 Greetings, mobile accomplishers. Welcome to the Verge Mobile Show. This is episode number 71 for the week of December 2nd, 2013. I am Dieter Bohm. I am Vlad Sevov, and I'm delighted to know that we are now a septuagenarian show. I'm Dan Seifer, and I don't have a witty comment to add. And Chris Ziegler is here. At least his thumbnail is here with us, but Chris Ziegler is coming to us from Chicago, where... Okay. So we have a running schtick on the show where we troll Chris by making fun of the city of Chicago. The city of Chicago, if we tell the truth, is a beautiful city that I love, that we all like to go to when we have the chance. There's lots of... They make great tomato casserole. Yeah, they make... See? He was trying to be nice, and he just went straight for it. I've been talking this entire time, and apparently I was on mute. I would just... Rewind, rewind, rewind. I'm Chris Ziegler. Yes! Yeah, I'm just going to go... You've got that whole thing where I was going to say that the one problem with Chicago is apparently it doesn't have internet. How many different ways have you tried to get online in the past week, Chris? It's kind of like I'm living... No, not kind of like. I'm literally living in a post-apocalyptic future where the only currency that human beings still have is their connectivity. And so you're trading MiFis for food or water, clean water, not still water that's going to make you sick, or a fire if you're cold, that kind of stuff. That's where I'm at with my life right now. I have three MiFis, each of which... Well, no. I don't even have three MiFis. I have two phones and one MiFi on three different carriers that all get one bar of signal, and they're all finicky. Sometimes they like to work, sometimes they don't, depending on their mood. So I can go for a little while on one, and then it craps out, and then I have to switch to another, and that's what I've been doing for the past four days. And I'm about ready to just say, never mind, and move to Costa Rica and disconnect from the internet entirely and disappear off the face of the planet. So here's the thing that I don't understand is, from what I can tell from the maps you've shown me, the entire city of Chicago has no Comcast internet service and hasn't since Friday. I mean, I'm sure that's not actually the case, but that seems to be the case that you're thinking, and in any other modern city on the entire planet, that would not stand. There would be riots on the streets, but apparently in Chicago, it's like, meh, no internet, whatever. Well, so I went to Starbucks both yesterday and today to try to get some work done, because at least I get signal there from my hotspot, and the Wi-Fi situation there is kind of the most depressing thing ever, because you get the Starbucks connection screen, and then you accept their terms and conditions, and then it just, no matter what site you go to, it goes to the same terms and conditions page. So it's like you're just permanently looking at a paywall. Not a paywall, because it's free, but it's the worst possible, it's like if you were using the internet in hell, and you just had to keep accepting terms and conditions to get on hell's Wi-Fi, that's kind of where I was. So yeah, everything about my life has kind of been terrible as a result of Comcast for the past four days. And the word on the street, I've been doing a lot of Twitter searches about this, obviously, as you can probably imagine. The word on the street is that a fiber cable somewhere in Indiana may have been cut by a construction crew on Saturday, which somehow took out all of Indiana and Illinois, which leads me to the obvious question, why is Comcast's infrastructure such that a single cable cut takes down two states? Which leads me to the next question of why are you at all surprised? Yeah, yeah, fair enough. But then I also, I talked to a Comcast person earlier today who I think heard my rant, and she said that there is a problem with my node, whatever that means. Wow. I have absolutely no idea what that means. That almost sounds like a diss or a threat, I don't really know. But so anyway, this is the hell I've been living since Saturday. It's ongoing, that's why you can't see my beautiful face right now, and hopefully it'll be resolved this week. Well, I think maybe the node she's speaking about is, I'm not really sure how Comcast does it, but when you have fiber to the cabinet, the cabinet is usually the node where the fiber ends up and then the copper starts coming out. And also, if I can just hijack or jump on Chris's tale of woe, well, my video is gone, which is perfectly fitting. But yeah, I've had wireless issues and issues with my ISP the whole weekend and Monday night as well, and the thing that actually frustrates me, and I don't think it's terribly unusual, is how many Wi-Fi networks I can actually pick up in my home, and there's usually a solid dozen of all my neighbors. But the thing is, in spite of the fact that some of us share a front door in the building and all of us share a street, we don't know each other, and if we don't know each other, we're not exactly going to trust each other with sharing Wi-Fi passwords. So when my connection cuts out, I need to go out and hit the library or hit a coffee shop or whatever to continue working, whereas if we were actually social beings, as opposed to being social and things like Twitter, we could save ourselves a lot of hassle. But I just, you know. I don't think that's true, Vlad, because I mean, if I had access to my neighbor's Wi-Fi, that's where I'd download all my illegal, you know, all my pirated stuff, you know? And then all that gets recorded in the data. Okay, so the downfall of society is basically your fault, Chris. I think the minor inconvenience of once in a while having to go to a coffee shop is much less than the major inconvenience of having to get to know your neighbors. It's a good point. Touche. Or, you know, you could just pay for internet that works and not have it fail. Comcast has actually been super reliable for me in the past, and then over the course of the last four months or so, the frequency of outages has become greater and greater and greater, and this is kind of the icing on the cake. So we'll see. They're supposed to call me today to discuss my woe. They haven't yet. We'll see if it happens. But then again, I can't get a phone call because I rely on a micro cell, which relies on the internet. So we're back to square one. And that's it from the Verge broadband report. Look, man, I don't know. I have no sympathy for any of you because I have files, and when it fails, I'll demand sympathy from you. But until then, you're on your own. Is Hangouts acting differently now? What thing shows on the screen is completely random? Hangouts is different every single week, so I don't even know if I can answer that question. It's like, I don't know. All of you guys look like really beautiful, pulsing circles. It's kind of like hypnotic. You're all pulsing circles for me. Yeah, well, when