particularly because it really goes nicely with my white pebble. I mean those two things, I've said it before but those two things are just made for each other with the white and black contrast. So I actually removed the stickers in the word, you can't see this in the camera. I removed the stickers inside the word Nexus and the LG logo so it's no longer reflective black it's just straight dark matte death all the way across the back of the phone. I'm pretty happy with it. I would be. It's a good looking phone. I am this close to switching back to the iPhone right now because of the Twitter app. Yeah the new Android Twitter app is ugh. It broke a workflow that I had when I was checking things. You know how you could swipe between mentions and Twitter feed? I used to do that all the time and now it's gone. We ranted about this at length on the Vergecast so I don't necessarily want to recapitulate it other than to say that I still believe it is a dumpster fire of a redesign. Everybody there should be ashamed. If you just started a Twitter yesterday, you should be ashamed that you went to work for a company that produced this. If you have been on the beta group where they've been testing this and you didn't go out and protest in front of Twitter with picket signs, you also should be ashamed. I am mad at literally the entire planet over this app redesign. I can't even handle it. But what expectation do you seriously have buying an Android phone that the apps aren't going to be complete piles of garbage? They regressed. It went from okay to terrible. Yeah, it's bad. What's killing me is that it's the same design concept used on iOS but it's executed so much better on iOS. The aesthetics are the same and things like that. The reason it's executed better on iOS is one, they have this crazy idea in their head that they need to put their UI elements at the top which is stop trying to follow Hollow but still screwing it up. Two, the reason it works on iOS is you can do this swiping between what is it, timeline, discover and activity but on iOS, nobody cares about discover or activity. Or on Android. Right, but there's just three little dots. On iOS, you've got this giant tab bar like they actually matter but they don't or on Android. But the worst part of it is, and I wasn't going to do this, but you can't in the tabs in home discover activity, you can tap the top of the tab to scroll to the top but when you go into your notifications, you can't do that because when you try and tap the top, it takes you back. So you just have to sit there and scroll and scroll and scroll and scroll. Okay, yeah. But I need to pull us back from the brink here because one thing our commenters have been noticing is that we've been actually spending about 90% of our time complaining about things. Yeah, that's fair. We should be happy about something. What are we happy about? Yes, yes. I mean, listen, I want to say… I'm happy that the wood Moto X is now available or soon to be available. However you want to express that. Like yeah. It's so hard for us to be happy about things we don't know what to do. You know, I need to do some pushups to get some positivity back in me. So I'm just going to do imaginary ones. But listen, seriously, the old Twitter rep on Android wasn't just decent or half decent. I was very happy with it. The new one is a downgrade. But you know, what I was going to say and something I was going to tweet was I would complain about this Twitter redesign but then I have to face it, I'm going to be using it anyway. So I might as well just deal with the fact that it kind of sucks. And ultimately, I'm going to get used to it, then they're going to tweak it again and then figure out the right path, etc. So somebody on Twitter recommended Tweedle to me and it's really good. In fact, it would be my only Twitter app in a heartbeat because it's so good. Except that Twitter doesn't make it easy for Twitter specific features like notification alerts from specific users and seeing your full activity or your full notifications timeline including like retweets and faves to third party cloud clients. Right, the connect timeline isn't an open API for developers. So what I'm doing is I'm using Twitter for incoming alerts and then I'm using Tweedle for like all of my reading. And it works. Tweedle doesn't refresh in the background though. There's like no option to have it refresh every hour which is one thing that I wish it had. I mean I think the option is there, it just doesn't work. Well it doesn't. Either way, you have to pull the refresh every time you open it. Okay so Twitter is kind of sort of a little bit evil. But I have to take issue with Chris' point saying how are you going to pick up an Android phone and expect the apps not to suck. I mean that's not fair anymore. It is. It is absolutely fair. It's fair for third party apps that also have iOS components. I can't think of a single one that the iOS app is an inferior version unless it's like Google's own apps that they make sure they're better on it. I mean I would say that, well I mean I'm going to, I don't know. There are a few apps like AnyDo stuff I think