 Oh, hello. You're here. Well, welcome. I guess we should talk about phones. Smart phones, not so smart phones, and everything in between. I promise you we won't have any fire alarms going off during today's taping. All that and more coming up on The Verge Mobile Show. Hi, I'm Dieter Bohm. I'm Vlad Savo. And I'm Chris Stigler. I would just like to say a couple of things before I let you talk. What's that, Dieter? First of all, thank God you're back because I did an absolutely terrible intro last week. So thank you for coming back and gracing us with your presence. Secondly, actually, no, three things. Secondly, thank goodness you're live. Actually, can I can I say point five thing is this is The Verge Mobile Show where we talk about mobile things and it's episode five for the week of June 25th. I just want to put that out there. That's what I was trying to interrupt. I was trying to interject before you got that that teaser in. The third thing is that I don't want to cut my beard until Google releases or excuse me, until Samsung releases an Android four point one update for the Galaxy S3. So you are looking just like Jim Durimple. You are going to have you're going to be you're going to be ZZ Top up in this action. That sounds about accurate. Anyway, please continue. I have nothing else to continue with. Welcome. I'm happy to be back. I'm sorry that I missed last week. What I was at Windows Phone last week. That's that's why I missed. Right. Yes. Yes. Yes. I hope so. Yes. Which was a shindig. It was a shindig of the highest order. Like if I do say so myself, it was it was quite the shindig. And, you know, I got to look at Windows Phone seven point eight on Lumia 900 myself or at least a prototype version of seven point eight. It might have just been the home screen, which I guess is all seven point eight is. But I'm guessing that you guys talk seven point eight to death and you don't need my insight and opinion on seven point eighty. I would love to get your input on seven point eight, actually, because I you know, we had the the buyer's guide, the smartphone buyer's guide go up last week. And there's a lot of debate internally before the guide went up on whether we should be recommending the Lumia 900 because of the fact that it isn't getting eight point oh. And my belief is that for the price that you're getting it for and considering the fact that it's an LTE phone that you can use as a hotspot still looks great, especially in cyan and the fact that it's getting some point at seven point eight upgrade, there's still a value proposition there. But I'm curious to get your take on that. No, I agree. I think that well, I have two thoughts on seven point eight. The first one is Microsoft deserves a ton of credit for coming out and saying this isn't going to happen. They have been as clear as can be about what their update roadmap is for various phones. And I mean, if you think about the fact that you just mentioned, you know, you're waiting for Samsung to put four point one jelly bean on the Galaxy S3. When is Samsung going to announce whether or not it's going to get jelly bean? Is Google going to announce what phones are going to get jelly bean in the Android world? You just literally have no idea. And you're scraping for rumors and leaked roms and blah, blah, blah. Microsoft just said it's not getting it. It's getting seven point eight instead. And they deserve a little bit of credit for that. As far as seven point eight itself and actually I guess what we know of Windows Phone eight, I am a huge fan of the start screen. I think adding that smaller tile, it sounds really stupid, but it makes a big difference to me and it makes the Windows phone start screen probably the best power user start screen that you can get on a smartphone. It reminds me of what it was like back in the days of Windows Mobile when I could cram a million things onto my start screen and just know everything just from looking. And now that you can actually have things that are basically icons, but they are little live tile updates, you can get much more on a single screen than you can on Android or especially on the iPhone. So from that perspective, I think that Lumia 800 and 900 owners should feel okay about just getting that. But from a larger perspective, I go back to the discussions we had a long time ago. Why are they releasing this flagship phone when they knew that they weren't going to give it the full big Windows Phone update? That's just hard. I want to I want to say something about these live tiles because I do really like the theory and concept of the live tiles on Windows Phone. The problem is that even in seven point five, I find that they stop updating frequently. It's a problem on Android, too, like a lot of Android widgets will just stop updating and then you have to go into the app and then the widget will magically update and you go back to the home screen and it works for maybe another day or two. Windows Phone has the same problem. So I think that the value of the Windows Phone seven point eight slash eight point oh home screen pivots almost entirely on Microsoft's ability to get that straight. Right. Since we have decided to completely deviate from our plan to this, I might as well pitch it on this and say that the the most appealing thing for me with this seven point eight slash eight point oh home screen update is actually the customizability of the size. So, yes, you can have tiny icons and you can have really big tiles rather. You can have them tiny, mid-sized or large. And that's just handy, you know, because a lot of the times, I mean, with the current Windows phone, it's just pictures is a big tile. Calendar is a big tile, whether you like it or not. Whereas, you know, seeing the demo of the Windows Phone seven point eight home screen, it shows that, you know, customizability and something we were also whinging about was the fact that there's quite a lot of this space on the home screen. There's a lot of black space around those tiles, whereas now you can really, as Dito was saying, be a power user and really load up your home screen with tiles slash widgets slash whatever. Thanks. So that's handy. But also, if I can get back to Dito's question of why is Nokia releasing this? I said there's no answer. To be honest, there is an answer, and the answer is Nokia needs to sell phones. And when you're trying to market phones, you can't market them in a half-assed fashion. You need to go with both cheeks. And the way that Nokia is doing that is the new V900 is the new smartphone, et cetera. That's what we discussed last week on the podcast slash show. Is this a podcast or a show? It's both. I'm leaning towards show, but I think it's both. I think it qualifies as both. Yeah. I mean, we're versatile like that. And since I'm booting up to this awesome segue, I might as well execute it and say there is another device that Nokia just recently released or about to release, which also makes you wonder and ask why is it being released at all? And that is the 808 Pure View, which by pure incident and accident, I managed to review over this weekend. And boy, it's a crazy, crazy phone. Yeah. So, I mean, first of all, obviously, we're going to spend the majority of the time talking about the camera. But can we talk about the state of Symbian? I said in the intro we're going to talk about not so smart phones. It's not fair to call it a feature phone, I guess. But I think it's totally, it's a not so smart phone. That's what we should be calling it. I think somebody in comments said, okay, I get that Symbian isn't a smartphone OS, but it has a lot of really good functions to it. He didn't really delve into the details of what those functions are, but maybe calling this a function phone might be the diplomatic thing where all sides of the coin are satisfied. Because on the one hand, there's the guys who appreciate applications, the guys who appreciate responsive user experience, the guys who appreciate having a browser on their phone. They won't accept the 808 Pure View being called a smartphone. And on the other hand, you have the guys who love Symbian in some irrational passion. So, to appease everyone, it's a function phone. Look, I would put up Symbian against any proprietary feature phone platform on the market today, and I would take Symbian hands down. And that includes Nokia's own S40. But to your point, Flat, I mean, you put it up against any legitimate smartphone platform. You know, name one. Could be iOS, could be Android, could be Windows phone, could be web OS, could be any of these things. And it just falls flat on its face. Well, somebody said that is worse. That is worse. And Samsung also tries to pitch bad as a smartphone platform. But honestly, I don't care. It's kind of like picking between three legged horses. It's just, ugh. I mean, this is the thing with the 808. Dieter said we'll spend a long time talking about the camera. Well, I don't know that we will. I mean, it's very, very simple. The camera is just flat out amazing. It's the best camera you've ever seen on a phone. And I don't know if you can see the point in buying a point and shoot compared to this. Most point and shoot cameras don't have that much of a bigger sensor than you get in this phone. They don't get the opportunity or the option for you to take 38 megapixel photos, which are actually good. This is the thing that shocked me about it is at 38 megapixels, Nokia calls it a creative mode when you're taking those pictures, but they're actually good. My comparison is that at full resolution to the Hc 1x at 8 megapixel resolution, it's just as good and sometimes even better. Like this is how much of a gap you have. Like the 808 POV records, how many is it? Nearly five times as much information, nearly five times the megapixels as the 1x and the same level of quality or higher. Whereas the 5 megapixels, the 808 just blows everything else out of the way. So that part is a given. I have to say taking the 38 megapixel photos was just thrilling to me because it's just browsing them and like loading them up on your laptop or your computer and seeing your computer struggle. And you click on the 100% zoom and then you know you're going to have to wait for like two or three seconds until your computer is like, okay, okay, I'm still zooming. I'm still getting to the point where I'm at 100%. I mean, it's just amazing. And it's like no other phone in recent memory has like thrilled me in this fashion. So it is truly a unique phone. So if I were somebody and I, if I were somebody, if I were a human and I told you I don't care about having a smartphone, as long as it can make calls and do texts every now and then, that's enough for me. I care about nothing else