I talk, your circle stays on the screen because that's what the people want to see. The people just want to see Chris Ziegler, and I don't blame them. I don't blame them either. Yeah. Actually, what the people want to—no, this is a terrible transition. I'm doing it anyway. I'm powering through. What the people want to see is how Virtu makes its ridiculously, insanely expensive phones, and Vlad went to the factory. Give us the—set the scene. Where is this place? What's going on here? Well, set the scene. First of all, I've got to say, the guys at Virtu were extremely accommodating, extremely nice, and I have to acknowledge that. For a luxury company, they were just so modest and sweet. It was really surprising. Usually you kind of expect—and to be honest, I've been in Virtu stores, and the vibe you get in those places is not one of, welcome, everybody. We're nice to you. If you don't look like you have millions of dollars in the bank, they're not particularly interested because they know they're not going to sell you anything, but anyhow. So the Virtu HQ, this is a place on the outskirts of London near a place called Fleet. The specific location is called Church Crookham, which is just a really amusing name, and also worth mentioning, the Virtu chief designer is called Hutch Hutchinson, which I would just love to be able to put that on a business card. My name is Hutch Hutchinson. I'm the chief designer of Virtu, and I work at Church Crookham, and I'm starring in the next Bond movie. That is the most British thing I've ever heard. But yeah, well, what are the important things about it? First of all, this is where every Virtu phone has been made from the beginning. So it's one pretty large building, but it contains basically the entire Virtu operation. They have another facility still in the UK which handles repairs, but this is where every phone is manufactured. And it has an atrium on the inside, high ceilings. It's kind of like, it's a mix between a manufacturing spot, a factory, and just a classy modern office. It's just, what really surprised me about it is the scale, is how small it is and how compact the whole thing is. So basically you walk in, and on the right side there's the design team, the admin team, et cetera, et cetera, and on the left side there's the guys assembling the phones. And while you're standing at reception, you can literally see through some darkened glass people putting together the $10,000 phones, which is kind of brilliant. I have a question for you, Vlad. You keep saying that they're assembling the phones. So is this like the same kind of thing as Motorola's factory in Texas where all the parts are essentially made in Asia, shipped there, and then people hand assemble the phones? Or are there actual part manufacturing going on here? Oh, it's very different. It's very different from the Moto operation. There's a lot of custom made parts for every handset. So a great example was the battery cover of the signature phone, which is $10,000 and above. On the inside of it, they have this pattern. It's an angular pattern, but the thing is, it's made out of metal. And we're talking about the inside of a freaking battery cover, okay? This is the metric opposite of Samsung's plasticky thin cover. On the inside, this pattern is very geometric, it's very pretty, but it's made in metal, and it's done in such a refined fashion that when you actually touch it, there is no texture to the pattern. So the amount of precision that's required in this is crazy. The guy who explained it to me, he made the sound of kissing. He's like, we just make it kiss the surface and then we pull it back, right? And I'm like, I believe that. I believe that you're like almost kissing the thing. They're really passionate about making their phones as well. People invest their pride in it. But the thing he told me is that 15% of those parts get thrown away because they're imperfect. And this is the thing that sits next to the battery, the thing that you pretty much never see. So what you're telling me is that there's good money to be made in standing by Virtu's dumpster, collecting discarded parts and making secondhand Virtus that are almost as good. If you could cobble together the discarded sapphire crystals and things like that and throw together a Virtu lookalike, you could probably get 500 bucks for it. The cityscape like renowned British sculptor Richard Wilson did. Yes, so Virtu has a plan. Even the discarded parts, probably because it's so freaking expensive, it's turned them into a kind of a scale model of a futuristic city which is, I don't know, two square meters. It's a really nice thing. I didn't understand it because it was like usually it's right next to their reception area and usually when companies do that, it's the wide facilities or like a map or something related to the company. But this was just having fun with essentially rejected parts, antennas, display panels, etc. etc. and it's just made to be futuristic. And they are going to make money out of it because they're going to auction it off for charity. So they have a plan for the rejected parts even though Chris' strategy, always thinking with his business mind, isn't a terrible one to be honest. So here's the thing that I don't get. Like when I imagine Virtu, I imagine that they're like pumping out like five phones a week and they're just selling them for ridiculous amounts of money. But looking through your pictures here, they're making a ton of these things relative to what I imagined. Do you have any idea how many phones are kicking out a day out of this place? It seems like they're working on a whole bunch at a time and there's a whole lot more people. They're putting like, I don't know, five jewelers in a room hand crafting phones one by one. Like an order comes in and they're like, alright Jim, you go do it. I'm trying to think what the market is for $10,000 phones and apparently it's way bigger than I expected. The market is Gwyneth Paltrow. She is a known Virtu fanatic. Okay. They're making all of them for her? Yes. And what's his name from Coldplay, her husband? Well, the dude from Coldplay. The dude. I'm sure people will find him. To answer Dieter's question, how many phones are they shipping out is exactly what they wouldn't tell me. But from my observations, I walk through the entire process from start to finish and packing and putting it in boxes and getting them ready to ship. And there was always a phone in progress. So to Dieter's point, they are doing a higher volume than most of us probably expect. In total though, since its beginning, Virtu has shipped roughly 350,000 phones. And I can imagine they've started ramping up more recently and the numbers are growing. And particularly now that they're doing Android phones and touch screens and Google Play Store access and all of these more contemporary features, you can see a whole new audience opening up to their devices. But actually, to Dan's point, you know, Dan said, hey Jim, we've got an order, pick