 So every once in a while, Dieter Bohn just disappears without a trace. We don't know where he is. We don't know where he's going. We don't know what he's doing. We can only hope he's okay. That doesn't mean we don't have a show for you. Stay tuned. It's coming up next. Hey, welcome to the Verge Mobile Show. I am Chris Ziegler and this show is presented by the Samsung Galaxy Note. You may notice that I'm a little rusty here. Dieter usually does this. So I want to apologize for the flow of this show, which is not going to be our normal buttery smooth stuff. But I'm joined as always by Vlad Seval. Vlad. Hello. And we also have a very special guest to replace Dieter because it wouldn't be appropriate for us to have anything less than a Troika. We have Ross Miller, who's joining us from our New York studio. Ross, thanks so much for being here. I'm proud to be your Unoka for the Troika in other foreign words. The what? Wait, Unoka? What? What is one third of a Troika? It's an Unoka. He's got a point. Unoka. Okay. Don't question my logic. It's flawless, clearly. Yeah, no, I'm, I'm, I'm, I can't argue with your logic. If, if Roy is three. Rosen has already made a podcast. I promised I'd ruin everything as fast as possible. Duoka would be two. Okay. And Unoka would be one. Or Monoka. Quadroka. We can keep going, but we won't. Instead, we'll talk about Nokia, which I think is the first big piece of news of the week. Of course, Stephen Elop laid off 10,000 people or is in the process of laying off 10,000 people, which is just terrible for this company. What percentage of their workforce is that? Vlad, do you know? Off the top of my head? No, no, I don't. But it's a fair old chunk. But it's a lot of people. I mean, this is terrible for the people themselves because they lost their jobs. You know, doesn't need explaining why that's a bad thing. But for Nokia itself, it was pretty much necessary. Like a lot of people still feel that Nokia has more cutting to do. It's such a massive, massive company. It's essentially built out and designed to be a leader in selling mobile phones. And that's not where Nokia is today. So now it's kind of cutting itself down to its market share. Where exactly are the cuts being made mostly? There's some in Canada, right? Canada. They're shutting down their factory in Finland or one of their factories in Finland. Yeah. And I think one in somewhere else in Europe, if I'm not mistaken. Of course, we could all just look at the post. We're not. Let's pull up our post and see. Yeah. I think the big thing that people were burnt up about was shutting down the Finnish factory. I saw actually quite a few people on Twitter citing the video from Nokia World 2011 where Stephen Neelop was so proudly showing the Lumia 800 and how it's being produced and how much care is taken about it and how much of it is Finnish built and made and all of that stuff. He was really talking up the whole Finnish heritage. And then now that's gone for the most part. This Finnish factory is where they've historically built most or all of their high-end smartphones. Is that right? Yeah. Yeah. And they're shutting it down. One thing that Stephen Neelop said in the subsequent conference call they had was that Nokia is still Finnish to the core and Nokia will remain Finnish forever, whatever. Those kind of feel like hollow words because the fact of the matter is Nokia's production and manufacturing are no longer in Finland. Every part of it is moving over to China. So all that Nokia really has left now is its design jobs, which it still has. And that is still happening in Finland for the most part from what I know. But it still, you know, it isn't the company that it used to be as much as Stephen Neelop would like to paint it as that Finnish, you know, source of Finnish national pride. And they've moved a lot of their engineering resources to Sunnyvale, too. They have that big new office on the West Coast right in the heart of Silicon Valley. So, yeah, it's, you know, I feel like I'm torn because on the one hand, I feel like Stephen Neelop is doing some of the things that were set up. Like he had no way to avoid some of these things. They were set by the time he got to the company, all these wheels were in motion. And so some of these cuts he had to make, but still, that's just a terrible number of people to be let go. And it's not the kind of news that you want to convey both to your consumers, but your customers and to investors when you're trying to make this big Windows phone push. We're expecting some big Windows phone news later this week, which we'll get to later in the show, actually. But yeah, this is this is not good. No. And the other thing is that with these 10,000 jobs in total, since he has taken over the CEO position, he has got over 40,000 now, which I think Thomas Ricker from our team put it really well in saying that, yes, Stephen Neelop is jumping off the burning platform, but he's leaving 40,000 people on it. Yeah. So, yes, he's the leader. Yes, he's the captain. But he's doing the exact opposite thing of what the honorable captain is supposed to be doing. Well, is it? I mean, if those 40,000 people cut actually save the ship or save the burning platform, as it were, it may be a horrible decision to make, but it may be the necessary one to save everyone else. I mean, it's 40,000. Do we know how big the company is as a whole even before that? Let's get some numbers. Let's find some total employee numbers here. Chris is going to Wikipedia that for us right now. He's going to come back like two billion people. If I could reach through this Skype conversation and strangle you right now, I would know. OK, so according to I'm not using Wikipedia, I'm using Google, according to Google. Nokia had 124,292 employees as of March 31st, 2009. So if they've cut 40,000 employees in what, the last year and a half, two years? Yeah. Something like that. Yeah. Yeah. So simple math would suggest that they have roughly 80,000 employees remaining, which is still a huge, huge company. I was working on that that Palm piece for a long time, and everything that they did from 2007, 2008 through the HP acquisition was done on under 2000 employees, I think, at all times. And at the end, I mean, they had just a few hundred. So when you when you put that in perspective, it's like, what are these people doing? So it is easy to see why and how Nokia could still survive on a much lower employee count, especially since they're they're outsourcing so much of their smartphone platform to Microsoft. But still, that's and of course, Symbian is we talked about this last week. Symbian is being run out of Accenture now. So, yeah, I mean, I can totally see why it would make sense for those employees to go. But still, that's just a sad, sad thing to hear. And Nokia stock took a beating. I think, Vlad, you brought it up last week. They were down, what, 20 percent or something? I don't think it reached 20, but it got above 10 percent. It was really dire news. But actually, actually, to Ross's point, I think that that is the realist