except for the camera. I want the most amazing camera possible. Would you tell this person that the 808 is a legitimate option or would you tell them to run screaming for the hills because even then the camera isn't, the dealing with the phone isn't worth this camera? Oh, I would say yes. But then they would need to justify paying the price because I don't think the price is logical. And also that person doesn't exist. Like there is no human being in the world that says I just want to be able to make phones or phone calls and send text messages. And also I want to be able to take the most amazing photos on the planet with the same device. I don't think that person is real. If they are, I'd like to make them and actually have them on the show as a guest. Well, here's the thing, Chris. Here's the thing. I mean, we get devices like the Blackberry Porsche design, which is way, way overpriced and ultimately isn't even better designed than anything else on the market. It's just kind of Gordia, you know, so you're not actually buying anything extra. Whereas I do appreciate getting a unique device, which is also technically and technologically better than everything else and stands out in a technological and in a real way, even though I still consider it completely overpriced because as I just said, it does two functions really well, phone calls and pictures. And I mean, give it credit for its phone calls and also for Nokia's design. Like, yes, it has a massive huge bump on the back because that's how big the sensor needs to be. It's a physical limitation you can't get away from. But physically, it's well designed. It feels, you know, really strong and durable. And it's the back of it is molded really nicely. So it fits in your hand, even though it's a bit heavy around the camera and has a great earpiece and a great loudspeaker. So the sound is great. Phone calls are also pretty great. In my mind. Go ahead, Deater. Speaking of sound, what's the deal with the headphones? They only work with the bundled headphones. Isn't it a standard 3.5 jack? It is. It is. Well, I don't understand it myself. I mean, Nokia's marketing says that you get some special Dolby surround sound, yada, yada, yada optimizations. But and also, let's clarify, you can stick in a regular set of headphones and they'll work. It's third party headsets, you know, with a line with a mic in the line, like something like this. They don't work, which is just kind of annoying because I have about 20 of those. But at the same time, Nokia's own headset works and it's actually a really decent one. So that's fine. The problem with the 808, I think, is indicative of everything, virtually everything that's wrong with Nokia. And it's the exact same situation we saw with N9, where they make this one off device that really sort of puts a puts a product to the immense engineering and design talent that the company actually has. And then then it just sort of vanishes into thin air. The only hope we have with 808 is that, you know, presumably this technology, we've heard this going all the way back to the 808. Presumably this technology is going to find its way into WPA. Can't believe I just said WPA. Is that even fewer syllables than Windows Phone 8? I don't know. We can only hope this technology is going to find its way into Windows Phone 8 devices because and I said this on Twitter yesterday. I really, truly believe that this camera and an attractive Windows Phone 8 body from Nokia could be a very compelling product. Of course, at the end of the day, it still comes down to marketing and what carriers pick it up. But that could be, I think, the closest thing to a game changing product that Nokia has had in a very long time. Yeah. OK, so what about this? What about this camera in a not so attractive, big and bulky Windows Phone device? I mean, I know I'm sure this thing has been in development for a long time and maybe Windows Phone 7 7.5 just can't handle the camera and they need to, you know, dedicate more hardware to it in order to make it work that Windows Phone just doesn't support. But if this phone were running Windows Phone 7.5 in this hardware, I don't think it would blow anybody away, but I think it'd be making a much bigger impact than it is. Yes. Yes. Now that's an absolute given. And the other side of the coin with the 808 is the fact that, again, Symbian just has issues stacked on top of issues. It, you know, it's never been good on a touch screen and people have accused me of hating it. And that is absolutely true. I do hate Symbian on a touch screen because it's terrible. It's simply as simple as that. I can't pull any punches. I can't put it any other way. It sucks. This is why I hate it. If you think there's some irrational reason why I hate this piece of software, like, I don't know, my girlfriend cheated on me with Symbian. I don't understand it. Like, why do people think, why do people think that I love Symbian for any other reason than the fact it sucks? Like, I'm a selfish person. I want to use the best software. So if it was Symbian, I've got no problem with that. I would use it on a daily basis. But the fact is, it's not, it's terrible. Like, honestly, the browser just does not work on this thing. And everybody is like, you know, you should use Opera, Opera Mini, or whatever. That's not the point at all. And everybody, without exception, who has told me, you know, give Symbian a chance has told me, use the Gravity Twitter application. And it's just so sad because this is the whole ecosystem for this platform. Use the Gravity Twitter app. That's the only thing people have left to clutch hold of. There's nothing left. And the other thing is, the Gravity app costs eight pounds in the UK. It's a Twitter client. I mean, you have, I don't know, 27 Twitter clients on Android, all of them free. iOS, same situation. Even Windows Phone has multiple really good free versions of Twitter clients. And they ask you to pay eight pounds for the someone on Symbian. Well, the good news is you're not going to be spending any of those eight pounds on any other apps. So you might as well. Yeah, that's true. You know what's really sad to me is that the Nokia S60 browser was a pioneering browser. It was the first WebKit browser for smartphones. And in the N95 days, it was really good and did amazing things that no other mobile browser did. And the problem is that it's effectively not, I mean, it has evolved since then. But the fundamentals and of course the platform on which it's running remain the same. And that's, that's a big problem. Let me ask you something, Vlad. Do you still get out of many, out of memory messages on this device? Because for ages that was this like long running joke. It was almost like Nokia was trolling the world. Like you'd buy a new S60 device and without fail after loading one or two or three apps, you'd get this out of, out of Ram message. Um, I can't remember the exact verbiage, but anyone who's ever used an S60 device knows exactly what I'm talking about. Is this still a problem with the 808 or have they finally fixed that? No, I never encountered that at all. But in the same time, the thing I need to mention is that I never got up to that source, uh, you know, uh, speed where I'm running multiple applications and I'm multitasking and I'm doing my Symbian thing. Cause it, it just discourages you from doing anything. Um, it's not so much like lag the way you might've seen in previous versions of Android where everything is kind of chuggy, but it's just really consistent little delays and loads. Like you open up an application loading animation, uh, you get into your picture gallery loading animation. You, you put anything is, I mean, literally anything you do, there's some little loading thing and it's just stop and start, stop and start all the time. And then, and by the end of it, you're kind of like, you know, I'd rather just not see if this app is interesting to me because I'm tired of seeing that freaking, you know, loading circle. It just, it's a noise. I almost feel like Nokia should have stripped the GSM radio out of it, left in the wifi and Bluetooth, um, and sold it for 449 as the world's smartest point and shoot camera. Yeah. But you know, the 3G radio is good. The 3G radio is good. I mean, I do feel like Nokia is, uh, Nokia could have been a lot more aggressive and bold with this because, uh, okay. First of all, the price in the USA is 699, uh, unlocked. The price in the UK is 499 unlocked in the UK. It's June 30th in the USA is July 8th that you can get this phone. Again, the price doesn't make sense. So what would you have had to lose if you decided to just go completely bonkers with your promotion for this or the way you pitch it to people? And my idea is this. First of all, Nokia should have said, forget the 41 megapixel number entirely. Like that's just the geek number because you can't take 41 megapixel photos. So just say, this is a camera. It takes 38 megapixel photos. And if you step down to lower resolution, you get the highest image quality you've ever seen on the phone. That is a sales pitch that people can understand. Whereas the way Nokia has done it is this 41 megapixels, 38, 35, eight, five and five and two megapixels. They're just too many numbers. People don't understand it. And they see 41 and they say, it's a gimmick. They don't get the sales pitch. And I don't think Nokia has necessarily conveyed the idea of how amazing the image quality is either. So start off with that, call it a 38 megapixel camera, and then just pitch it as a phone with a camera. Like, I mean, honestly just sell it as a feature phone. Cut the whole Nokia store, cut all that nonsense. I mean, look, the answer is just don't ship it with Symbian. As much as I'm trying to work around it, don't ship it with Symbian. That's exactly it. Here's my concern is that Nokia is going to draw a bunch of new customers in with this product because they'll be intrigued by the photography capabilities. They're going to be shocked and dismayed by how bad the software experience is and the lack of a third party ecosystem. Then when it comes time to finally ship this technology on a product that matters, i.e. a Windows Phone 8 device, those people are going to pull a fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me. They're not going to buy another Nokia product. Yeah. I mean, and this is the same issue that Nokia is facing with the Lumias and the fact that they're not being upgraded to Windows Phone 8 because it pitched them so hard to people. People, rightly or wrongly, they feel hard done by Nokia because they would have just bought a Lumia 900 very recently. Maybe, as you're saying, Chris, now with people knowing the future of the Lumia 900, they