works a little bit better on Android. AnyDo started on Android if I'm not mistaken. That's right. And for whatever reason I feel like Pocket Cast is better on Android but that's, I don't know why I feel that fully but I do. There's a couple others. But there's definitely examples where it's worse. There's a lot more examples of where it's worse than there are where it's better. That's totally fair. But it's like it is night and day from what it was even like a year ago. A year ago it was like god they're terrible but now things are starting to catch up a little bit. Yeah. Can we do like a two minute embargo where we use no negative adjectives and just see if we have anything to say? I'm going to double down on that challenge. You ready? Let's talk about Windows Phone. Let's talk about Windows Phone. No look I'm always, I tweeted about this yesterday, I'm always super bullish with every single Windows Phone update that's been announced I'm always super bullish. This is the version that is going to not only save Windows Phone but reignite my passion for Windows Phone. And 8.1 is no exception. It doesn't need saving. It's not like wildly popular but it's not falling out. So we're expecting in 8.1 that there's going to be a proper notification center and there's going to be a Siri competitor which Microsoft has smartly called Cortana which I think is really clever. That's the right thing to do. That can't possibly be the actual shipping name. They got to do it. That would be so awesome. Yeah it's not going to happen. They're going to call it like Windows Phone 8.1 voice live actions. I hope it's not the same engineering group that is working on making the Xbox One turn on when you say Xbox on. So here's the deal. If they are, they're in a world of trouble. You guys know that we're supposed to be in the happy zone right? In our two minutes of constant emotions. I didn't use any negative adjectives. I'm just saying that they could be in some trouble if those engineering groups are related. Chris just transitioned to nouns. I am a well documented noun transitioner. This is a problem for me. Look I'm just saying I have to scream Xbox on at my TV like 10 times now before it will turn on. Wait you have to just like hit a button. How often? I just picture Chris in his living room getting really red in the face and like starting to bulge out as he's screaming Xbox on instead of just hitting the controller that's in his hand. Well that's kind of what it boils down to. That's not far off. And I'm usually not wearing pants when that happens. But anyway back to Windows Phone. I do think that this closes a really important feature gap. You know which is the same thing we say with every version of Windows Phone. I don't know if they're – I don't even know what – to get to what you were saying Dieter, I don't even know what Windows Phone's problems are per se at this point. We've heard some talk from Microsoft that they feel that 10% market share is a golden number for them globally. But I don't know if people – I don't know if like the plebs with their smart phones are saying to themselves I would use Windows Phone if only it had a notification center. I don't know if people are saying that. Especially when you consider that iPhone's notification center is perhaps the worst thing about iOS. So yeah, I don't know. I think there's some app issues in both third party and then also like Metro is starting – we've started to hit the limits of what feels awesome about Metro. But I want to actually talk about something and god damn it, I'm going to do it. I'm going to bring up WebOS. Sorry. The rumor is that the notification center in Windows Phone is going to come down from the top and that there is going to be something at the bottom, right? I thought like a – maybe not. Am I crazy? I thought you could swipe up from the bottom to get like controls because that's how it works on iOS. I think you're thinking of iOS 7. No, I'm definitely thinking of iOS 7. I thought I read something but maybe not. Anyway, notifications at the top. I actually think – I kind of am sad that both Android and iOS do it that way, especially iOS where the controls are at the bottom because conceptually to me it makes way more sense to have like your random controls up at the top because that's like an extension of the nerdy crap that's already in your menu bar, right? And then notifications at the bottom, you access that stuff way more often and that's just easier to get to than the top. And so I think – I really wish that we would just flip those things and have notification stuff slide up from the bottom and have utility crap slide down from the menu bar which conceptually makes perfect sense. So I think that could maybe work if you had like a permanent bar – like how Android is today. It's got its permanent bar at the top of the screen and the icons pop in when you have notifications. I know that you're thinking of what webOS did and how the screen would like shrink up but with virtual keyboards that throws off the layout of the keyboard or the position of the keys. It worked on webOS because all the devices that actually made it to