perspective. The fact that Nokia was already huge and you do have to cut it and that is basically your only chance to survive because Stephen Neal and the new executives that he has put in charge. That's the other thing. I think his new chief something officer is a lawyer and he replaced quite a few of the senior people as well. So he's done a bit of reshuffling there. As much as they want to put a happy spin on things. Nokia's cash reserves are running out. Nokia is losing money every quarter and it's forecasting it's going to keep losing money every quarter. So things aren't going to just magically improve while you're still employing such a massive workforce. So the things that he's cutting, first of all, the people, that's the biggest human impact. But he's also cutting back a lot of research projects. He has said that Nokia will also prioritize the markets, specifically the US, the UK. Western Europe and China, because China is the big growth market. Western Europe and the USA is where you make your money. And also the speculation is, Stephen Neal hasn't considered, but the speculation is that the Motami OS, which was supposed to be some sort of middle ground between the Asha phones, S40 and Windows phone has also been shelved. And now it's basically all about Windows phone. So what that means is that if Stephen Neal had not already put all of his eggs in the Windows phone basket, he certainly has now. Because he's shelved every conceivable alternative. And Harmattan is long since, if not dead and gone, then certainly in a state of stasis, unless there's some crazy Skunk Works project going on in Espoo. But Meltemi was another big project for them that, yeah, I mean, they could have potentially fallen back on that had Windows phone fallen apart. And if they freeze that, then yeah, they're just going full bore on Microsoft. I still think we talk about this literally every week. I'm still bullish on Windows phone in some foolishly optimistic way. And we'll see what they have to to unveil this week. I want them to succeed. I want them to be competitive. I desperately want a meaningful third horse in this race. But but yeah, it's not looking very good right now. There's more Nokia news, too, though, right? Because they sold Virtu to an equity. Big news. Yeah, big news. You're in the market. They actually sort of virtue phone. Yeah. So here's the really good news. Here's the great news about them selling virtue is that it probably means that they won't be stuck making S40 and Symbian devices now because every single device in the virtue line up is S40 or Symbian, which, you know, I'm sorry if I'm if I'm a multimillionaire and I have 20 or 30 thousand dollars to blow on a phone. I don't want a Symbian device with all due respect to to the good people working on Symbian and who have worked on the money. And I don't want to see me in the vice anyway. Come on. Well, I do want a gold plated Windows phone, though. Yes. No, no, no, no, no, no, not gold plated. Oh, sorry. Sorry. So go. Yeah. Russ is not a pro. Sorry. But I will say a little known fact about this deal. It was about two hundred forty nine million dollars, which in fact was paid in virtue phones. About 10 of them still the deal. Yes. That sounds about right. Yeah. That's the filing. Yeah. It's there. It's fact. So my question is, you know, without having the the umbrella of a company like Nokia, I wonder where virtue is going to get its guts. You know, we've seen mode labs, which is a French company, succeed making devices for companies like Teg Heuer. And I think they did a Christian Dwar phone a year or two ago or Dior. I don't know how you pronounce it. But anyway, they've made a few fashion phones in years, multi-thousand dollar fashion phones, and they seem to be doing OK. So maybe virtue can survive doing that kind of work. But, you know, white label stuff. But but they're going to have to pick their guts very carefully from here on out. I can't imagine that they want to stand Symbian. Maybe they'll just become a Windows phone house. I don't know. But then they they don't have as many opportunities to differentiate on the UI. I don't know why we're spending this this long talking about a phone brand. There is a reason. There is a reason because this is actually building us up into one of the most amazing segues ever, because you just said all of the virtue phones up until now have been Symbian RS40. But actually, we saw a supposed leak which is showing a 64 gigabyte virtue with Windows phone on it. And that is interesting. I mean, we don't know if this is necessarily legitimate and we don't know this necessarily something that's going to be going to market. But it is interesting because Windows phone hasn't had any 64 gigabyte devices yet. So that's one thing. The other thing is that this new integration for SkyDrive storage, which is shown off by screenshots that we've seen, which is another thing, all of which is pointing towards this when the phone summit, which is coming up tomorrow. How's that for a second? Yeah, I like that. It's a very good segue. But before we finish with Nokia, I'm sorry to keep interjecting your segues, Vlad. I apologize. It was beautiful. I was going to segue back. Oh, you were. You had this all set up. You had a plan. You want to take it back? I'll allow the segue. If you had a plan to get back to Nokia, I'll allow the segue. All right. OK. OK. So let's talk about the Windows phone summit. We're expecting Windows Phone 8 news. You know, it's about that time where they need to move past Mango and Tango and talk about Apollo. And there are a few rumors floating around, right? We saw what was about a week ago. We saw some Skype integration shots that were leaked from somewhere. We've heard rumors over the past couple of months. In fact, we had a very credible source come directly to us and say that current devices will not be upgradeable to Windows Phone 8, which is the biggest slap in the face in the history of the mobile industry. And I went on a Twitter tear when that story broke. In fact, you want to go back far enough in my timeline, you can dig that up and enjoy. Are we talking about the story from last April or this past April, rather? That sounds about right. That's about as far back as I'm seeing. And if I recall, they didn't issue a denial. They issued this kind of, we're working on it. We're trying to figure it out. They issued some kind of denial and realized that wasn't accurate. Can someone catch me up on this one? So the latest we have on this story that I'm aware, unless, Vlad, you want to correct me, but we had a source come directly to us, a credible source, and say, and that's all we can say, credible source, come to us and say that current devices will not be upgradeable to Apollo. But that is, I believe, all we know, official. Well, it's not official, but that's all we know that we can say it's probably correct. Everything else is kind of speculation and leaks at this point. But we're pretty confident about this upgradability thing. What that means for people who have bought devices like