can go into it with their eyes open. Maybe they still value getting that phone, but at least they know what they're getting themselves in for. Whereas a month back, it was Nokia, Microsoft, this is the best smartphone you can get. Maybe in their world it was, but people feel a little hard done on that front. Right. Yeah, I just feel like- The problem I have here is that Nokia can't break this narrative that it's been in for a long time now of every company has a narrative. So like RIM's narrative is like, oh, here's another Blackberry. It's not what it should be. It's good for business users, I guess. Apple's narrative is, oh, it's an iPhone. It's the best thing ever. And Android's is fragmentation, I guess. But Nokia's is, is Nokia back? Can Nokia make a comeback? This next thing is, Nokia make a comeback? Probably not, but they've been in hard times. This is more interesting than the last thing that they had. And this doesn't break that narrative. It's interesting, but nobody thinks it's going to be their comeback. And so it doesn't move the narrative for what the company is, what people think of it, forward enough. It shows that they've got some chops to do interesting technology, but that's not a consumer product strategy. That's a tech preview. No, that's exactly it. It is. Also something that reminded me when you were asking what if this shipped with Windows Phone 7 or 7.5, I don't believe Windows Phone 7 has support for 1080p video recording yet, which might've been one of the big obstacles. Yeah. No, I think that they should have held PureView and shipped it on Windows Phone 8. I think that they would have been better served to keep this technology under the covers until they were able to ship it on a platform that mattered. I just think that this 808 is not serving them at all. Well, yeah, that much is true. But then there's also the rumor that, I don't know where I got it from, but that the Windows Phone 8 version of PureView will still use the same technology. They'll still oversample, take a whole bunch of pixels and create one super pixel and that kind of thing, but use a smaller sensor and then integrated, as you were saying, Chris, into a more attractive design phone. Because the 808, as much as you might like it as a crazy geek device, it's not a mainstream device because it's nearly 40 millimeters thick. That's well over half an inch, I believe. Yeah. That's a beast. It's huge. It's huge. That's as thick as some QWERTY devices, I think, QWERTY sliders. Dude, I looked it up. Way back in 2007, when this phone was starting to be designed, there were thicker sliders on the market and on sale. But this is the issue. If Nokia takes five years to bring technology like this to market, the original dimensions that he was working with just don't exist anymore. The rest of the market moves along and then you kind of stuck with this design, which is awesome. It's great technology, but it just doesn't fit in the modern ergonomics. So maybe that's what's happening. Maybe now Nokia is shrinking it down to smaller design. Well, so here's my question. Does that mean that Nokia is right now starting work on a 400 megapixel sensor that they'll debut in 2017? Running on a Symbian OS? Yeah, running on Symbian. What would the name be by then? It would be like an F or G name, probably. Francine. Symbian Francine. This hurts. Even thinking about that just hurts me, honestly. I have nothing else to add about the 808. I'm done talking about it. Do you have any other thoughts on the 808? I feel like we could just keep going about it, but like... I can't. I have a question. You were talking about performance earlier. Is the poor performance in the rest of the phone OS reflected in the camera or does the camera launch fast and do burst shot fine? You're not waiting around to shoot pictures, are you? No. There's a processing delay, understandable one, when you shoot 30 megapixel photos. It's about a second, but beyond that, the gallery and the camera applications are clearly really, really well optimized. There's no complaints about it. Pinch to zoom in those applications works brilliantly. Processing works very well. The only thing I noticed is that video can have little freeze frames where the processor just isn't handling all that information because during video, you got 16 pixels or rather the camera reads 16 pixels to create one. So you're looking at a 41 megapixel image and then I get shrunken down to a 1080p resolution. So there's a ton of processing happening during video. I mean, I'm amazed and impressed that Nokia can do it with a single core or 1.3 gigahertz processor. So I mean, on the software side for the camera, Nokia has done a really good job. So it does show that Nokia can do good software. It's just not symbiont. And that's a great bottom line and we can move on to something else now. Well, speaking of phones that are too thick and running an antiquated OS, I took a quick look at the Sony Xperia ION over the weekend. Well, I actually had it for quite a bit longer. And so it's on AT&T, it's LTE, it's 99 bucks on contract. And it just is like totally, I don't even know what to say. It's running Android 2.3. There, I'm done. Like that's it. It's not running Android 4.0. That's completely ridiculous. It has a quote unquote 12 megapixel camera, which in my experience with it was very, very noisy and grainy. And you know, it's pretty thick. I think it's 0.46 inches, which is thicker than the other LTE phones out there. It's like, it has a great screen. 4.6 inches isn't the thickness, Dieter. 0.46, excuse me. 0.46. Although if it were 4.6, that would be pretty amazing. That would take some boldness to read the phone like that. It's designed as though, looking at it and feeling it, it's like, oh, this is meant to be a flagship phone. This is meant to be a top tier smartphone, but it's not. It's nowhere near top tier smartphone when you compare it to the One X or the Galaxy S3. So it's an Xperia. So you know that it got released eight months later than Sony meant to release it. And so had they got it out on time, this could have been a really hit flagship phone because I gave it a pretty low score for design because the buttons are really hard to hit and it's pretty thick, but it looks cool. It's got this aluminum back. It could have been a contender, but it's just too late. I think we first mentioned this back at CES, but I'm dying to know. I wish I was a fly on the wall for the discussion at AT&T headquarters where they said, well, Sony's pitching us this really awesome looking Xperia S, but we'd like to dumb it down a bit and make it look like hot garbage. That's hard. It doesn't look like hot garbage, but it looks like a completely anonymous black slate, just like every other smartphone on the market these days. They had an opportunity to have a differentiated product and I don't understand a why AT&T went that route, why they didn't just launch the Xperia S and B why Sony didn't push back and said, Hey, the design that you're pitching or the design that you want looks, looks like trash compared to what we're pitching, which is the Xperia S because really this is just a localized version of the Xperia S, is it not? Well, yeah. So there's no region that's selling the Xperia S with LTE, is there? Right. Yeah. As far as I know, there's none. So I mean, here's my sense. It's also running the S3 processor, not the S4 processor that the other LTE phones out there are running. So my genuine belief is this thing was designed like a year ago and like, well, AT&T says it's got to have LTE and at the time, they're like, well, nobody knows how to do LTE in a thin hot phone like the Xperia S. So we can chunk it up like this and AT&T said, sure, go for it. And then, you know, a year later, they finally get around to releasing the thing. I mean, to be clear, in between the time we first saw this at CES, both HTC and Samsung announced and shipped phones that are way better than this. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's a big issue. And the thing that I've noticed with Sony, previously Sony Ericsson, is that they do build up to have the biggest flagship phones introduced around CES or MWC. So to your point, Dieter, it does look like this device, along with the Xperia S, was being designed in the latter half of last year. But, you know, when you're working up to CES, the ideal thing is to then release like two weeks after CES, not five months. Yeah. Why didn't they learn their lesson? They would have sold a ton of these if they had managed to pull that off. Yes, absolutely. I have no idea. This has been happening for years and years and years. This goes back to the days when like, we were waiting for the N95-3, or no, the N95 8 gig, I think was announced in, or no, no, no, no, no. The Sony Ericsson X1, I believe was announced. The X1 is the one, that was like the first Xperia too, right? It was running Windows Mobile, and we waited forever for it. It had this insanely awesome looking metal design. It was a really great slider. The keyboard, yeah, but you know, we waited forever. It was super expensive. They've finally got carrier relationships. They finally brought the price down, but it's still just too late. Yeah. I mean, it took them so long to bring it to market. I have no idea why they haven't learned their lesson. And if the carrier gets in their way, they should be pulling the product. I mean, Sony isn't making any money in the US off phones right now anyway. So stop being precious about maintaining these relationships. Either ship it or don't, but don't make people wait for six months. It's just terrible. Well, see, my question is, we're talking about this like it was an intentional strategic decision, but my sense is that they just can't execute. They just couldn't get it done in time and out the door in time. And that the problem with Sony making phones is they're just not as fast as they need to be. And I think that they don't have, I think that it takes very particular people with very particular skills and talents to maintain a successful relationship with a carrier in the US. And I don't think that Sony has those relationships. HTC has worked very hard over the past decade to build those relationships. And of course, Samsung has those relationships. Sony is not showing any evidence that they have those. Well, and Sony is also not coming from a position of strength in the US. I mean, you look at HTC's relationships, they're very friendly with the carriers. They've got the evil line with Sprint and they'll change things up for the carriers when they need to. They unified stuff a bit with the OneLine, but they're still giving the carriers a little bit of what they want. Samsung's relationship