market had hardware keyboards. But if somebody had like a permanent thing there – but the thing is then also you've got a problem with typing and maybe tapping your notifications or you're not seeing them because your fingers are in the way. Yeah, so the way Windows Phone does it is it's actually going to be reportedly a quick swipe – a short swipe will bring up your settings and a long swipe will give you your notifications. That sounds problematic to me. It could be problematic. I mean the way Android does it is it's a single swipe for notifications and then you tap over to get your settings or you can do two fingers or the two finger thing which – I mean who does that? I do it all the time. Really? There is also – first of all I think it's part of some other customization. The option to – if you swipe down from the top right or top left corner you get directly into a particular settings menu. But I just find that complicates and probably frustrates most people – complicates matters and frustrates more people than it actually helps. That's a real power user feature. With the – specifically to the notification center support or addition in Windows Phone and what Chris was saying is it being a must have feature. Obviously it isn't. Like nobody is going in there and asking for it by name. But I feel like if it's implemented correctly, if it helps the user experience, it makes for a better experience for the end user and that ultimately is constructive. And again it leads to a stronger OS, stronger potential for the future. I recommend it rather than say, oh I really hated the experience of using that etc. My biggest issue actually is I've just been hanging out with Tom Warren and I've seen – That's your biggest issue that you've been hanging out with Tom Warren? Yes. He does have problems. Well I mean he is Britain's premier troll. He can represent the country in the Olympics, in the trolling Olympics. But I've used his Lumia 1520 for a little bit. First of all the display on that thing is just gorgeous. It's amazing. Second of all the screen size is stupid. It doesn't make any sense. But the third thing is when you look at his home screen with all these small squares, big squares and tiles and animations and things happening, it is just so confusing. It's stressing me out just to look at it. And he's right to say that when you customize it to your own preferences, you develop a memory and you get things to be really accessible. But I'm finding all of this customization, all of these tiles going on on the home screen actually too busy. But if you want, I mean you can just make all of your home screen tiles the biggest size and then it looks like Windows found 7, right? Yeah. Well on the 1520 the biggest size is only two columns so you still have like a third column to deal with. I mean I guess you can make them large and medium. Right. I mean that was just my immediate impression of looking at it with all those tiles. My wish is that Microsoft doesn't push into this let's have a ton of tiles all over the place thing and they need to keep the simplicity because that was the point of Metro. Simplicity was pushing things out of the way. Whereas if you have everything animated and kind of manifesting information in front of you then you get information overload and that's my fear. And then the notification center becomes kind of redundant as well. Right, well the idea would be you could have the notification center for your notifications and you wouldn't have to go hunting around on your home screen. You could just have the tiles that you want there and then like if some of them animate in a way that you like then they're not there as like giving you essential information, it's just sort of a nice ambient effect which is how I think it ought to be. I think that would be great. Yeah, totally. Right. And another X factor for Microsoft which really hasn't paid dividends in the way that I kind of thought it might is that Nokia is still making arguably the most attractive and best feeling smartphone hardware in the industry today. I mean they're certainly doing things with plastic that no one would have considered possible three or four years ago. So you know, it's the same story each and every time. Like I will without question try very hard to make a Windows phone 8.1 device my primary phone and we'll see if I can finally get past the pain of the lack of apps and software weirdness. Maybe this is the time when everything is coming together for them. You know they have Instagram out now, they have Vine, the all important Vine. It's funny how much of that pain is caused by Google not cooperating with Microsoft. Because like you know at least for our work emails all based on Gmail and you know, I don't know anyone other than Tom that doesn't use Gmail for their personal email. And that kind of just really sucks with Windows phones still and Microsoft can try and try and try but if Google doesn't offer the access or offer the keys or whatever it needs to make it work well it's not going to be an easy thing for them. There are some actual third party Gmail apps in the Windows phone store now that give