it up. That is actually very close to what Virtu is doing. Because one person is responsible for each handset and at the end when the handset is completed, there's a laser engraving somewhere on it with that person's signature. Now that doesn't mean that they make every single part because they do essentially serialize some of the tasks. So some of the polishing, I think some guys are just doing polishing and some guys are just doing whatever which might require more expertise. But generally speaking, one person is assembling the components of the motherboard, screwing that down into the case, polishing it, testing it, et cetera, et cetera. And Virtu have actually had customers call in and say, I would like Wendy, and there is a lady called Wendy Bevan who's been with Virtu from the beginning, I would like Wendy to put together my next phone. And then the Wendy in question was apparently in the brink of tears because she was really humbled by that. Wow. Does she get a tip? I don't know about that. And Chris, stop thinking about money, man. Come on. I don't know, Vlad, did you bring the Blackberry Pananana with you? I did! And did you compare it to the Virtus and which one is more luxurious? Very good question there. Fantastic. I mean, the first thing I had to do was present Virtu's chief of design with a Blackberry Pananana 999A2 and ask him what he thinks of it. And actually he was more positive on it than I thought. I mean, he called it incredible effort. I don't think that was pure diplomacy. He was like, I think it's honest design because it's honest in terms of what it wants to be and what it wants to present and project to people. It's quite a clean design. Of course, he's a designer, he's not talking about the software, which obviously would be a whole other bag of hurt. But yeah, I compared the two, there's the Virtu Constellation, which is the most affordable handset you can get. You're saying affordable very loosely. Yeah. It's not for like 5,000 euro or whatever it is. Oh, just that? I'll take two. Yeah. I mean, if you get a nice tax break, you probably cover that. But that's if you, Vlad, to be clear, that's if you get it without any options, right? Like you can get them in gold, you can get them with diamonds or whatever you want. That's right. I would like to point out, somebody else covered my article with the visit to Virtu and he said that they make phones up to $15,000 in price. And that is not correct. $15,000 is where the top end Virtu begins. There are parts and components that you can put on in customizations and laser engravings and I mean, you can basically quote them and say, I want you to draw the Mona Lisa in diamonds on the side of this phone and they will do it. Because they have the skills, they have the expertise and they have the diamonds. I hate to say this. I'm actually, I'm on Virtu's site right now. The signature in black stainless with white ceramic inserts is absolutely gorgeous. It's a really beautiful phone. I would rock that. With Android 4.0 and a 5 year old processor. So here's the thing. The signature is that's $340 right? We do need to point out that I understand spending, okay I don't really, but I can live in a world where I understand spending tens of thousands of dollars on jewelry. On something precious that I will have with me or that I will keep in my house that is beautiful and expensive and unique and amazing. The problem that I have with Virtu is that it's tied to a thing, a computer that is essentially not going to be timeless. It is going to get old and break down and at that point, like what do you do with the rest of it? Well, I think here's my theory and Vlad maybe you can expand on this, but my theory with Virtu has always been that the kinds of people that buy these phones are the kinds of people who don't want to deal with their phone, they just want to press the concierge button on the side and talk to someone who makes magic happen at any cost. And if you look at the signature series in particular, if you look at, you know it's been around for a long time and if you look at a signature from say 2005, 2006, it looks basically the same as a signature from 2013. So they've done a good job of making at least that line in their design DNA kind of timeless. I'm sure the innards have changed, I'm sure it's 3G or maybe even LTE now whereas it used to be Edge, but the appearance of the phone is the same and frankly for what people are doing with these phones which is pressing the concierge button, a 2005 Edge signature works just fine. I'm curious Vlad, did you ask about the concierge service and how much it's used by Virtu owners? I did, I did and they have metrics which they get to share, but they say it gets a lot of use. But what I noticed was that the latest Android phones, the cheaper ones, aren't getting as much use as signature ones, but that basically goes to Chris' point. Also Dan, I saw you grinning when Chris said maybe it has LTE and you're like no it doesn't. That is exactly the case. There is no LTE here. Oh come on. And I mean seriously, the signature, again the most expensive phone is basically unchanged since it was introduced in 2008. The fact it runs Nokia Series 40 is just amazing to me. And the screen is probably like what? The same resolution as my Pebble? More or less, it's a color screen. It's color. You got that going on for you. I mean it's a 2006 or 2007 era Nokia with a fancy shell on it. That's what it is. Right, but you buy it for the fancy shell. Right. You buy it for the… and listen, the thing is I am really surprised by how candid Virtu were about their motivations as well. They weren't trying to spin a whole other story about giving people the best in technology and what not. They're not particularly interested in competing on specs. They want to have leadership, but their idea of leadership is we'll give you the customer service and the customer care. And frankly they do give you that because when you call up tech support with Virtu, you call the guys in that building. So when somebody picks up a tech support at Virtu, they can literally yell at a person who put together your phone. It can be like, you know what, Yuri from Moscow ordered Alpine leather and he did not get that. So anyone from Moscow knows about leather because he's Yuri from Moscow. And also to that point, the leather on the Virtu Constellation is a little bit rougher in texture, a little bit more sensual than the leather on the BlackGrey Porsche design. So if you're picking between the two, I would say Virtu has the better leather, but then it also costs twice as much. But then again if you're spending thousands upon thousands of whatever currency you choose on a phone, again I don't even think the considerations that Dieter presented are particularly important to these people. Like it's not really a case of I want to have like a family heirloom that I pass down to whatever. So it's just pure ostentation. Well it is, it is. And Virtu, the Virtu guy said to me, when you pull out the