with the carriers at this point in time is just one of brute force. They're not Apple, but the fact that they got the Galaxy S3 out on all four carriers with that center home button, same design called the Galaxy S3. We've talked about this a half a dozen times, but their relationship is just raw power. And Sony's relationship is like, I don't even know how to describe it. They're just lucky to get in the door and get phones released right now. Even if they're lucky to just get phones released, the fact that the ION is what they're putting out is really troubling. Yeah. No, I was going to say exactly the same thing that Disa just said, which is that even if Sony has really great negotiation staff on his team and it has some really nice guys who know how to talk to carriers, if it doesn't have any compelling hardware to pitch to the carriers, what does any of it matter? It's absolutely true. If Sony had a phone that every carrier says, well, actually we need to have this on our network. That's the Galaxy S3. You're stuck. If you're AT&T and you start demanding that you rebrand the Galaxy S3 and Samsung says, well, no, forget you guys, we'll sell out the others. You're stuck. You have to have that phone. We'll get around to the Galaxy S3 later, but just today, some analysts were saying that approximately 2 million shipments were affected by a shortage of components for the Galaxy S3. Samsung can't make parts fast enough to appease the sales that it's making with this device. It's that crazy. Early indications is that it's beating the Galaxy S2's first couple of months. That's insane. Right. It is. Right. Vlad, I have to disagree with you. I think that the Xperia S, particularly around CES, was a very compelling looking device with great specs, and they should have been in carriers' faces in August, September, October of last year saying, Hey guys, Sony is back. Wait, you know, we're, we're going with the Sony branding. Here's, here's this really gorgeous Sony designed device. Even if they're lying about it, they can say, yeah, design in house. Like it won Sony that whole message. Check out this, this amazing phone that we're, you know, that we want to get out to, to consumers early next year. They should have been trying everything in their power to build those relations. Maybe they were, but I see no evidence that they are doing what they need to do to maintain a successful relationship, not just with us carriers, but with us consumers. This device isn't going to do it, but Dieter, I do have to ask you at $99, would you recommend this over the Lumia 900, which is the same price? Man, that's a really hard call. I mean, this thing is supposed to get Android 4.0. I don't recommend you buy it on the assumption that that'll come in a timely fashion. I think the Lumia 900 is a much better looking device. It's just, it's just prettier. And so I would probably, I mean, if you're, I would say no, if you want windows phone, you know, you're going to get a Lumia 900, but if you're interested in Android, you should save up however long it takes you to save up to get a one X or galaxy S3. Right. It's fair advice. And I mean, that's the same story that we were just talking about with Nokia. Like when is Sony going to come back in the US? They tried with the Xperia play on Verizon. Let's not forget about that thing. And now this, this ION is uninspiring. I, you know, we all want to be inspired by Sony. We all remember when we were inspired by Sony and we're just, we're still waiting. Yep. We're not there yet. So I'm still using a one X still it's been like three weeks or a month. I don't know. But Chris, you abandoned me in my one X-ness and got a galaxy S3. Well, no, no, I didn't. So I, I, I just, I accosted Josh and David long enough and hard enough so that they would send me the galaxy S3 review unit for AT&T. So that's actually what I'm using right now. Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Wait a minute. No, no, no, no. That is not cool. I call dibs on the AT&T review unit for galaxy S3 way before I like I, David, I called dibs. I put my finger on my nose, whatever you need to do in chat. And he said, ha ha ha. Yeah. Okay. It's yours. And he sent it to you anyway. Well, so, so here's the thing. I see how they're made. That's fine. No, no, it's cool. It's cool, man. There may have been something lost in the communication chain because by the time I asked for it, it was in Josh's hands and I actually went through Michael to get it. Um, who is of course Josh's assistant. So, um, uh, I don't know what to tell you beyond that, but, uh, let me try to smooth things over by telling you that it is not much better than the one X you're not missing. It is slightly better. I think that if I were forced, if somebody put a gun to my head and said, rank the one X versus the galaxy S3, I'm going to blow your brains out. I would say, uh, the galaxy S3 ranks like 0.01 higher on the scale than the one X. They're both absolutely terrific phones. Best in class, best you can get right now for Android. Um, Josh would disagree with me. Tell you the galaxy next is the better device. Um, and it may very well be by then this week. We'll see what happens with jelly bean. But, um, uh, yeah, the, the, the, the galaxy S3, there are a few things that I like about it. One and Dieter, I think that you kind of got a sense of this at a CTIA and so did I, the, the skin is less offensive than since 4.0 is, um, it's, I would say that's true. Yeah, it does a better job of, um, of augmenting and enhancing Android 4.0 instead of trying to fight it be the best way to, to describe it, I think. And that's really shocked. That's a shocking thing for me to say, considering where touch was has been, right? If you go back to the galaxy S2, it looked like complete garbage. Um, and so Samsung has really reinvented and rethought touch was, uh, on the native Android for experience. And I give him a lot of credit for that. The camera is far, far, far superior to the galaxy nexus and arguably a little better than the one X I'm sure Vlad will, will, will agree with me on that. Definitely. Um, yes. And, and the materials that the, in the, in the hand and when it's sitting on a table, I think that the phone looks better and feels better than any photo that I've seen of it. When you look at a photo of it, it looks like, you know, typical kind of cheapish Samsung hardware. And it still is, you're not going to be fooled into thinking that this is an Apple device or an HTC device or any other kind of device. It looks and feels like a Samsung, but it's probably the best looking and feeling Samsung that I can remember. The materials is it's a very solid feeling device. Uh, the, the plastic is of a very high quality. Uh, the biggest problem I had with the hardware was that when I first got the device, it had the review Sim in it and it was literally impossible to eject it. It's the, they, Samsung uses this really stupid, uh, SIM tray. That's a, it's a push, push, a spring loaded tray. So to get a SIM out, you press down and it clicks and then it pops out in theory, right? But in practice, you, you press it and it just, it would stay in like, it would, it would, uh, it would go down like a millimeter and then spring back into place, but would never eject. So I ended up having to completely disassemble the phone. It comes, it comes apart into two pieces with like eight or nine screws, something like that, took the back plate off and then use tweezers, very, very small tweezers to sort of gently wiggle the SIM until it, it popped out without releasing the mechanism. And I, I did it without doing any damage to the phone because when I put my SIM in, it was fine. Uh, but repairability rating, would you give it then now that you've done the whole tear down? I've never had to do an I fix it style repairability rating before, but I would rate it as good to very good. Uh, and Evan Rogers, one of our writers, uh, has taken apart as GS two. And apparently I didn't know this, but apparently the GS two is pretty well known for being a very, uh, disassembleable, if that's a word device and being pretty repairable and uh, the GS three looks to follow in those footsteps. So that's, that's an encouraging sign, but, uh, but yeah, overall I would say if you are buying, if you are buying an Android device right now, today on any us carrier of import, the GS three is the phone that you want. I'm very comfortable saying that. Oh, I would have said that if they had sent the review unit to me, I'll send it to you today. I'll drop it in the mail. I'll drop it in the fricking mail. This is how important we are. If we get the phone, we'll recommend it if we know we won't. Yeah. Oh no, someone in chat said, why don't we just use apex to deal with these skin issues? And I do want to bring, bring up that like it's more than just the launcher with this stuff, especially, especially with sense. Uh, it goes pretty deep into, uh, the OS and all of the apps and it can be kind of annoying. So I've actually, you know, I'm on the custom ROM train with, uh, with my one X and right now I'm running Paul O'Brien's, uh, Modico vanilla ROM. And I gotta say, I highly recommend it. It's quite good. Uh, you get the, the stock, uh, apps and, uh, you know, pretty close to stock experience, uh, where possible, there are still places where he still has, you know, it's still the HTC stuff. It's still the HTC multitasking. It's still, um, on screen keyboard settings and a few other places. But other than that, you know, they've done a really good job. And so I am going to hold out and stick with the HTC phone instead of the Galaxy S3 for a while longer, just because it's been so long since I used anything other than the Samsung phone as my main phone for an extended period of time that, uh, I feel like I, I owe it to the smartphone world to have switched up hardware. Actually, you know, I was actually making a massive compromise here, Dieter. Yeah. That's major, major sacrifice. Right. Yeah. The one X and the, uh, and the, um, the GS three are seriously a stone's throw apart from each other in terms of which phone is best. And if you ask 10 people that use both phones, I'll bet you would get a five, five split. Seriously. They're that close, but there are a couple that the one X has got pretty good battery life. Cause if the battery life on this thing were poor, um, the removable battery on the GS three would, uh, be a huge, huge deal for me. I figured it would be anyway, but I'm turning out to manage pretty well without a removable battery. Yeah. And, and actually battery life does not appear to be great for me on the 18 TGS three. And that's probably because I'm using it on LTE a lot. And, and AMOLED is an issue