you label support and starring and archiving and all the full Gmail compliments that you might expect. But they're third party and not everyone is comfortable with a third party app and stuff like that. Yeah, my concern with that is that you know one of the things that has always been a problem for the Windows phone app store is that you have all these developers that you've never heard of and some of the apps sound cool or intriguing but you don't know if they've been vetted and you know the question becomes are you comfortable storing your Gmail authentication you know in some developers cloud that you've never heard of for two reasons. One there's the security concern but then also there's the concern that this guy could disappear at any moment and just you know take all your email with him. So well not take all your email with him but like take the app with him. So yeah, the Google challenge is a very, very real one for Microsoft. So part of speaking, I don't know I forget it, there was going to be a transition here it was going to be great and I lost it. Android is free and apparently Windows is thinking about giving away Windows phone and Windows RT away for free to manufacturers which like honestly fine. Like I don't think it's going to like radically change things for them. I don't think that the cost of the licensing cost for Windows phone was the primary reason people were going to buy it. I think it was important. I think we may have underestimated it because… Really I mean… One phone manufacturer discussed that with me and they were saying they could never match Android's off contract pricing with Windows phone because of the licensing costs. The royalties that are paid to Microsoft and every Android phone that is sold nearly, I mean Microsoft has never publicized the licensing terms but it's believed that it's about a wash between Windows phone and Android by the time you pay all the royalties. Right, but what Microsoft wants is not Android, it wants its own OS and its own platform in as many hands as possible. This is the thing, I mean Google was the first company that said we're going to invest this money in developing this OS etc. etc. but then our focus is not going to be making money out of it, it's getting people to use the device so we can distribute the stuff that does make us money which is our browser, our ads, our email client, maps, YouTube etc. etc. etc. and now Google is in that leading position. Apple realized the same thing and made a whole bunch of its software free recently and now Microsoft is coming around to the same point of view. I mean we've talked about this, it's a battle of platforms nowadays and the reason I mean I tweeted about this this morning and everybody was like you're crazy Vlad which is fair enough, I probably am. I asked why is Microsoft trying to get YouTube or Windows phone instead of building its own video service and first of all people raised the point that Microsoft already tried and failed but the major point that everybody raises and I can't argue with it is that YouTube just has such a vast advantage over everybody in terms of popularity, awareness and content already on it that it just can't catch up and Apple tried to do it with maps and it's still trying to do it, it takes years to catch up with these things. So Google has that advantage so if Microsoft starts losing money by selling Windows phones relative to like if an Android sales turns into a Windows phone sale and that actually ends up losing money for Microsoft in the short term, I don't think anybody cares. I mean that's going to be trifling amounts relative to Microsoft getting people to actually use and endorse Windows phone as their primary OS. So let me give you something to put in your pipe and then you can decide whether or not you want to smoke it. What if Microsoft can make licensing Windows phone cheaper than Android because they're giving it away, they say we'll handle licensing fees and oh by the way if you do Android you've got to pay us royalties and so they could literally undercut the free operating system. Yeah I mean it still doesn't matter anyway because Nokia is the only licensee that matters. At the end of the day they need to get companies like Samsung and LG and Sony to commit to building competitive Windows phone hardware. And that's going to be their biggest challenge and I don't think anybody, whether you're talking HTC Samsung or any of the other OEMs is particularly enraptured with Microsoft at the moment. I think, you know my feeling is that everybody saw Nokia being treated as the favorite child among all the companies and Nokia got bought out. Well it's in the process of doing so and it's going to be Microsoft's own hardware. Microsoft's already screwed everybody with its Windows RT tablet which is why within a year the Surface was the only Windows RT tablet on the market because everybody couldn't compete with the aggressive pricing and design. So you have a track record which tells you if you start building Windows phones, Microsoft itself is going to be competing with you really aggressively. So perhaps the only guys who might be