the Titan 2, the Lumia 900, even the Lumia 800 is unclear. Hopefully we'll get some clarity on that this week. In fact, Microsoft is going to have to give some clarity on that because that's going to be one of the foremost questions in people's minds. It's not just about, I don't want to get on my soapbox for too long here, but it's not just about servicing the customers who bought the Lumia 900 and the Titan 2 and devices like that that have come out in the past few months. It's about preserving your credibility as a platform supplier that wants to create phones that will not be obsolete or will not give off the air of obsolescence within a few months of their release. And that's really important. Apple has been so good about that. You look at iOS 6, even the 3GS is upgradable. And that's the benchmark that companies from every OEM, for both Windows Phone and Android, need to be shooting for. They need to be looking at Apple and saying, that's what we need to accomplish. It's upsetting because, for example, the Nokia Lumia 900, I may forgive the focus series for not getting Windows Phone upgrades. I want to know why exactly, on a technical level, that the Lumia 900, which by the way is the end of the smartphone beta test, is now itself a beta model that can't get Apollo. Exactly. That's a great point. Yeah, they've lost so much credibility, or they will if that happens. So we'll see. I mean, we're expecting, this is a developer-focused event this week, which I think is, Microsoft has done that for a long time, going back to Mix in 2010, when they first issued a lot of guidance on how developers should attack Windows Phone 7. And it makes a lot of sense because they need to get developers on the same page, so that by the time devices hit the market, by the time the upgrades, if upgrades exist, hit the market, we'll have software in the pipeline. But we're expecting news. We have a long history from events like WWDC and BlackBerryJam and all these kinds of events, of extrapolating consumer-focused news from the developer events, and I'm sure that's going to be the case this week as well. Yeah, and it's going to be a big event as well. Yeah, it's two days, right? I'm not sure about the overall event, but just the presentation, because Dieter is going to cover that, Dieter and Brian are going to cover that for our team. And from what I understand, the whole presentation to journalists and the whole, or at least the initial stuff, presumably including any potential hands-on opportunities, is going to wrap up in the afternoon, whereas it kicks off at 9 a.m. Pacific time. You can kind of imagine Microsoft is going to go through a whole heap of things. It's actually just a sacrifice, it's time for Windows Phone 8 to be revealed at least to developers. It's time for us to see what's going to underpin all of these upgrades. I also feel like if it's enough to blow us away, enough to capture attention and people's imaginations, maybe we'll be more forgiving about the fact that the upgrade isn't coming to the Lumia 900. We'll hate it more because we would like to have it on the Lumia 900, but if we see a big enough technical gap, exactly as Ross was asking, if we see a big enough technological leap between 7 and Windows Phone 8, then maybe we can find it more forgivable and say, okay, you couldn't make these new changes without cutting compatibility with your stuff. And there's still the possibility that Microsoft, kind of the way that Samsung has been doing with the Android phones that didn't upgrade to Android 4.0, might kind of backport some of the Windows Phone 8 features to the Windows Phone 7 devices. Yeah, that's such a hack though. Oh yeah. From our perspective, from a geek's perspective, we might forgive them if the technological gap is large enough, but that doesn't account for the consumer who, you know, all they know is that they've been left behind literally, you know, two or three or four months after they bought their device. I mean, the Lumia 900 isn't going off shelves anytime soon, right? It's probably going to be sold right up until the release of Windows Phone 8, if not beyond. So, you know, that's a huge slap in the face if two weeks before Windows Phone 8 is released and the first devices come to market, you buy a Lumia 900 and you're just, you're left behind. It really, really bothers me and it's, I don't know if that was just... No, absolutely. And it doesn't sound sincere as well because, I mean, Ross's point is great. The Lumia 900 was supposed to be the end of the smartphone beta test. Why do I always say beta? I mean, this time I got it right, but why do I always say beta on these shows? Like every single show... It's not beta this time? It's not beta? No, this time I'm in tune because Ross said the tone. Thank you, Ross. I do what I've got. I'm going to mess with your mind, Vlad, and if you start out by saying beta, I'm going to say, Vlad, it's not beta, it's beta. And if you say beta, I'm going to say, Vlad, it's not beta, it's beta. You're already doing it, Chris. You're already doing it. Don't act like you're just going to start now. But, yeah, I mean, Ross's point is exactly the thing. If you, as Microsoft and as Nokia, tell people this is a big leap, whatever you thought of it as a smartphone before, forget about it, this is the new smartphone and the truth, then you're making a statement affect people and you need to back that up. Whereas if you then go back and then call it six months later, let's say it takes Microsoft a while to get Windows Phone 8 to market, if you then turn around and say, no, actually, this is so much better, this is the new smartphone, then people's memories aren't that short and they won't feel like they can trust you anymore. Then they will be like, well, actually, you're just giving me a marketing spiel and a marketing message. Whereas the thing with Apple is as much exaggeration as Apple might use with all of this revolutionary and resolutionary, which is like the worst mix of words I've ever heard, Apple kind of delivers on its promises. Okay, not on magical and revolutionary, but it kind of treads the fine line, the fine balance between promising a lot and then delivering on that. Whereas if you're just going to promise every six months, this is the next real smartphone and then just upgrade away from it and then try and sell people a whole new other one, then it doesn't work. Right, right. I'm just going to throw caution to the wind and say, when they did the Mango upgrade, as long as it took, it did get to most of the phones out there. Granted, there were not a lot of Windows phones at the time, but Microsoft took a lot of effort doing so. So until we hear otherwise, I'm going to have hope at least one phone out there in the market will get an upgrade, probably the Lumia series, because Nokia, more than anyone, probably knows what's up with Apollo. Oh, that would create a whole other mess. Because all of these phones are specced so similarly that if you upgrade one, then it's like, wait, wait, wait, why isn't mine upgraded? So the