too, right? Because you're looking at a lot of white things and white consumes the most power on an AMOLED. Um, but there's one other problem with the GS three that I should bring up. Um, and Vlada, I'm sorry, I can't remember how much you talked about this in your review, but I don't think I like Samsung's decision to go with this weird, wonky custom, uh, menu, uh, paradigm where they, you know, the GS three has a physical menu key, which goes against, uh, Google's design guidelines for Android completely. So, um, for, I don't know how they do this in software, but somehow the phone knows all apps know that they shouldn't show the menu button in the action bar at the top. Like you would get on the one X or, or the galaxy nexus. And instead you just had the physical menu button. And when you hit that, it doesn't show up by the action bar where you would expect it show up. It shows up as this text only weird list thing at the bottom of the display. Now in practice, that's good in a way because you can actually reach it with your thumb, but it still feels hacky. Uh, and I also, you know, in the U.S. I've never had to deal with a galaxy S phone that had the physical home key. And after using the GS three, I don't understand it. I don't know why Samsung would want to do that because it's, it's, it's like, it's unnecessary effort. Like I know that we're, we're living in an age where people are lazy. You're going to complain about the effort of pressing in a physical piece. Yes. Wow. It's nice though to hit a physical button. I mean, you use an iPhone. It's nice to have that physical button. The, uh, the menu thing is totally all about ice cream sandwich and how Google has directed developers to code their apps. Uh, I see the same thing, you know, on my hacked rom that doesn't have the menu button anymore, but uses the, you know, the multitasking button as a menu button. Um, and if you do find, you can, you can still find apps that have the action bar that don't hide the menu button like they're supposed to. And on those apps that will pop the menu up in the action bar, which is weird. So, um, you know, it's all about just consistency and, you know, Google with, uh, with ice cream sandwich kind of failed at shoving the new design guidelines that Matthias Duarte put together on all the carriers, uh, to go deep down into their skins. And that just means we're going to be dealing with, you know, weird behavior issues on stuff like the menu for a long time to come. I think, well, let's bring it back to Chris's point though, because this is the one way he's not a hundred percent right on, uh, whereas w which, you know, I mentioned it because he's being a hundred percent right so far, the whole show and he was, you know, batting a hundred percent, but seriously the home button you need it, Chris. I mean, no, if you, if you put, if you put any smartphone, any tablet, any smart digital device in a non techie person's hands, the thing they want to know is how do I get back to the start? How do I get back to the beginning? How do I get back to home? And this is why Apple keeps having that. Yeah. This is why Apple keeps having the home button, the physical home button. Um, whereas if you have, I mean, okay, I'll take the point. If you have a soft, a software home button or a capacity home button centered as it is on ice cream sandwich, it does the same job. But, um, having it as a physical one is just really unmistakable. And to me, it is an upgrade to have two capacity keys and one home button in the middle. As Samsung is doing rather than with the galaxy S2 variants in the U S where you still had the four Android keys at the bottom, because there it's like, I need to find the home icon and then press it. And then there's the other thing, which is that every Android phone has in a different spot. Every Android phone has a slightly different home icon. It starts to get annoying. So, that's fair. The way to get back home needs to be in the middle. And if it's the one physical button on the whole front of the phone, it just makes it that much easier point taken. And I think we're going to really get into it, get into this. Let's get into the fact that the menu button is on the left hand side and the back button is on the right hand side. Because I'm not defending that. Okay. So my theory is that they did that because I thought about that Deter. I think the reason they did that is that the back button is used significantly more than the menu button and they're designing it to sort of favor a right handed person is my guess. But that's just a guess. I mean, I don't really know. But back to your point, Vlad, point taken. I think that the center home button makes a lot of sense and maybe I'm complaining more about it more than a normal person would because I'm coming from the One X, which has a center mounted capacitive home button, which I think is kind of the optimal solution. But one thing that I've noticed in using the GS three is that I'm I'm using the multitasking feature less. I'd really gotten into the habit of multitasking between apps on the one X. I don't know why. I can't explain why, but I just did. And now I'm not because you have to hold the home button down for what is like a second or something, which just feels like an eternity when you're holding it down, waiting for the menu to appear. No, that's a very valid point. I've been using the one X as well, and I do find myself increasingly starting to rely on it. So just jumping between like, for example, today, the music app maps application Gmail going back and forth. Usually I'll do that by going back to the home screen and getting back into the app via the link that now I'm starting to rely on the multitasking button because it is quick and it does actually work like it's supposed to. So, I mean, I'm actually getting the feeling that Google knows what the hell it's doing because Google is the one that enforced this idea of forget the menu button. You don't need that anymore. What you really need is a multitasking key. And, you know, a lot of people might recall a few weeks and months back me saying, well, multitasking menu doesn't really seem like that much of a useful thing to me, but it's kind of like the iPad is starting to sneak into my life in an annoying way where you kind of grasp that, oh, actually this thing is useful. Right. So, yeah, I have nothing other. Well, let me think. I want to go through my usage of the GST in the past three days to see if there's anything else notable that I want to talk about. I don't think so. Go buy it. Go buy this phone. If you're in a market, if you're in the market for an Android phone this week, buy it. If Josh Topolsky were listening, he would tell you that I'm completely wrong and you should get a Galaxy Nexus, which is also a great phone. Not a bad choice. Yeah. See, I'm going to tell you that if you're in the market for an Android phone this week, you should wait at least until Thursday when we have finished with our two live blogs of Google IO, when we are expecting Android 4.1 Jelly Bean to be announced and maybe Google will actually do something about this upgrade situation and then you'll know what phone that you buy next is going to get an upgrade. Come on. You know better than that. They tried last year at IO. They failed. What are they going to say or do this year that they didn't say or do last year regarding the upgrade? Every Motorola phone is going to ship Android 4.1 next month. Yay. Boom. It's not going to happen. Yeah. And if they did that, there would be riots in the streets led by Samsung and HTC and all these other guys. So yeah, I mean, go ahead. So we're expecting the Nexus tablet, of course, or whatever it's called. Maybe it'll be Nexus. Maybe it won't. Seven inch looks like they're targeting the low end of the market, right? Something that would go up against like the Kindle Fire, which I think is a product that Andy Rubin, even though he's never gone on the record saying anything negative, particularly negative about the fire, I think he would love to see that product torpedoed. And I think that, you know, Android as a platform has escaped his control enough at this point so that there's nothing Google could say or do or produce that would torpedo the fire. But gosh darn if he's going to try. And I think that the Nexus tablet is designed to do exactly that. It's not designed to kill the iPad. They tried that last year and they failed. Well, if we if we can back off from the Americanism of trying to kill something with every product that you're releasing. Yes, I use the term kill. You know what I mean. I know. I know. But no, but still, I mean, he it does very much seem like this Nexus tablet. OK, first of all, you pretty much take it as given that the Nexus tablet is coming out. You pretty much take it as given that it's seven inches made by Asus feature integrity processor inside. Those have been rumored so hard, so thoroughly, so consistently by so many upstream components, maker sources, by so many people familiar with the matter that we can trust at this point. So that's a given. And the other thing is that this whole heap of circumstantial evidence from previous information from Asus, as we all know, Asus loves to launch devices at least three times. That's now a new Taiwan tradition. You'd launch a device three times, maybe four times. You try and keep people on their toes and then maybe eventually you release it. OK, they showed off. I don't even know if they showed it off, but they announced to get over Nvidia and see as that they would do a 200 or was a two hundred fifty dollar tablet and it's going to have Tegra free inside it and it's going to be a seven inch device. And they called it the memo, even though the memo had previously been announced as a model device. In any case, the point is this device already exists, but after CES, there was just complete silence about it. So it does seem like between CES and I know a couple of months ago, four months ago, Google decided, you know what, we will call this the Nexus tablet. We'll brand it with you guys, et cetera, et cetera. And this is why we never heard of that cheap Asus tablet again. And it should now resurface as the Nexus tablet with Google's branding. What's going to be really interesting about it, though, is most tablets so far, Android tablets have already stuck with stock Android. They've already been shipping the stock software and it just hasn't been good enough. You know, IceCream Sandwich has been an upgrade, but it still isn't really good enough to compete with the iPad, as Chris has been saying. So now that Google is branding one as a Nexus device, how is it going to differentiate it from its partners? Because differentiation