interested in this are guys like ZTE and Huawei who might be doing the really entry level devices and devices for emerging markets and that could be something that grows and something that develops potentially. But that's the only real market development that I see for the company. Otherwise Microsoft is going to be building its own high end stuff. Yeah the problem here is like there's just no, like Chris said there's a lot of saying there's no space for anything on the high end other than Nokia. I mean remember the HTC 8X a little over a year ago? Yes. It was a beautiful phone. It looked way better than virtually anything else around Windows phone on the market. It was easily competitive with the stuff that Nokia was putting out at that time. It was the signature device, lots of colors so there was lots of like brand synergies with what Microsoft was trying to do for branding Windows phone. They were working together and I mean you know it didn't flop but it sure didn't do that good and like if that kind of phone that looks good, that feels good, that performs well and that has got like perfectly aligned like marketing strategies from both Microsoft and the manufacturer, if that phone can't like make a dent and certainly didn't help HTC and didn't do anything for Windows phone, like why would anybody take a flyer on Windows phone right now especially now that they've bought Nokia? So it's like they're in a really tough spot to drive the platform anywhere in the high end except with their own stuff. They might get lucky on the low end and get like you said ZTE or Huawei or whoever to buy in but even then like are those companies going to believe that they can do better than what Nokia is doing like with the 510, the 520, their low end stuff is really, really good right? Not to mention Nokia's Android phone which oh, we haven't talked about here because it was happening during the last mobile show. Chris, can we celebrate this transition please? I already raised the roof, the roof can only be raised once per show, I'm sorry. Wow, it's called the threshold right? Yes. I need a replay. Maybe you should do, what is the other dances, what is this one? Transition, transition, transition. I don't know what that was. Deter left. I think that was the third part. Deter literally left, he's just gone. You forgot to drop the mic though. What were we transitioning to? I've totally lost it now. I was looking at Twitter. We were trying to talk about Nokia's Android phone. Yeah, that looks like garbage. I hope they build it, it's going to be garbage. No, look, I think, I really think what's happening here, and Nokia needs to do this. So there were apparently rumors that Microsoft attempted and ultimately decided not to kill the 2520 for obvious reasons. Is it dancing over? There he is. Because the 2520 cannibalizes the surface obviously. And they ultimately decided not to kill it because of, that would look weird from a regulatory perspective, they're not one company yet. I think there's a lot of factors going into that. I think that they probably had deals with the carriers to stock it already, because remember the 2520 is an LTE device only and things like that. I need to correct myself real quick before you finish your point. I call it threshold, that's actually a Windows rumor. This is the Normandy that we're discussing right now, the low end potential Android phone. Yes. So, what I think this is, is just Nokia doing it, they're playing out their game plan, assuming very smartly that the deal will not go through, so that they aren't completely screwed in case it does fall through, either for a business reason or for a regulatory reason. I see absolutely no reason why Microsoft would sell this product if the deal completes. My guess is that unless they have an ironclad carrier agreement that they can't get out of, they will EOL this project the moment the deal completes. This is how it's going to go down. It's going to be, the Microsoft deal is going to go through, they're going to buy Nokia, and then a contingent of Nokia engineers are going to be laid off, and then they're going to start their own company, and they're going to put out an Android phone that looks just like the Normandy. I wish you were wrong, or kidding, but you're not. Yeah, I mean, who was I talking to? I think it was you, Chris. There has to be, one of the reasons this is still going on is there has to be a sort of pride within Nokia that they can still make their own stuff. There's got to be a group of people that are still there that are like, yeah, Windows Phone is fine, but we believe that we can do something awesome with software on our own. We're going to keep pushing it, and they add space on Android or whatever. And that sort of grit and determination is what's keeping this thing alive, even on the low end. Well, yeah, you just said it, on the low end. To be clear, this isn't designed to compete with the 1020, right? This is a device that slots somewhere between the Aria and the Lumia. Right. Asha? Asha. Excuse me, Asha. The Aria was an HTC phone on AT&T. The Aria is also, my mind is on CES. Aria is a hotel in Las Vegas