signature and you put that thing down on the table, that basically says to people, I'm the boss. So there isn't a question about who is the chief in whatever the hell is going on here. Well I was never in doubt that Gwyneth Paltrow is the boss. I mean if I sat down at a table with her. I thought it was Tony Danza. Yes, Tony Danza probably can't afford a Virtu unfortunately. Oh man, Danza burns. Wait a minute, hang on, isn't there some like back catalog for a global show where we made fun of Tony Danza? I seem to recall this happening. Poor Tony Danza. Talking about like back in the legit Panda days when that was a running joke. I feel like, poor Tony. Yeah I don't know, I mean I hate to, the standard joke about Virtu is oh my god why would anybody spend that much money on a phone, what idiots, it's going to be obsolete and this is just money and I want to look deeper than that at this. But at the end of the day, it's a lot of rich people things. It's very cool, very well made, very interesting, rich people things. It's just like Birkin bags and all those other things that are obscenely expensive and they become out of date in a season and they end up who knows where. It's the same thing. But if you buy a $50,000 watch, the $50,000 watch isn't like out of date and can't run its software and tell you the time in 10 years. That's what I'm saying. Not yet. Not until you have a smaller watch. I'm actually kind of surprised. Oh my god, Virtu watch. Maybe Virtu does have either a trade in program or an upgrade program where they can swap the guts out on the device. Well while we're bringing up watches and Virtu, there was a report recently that an ex-Virtu designer or current Virtu designer is working with MetaWatch on an upcoming smart watch. He is the guy who started up Virtu. He was head of design at Nokia. Yeah Frank Nuova was his name, right? Yeah. That was a dude. Yeah I mean it's, you know, I've said for a long time and I still will say, MetaWatch has exactly two problems that prevent it from being a much better solution than Pebble. One is the display is a sick, sick joke. And two, they have some work to do on design. I mean the frame actually is a pretty good looking model but the strata is really unattractive. And getting some serious design chops on board hopefully will do some good things for them. Well I think it would do… A screen that isn't a steaming pile of reflective garbage. Right. Having good design chops would do good things for this burgeoning smart watch industry as a whole, right? Right. I mean that's probably the biggest complaint levied against the Pebble, you know, aside from maybe it can be a bit of user interface issues. But most people complain that it just looks cheap and like a toy and they don't want to wear it because it doesn't match their suit or it just doesn't have the high end feel that even a watch of a comparable price offers. So if this does come through and actually happens and you know, Metawatch is able to release a watch that can match the craftsmanship that you get on a regular wristwatch, that would be very good for the wearable world. I thought you were about to say match the craftsmanship with the Pebble and I was going to reach through the microphone and punch you in the face. So listen guys, I just wanted to wrap up with just a couple of points. Yeah, enough. Wrap it. Very briefly, one of the things that really amused me and the thing that I couldn't photograph was the fact that they actually have essentially a bank vault at the back of the packaging facility. They wouldn't let you take a picture of the bank vault? No. Like there's going to be an Ocean's 15 style like George Clooney and Brad Pitt are going to come and steal all their phones? The door was wider than I don't know, my body. It was just massively wide door and then you've got steel bars and behind the steel bars. Speaking of ostentation for ostentation's sake, that's hilarious. Yeah, I guess that's fair, right? I mean if they're storing diamonds and gold and sapphires and all this other crap that they glue on there, I guess they need to keep it safe, right? Yeah, I mean Dan had to you know, class it up by saying they glue all that crap on but I mean those are expensive parts. Set aside the whole phone element of it, they work with some seriously expensive components and I mean it's like things like the alligator skin on the S40 handset that I had which I have to tell you is completely indistinguishable from anything else. It's just kind of like any other surface. There's nothing alligator about it but then again I haven't fondled too many alligators to tell you. It didn't try and bite you? No. I mean the phone almost did. It's so sharp and angular. I mean these phones are crazy. They're so macho. This is why I think Chris is in love with them because they're just completely, totally you know. So this is like the dream phone for the Droid set. I don't know about the Droid set. Like the ultra masculine, you know the whole Droid thing that Verizon's been doing for years with the ultra masculine angular edges. See now I'm getting this vision of a bird suit with a Droid notification on it and it's just no. That would be quite terrible. Oh there he goes. There goes Chicago. He gets Chicago'd. Chris just did the Chicago remix of himself. Wait you can't hear me? No there you're back. Okay I wanted to ask you what. You heard me but like. You heard me but like. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Okay so. I just want to ask you what? You were talking to us through a mouth harp. Which I don't know where you got a mouth harp. But I'm very impressed. But it was good. Is that another word for harmonica? No. I have no idea what a mouth harp is. Yeah. Well no. What's the thing called a little going doing doing. What's that thing called? It's called a mouth harp right? Yeah it could be. I'm going to have to wick from you in this switch room. Yeah I know. Okay yeah. So my question for Vlad was, is there a signature vertu ringtone or sound set? Oh, they have custom ringtones and notifications, yes. Do they have a composer who customizes ringtones for each client? It's just a ching ching sound, right? Every ringtone is just like ching ching ching ching ching ching. Just money cash register sounds. I'm not going to answer that. Vlad doesn't like talking about money. He does not. Actually it's called a view harp, which is really offensive, I'm guessing. But that's what Wikipedia has it as the main entry. A what harp? Just let it go. Should we talk about Yalla? Very final point. Very final point. I just wanted to say this. You don't get any more final points ever, I guess. Just kidding. Let's hear it. Exactly. Exactly the point about not talking about money. I in no way am going to seek to justify spending thousands upon thousands of whatever currency on the phone. I'm not trying to do that. But what I would say is having been through their factory and having seen the way that they work and having seen how long people have been working