with Nexus phones was here's stock Android, here's the pure Android experience. But on tablets, you're already getting the pure Android experience and it's not good enough. So what is Google going to add? Right. And they've already got the ecosystem. They've got Google Play video, Google Play music, Google Play Books, they got all that. Most Android tablets are already running something very close to stock, if not straight stock. They need the apps, man. The apps are just not there for Android tablets in the way that they are on Android phones or, of course, iOS tablets and phones. Unless Google can give us, unless they're going to go and kidnap all the top developers and put them in Mountain View and chain them up and make them write apps for Android tablets, it's not going to kill the fire. But I'm also just, I'm not bullish on Google being able to convince me that I need this thing. I mean, we'll wait until we see it, of course. I predict that at the tail end of tomorrow's keynote or Thursday's keynote, I guess we don't really know, there are keynotes on both days, but at the end of one of these two keynotes, they're going to parade a long, long line of top tier developers on stage to show off new apps or redesigns of existing apps that have been designed specifically to run on this seven inch device. Because Google cannot be stupid enough to believe that their tablet failure has been anything other than an app story. And so I think we're going to hear a very strong app message. It's very easy. All these guys have done it. The app message on this Nexus tablet, they need to thank Amazon for the fire, for actually being successful because we're finally seeing apps start to move towards that seven inch form factor. That was Mark Rommelman with Instapaper. He's like, well, I didn't want to do an Android tablet app, but there's this Kindle fire and it's doing pretty well. And so whatever success Google can get at convincing developers to get trotted out on stage to show off apps on a seven inch Android 4.1 tablet. I think a large part of that comes because of Amazon. Yeah, that's a fair point. I can see that justification. I mean, if the Kindle Fire never came out, though, let's make no mistake about it. This device that Google is about to introduce would have been seen as a real breakthrough and would have been like, hey, Google is going to war. Google is such and such and such. So now, I mean, let's face it, Amazon beat Google to the punch with this. It beat everyone to the punch with reaching that low price point. And now Amazon is bearing the fruits of that. Hopefully the whole Android ecosystem is bearing the fruit of that. I think that's the whole benefit to it. But coming back to Chris's earlier point, the reason Google has Android in the first place is not to do some magical, wonderful thing for the whole of humanity. It does it so it can distribute Google services. So just because the Kindle Fire is based on Android doesn't help or doesn't serve Google's interests. Google wants its maps, its apps, its application store and most importantly as well, its content source, music, books, etc. on those tablets. And this is the device that's going to do that. It's going to drag down the Android entry price point. It's going to thereby open up a new audience for Google services and Google's content distribution services and in-app payments and all the other junk and nonsense that Google might want to pitch along with that. But as you guys say, I'm not convinced that there's going to be something unique about this and something that Google can pitch as a Nexus thing. And I don't even know what's going to happen with this whole Nexus branding thing because, okay, you stick it on a tablet now, the tablet isn't unique enough to justify it and then soon enough as we'll be hearing a few months from now there'll be like five Nexus device manufacturers. So what does Nexus become then? Does it just become another byword for Android? Yeah, I think the term Nexus is going to be the replacement for what we called in the early days the Google Experience Android. I think that's what it's evolving into. And let me say something else about this tablet. I think that the key to its success, I think that they stand a very real chance of selling a lot of them and one of the ways they're going to do that is by undercutting the fire. I think that we'll see an entry level product and we've been hearing rumors about this for several months now, but I suspect we'll see an entry level product for somewhere between $149 and $179. And of course the fire is $199. Yeah, can you imagine? Can you imagine if they announced tomorrow a 149, eight or 16 gig tablet, eight gig because all your stuff is in the cloud and that's still plenty of storage space for a single movie and then you can just swap in whatever movie you want to watch for 149. I don't think we can do that with CineGraphy, Chris. 16 gig. In volume they could still do it. I don't understand why 16 gig is going to make it cheaper. I'm saying Tegra3 is a bulk processor, expensive, that's a chip to grab and stick it to your device. I think that in volume. I mean that would be crazy aggressive because I think that Asus was cutting its profit margins really thin by pitching it at 200 or 250 and if Google is subsidizing it, that would be extremely aggressive. I mean I would buy one of those. Well let's put it this way, they certainly can't sell it for more than the fire, which is $199. Yeah, no. That is their upper limit. They can't. It's got to top out at $199. That's it. I think it could be 250. I mean the expectation is, let's get it straight, the expectation is that it will be $200, yes, or $199. But I think 250 is also a realistic scenario. Because in the same way that getting a splinter is realistic, it's going to happen, it could happen, but it really sucks. Yeah, very much. I mean compared to the rest of the, so to speak, full powered Android tablets, they still don't cost 250. So even at $250, Google is undercutting its OEMs and its partners, which I'm sure they'll appreciate. They will love it. They'll be like, yes, build up the Android ecosystem so we can have zero profit margins. That works for us. I mean, do you really think that Google's OEM partners are going to be crying profusely and weeping in the streets because they can't sell more Android tablets? They're fine with phones. Has anybody had a raging success with Android tablets? No. I mean, I think it was last week we were discussing LG deciding that it's just going to bail out on tablets for now. Yeah, HTC effectively has too, right? When is the last time HTC showed an Android tablet? Jet stream, baby. Jet stream, you know what? That's a really good point, Chris. HTC has just been completely silent. It hasn't said we're not doing tablets, but it hasn't done it for months. Right. In fact, the last HTC tablet rumor we heard was that they got shut out of making a Windows RT device. Windows. Yeah, that's right. Oh, that's right. Yeah. I wish I hadn't brought up the jet stream because now all I can think about was the fact that thing retailed for like $5,000. On contract. It really was. Yeah, at launch, it was something insane and everybody just laughed it off the stage. It could have been successful for $200 on contract, maybe. I actually have something of an answer to my question earlier on about what Nexus branding is going to mean. It's also kind of a predictable answer actually, but let me say it anyway. I'll finish. Whatever. The point is, so maybe Google with the Nexus branding is going to thereby distinguish the devices that it considers part of its inner circle or part of its Android, the part that it can control and the user experience that it wants to pitch and promote. I'm sure Google has been saying that as well in its marketing, but we've discussed previously the whole idea that Android is bigger than what Google can control and what Google can enforce. You have all these Android phones in China that cost like $49 and have resistive touchscreens and all sorts of crazy, stupid skins like iOS skins and whatnot. Maybe that's the best way to look at it. We have Android as this sprawling, massive, crazy thing which Google is giving to the world in its charitable ways. Then you have the Nexus program, which is actually the devices adhering to the Google design guidelines. I don't think anybody is going to... Actually, Google design guidelines have more to do with apps, aren't they? Yeah, but they could say you can't skin beyond this point with the Nexus line. I hope you're right. I hope Google really makes a go of it and really tries to get a whole bunch of manufacturers on board with the Nexus program and really tries to get more pure Android or Nexus class Android phones in front of consumers in a bigger way. I would like for that to work. I would like for that to win. I would like for Samsung and HTC and Sony and whomever else, Motorola, to recognize that that can work and that people will buy those phones. Or it will be a huge failure. Nobody will buy the phones. Nobody will actually care the way we do about a stock experience. Then we'll know. But we don't know right now because as much as Google has tried with the Galaxy Nexus and the Nexus S and yada, yada, yada, I don't feel like it's really gotten any serious carrier support. I would like to see that happen at least once, even if it fails, because then we'll know and we can stop complaining about it and just accept that we live in a world of touch whiz and sense. I think the Sprint has tried very hard to be buddy-buddy in the Nexus program. Remember they originally announced the Nexus One was going to, they said that was going to be coming to Sprint and then they canceled it a couple months later, I don't know if you remember that. And then they launched the Nexus S of course. They were the first US carrier to do so and now they have the Galaxy Nexus. And they're the only carrier that has that really tight, although wonky Google Voice integration. So they're trying, it's just that it doesn't really matter. And Google Wallet too. Yeah, Google Wallet, yes. Yeah, the point I was going to raise is that for a long time, Google has been held responsible for all of Android. And it just really grown way too big, like I was just saying. So in having this Nexus program, in having this partnership with the big phone manufacturers, at least then Google can kind of put a circle around its ecosystem. So you can say, this is the Nexus program can be said to be the Google ecosystem within Android. And then everybody else, guys like the Amazon with a Kindle Fire and the Chinese OEMs who are trying to sell cheap phones, they can just be taken to be responsible for themselves