question is why doesn't he have an upgraded? Yeah, that's been going on for three years in the Android ecosystem though. Like there's no rhyme or reason to what phones get upgraded when and which ones are left behind. I mean, I think the consumers, especially people that have had Android devices in the past and are upgrading the Windows phone, they're just used to that nonsense, as terrible as it is. And then we're also in the developer summit. I mean, app developers have to now develop for Apollo, but if they develop for Apollo and it doesn't work with all the other phones, what market do they care about? Are they not going to use the new features? Are they just going to go for universal PR? Are they just going to say, well, there's not a lot of Windows phones out there, excuse me, Windows phone users out there anyway. I can just ignore the ones that are currently there and focus on the new market and what's special about that. And we're already at fragmentation in a very young platform. Right. It's a very solid point. Yeah. And the other thing is Microsoft, even how far are we removed now from the introduction of Windows phone 7? We're about 18 months, two years. Two years, yeah. Thereabouts. Yeah, I mean, it's not hours, excuse me, two years and three months, something like that. When was it introduced? Till the end of 2010? No, it was MWC in 2010. You guys keep guessing. I'm going to use the power of the Googles. Actually, I'll be in it. MWC in 2010. I do this for a fact. Okay. Yeah, no, no, no, that's fair enough. I mean, I was actually thinking when it was actually introduced to market, but you're right, Chris. It's actually introduction to developers was MWC 2010. Right. That's correct. So actually, Microsoft finds itself over two years removed from that. And as Ross says, still kind of pitching to developers the idea of a potential market because Apollo is the one that potentially is going to expand the market and get some real market share and a real foothold, which isn't, you know, the best assessment of what's happened over the past few months. Well, so Stephen Elop, one of the things that he said in his really dark address last week is that they are receiving ongoing support. I can't remember the exact verbiage that he used, but it was something to the effect of we're receiving ongoing support from Microsoft, which comes as no surprise. $250,000 a quarter. No, $250 million. It's something. Can't be $250,000 a quarter. If it's a quarter million dollars a quarter, Nokia is getting ripped off. Yeah, I think $250,000 a quarter might not cover Stephen Elop's salary. Probably doesn't at all. You're right. So yeah, it's a substantial payment. Yes, it's $250 million. I'm sorry. Yeah. And so Microsoft, by all accounts, is firmly, I mean, as it was at day one, they appear firmly committed to brute forcing their way into the market, which is the only way that they're realistically going to be able to do it. Right. They can't, they're not going to be able to do it just by saying, hey, check out this cool product because they haven't been able to so far. And WebOS is a prime example of why that doesn't work. The only way you can do it is with a lot of money and a lot of patience. And so I still, you know, I hate to keep driving this point home, but I'm very bullish on the fact that I believe that Microsoft is eventually going to be able to buy its way into a very firmly footed third place. Whether Nokia is a part of that, whether they remain an independent company when that does finally happen, I don't know, but I do think that's probably going to happen. And let me also raise another point. Admittedly, this is in service of my next segue, but, you know, whatever. I'm working the segues today. One of the big issues with Windows Phone, because of the fact that it's relatively standardized on specs and relatively standardized, I mean, it's totally standardized in terms of user experience, really, because how can manufacturers differentiate themselves? And I mean, I wondered about the same thing. But what I saw from Microsoft yesterday when it introduced its new Surface tablets was actually, well, hang on. This is a Windows 8 tablet that differentiates itself really well from all the others. And it's done just with hardware, just with hardware and just with really good design. So bringing it back to Windows Phone, I think there is definitely still room and opportunity for all of Microsoft's hardware partners to do something that really sticks out and stands out from others. They just need to, as you say, Chris, invest a lot, you know, go with some actual investment of resources and money and time and plow those things in. Because what I saw with the Windows RT and Windows 8 tablets from Microsoft was a great deal of that and something that really does stand out. But then it also kind of has implications for, does Microsoft want to do the same thing with phones, produce its own hardware? I mean, everyone's speculating that Microsoft might as well buy Nokia now because it's kind of growing to be cheaper than Skype at this point. But let's talk about Surface. Let's talk about Surface because we said it's tablets, but it's so damn interesting that we should address it and get stuck into it. Right. And also, I have my own segue here. I'm going to backtrack and give this a shot. Because as excited as I am for the Windows Phone developer conference, that's an event that Microsoft actually spent a few days planning, whereas the surprise event was kind of out of nowhere and they came in kicking. I mean, this is a surprisingly good announcement. It was really weird the way this was all set up. The fact that we didn't know, members of the press did not know until literally hours before the event even where it was in LA. But journalists were just told to come to LA and chill and await further instructions. So the common belief was that, and Ross, you may have been the one to posit this, someone posited this, was that knowing the location of the event would give away the subject of the event. And that turned out not to be the case. Right. Like Milk Studios had nothing to do with the Surface. So I think that this event was very hastily planned. They pulled off a relatively smooth event, all things considered. But there were a few very important things missing from yesterday's announcement. Right. We don't know critical things like battery life. And much more importantly, availability and price. Yeah. Until we know that the Surface, at least in Windows RT form, is going to be no more than an iPad and preferably less, it is vaporware. I don't throw around that term loosely, but quite frankly, it is a completely irrelevant product until we have those details. And they do need to at least match the iPad in price. One of the things that killed the touchpad was the fact that they sought to go head to head with the iPad, which was a non-starter. HP needed to subsidize that device to buy its way into the tablet market. They failed to do that until it was too late and they blew them out of $99. That's Microsoft's problem