there and the fact that you can have a career as a phone maker, assembler, whatever, and you can feel proud about it and you can have job satisfaction and you can have customers reaching out and saying I like your work, etc. I feel like this is the way things should be done. As a customer, if I could afford a phone that expensive, I would spend the money on it because then I would feel me buying the phone isn't victimizing whatever person is making it. We keep making these complaints, working conditions at Foxconn, etc., etc., but then we keep buying the devices and there remains this disconnect. Come on. There's a middle ground here. Absolutely, I'm just saying that what I saw there is so much closer to what we expect and wish this industry to look like. Again, I'm not trying to justify the cost of these phones. There's a middle ground, but I think to Vlad's point, I think it goes beyond just making sure that people have good working conditions and a basic living wage. I think it has as much to do about supporting craftsmanship, which is something that is increasingly lost to robotics. It speaks to a simpler time, almost pre-industrial age where everything was made by professional craftsmen. That's kind of cool too. You can understand when you have these extremely highly trained jewel makers working on these devices, that's in part why it costs so much to make them. Obviously, you have the cost of the raw materials, which in some cases are very expensive, but then you're paying people, I'm sure very, very good money to do extremely high quality work. Man, I blame the Steam Engine for all this. I think we're better before we automated things. I strongly agree. What I'm saying is that when you think that you have something cheap... The price is paid somewhere. It might be cheap to you, but then somebody somewhere is paying the price. I have no way to transition from that to Jala, but I think we should talk about Jala briefly. The transition is really obvious. They're both former Nokia, and they have relationships with Nokia. They're both ex-Nokia. Well Virtu is ex-Nokia. Jala is Nokia expats. They both share the Nokia germ. You had to spend some time with Sailfish and their actual shipping phone, right Vlad? I did. What's your verdict? The thing that I discovered is that the Nokia fanboys do alive and well. He just found a new outlet in Jala. This is worse than Nokia or Nokia. Honestly, I asked him, and I was going to say the Swedish, the Finnish pronunciation is Jola. They are tolerant of people calling it Jola if it's more convenient or comfortable for them. There you go, you already have a fragmentation issue with this platform, so get an arrival. But on the software side, it's a continuation of what we saw with the Nokia N9. It's the MeeGo project that Nokia abandoned, but at the same time, it isn't building on the Nokia N9 or the Hamilton interface. They've essentially started from scratch and done their own new spin on a gesture interface with a lot of swipes left and right, a lot of coming in from the edge, top, bottom, left, right. They all do different things. My issue with it is that the interface is just highly intuitive, and it's also not visible. So they've taken away all the chrome of the interface, left you to guess what it is. You need to memorize these gestures. It's not intuitive. It's crashy, and there's no app library. So I'm wondering… They can have NoLTE. You get a mulligan on that one. Other than the dream of MeeGo and the dream that there'll be somebody else that can actually compete in the smartphone world, maybe by getting Android apps on there somehow, so that they've got some kind of parity, I'm at a loss to know why I should still be excited about this. I think of it as a possibility. Now that it's becoming a reality, the reality seems like they didn't finish the work to make it to get there. There's just a lot of stuff that feels… Maybe I hate everything today. It's a theme. And so I'm just continuing that theme of anger and frustration. Well, you're right, though. You're right. It isn't finished. The Salesforce OS is, in official terms, is still in beta. The thing after alpha, whatever. No, it's good. It's been a long time since we've heard you say beta. It's nice to hear. Beta. All right. So YOLO is in beta. So Salesforce OS is in that state. The LTE support is software issue, which is going to rectify. It has the LTE hardware. It has Bluetooth 4.0. It has NFC. It has decent aspects. In terms of the actual physical design, it's blocky and chunky because they have that other half second part, which attaches to the back of the phone, and that can include upgrades. So one of the ideas was maybe if you're into physical keyboards, you can buy an other half which adds physical keyboard to your phone. So there's a bit of modularity going on there. But none of that, as you guys are saying, is available today. So again, we're kind of looking at quite a bit of potential, and essentially it needs to be driven by the investment of enthusiastic supporters, which is fine. I mean, I can't think of a single person who's enrouting for YOLO to do well because it's a small startup company. They invested their money, their effort, their passion, their pride, et cetera, into it. And they've had a successful launch. I think they've had over a million euros sales since they started shipping the devices out. So they're doing decently well. And the one reason for optimism is actually that they're still such a tiny, tiny company with small expenses, and they're making a profit on a per device basis. As a company, they're obviously not making a profit yet. But because they don't have such a vast cost base the way that Nokia did, they can potentially afford to just sell a few devices, work quickly on the software, keep iterating, keep giving people more, and then survive long enough to have a second generation which will be refined and improved. It's the same problem as always though, where you have all these guys at the tail end fighting for table scraps, right? You have the Ubuntu phone, which is coming. And you can obviously see how this device would go kind of head to head for the same hearts and minds. Well, I think the Ubuntu phone is a great example of Vlad had mentioned that it's going to survive on the interest of these enthusiasts who are willing to plunk down 600 bucks for an unknown. The Ubuntu phone didn't get enough of those enthusiasts to make its goal by a long shot. Yeah, but I mean, Mark Shuttleworth is a billionaire. So if the dude wants to make an Ubuntu phone, he'll make an Ubuntu phone. I think that the crowdfunding campaign, as is increasingly the case with the crowdfunding campaigns now, was really just a publicity stunt to drum up interest in the phone. And he succeeded. He got a lot of publicity for that device. And now he can take it back to the drawing board and decide what he wants to do with it. I mean, money is not a problem for the guy. I'm not going to pitch in. You're talking about money again. I'm keeping