and using Android. And I didn't feel like Google needs that in PR terms, because Apple can say, okay, we take care of the iPhone and we take care of it very well. Microsoft soon is going to be able to say, we've got Windows Phone 8. And we take care of everybody who has that very well, hopefully, right. So everybody has the little stable of devices, let's say Microsoft is going to have that, Apple is going to have its iOS devices and now Google can say, okay, we have the Nexus program, hold us accountable for that. Don't hold us accountable for the crazy OEMs and Amazon and whoever else. Yeah, I like that. That's a beautiful dream. And I want to dream it myself. And Google wants to find out if we can tomorrow. Yeah, Google wants to, I really believe that Google wants to control something. They've lost control of Android. And I think that they have every reason to want to regain some semblance of control over the platform. I mean, going back to the Xperia Ion, it is patently absurd to think that the Xperia Ion is becoming available in retail channels the same week that the version of Android two versions later is being announced. Yeah. Two and a half versions later if you want to count Gingerbread, or I'm sorry, Honeycomb. Sure. Yeah, good point. And so that is a sure, if that's not a sign of a broken platform, I don't know what is. Yeah. I mean, it's a tolerably broken platform because at the end of the day, when all is said and done, I come back to Android. It's only tolerable- I need my Gmail. Do you come back to, do you come back to Gmail? Let's see, that's the thing with me is like I come back to Google Maps and I come back to Gmail. I don't come back to Android, I've realized like- But not much is true, but then where do you get the best experience of both? Android. Right. Right. I'm struggling with the Gmail app on the iPad, but you know, it's a- It's ecosystem lock-in just like any other. I mean, the same goes for Apple and Microsoft would like for it to go the same way for them and maybe they'll have that success in Windows Phone 8, but yeah, I mean, it's only tolerable in so much that you can run roughly the same number of apps and all these versions. Chrome is a very notable exception, right? Where you need 4.0 to run it. And that's a big problem because Chrome is notably better than the built-in Android browser. Yeah. Yeah. I kind of wonder if it's like it could run on 2.3 and they just said no to try and force people to upgrade and it didn't work. I believe it. And here's another nightmare thought for you, Dieter. What if tomorrow or Thursday they announced that Chrome for Android is going gold and oh, by the way, you need 4.0 or excuse me, 4.1 to run the gold version. Oh no, that would be horrible. I will do this. I will just walk away. I'm just gone. Like I just will give up. In the middle of the keynote, you'll just get up and leave. I doubt they would do that, but I just wanted to draw a distinction before somebody tries to call me out because we were just discussing earlier in the podcast how I'm saying the default browser in Symbian isn't good enough. Whereas now we're saying Chrome beta is the thing and there I go again. I said beta in the podcast. Every single show without fail, I will talk about pre-final software. Anyway, but the reason there's a difference between the Symbian situation where you have to download Opera Mini and this one is because Chrome is the product of Google. If Nokia was producing a better browser and just asked you to download it the way that Google does, then that's fine. But relying on third party applications just to get basic functionality running on your phone is not acceptable. That's me done with the whinging about Symbian. I really promise, I'm never going to talk about Symbian anymore. Our chat room just exploded with people trying to spell beta. It's pretty amazing. We have the best listeners. I've got a solution. I'm just going to say in Bulgarian. It's better. That does sound good. I like that. But that still sounds like you're saying better with an English accent or beater with an English accent. That's the problem, Vlad. Chris, there is no problem. Just let it go. Well anyway, we should talk about something else. Do we want to talk about Microsoft saying it's not going to build Windows phones? Which I guess is only notable because they just started saying they're going to build tablets. The thing about them not building Windows phones is to me is like, well, yeah, that's because they've got Nokia, so they don't have to. But if they hadn't, I was going to say if they hadn't bought Nokia, which isn't true, but if they hadn't partnered so closely with Nokia, I think that this would be a much more open question. But it didn't surprise me at all to hear them reiterate that they're not going to build Windows phones directly. No, I don't think that it's cut and dried at all. Mark my words, I think that within 10 years and maybe this will be accelerated. Ten years, come on, man. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Flying cars and jet packs. That's what they said in 1960 and it's still not true. Dude, it's a 2015 roadmap. It's happening. Look, even if Ballmer doesn't leave in the next 10 years, which I'm assuming he will, but at some point, Microsoft is going to become a fully vertically integrated company, a la Apple. Mark my words. HP is going to be screwed. ASUS is going to be screwed. Acer is going to be screwed. Dell is going to be screwed. And it's not to say that they won't be licensing out Windows, just as they do now, but I think you're going to see Microsoft make some extremely compelling hardware across the board. Surface and devices like Surface in the Surface family, to use Microsoft terminology, have the potential to replace every single PC in your life, right? They showed that dock. And so they have that angle covered. They are one CEO whim away from becoming a phone manufacturer, in which case you will not want any other Windows phone on the market. You just won't. Yeah, that's true. Do you think that they'd buy Nokia to do it? I mean, do they need to? I mean, as we've seen, Nokia's got a lot of extra stuff. That's the point, though. The rumor with Microsoft and the reason it did Surface was that Microsoft, it wasn't really a rumor. It's just Microsoft wasn't happy with the hardware. Steve Ballmer said that in the Surface introduction. He was saying, sometimes we feel we need to produce the hardware to support the software. Where we see the need for hardware, we do hardware to support the software. And then he started talking about Microsoft mouses from 1980, 11, whatever. But that was his point. This is why the Surface tablets exist. He's not happy and Microsoft isn't happy with the Windows tablets that others are doing. So it's doing it itself. The thing with Nokia is that I don't even think Microsoft is convinced that it can outdo Nokia on design. And me personally, I don't think it can. I still think Nokia has some of the best hardware designers just anywhere. So the point is spot on. You have Nokia and they're kicking out these awesome designs. Why buy them? I mean, how are you going to improve on things? I mean, yes, if you're going to build hardware, you buy Nokia because that's the cheapest mobile manufacturer you can get now. It's just going for a bargain now. You can get them for like a billion or something. They're like 90% off. You can get them for two Instagrams. Two Instagrams? Come on, man. They're still like six or seven or eight billion in their market cap. And they'd have to pay a premium on top of that to satisfy investors, I think. But wait, wait, wait. The big question is would they pay more or less than they paid for Skype? Because if they pay less than they paid for Skype, then that's just the most embarrassing thing ever. Look, they just paid 1.2 billion for Yammer, which nobody has ever heard of. That's so I use Yammer every day and I'm the only one. Yeah, you're the only actually somebody ran the numbers and I think they reported that they paid 240 dollars per user. How? Okay, I need to ask this question because I'm pretty sure of the numbers, but I just need a reality check. So Instagram, arguably the most popular dedicated photo sharing app ever, cost one billion dollars to buy. And then Yammer, this limited niche social enterprise application, even though social enterprise doesn't really exist or anybody apart from detail uses it, cost 1.2 billion. So it cost 20% more than Instagram. I have a theory if you'd like to hear it about the Yammer price. I believe and I have specific reasons to believe this unnamed sources, sources familiar with the matter. I think that in the past month, Oracle and Microsoft were engaged in a bidding war for Yammer, which drove the price well beyond reason. And Oracle finally backed off and Microsoft won the war. I think that's what happened. I think that's a very reasonable thing to believe. I need to have a mini rant here because this is just nuts to me. Because first of all, you're opaque. But the other thing is the whole idea that you need specific software for enterprise is just flawed to me. I know people are going to say, oh, well, enterprise has special security needs, et cetera, et cetera. But we all need to sit down and think about the developments and the trends in software. The software that is becoming most prevalent and most popular in enterprise, in business, is actually consumer software. So people are moving to Gmail because it's the best consumer email client. I mean, we all use Gmail. I don't think that's much of a company secret. And a whole bunch of other people are using it because it's convenient, because they enjoy it, and because they like to have a consistency between their home and their work environment. And OK, I'm not getting too many other examples off the top of my head, but there are so many other instances where... OK, perfect example is Twitter. You think Twitter is a social network? It's not. Twitter is actually a work network. It's not shock or surprise at all. Look at the statistics. During the working day, the working hours in the United States, that's when you get the most tweets. And the BBC, when it does breaking news reports, it will say such and such dead Twitter client, et cetera. And the time when Twitter dies down and quietens down is the weekend. If Twitter was a social network, that's when it would explode, whereas it's most popular and most actively used during working hours. I mean, it is a social network. Come on. I mean, it is a social network. It's a social network. People are using... I mean, the vast majority of Twitter users are using it to talk to friends. They're not using it the way that we use it as journalists