in actually entering the hardware competition. Because all of Microsoft's fans, all of the analysts will say exactly what you just said. You either price it on par with the iPad or much more preferably, you price it below the iPad. Because one is incumbent and leading the market and the other one is non-existent at the moment. But if Microsoft does that, if Microsoft just cuts its profit margin on the Surface tablets to zero or close to zero, where do Microsoft's hardware partners end up? Because as a hardware partner, first of all, you haven't invested as much in designing your tablet. And I know they haven't because not too many companies are planning on coming out with some special magical magnesium cases and grid glass two screens and all of that fancy stuff and the integrated Kingstand. Just the whole Surface package. In hardware terms, that isn't the Playbook or the Kindle Fire. It's not just a black shell. It has a lot of really nice design touches in it. And then if Microsoft actually competes with the iPad on price, it's screwing its own hardware makers. So how do you reconcile the two? How do you beat Apple without beating your own OEMs? I think that Microsoft is finally at the point. I think that they're getting fed up at the executive level with the products that their chief OEMs have produced. Complete pieces of garbage like the HP Slate that have not served Microsoft well in any way whatsoever. And if Microsoft can't rely on its OEMs to produce competitive products, what is stopping them in the long term from becoming a completely vertically integrated manufacturer? What is preventing them from going the Apple route and completely blowing companies like HP and Asus and Acer right out of the water? Nothing. That is a possibility. It's just that would be a really major change. Where does that leave Samsung and Acer and all of them stuck with Google who themselves have always played favorites with certain devices with their Nexus series that's supposed to be setting the tone? But what if Google does the same thing? Where does that leave everyone else in terms of platforms to use? It's this weird interplay of hardware and software that historically, going back 25, 30 years, Microsoft has sort of been this constant that has allowed the entire PC industry to thrive. And it's getting to the point where Apple is eating everybody's lunch so hard that I think that it might be time for Microsoft to consider a radically different approach. We know for a fact that they have design chops, right? Look at Metro, which is still a very, very attractive and innovative UX, and the Surface is proof positive that they can produce – I mean, I don't want to oversell it. We need to review it. We need to see if the hardware really lives up to the hype. But from the initial impressions, we have every reason to believe that they have the design chops and the manufacturing chops through their relationships with OEMs to produce world-class hardware. And we've seen it. iPad matching hardware. Yeah. I would say they're from the ArcMouse, which I still think is one of the best mice you can get, to even the Xbox itself, especially the Slim, which is a gorgeous piece of industrial design. I mean, it's something they can do. Yeah, they can totally do it. Yes and no, Ross. Oh, okay. The Xbox is a good example because think about the first – well, the first-gen original Xbox, which was just a PC in a plastic shell. That's true. But think about the first-gen Xbox 360, which had all of the overheating issues and other reliability issues. Well, notice I specified Slim for a reason. I will give you that the Xbox 360 and the original Xbox are pieces of garbage. And, of course, there's the Kin. There's the Kin. You could probably blame that on Sharp, can't you? You could just lay down that on Sharp. Although it was Microsoft Design, so yeah. Microsoft Design, they put a lot behind it. They should know better. Yeah, so the Kin 1 remains, to this day, an innovative piece of hardware. The actual hardware itself was never the problem. It was the go-to-market strategy. It was the fact that Verizon screwed them on planned pricing. There were a lot of strategic missteps there, both on Microsoft's part and on their partners' parts, but it was not the fault of the hardware, I don't think. The Kin 2 was pretty forgettable, but the Kin 1 was pretty cool. But one other point I want to make about the Surface is that Microsoft, I believe, only needs to match or preferably beat iPad pricing with the Windows RT model. I think with the Pro, they have a little bit more breathing room to say, look, this is not just a tablet. It's also the best PC you can buy, and we're going to price it like a premium PC. Fair enough. Yeah, I mean, that's what Microsoft have said. What I was just going to add to the Kin commentary is that Microsoft completely missed out on a big opportunity by not branding and designing the Kin 1 to look like an accessory out of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Seriously, if they did that, I would have bought one. I wouldn't have used it, but every time I would see it, it would make me smile and think about a happier world. But yeah, let's actually get back to that. About the availability point, we can actually extrapolate quite a bit about the availability of the Surface tablets because Microsoft said that the RT, the ARM-based Surface tablet, will be available at general availability of Windows 8, which is expected to be around September, October. And the Intel-based Windows 8 Pro version of the tablet should be available three months after that. So just in time for Christmas. So, I mean, those are the release dates that we can speculate on. The pricing that Stephen Sienowski said was that the ARM version will be competitive with other ARM-based tablets, which to me basically said we're going to match the iPad in price. That's my interpretation of the Sienowski language. And the Intel one will be competitive with Ultrabooks, which basically says like $799, $899, just some crazy prices for a tablet. I think that they need to beat, with the Windows RT model, I think that they need to beat the iPad by $50 on account of the display alone. Yeah, I mean, the iPad display, we kind of forget just how crazy that display is. And let's not forget that if this is coming out holidays, granted, it is competing with a $500 new iPad. A few months after holidays, it's competing with a $400 or $300 new iPad with rented display as they go down in price as the new ones come out. It's a very good point. So if they're going to have any lead time, it's going to be very minimal. So, yeah, like Chris says, you have to price very aggressively, even the Pro model. Yeah, Apple's scale in the supply chain is absolutely deafening. Like it crushes competitors left and right. It happened to Palm. It's not as likely to happen to Microsoft, but Microsoft simply does not have the hardware scale that Apple does. And I'm sure that they are still fighting Apple for components even with the... I'm sure that that demand for iPad