where I will be spending at least part of my week. I'm not a fan of the Aria hotel. I like that Aria. The whole thing about this Normandy leak is like, man, look at this phone. And you know it's a low end phone, but look at, if Nokia made, man, if they made Android hardware for really real, they'd gone that direction. So the rumor is that this is not, this is going to be a, would be a forked version of Android much like Amazon does with the Kindle flyers. And like, you know, if they end up doing that or did do that or whatever, you're going to be the same sigh, bummer face that you're making now because it's going to be like, oh, this really cool hardware runs Android, oh! You can't get the Play Store. I do find it hilarious that Nokia is apparently working to secure BBM for this device. Like that is so messed up on so many levels. Well, hang on. Your Microsoft division is working with Blackberry to secure BBM for Android. Like just think about that for a second. I can tell you exactly why they're doing that. Look at the markets where BBM is growing and BBM is still extremely popular. Oh no, no, no. It's in low end markets in Asia and that's where this device would be sold. From a business perspective, it makes perfect sense. I'm just saying it messes with your mind to think about what's actually happening there. But yes, I agree. It makes sense. So the thing about Amazon, the Amazon comparison is fair, but with Amazon, they played it very smartly, right? They spend a long time building up and preparing their own market so that they could fork in a responsible way. And Nokia has not done that. They have no Android market. Right, right. I wasn't knocking Amazon's per se, but I was saying like Nokia is going to do this thing that's going to be Android but not Android. So you're still going to be super bummed out by it. I mean Amazon can do its own thing because it's got like the world's largest content store or whatever and it sells the things at cost practically so it doesn't really care if it sells a lot or a few or any. It's just a window into the Amazon store. The Nokia store is not the same thing. Right. I mean think of how much good Android has done Blackberry, right? No good. Yeah. But listen guys, if you are in a hurry and you can't wait for Nokia to release this head and arrival device, you can already go and get the Yola because that's essentially what we're talking about here. Nokia developers working getting Android apps onto a forked, different OS on a Linux based OS and with the Yola you get the Yandex store on there, yay, right? 85,000 apps of dubious quality. 85,000 wares apps. Actually on the Yola it's pronounced Yairs with a Y. I see what you did there. It took me a second to process. I see what you did there. The Yandex store says Yairs. I get it. And yes, they were… And Yaps. Well, okay. See that's good. They should just do that, you know, just customize everything and just make it really cute and fanciful but they do actually recommend getting… I would just love to have like the conversation like I'm having with like a marketing person at this company and their PR person and I'm like so how many apps do you have? And they're like well we like to say that we have between 10 to 15,000 Yaps and they like just like subtly correct me to Yaps every time I say apps. But you realize they'd be doing that with a Russian accent which makes it even better. Even threatening just a little bit. We love you Russia. We do. I'm not sure if I should be offended by proxy but I just, you know, I'll let it slide. But you know, the thing is I actually and I was reminded by a reader about this. I wrote a wishful love letter sometime in like 2011 I think or 2012 about a Nokia Nexus and I was saying if Nokia would just do a stock Android device, I'll be in heaven. It would be brilliant. It would be awesome. And you know, obviously I was talking about a high-end Nokia device and that was around the time that we had the N9 and the Lumia 800 and things just weren't looking all that great with this phone which they are really looking all that much better today. But you know, since then what I've thought about it is you kind of have to realize that if Nokia had gone the Android route, we might have had potentially even the best Android phone full stop, right? We might have had the best combination of hardware, software, camera, design, everything, right? But that would have been a short term thing. It would have been a short term benefit. I think exactly the point that Chris raised, Nokia has some of the best hardware designers and it has some of the best camera people on its staff. Those guys shouldn't be in the Android ecosystem because most of the really good designers and hardware guys, well probably 99% of them are either in Android or working for Apple with the iPhone. And we need that third party and Microsoft is the company that has the financial muscle to survive as the third option. As soon as they pick a CEO. Yeah, which will happen next year. But the point is if Nokia had gone with Android, we might have had better phones over the past couple of years. But ultimately the competition would