on the web who use it as partially personal and partially to talk about our articles and talk to our other journalist colleagues. The vast majority of people are using it just as a straight up social network. They just happen to be doing it at work. Right. But that's the point, though. When you sit in front of your computer, you're using software and this is the software you're using. You're not using things like Yammer. And again, I need to sit down and find meatier examples of what I'm trying to say here. But it is the truth that to me, there is no distinction anymore between consumer and enterprise software. It's just good software that people want to use and that's what people should be making. To support your point, Vlad, I haven't logged into Yammer in a while, but last time I logged into it, the interface was literally a Facebook clone. Yeah, it's a Facebook clone. And that's why I like it because it is a Facebook clone that I know is guaranteed not to be shared outside. It's a private Facebook just for a small group of people. And it has a few features like mobile alerts and whatnot that are convenient for me. And that's what I want. And if you can find me something on Facebook, they use Facebook for internal private Facebook stuff. But I just want to have a different URL and a different logo, but some of those same features. Okay. If Facebook wanted to say, here's Facebook for enterprise, if they did that tomorrow, then this Yammer purchase would look like the most ridiculous thing ever. You know what a Facebook for enterprise is? It's called a private group, a private Facebook group. Yeah, I know it's a private group, but there's still a little bit of a... There's at least a sense for me that maybe that won't work out. And I know that that's just me being all... But, Dito, you're actually making my point right now. Thank you. You just made my point perfectly because, yes, I completely agree. Yammer is just a total and complete Facebook ripoff. The only reason it even exists without getting sued into the ground is because there's no intellectual property protection on all of Facebook's UI features. But everybody who's seen it has said two things about Yammer. First of all, yes, my company uses Yammer, but I don't, which is hilarious because it's so true for most people other than Dito. And the second thing is, it's just a Facebook ripoff. So what I was saying earlier is, here's the best social enterprise network that exists and it's modeled on the consumer software, which is Facebook. So I am totally right. You are totally right. But the secondary point is, doesn't the fact that Microsoft paid so much money for Yammer, which is a ripoff of Facebook, kind of betray a lack of confidence in Microsoft itself? You're paying 1.2 billion for something that ripped off one of your direct software competitors. Shouldn't you have the confidence to build a ripoff at least yourself or a competitor yourself? Keep in mind that Microsoft owns a pretty good chunk of Facebook. They own what, like 5% or 10% of Facebook? I don't know if it's that big, but they own a chunk. We really need to stop talking about Yammer, even as the one guy who defends Yammer, it's depressing to me. Yeah, this is getting real boring real fast. Do we want to talk about this rumor that Ruum might spin off its hardware business? I think you said it. There it is. It seemed much more likely to me that they'd spin off their messaging business. But I think that the thing that ran Jim Becilia out where he wanted to beef up their services offerings, I think that that conflict is obviously still going on there. It'll come to a head at some point. I think spinning it, rather than selling it, but spinning off the hardware division might make sense. But man, that's just- To be fair, I've lived- Yeah, we've all seen a phone. We know all the example of a phone company that tried to split itself up into a hardware and software division, and we all know how that turned out. Yeah, I'm just saying. Fair enough, Dieter. Yeah, Palm One and Palm Source. But the counter argument is that there are lots of examples of companies doing this successfully in other related industries, right? IBM is now largely a software company. Barnes and Nobles in the process of spinning off its digital division into NUCO, which is the joint venture with Microsoft. And I think that there is reason to believe that this might be a way to save what RIM perceives to be its core business, which is enterprise framework stuff, and let the hardware side wither on the vine, right? Like Motorola Solutions and Motorola Mobility is another example where Motorola Solutions was tired of getting dragged down. It's an extremely profitable company, and they were tired of getting dragged down by Motorola Mobility, which at the time was a very dangerous sort of liability in the company that was constantly dragging down the quarterly reports. And so it made a lot of sense for them to split. Same thing here. And Barnes and Noble, same thing, right? Like the legacy book business is dying. They want to split the good part from the bad part. So yeah, I mean- Okay, but who's in the room? Which is the good part? Which is the bad part? Well, the good part is definitely the services. Okay, well, the services, guess what? I mean, Microsoft is coming down hard with Windows Phone 8 running the same exact management software that's used to manage desktops, right? And the same security features and the same, not everything, but a whole lot. I'm sure that the services are going to do quite well, especially in emerging markets for quite a while. But I think that RIM's enterprise business, which everybody's like, oh, they're strong in enterprise. They'll be strong in enterprise forever and ever. I feel like there's a glass jaw there. It looks strong, but it could plummet really fast. And I know that enterprise, I'm going to stop talking in a second. I know that enterprise has a longer cycle for choosing the products that they use, but I mean, the cycle is going to hit sometime. And I mean, once they start slipping and big, big companies start moving away en masse, there's no way for them to claw back in. Okay. You stop talking now? I have stopped talking now. We need to remember Jim Bowsilly and when he left, because that was months and months and months ago. Now, anything RIM does now is just going to be overdue and too late. Whatever decision, solution that the company attempts to make is going to seem like it's too late. Jim Bowsilly wanted to do this kind of thing, start distributing RIM's software services a lot more broadly, de-emphasize the hardware side of things, maybe split it into two, which is the rumor now that there'll be a hardware section and there'll be services and enterprise and all of that stuff separately. He wanted to do that probably a year ago and longer than that. It was late last year that him and Michael Azarias left their co-CEO positions, I think. This idea, as I was saying, the conflict has been in the works for a long time, but I also feel like the whole discussion has a lot less to do with the consumer facing aspect of the business and more to do with just basic trying to appease stockholders and shareholders and prospective investors, let's say, because the hardware side of things is not the growth area of RIM's business at all. If you can split that off and just give people proposition where, oh, look, we have profits and they are actually growing, maybe you can stop the hemorrhaging of your overall share price, because RIM and Nokia have been just going downhill for the past year, year and a half. It's been nuts for those guys. It could just be a financial markets operation rather than a fundamental change in how the company operates. Right. No, I could see that. I have a hard time believing that once you make a change like that, it seems like it's a sign that that slide isn't going to stop. Even the success stories that Chris has pointed out, let's take IBM as the example. It's not like things were going terribly for them when they split off ThinkPad to Solitil and Lenovo. Where's a company that was on a downslide and then split up into two separate divisions and all of a sudden things were like, hey, back up, everything's awesome. I can't think of any. That's a good point. I can't think of one off the top of my head either. That's fair. Here's the other point that I would make, which is what is the other alternative? What could RIM do that would instead guarantee their continued success or would put them back in the driver's seat? Get it by a time machine. That's their best solution right now. They should invest in time travel technology. Even if BlackBerry 10 is perfect, even if it's the best thing that we've ever seen and it just blows minds throughout the audience wherever they introduce this product, which it may very well be. We saw some pretty cool things at BlackBerry World. But assuming it's spot on perfect, they still have this huge, huge uphill battle around the ecosystem, around being carriers on board, and around convincing consumers that they want one of these devices instead of an Android device or an iPhone, which I don't know how they're going to do that. Honestly, Chris, I think if RIM nails BlackBerry 10, that is its sole chance of survival. I'm actually more positive because brand loyalty takes a long time to wither away with people. I think a lot of people who have been loyal to BlackBerry and potentially moved on to Android devices, like I know Joanna Stern did that where she eventually finally gave up on the BlackBerry keyboard, gave up on BBM and got herself a Droid of Verizon. I think then she went back to BlackBerry again. But in any case, those guys would be willing to give RIM another chance if it really, really nails the software. So there's like the twinkling tiniest little spark of hope for RIM, but it needs to execute perfectly, which it hasn't done for years and years. And this is why we're so downbeat on the company's future. It would need to change completely, way down its route. I don't know how you do. Maybe you do that with one person, one small team, massive big company like that. I don't know how you're able to achieve that sort of change. I think that also kind of tells you that we're nearing the end of the show because we're really taking it way down. That's how we do it. That's how we roll. Yeah, we always end on a depressing note. That's our signature. Well guys, if you'd like to email us, you can. We are at mobile show at the verge.com. We're also on Twitter. I'm at back lawn. Vlad's at Vlad Savov. Chris is at ZPower and we are all at verge and we'll be back next week with another positive upbeat verge bubble show. Thanks guys. Bye guys.