manufacturing, both on the component side and final assembly, is putting some constraints on the surface. I have very, very little doubt about it. They've really kind of sucked all of the air out of the entire mobile industry supply chain in China. I'm really curious what O.D.M. they're using for the surface. I think we've heard rumors of QANA and Foxconn, right? I don't know about rumors, but I'm curious, too. Like that was actually my first question was who's actually building this? Yeah. I mean, I did... I mean, my expectation honestly was to get something closer to the BlackBerry PlayBook and Kindle Fire. Like something kind of stock, kind of... Well, it's just, you know, a tablet and then make it Microsoft's own. But Microsoft has really gone to town on designing this thing. So it kind of is like the Kin. It is Microsoft pushing its own design credentials forward, which is Ross and I discussed just a little bit ago. Microsoft has had some brilliant successes and some less brilliant ones. So it has kind of a check of the past. I do feel like from what we've seen so far, the Surface tablets are going to be one of those Microsoft designs that we look back on and think, yeah, that was a good one. But again, it's going to depend on exactly the same thing as if they were the Kin, which is a software. The software is just becoming too critical in these circumstances. That's the interesting thing about the announcement. Something that Microsoft, I felt when I was watching it, correct me if you felt differently, they talked a lot about what the Surface is, but not what it can do. It's almost like an assumption that, yes, it can do Windows and you should know what Windows is and what that means, which is almost a shame to me because Microsoft, its biggest attribute is not necessarily the hardware and it's not necessarily assuming people get what's great about Windows. It's this huge ecosystem and where it works everywhere in your life, mobile, tablet, home entertainment now especially. I would have loved to see more of this is the Surface, this is great hardware, great design, but this is how it also accentuates Windows in a way that you might not have thought to do before. You might actually want to get Windows as opposed to sticking with it because it's not iPad or OS X. Yeah, that's the crazy thing to me about Windows 8 is that I feel like this is the first time maybe ever or maybe since the launch of Windows 95 or maybe XP back in 2001 where Windows has the opportunity anyway to be cool again. Metro is something that you want to play with and experience and see what it's all about. I think everybody on the Verge team and probably all of our listeners want to at least play with the Windows RT tablet. They don't know if they necessarily want to buy one yet, but they want to check it out. They want to see what it's all about. That is an advantage, a consumer advantage that Windows has very, very rarely had through its 25-year history. It's exciting. I'm happy to see a company like Microsoft really start to figure out a valid way to compete with Apple. I was just saying on Twitter this morning, I love the iPad, I love the iPhone, I love Apple devices in general, but it doesn't matter how much you love these devices, you need a competitive market in order to keep all of the products good and continuing to innovate, and that is something that the iPad simply hasn't had. I'm excited to see somebody try to finally make a real go at it, and that's an opportunity that the Android guys like ASUS have never really had a chance to do. The Transformer Prime, don't get me wrong, it's a great tablet, but is anybody seriously considering it over an iPad? I don't think so. That's the thing. When you think about the Transformer Prime right now, it kind of gets whooped by the surface. I could never be sold on the weight and the bulk of the keyboard accessory for the Transformer Prime, but the keyboard that Microsoft introduced with the magnetic attachment and all that stuff, that was slick. It's simultaneously Apple's smart cover and keyboard, so that's nice. To Ross's point, I don't think Microsoft has ever really been able to properly articulate the benefits of its ecosystem, which is to Microsoft's great disadvantage. It's trying to give us a pitch very much in the Apple and Google mode, whereas it really doesn't need to do that. I'm not saying Microsoft's old pitches were really working particularly well, but now Microsoft is... They just showed off the Netflix app for Windows 8 for the first time while announcing the Surface tablets. That's exactly the point that Ross was making. Microsoft has such an amazing ecosystem built up around the Xbox 360, for example, of entertainment, and they didn't mesh those things together at all. They were just like, well, here's our custom-made Netflix application with smart pincher zoom. Apple could have that. Google could have that. Anybody could have that custom-made Netflix application. Right. Microsoft has never figured out how to fully capitalize on the huge win it has with Xbox. I think that that speaks... This is a topic that's been covered in depth. There are many great articles on it from Mary Jo Foley and others. The fact that internally, Microsoft historically has been basically a fiefdom. There are these different divisions that are always at kind of semi at war internally for control of Microsoft's future. There are very deeply rooted political incentives for certain executives not to work with other executives and for certain product managers not to work with other product managers. And so at the end of the day, that puts Microsoft as a whole in a pretty bad position because that means that Xbox, that entire entertainment division of the company, is far, far more segmented than it should be. And that sucks because what they have with Xbox is, I think, and Ross, I'd love to get your opinion on this, but I feel like Xbox 360 has turned into one of the greatest video game console stories of all time. I'm just going to interrupt for a sec. I mean, Ross, we need to hear from him, but I have the perfect analogy. I need to get it out. I want to hear this. About what Chris just broke down, and it's so timely as well. International football slash soccer for our American audiences. You have these situations, particularly with the Spanish national team and the Dutch national team, where cliques and groups of players will associate themselves closer with the Barcelona football team or the Real Madrid one. And when they actually have to come together and play in the Spanish national team, they hate each other too much. And they can't come together as a team. This has been Spain's problem, not so much the past few years, but it has been for years and years and years before that they will have the most talented teams in the world, but the guys on the teams hate each other. They have all of these rivalries built up from the fact that they compete constantly. And when you put them together as a team, they just don't gel and they don't mesh. So this is kind of the same thing. I don't