have been driven down and we would have felt the rough part of that over the next few years. Whereas the fact that we now have a great design team working for Microsoft and Windows phone, a great bunch of design teams working on Android and Apple's uncontested design chops with the iPhone, it gives us free. And look, three is greater than two. So yay. It's one more. No, it's a fair point. It's totally true. It's 50% better. It's a fair point though. A world with only two viable smart phone platforms is a very depressing world indeed. And the thing that's funny about that is not only are we heading towards a world with only two smart phone platforms, but we're really heading towards a world with really only two successful smart phone makers. Because Samsung is the only Android one that's making money and obviously Apple makes buttloads of money. So does Sony. Sony makes a tiny little bit of money. But you know, Samsung is definitely by far the dominant Android maker. It's two manufacturers on one of each platform. So you know, everything you're saying is very fine. There needs to be more competition differentiation options. Actually I'm not going to try it. I want to go back to carrier stuff because the CTIA, the carrier lobbying group that represents the biggest carriers in the US has agreed on six policies for allowing consumers to unlock their cell phones. It's not clear if you're allowed to unlock it when you're under contract, but they're required to let you do it after a year or two. They're required to give you the unlock within two days after you ask for it. And they're required to unlock phones for deploying military personnel. And this is my favorite one, they're required to provide notice that you are now eligible to have your phone unlocked. I'm sure that caused a lot of gear grinding in the CTIA when Tom Wheeler came down with that requirement. I think that the most ambiguous thing at this point, and I don't think it's ever been clarified is just what you were saying Dieter with regards to the contract. I believe the specific verbiage they use is you have to fulfill your contract in order to qualify for unlocking. And so the question is, does paying the ETF constitute a fulfillment of the contract or a breaking of the contract? Or if you buy a phone at full retail and never actually sign a contract. Well no, I think that with the verbiage the way it is now, that would make you instantly eligible for unlocking. But yeah, there are still many questions that are left unanswered. It almost feels like, apart from the military rule and things like that, it almost feels like a symbolic victory here. Because Verizon already offers a lot of its phones international unlocked if you're traveling. You can buy them right away, they're unlocked for international use. I think Sprint does a lot of the same thing. It's really AT&T. AT&T iPhone. Not just AT&T, AT&T iPhone. That's really what it comes down to. Yeah, it's AT&T who's been the stubborn one with the unlocking, but if you fulfill your contract with them and you don't happen to have an exclusive device, they'll unlock your phone if you call them. Not the iPhone. They won't even if you're out of contract? I don't think so. Maybe that policy changed more recently, but for many, many years that was like the one phone that they held precious. Well, I know they are very precious about devices that are their exclusive. If you try to go unlock a Lubia 1020, you're probably going to run into a lot of brick walls. But the exclusives are becoming fewer and fewer far between these days. But otherwise, it's a good thing to have it down as a policy and in writing. So now that's one small step. The next step is to actually have a network of carriers that are competitive that you could actually switch your phone between easily. Right now you've got T-Mobile and you've got AT&T and that's about it until we move to an LTE only world, then maybe we could start talking about being able to switch your phone. Well, unfortunately, phones like the Nexus 5 which support all these ridiculous technologies and bands, that's a step in the right direction, but we're going to run into another technical lock between carriers when everybody transitions to Volte because I don't think that any carrier has agreed in the US has agreed on how their Volte is going to work. They haven't even agreed within carriers. I still remember the map that Sprint showed for their Volte roadmap and the first step was it would work in the Pacific Northwest and in the Northeast and in the South, but since the network equipment wasn't compatible with each other, it would only work if you were both in those same geographic regions to start and they'd figure out compatibility between them later. That was HD voice, wasn't it? Was that HD voice? I think that was HD voice. Why am I trying to provide analysis? I mean, obviously not. No, no, no, but the point is still good. These guys are totally fragmented with Volte. Nobody has figured out how to – I mean, the fact that Verizon has delayed their Volte deployment like 18 times now and still isn't rolled out speaks volumes. I mean, we first