quiet. I thought that you were supposed to be... Okay. I'm the... So I really like the Ubuntu phone. I'm not going to pitch in. I'm not going to pitch in. I'm not going to pitch in. I'm not going to pitch in. I'm not going to pitch in. I'm not going to pitch in. I'm not going to pitch in. So I really wanted the JolliPhone. I guess I was rooting for it. I didn't put down my own money. I didn't help them out. But I was really hoping that it would be a better execution than I guess we've seen so far. And maybe, as Vlad says, it's a beta. So maybe there's room for improvement that we'll see. Obviously, there's room for improvement. Maybe we'll see them actually take action on that room for improvement. But they've got a very, very uphill climb as far as I can tell. Yeah, I mean, the thing that I want is for the interface and the thinking of the way a smartphone should act and behave and how you interact with the stuff that a smartphone does would be radically different enough for me to go like, I want this to succeed. This is so much better than what's out there. And that's like when I saw the early stuff, I'm like, they are thinking differently. They are thinking better about how to change the way we manage stuff on these little screens. And I want them to finish that. And that's the thing that I wish they had done was finish that. And maybe they still can because it's still in beta. Well, I'm kind of hesitant to say this because I'll probably endanger my own life. But given that I'm not in Finland, I'll take the risk. I have to say, the BlackBerry 10 interface actually makes so much more sense to me than the Yolo one. It has smoother animations. It's so much more, okay, you still have to figure it out. But they do give you a really neat tutorial on the BlackBerry. And you swipe up from the bottom to dismiss the app, get back to multitasking. You swipe down for notifications or settings rather. And then all your notifications are in the hub. And then all your apps are on the right side. That's it. I'm done. I'm ready to use the phone. Whereas with the Yolo, you do a whole heap of trial and error. It just takes way too long. I don't think I or anybody else living in 2013 has the patience to sit and study and learn a new phone precisely because the point that Dieter was also making is that by the time you've gone and learned the language of this new interface, there's something else on the horizon. Right, well, on this company's debt, by the time you figure it out. Unfortunately. Well, I mean, yeah. Are you talking about Palm here, Dieter? I am actually. Are you getting into painful memories again? I'm just channeling all my rage about web OS, as that's all I ever do. Oh, man. That car UI, I want it back. Speaking of unintuitive, hard to understand interfaces, VSCO Cam is available for Android. Oh, burn. Come on. That's not fair. Totally fair. That is not fair. Totally fair. Tell me what M does in VSCO Cam. Tell me what the little flag button does. Tell me when I take a picture. It flags your image. Yeah, but except it doesn't actually appear for like 10 seconds on the little thing, the little corner thing. Tell me when I take a picture inside VSCO Cam where it's backed up to. Yeah, Josh couldn't even figure that out. He tweeted about it today. So okay, so VSCO Cam. No, no. Hang on. I want you to tell me. It's not backed up. Tell me what C1 does. That's one of the filters. Tell me which one. What does it do? It's if you tap it and then you tap it again, you can see the name of it and then you have a slider for how strong you... By the time I've tapped it, it's already applied a filter. You can go back. It's non-destructive. Why don't you just tell me the name of the filter? Make the thumbnail a little bit bigger and I can see. It's called C1. You're turning, you're toggling C1 on and off. I'm not going to... What's the difference between M3 and M5? I'm not going to defend the interface because I don't think the interface is perfect. I think it's very minimalist and maybe it's too minimalist for people like Dieter. But at the end of the day, when you're talking about a photo processing app, all that really matters to me is the output that it produces and VSCO Cam produces some really, really impressive pictures from Android phones, which is not something that we ever say. So I'm really excited about it. I think it does a really great output on the iPhone and I've been using it on Android phones for a couple of weeks because I was beta testing it and it does really well there as well. So as a photographer, I'm really excited. Maybe it's a little too dense for the average user. Not offending you at all, Dieter. That was not a comment at you at all and I'm sure that I agree that it's annoying that the photos don't save directly to your gallery and aren't automatically backed up and there's definite room for improvement with the interface. But as far as the photo processing goes, I think it's great. I'm excited for the photo processing. I'm excited that on my Nexus 5, when I hit the shutter button in VSCO Cam, it takes a picture within a second or less, whereas in the default camera app, it takes about four seconds lately. So okay, that's an exaggeration. It's like two and a half, but still. But Dieter, to your point about give me a larger thumbnail on the filter, etc., etc., that just sounds like somebody who says, I can't order in a restaurant unless the menu is laminated paper with pictures of every single meal. Look, I want to know what a blogger does. I think that VSCO Cam has a learning curve. That's totally unfair. I think there's a definite learning curve. Once you've used it… There's a learning curve. What's frustrating with the learning curve is it's unnecessary. The interface when you're looking at your different filters, there's a ton of unused space there. You're already having to scroll left and right. Just like tell me what this button is going to do when I tap on it besides giving me a color, a letter, and a number. If you're already giving me a color, a letter, and a number, is there some system why one thing is labeled B and one thing is labeled P? I don't know. I bet there is. Just like if you're going to put that much work into it… Are you complaining about the iPhone version here? The iPhone version is exactly the same as the Android version. Their UI is exactly the same. A lot of people complain that it doesn't adhere to… I guess Android users are complaining that it doesn't adhere to Android standards, but the iOS version doesn't adhere to iOS standards. I don't care about adhering to… Their own interface for it. I guess the only reason I'm being so vehement about it is because I've been waiting for something like this. I mean, Snapseed is fine, but I want better photo tools on Android. I want photography better on Android. There's a whole lot of pent-up desire. For some reason, I decided to rage on VSCO Cam today, and I'm going to continue. Dan's right. It does take really good pictures. I wish that I could make it my main