know how much internal competition there is with Microsoft, but it was like a really fitting analogy. I like it. I really wish I knew what you meant in those players, because that sounds awesome. I'm sure my loyal audience of European listeners would be like, yes, Vlad. Not going to lie, I do wish I knew European football more. No, I think you're absolutely right. I think there's a Disney lesson to be learned, I guess, if you were, of everyone working together. Metro being kind of the tentpole that they're trying to make it. Chris, to your point, to get back to that, what you wanted, I'm not going to say that Xbox 360 is the greatest game console success story. I will say it's the best set-top box story, home entertainment device. Yeah. Yeah, because to your point, I think Microsoft is not looking at the Xbox so much as a gaming console anymore, as a way into the TV, to the big screen. Netflix and Hulu were big plays. Smart glass at E3, I think, was one of the smartest moves that Microsoft had. It's like this is how a Windows phone device, a Windows tablet, a Windows 8 device, and an Xbox can all work together in a way that you want to own all three. And if you don't own part of the ecosystem, you don't own the phone, you can still use an iPhone, but you're going to want the Windows phone now, because it is better. It is Microsoft's thing, and it's a further integration to a system you want. And that's Microsoft's beautiful potential, if you want to use it, is, well, you're probably going to like something that Microsoft does, and we can now tell you that you want the rest of it, too. Here's a couple little features, but we're not going to force you. We're going to kind of wean you into it, in a sense. Yeah. But whether or not they actually do that... I'll tell you what, though. There is one thing that the Surface tablet was missing, and that one thing was the POV camera from Nokia. Like, imagine if Microsoft came out with a tablet with a POV camera. If I ever see any company come out with a 41 megapixel tablet, I'm quitting not just this business, but life. I'm done. I don't want to see any 41 megapixel tablets. That's a warning to the entire industry. Can I interest you in a 42 megapixel? Yes, that would be fine. 42 is the right answer for Chris. Yeah, that's exactly right. So you want to talk about the 808 PureView. It's coming on sale in America. It's coming to America. I don't want to talk about it. That's what we can really talk about. It's happening. It's kind of crazy because another one of these... We're going to sell it unlocked on Amazon for a really crazy price and nobody will buy it, $699. Pretty much the same way that Nokia distributed the Lumia 800. It's a bundle with some Bluetooth speakers and stuff for like $899 from Microsoft stores. I have no idea... You have to be a crazy, crazy Nokia enthusiast to go and spend that kind of money on one of these phones. Particularly with the 808 PureView as well, which is running Symbian. Even if you can forgive the really tiny screen resolution and the fact that this is not a phone, but actually a camera that can make phone calls. It's Symbian. As much as this is going to piss off guys like Steve Litchfield, it's a dead OS and there's a very good reason why it's dead. I think that Steve Litchfield understands... He has a healthy understanding of the fact that Symbian is a dead end. And so does everybody. It is impossible to ignore at this point. The question becomes, can you survive on Symbian and do you want to? I think just last week a new beta of Gravity came out, which is the well-received Twitter client for Symbian, which I believe, as far as I can tell, remains the only quote-unquote good application for Symbian devices. And it has somehow become like this champion app for the entire platform. So there is still some support out there. But yeah, $700 is completely insane. Aaron just messaged me to have me point out, and this is a good point. Yesterday, Nokia had said that the 808 would only work over 3G on AT&T, and they have since updated their post to say that it will work on 3G on T-Mobile as well, which makes a lot of sense because of course Nokia is known for selling pen-to-band devices and that's something that they've done for a good year or two now. But yeah, I'm not going to buy this. I can't imagine very many people are. The camera is cool, but you can buy some really terrific point-and-shoot cameras for a lot less than $700. That's the thing I was just thinking. At $699, I'm pretty sure I could have a Sony next series camera and then still have a couple hundred dollars to sign up for a contract and get like a GS3 or an iPhone or something else. Or the Lumia 900, if I still want to stay loyal to Nokia. I could have a Lumia 900 and a point-and-shoot that would do just as well as the 808 for the same upfront price. Right. Yeah. The technology in the 808 is amazing, but they're packing all of this technology in there only to get the images roughly as good as a camera with better optics because they're not constrained by the same physical constraints as a camera phone is. So yeah, I don't know. $700, that's a lot to pay for a Symbian Bell device, regardless of the spec. Do they even try to work with the carriers on this is what I want to know. Or do they just say, this is T-Mobile is not going to want it, this person is not going to want it, US Cellular is not going to want it, I'm not even going to bother 18T and Verizon. If the unsubsidized price is $700, you're asking any carrier to accept at least a $500 subsidy before they start selling it. And then no carrier will probably think this is worth $199 when it has to compete with what it has to compete with. So then carriers will be like, well, actually, the only way we can resell this is at $99 upfront, which means then the carrier has to buy it off a $600 subsidy. And then Nokia is like, oh, you know, forget it. We'll just sell it. The carriers are very picky about the software that's running on the phones in general. And I'm sure I would bet my bottom dollar that 18T and Verizon at the very least have both blackballed Symbian at this point. There's no question in my mind. Yeah, and T-Mobile, I believe the last Symbian device officially sold by an American carrier was the Ascent or Ascend on T-Mobile, which was just a C7. Yeah, I remember that. And that had issues as well. Yeah, that was introduced at CTIA last spring, if memory serves me correctly, and it's been since discontinued. I would be shocked if any U.S. carrier ever carried another Symbian device. It would absolutely blow my mind. In fact, do we know, is there any evidence that there's going to be any Symbian hardware after the 808? Is this it? I mean, it would be a great swan song for the platform. You know, this is a platform that has been, I mean, as much as it sucks now, if you go through the history of the mobile industry, it is actually a very important platform both for Nokia, but then also, you know, it served a huge role in Sony Ericsson's history and Scion before that, which just got acquired by