saw Verizon demo Volte in 2011 on an LG Revolution. I think that was at CES, might have been CTIA that year, but – and it's still not here and that's because they're having – I don't think they fully detailed the kinds of problems they're having. One concern is battery life, I know, but yeah, see what happens. The LG Revolution, man, that phone looked like a car. It looked like a muscle car. I don't know if I'd use that terminology. Yeah, it lasted about as long as a muscle car as well. It was like, hello, LG, done. Yeah, pretty much. I have to say, Chris, throughout your rant about the fragmentation of American networks, it just so heartening to me because it just reminds me of how glorious it is to live in Europe. So thank you. Whatever, man. I'm not even – have you used a single LTE network in the UK yet? Chris, all I've got to say is look at the OECD data, man. That's my high level trash talk for today. Look at what data? OECD. What are you talking about? OECD? This is like a multi-level troll. Vlad just totally made up an acronym. This is some like UN garbage. What is this? What kind of troll is this? This is like eight grade levels too high for a troll. You need to kick it down a notch. Just make a comment about my face or my mom. Or Chicago. Yeah, or Chicago. Don't try OECD. I don't know what this means. I'm closing it. Tab closed. Oh my god, tab closed. What was that? Was that a Tumblr or something? What? Tab closed. Did a read. Did a read. Did a read. Did a read. Did a read. Did a read. Did a read. Did a read. Did a read? Did a read. Did a read. Did a read. I mean, I'm not going to talk about Resnce, the wireless charging thing. No. I will say that I am using wireless chargers now. I got whatever Nokia's standard puck is, I was looking at their puck dock. So does that work with the Nexus 5? Because it never wanted to work with the Nexus 4. It works better with the Nexus 5 than the Nexus 4. For a while, I thought it was causing it to overheat, but I think that was just the Nexus 5. But I love it. And so I'm like, I put a bunch of different wireless chargers on my Christmas list because I think it's great. The fact that Nokia decoupled wireless charging from the phones was a major blow for wireless charging in general. I think because they were the biggest champions of it, right? Yeah. I think Verizon has been the biggest champion of wireless charging. Yeah. Yeah. At some point, I don't know if this is still true, but when they first started selling LTE phones, they had a requirement that every LTE phone they sold, if it didn't ship with Qi, needed to have a Qi back accessory available. So is, like, yeah. So there's Qi, and now there's this new one, and whatever. I mean, I hope that they can get this stuff defragmented relatively soon. Yeah. Like, what was wrong with Qi? Like, is there really that much, like, is there so much money in this untapped wireless charging market that we need to fragment in 18 different directions before we arrive at a standard? Why can't everybody just say, yeah, OK, now it exists. The standard exists. Everybody make accessories for that. Because it's ridiculous. Yellow, Qi, done. Some people get paid for Qi, and some people don't. Well, there's also the offensive. Some people get cheated. That was, I'm not even going to respond to that. There's the offensively bad branding resins, which I don't even want to discuss. Like, everything about this is horrible. They take two brackets and then attach them with a lightning bolt. Yeah. It's the worst. And meanwhile, mark my words. Wireless charging is the next NFC. Like, the only way wireless charging is ever going to happen is when it doesn't involve a pad. It's just, like, through the air, which is a technology that different companies have been working on for a few years now. Like, if I can just walk into a room and things start charging, yes, I'll probably immediately get cancer. But if everything that is on my person starts charging, it's worth it. Sorry, I'm just reading that resins is a portmanteau of resonant and essence, and I find that amazing. It's the worst, is what it is. Of course, Qi isn't any better. It's just pretty cheap. Dan, stop trying the Qi puns. They're not going to happen. I think they just dropped on us, like, two mega bombs of punnage. Can we fire Dan and just rehire him just ahead of CES? I guess you could say I'm achieving new levels of puns. That, ladies and gentlemen, is the Verge mobile show. I want to thank you so much for listening and or watching. If you want to follow us on Twitter, you can, I am Backlund, Dan is Qi, Vlad is Vlad Sabov, Chris is ZPower. We are all at Verge. And as we mentioned at the top of the show, we're probably going to be taking a hiatus for a couple of weeks. Or maybe not. We might surprise you and have a New Year's Eve crazy wild time, or not. We will let you know on the website when that happens. In the meantime, please comment on the post and say hi. Or we won't. I'm trying to drag this out to come up with a cheat pun of my own, and I can't do it. We'll cheat you later. Oh my god. Just leave it to the pros, Dieter. That's it. Yeah. Cut. End the show.