camera, but I totally can't because I need to have my pictures here in the cloud. It's great for composing shots, but it can't become my main camera app. It's also good for editing a photo after. If you take a whole bunch of photos and then you've got time later on, you import them into the app, and you can process them and get all the quality and the effects and all that fun stuff. Did you guys ever use… The first computer that you used, what OS did it run on? I had a… Did you ever use DOS? I mean, I had a PC Junior, so… Before DOS. So the best word processor of all time, bar none, is WordPerfect 5.1 because it was wicked fast. Nothing could slow it down. No matter what you did, it was instantaneous. But everything had to work via function keys, and so you had this plastic thing you kept in your keyboard with different color codes telling you what all the functions did. So you could hit Control-F5 to do one thing or F5 to do another thing. I'm just going to get one of those stickers laminated and pasted to the back of my phone so I can reference it when I want to edit photos in Viscocam. That's the plan. And then I'll be super happy. I mean, to be fair, the little thumbnails at the bottom that have the P4 and the C1 and the M5 and so, they have little previews of what the filter is going to kind of do. I'm using a Nexus 5. I do not have a small screen, and come on. Like, come on. Just saying. It doesn't… But Dan, you want to be fair, whereas Dieter is grinning and trolling so hard. The truth is always in the middle. My thing for today is… I'm just going to… Until Viscocam copies WebOS's card interface, I will never use it. You know what? It could copy WebOS's awesome Edoff cameras and awesome GeekBank too. You really, really want to go there. Because we all know how great the Pre's camera was. Oh, it was so bad. Did you ever use the Pixies camera? Okay, we can't talk about… We can't go down this path. I don't know. Speaking of failure, Motorola doesn't know how to make a website that runs. God, this is so embarrassing. It's like… Their Cyber Monday sale for the Moto X was a complete and utter debacle. They sold no phones because they couldn't… Well, they sold the developer edition, but they sold none of the Moto Maker customized phones. Which is just like, Cyber Monday is the biggest online shopping day of the year. You are owned by what is arguably the biggest internet company in the world, and you can't get this to work. I just don't understand how this fell apart so hardly. I bet you that the people who ran the Google Play device sales for the Nexus 4 last year got put in charge of what they did this year. And that's what happened. I was just getting deja vu for that exact conversation around the Nexus 4 where Dan was raging about Google being the biggest web company and not being able to handle a few orders. No, I know this is an ongoing problem that Google has had. They didn't have any problems with the Nexus 5, and orders seemed to be… The store stayed up, orders going through, it handled whatever demand was there. But I just can't see how this went so wrong for them on what is the biggest shopping day of the year for the internet. And I can't imagine the demand was really that high. Because as reports have shown, nobody was buying the Moto X before. Most people don't buy phones off of contract. It was an off contract promotion to give you a really good price on the phone, which is without a doubt, I'm not arguing that at all, but it's still a lot more than you would pay if you bought a phone on contract in a carrier store like most people actually do. So I'm trying to figure out where all this demand and where all this traffic came from that actually kept the site down all day. And I don't know if it was really traffic or demand or if it was some other factor. People don't realize that I was trolling Viscocam. That was all shtick. I got a couple tweets at me there, angry at me. Okay, whatever. We'll let that go. Well, actually, on the point about Viscocam, that is the most interesting arrival on Android in terms of software for a long time for me. To me, I don't feel like Android has had an app where it's fallen behind iOS, even though I have to mention Badland just came to Android over the weekend. Oh, God, it's so awesome. And I somehow hadn't played it on iOS before. Yeah, me either. And I played that thing on Android and it made me smile. And that just stood out to me because games don't do that anymore. What's funny about Badland is that also last week or the week before, or very recently, another high profile iOS game finally came to Android in the form of Ridiculous Fishing. But the Android version was such a poor port initially. They've updated it since its launch, but at launch, it was really slow and choppy. It made my phone turn like 1,000 degrees and it just nuked my battery. So it was a really bad experience. So then when Badland came and I downloaded that and was playing that, I was just so surprised and relieved at how well it actually ran on Android. It's just as good as it does on iOS. It's beautiful. It's a wonderful thing. But when you have all of these frustrations, this frequently happens where games or apps get ported from iOS to Android, they frequently stink on Android. I thought Eric Schmidt told us that people are going to develop for Android first. I thought that was we were going to live in that world. Eric Schmidt says a lot of things. I'm sure some people do. It might not be- Stuff Schmidt says. You might not be the premier apps out there, but people who-I think Android now has a dedicated following and a dedicated user base, which as I've been saying recently, includes me now. I am attached to the Gmail app on Android. I literally-if I have too many emails to filter through, I might step away from the computer and go and do it on my phone because it's nicer to swipe things away. Particularly if you have spam email and you want to have a physical gesture to go with your disgust. It's so nice to just swipe to delete. It's like, screw you, man. I'm not interested. Also, great- There should be a thing where if you swipe with your middle finger, it mutes instead of just archives. I like that. You can use the touch sensitivity, all those finger-print sensors and whatever. Top tip. If you have media alerts in the headline of an email, trust me, you don't need to be alerted. It's not that important. Yeah. Oh, speaking of Motorola, Aaron interviewed-or interviewed- Well, I just want to say before we get to that, that Motorola is going to try again tomorrow and next- Cyber Wednesday? So they're going to offer the same deal again. So hopefully they're able to get their stuff sorted out and working. The deal, when it goes live again, just go to www.motorola.com. That might not be the exact address. You should probably look it up before you try. Anyway, yeah, the Moto G. Not bad. Not a bad phone. Not bad at all. You know what's funny is that normally we would say in a situation like this, it's not a bad phone. It's not a bad for a $200 phone or $180 phone, but this is just not a bad phone, period. Well, I mean, the camera is pretty terrible. Right, but so is the Moto X's camera. It's definitely not a bad phone for the price, and it's not the worst. This is way better than, say, the HTC First, right? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, and it's way better than the Galaxy S4 Mini and the Galaxy S3 Mini and all these other phones that occupy this mid-range garbage level sphere. It's like... Our esteemed producer, by the way, Evan Rogers, who you got to watch on the mobile show last week, as soon as I mentioned the HTC First, he literally just like thumped his chest, kissed his fingers, and pointed at this guy. That just happened. I didn't even know. So much potential. Yeah. Is this really the mid-range that we're talking about here? I mean, the Moto G is so cheaply priced. It's sold below the low end, right? If you're comparing it to like priced phones here in the US, it's sold at like the lowest of the low end, but it is comparable with a mid-range phone, right? So that's what makes it so interesting, so appealing, and kind of frankly so surprising. So good on them. I mean, to me, the biggest challenge to newcomers like Yola is their pricing, their phones, let's assume it's a reasonable number, right? For the company to have some success, have some chance of survival in the future, but they're facing a market where you have the Moto G, which costs so much less than we're used to paying for the amount of stuff that it gives you, and the Nexus 5. So to me, it's like the Moto G owns the low end, the Nexus 5 owns the mid-end, and then everybody can have the big scuffle with the high end, but it's like where's the room for a newcomer to step in and compete? It's hard to say. I mean, Motorola says that at the pricing that the Moto G is at, they are still making a profit on each phone, assuming they sell them. So how a small company like Yola could make the same kind of profit margins, it's really hard to fathom that. Yeah, I mean, the Moto G, it's not just cheap in the US, it's cheap everywhere. It's a play to be a global phone, to be globally available, and I think that's the point with it. The absence of OTE, still, it's so sad. I have to say, if I was in Bulgaria and saying, we don't have OTE, so that's cool, that would be kind of predictable. But I'm in London, and the case is, for most carriers and most people here, not having OTE is not a problem, because you don't have a network that you'd be missing out on. So there are still plenty of spaces and places that lag on the OTE availability where the Moto G could be quite an ideal phone. I mean, even if you get the HTC One, which is really nicely designed and all of that, you still get kind of a chromy camera. So why not save yourself the money, get a Moto G, and then, gosh, I don't know, do something nice with your family. Take a boat ride. One last thing to talk about, sort of a bad news, and then good news saying bad news, Cyanogen Mod pulled from the Play Store. I honestly am a little bit surprised that the move against Cyanogen Mod was pulling their installer from the Google Play Store, well, their how-to installer thing, whatever you want to call it, from the Google Play Store because it encouraged people to avoid warranties. That seems like a really, I don't know, it seems like kind of a cheap move from Google. If you're going to go after Cyanogen Mod, then go after people distributing Google apps and Google code. Don't go after an app that you're not quite sure what they're asking users to do in your store. It feels like instead of having the fight that they ought to have and actually saying what it is Google apps are and what it is Android is and what it is exactly their relationship to Android hacking is and Android openness is, they're doing this like, yeah, keep doing what you're doing but make sure you do it over there in the shadows so you're out of the store but we're not going to address this other stuff. That just feels a little chicken. I don't know. Dan is making fun of me right now in some chat room right now. I can hear him typing. Oh, no, I apologize. I was completely distracted by your chat room. Oh, okay. I'm actually waiting for the good news. Hit me with the good news. Oh, the good news? The good news is that the mad geniuses at XDA, a whole crew of them together have ported and installed mostly, well, okay, kind of successfully KitKat on the HD2. The Rasputin of the XDA. Oh, man. Yes, sir. The HD2. You know, Wi-Fi maybe not working so much. Cell phone connectivity maybe not quite there yet but they have KitKat running on the HD2. I mean, that's amazing, right? Kudos. That is deserving of epic praise. When did this thing come out? When the Leo was released? It's 2009, wasn't it? It was late 2009. Yeah. Turn of 2010, I think. Well, the Evo 4G was like spring of 2010 or summer of 2010 and this predated it by a good six months. The first giant 4.3 inch HD2. The rumors came out and then, yeah, so it may have been late 2009 when it came out, maybe early 2010. It's a four-year-old phone, guys. Yeah, but the thing about KitKat is it's designed to run on low-end phones, right? So why not? Give it a shot. Man, it's got fun. Yeah, dude, I'm going to try this. I don't have an HD2 anymore and I really am unhappy about it. I had one for a while and I let it go and I could, man, I could install so much software on that thing that I hadn't. I remember the first time I saw somebody using an HD2 just out and about or in the wild, as they say. Yeah. And it just blew my mind how big the phone was, like how big the display was and how thin the phone was. And we're talking about a 4.3 inch screen and I think it's something like 10.5 millimeters thick or something. And I just was like, I remember I was with my wife and I had like a total geek out moment and she did not understand why I was like freaking out. And I'm like, oh my God, look at that thing, look at it, look at it. And yeah, so and then here we are with, you know, the average phone is 4.5 or 4.7 inches or whatever it is. Yeah. And I'd just like to point out that the HD2 can now get KitKat and the Galaxy Nexus cannot. So Merry Christmas. Well, to be fair, the same nerds or different nerds at XDA have ported the Galaxy Nexus, ported KitKat to the Galaxy Nexus already. So I mean, technically they both have it in the same capacity. Right. Way to ruin the joke, Dan. Sorry. I didn't want to be peddling inaccuracies. Yeah, well I had to ruin my own extended joke about VSCO cam. That ladies and gentlemen is the Verge mobile show. We want to thank you so much for watching and or listening. If you want to follow us on Twitter, you should. I am back on Vlad, it's Vlad Saba. Dan is DC secret with an EI. Chris is Zed Power. We are all at Verge. You can also follow Verge video if you want to see all the cool video stuff that we do at the Verge. It's actually a lot more than you might know. And we'll be back probably next week. Adios.