Motorola Solutions, actually. And this would be, I feel like this would be a great bookend on Symbian's story to finish it with this, you know, really kind of groundbreaking device that has just maximal specs. I think it probably will be the last one because the very reason, I mean, the 808 PureView really shouldn't have happened at all, but the very reason it came out at all was that Nokia had been working on technology for so long and had been working on it, just integrating it into Symbian, making sure photography stuff and Symbian work together. That was really the reason to introduce it on a Symbian device. Like it had it in its labs and presumably Steven Eilop and senior management team were like, you know, let's just release this thing. We're not like, we're going to get a lot of credit for it, which everybody's given them credit for the technological achievement. Let's collect that. Let's, you know, give some fruition to all of our team's hard work, et cetera, et cetera. So they released it on Symbian. I just can't see when and what justification Nokia is going to have to release it on the Symbian phone. So yes, I do feel like this extremely quixotic or quixotic device is going to be this one song for Symbian. I agree with you, Chris. It's a fitting one. I would just like to point out we have somebody in comments here, Old Drunken Sailor, who says, Sony Ericsson ran UIQ, not Symbian. UIQ was a skin on Symbian. So as was S60 and then S60 and Symbian kind of became one at one point after UIQ died. But UIQ was actually based on Symbian and that all came from Epic, which was Scion's platform, which powered the Series 3, the Series 5, the Series 5 MX, all the same thing underneath, underneath the skin. Anyway, we should move on. We still have a lot to talk about. This podcast could go on for another year. Do we have any more Nokia stuff to talk about? I think that might be it. Yeah. We can actually reverse a little bit and come back to Microsoft Surface and the tablet situation. And I mean, this is the point that I was raising about where Microsoft's decision to enter the tablet market puts OEMs. And one of the big ones, LG, at least in terms of volume of electronic devices, if not success, has decided that it's going to put tablets on the back burner, which essentially means it's just going to exit the tablet market and focus completely on smartphones. We've seen LG do quite a few Optimus pads, try to compete with Samsung's Galaxy tabs. It hasn't worked out. Nobody has liked them. They've had some interesting technology in them. They had 3D cameras, which, again, nobody liked. So it was no surprise that it never succeeded. But it is interesting that LG, which does make laptops, it doesn't sell them in the US or the UK, at least until recently it wasn't selling them in the UK, just isn't going to play ball with Microsoft at all and try and do its own sort of ultrabook or maybe, yeah, it does ultrabooks, but ultrabook-competing Intel-based tablets or Windows RT tablet with it just saying, we're going to take a break from this and focus on smartphones. It's probably because they don't see how to make any money out of the business, to be honest. Right. That's it. There's this really weird and depressing long tail in the tablet market where after the iPad you have a couple standout Android products like the Transformer Prime that may be profitable on some level and maybe one or two of the Samsungs, just because they're so ubiquitous on all these different carriers and they push them through a lot of different channels. But then beyond that you have all these other products like the Zyboards and the Optimus pads that are selling for near iPad prices but couldn't possibly be selling in any volume whatsoever and we've seen that bear out with LG's announcement. And then after that you have, at the very bottom end of the market, you have these $79 and $99 tablets which are just complete garbage but they're able to pump them out and get some traction by selling them in like drugstores and stuff, right? But yeah, I don't see how there's any room for these guys to play, especially as long as they're working with Android. I mean the thing, the market I see for them is, you know, it might sound patronizing but I feel like it's the uninformed consumer. A perfect example for me was somebody while I was flying between the US and the UK. Somebody was unboxing a Sony Tablet S and I just felt so sorry for him because I knew he picked it up in the duty-free shopping area and he thought, well, you know, it's cheap over here, it's a Sony tablet, how bad can it be? Now I'm sure he might have been impressed by the nice packaging in the first hour or so but probably by the end of the flight he was like, yeah, I can see how bad it can be. I want a Tablet P, I'm not going to lie, I still want a Tablet P. Dude, you don't. I like the phone package. It's the dual screen. I like the phone package. It's dual screen, isn't it? Yes. Give it up. Stop. Chris, I'm looking at me. No, no. Stop. It's not going to work. Done. No, no, let's not dismiss dual screen entirely. Like if you took two iPads of the new version or if you took two of the MacBook Retina displays and just sliced them. No, no, two iPads does not count as a dual screen tablet, but that's not how it works. You know, if you did that with those viewing angles, yes. But you don't do freaking dual screen with the nasty, horrible viewing angles that you get with Sony's cheap LCDs. But no, I mean, here's the thing though. You need software, dedicated, specialized software that knows how to handle two screens. If you're going to try to type on one, oh good God, have mercy on your soul. We've seen countless people try. We've seen the Kyocera Echo, we've seen the Acer Iconia, we've seen the DS, which is just dumb luck that it actually worked. But the courier is still figment of your imagination, which means it's awesome because you've never had to use it. I have yet to see a dual screen device that I actually care about. I think we'll see foldable screens before we see a dual screen device that actually matters. And you remember the objective foldable screens? Well foldable is a beautiful dream. I mean, they've been talking about like flexible and foldable screens for like literally since I was like a toddler. Like this has been going on for so long. For HP, what's his name? The guy who's at Cablevision now, or not Cablevision. Is he at Cablevision? The CTO from HP. He always used to like walk around. Yeah, I remember that guy, Max something. No, that's not his name. Man, I don't know. He retired, right? He was part of the design team? Yeah, he retired and now he's with Cablevision, I think. But anyway, point is that we've seen so many companies bandy around these mythical flexible displays for ages. And Samsung appears to be finally ramping up production of some flexible OLEDs, but I still have yet to see a compelling form factor for any device that makes me say, oh yeah, I can see why that's practical and why that's usable and why that should be important to me when I'm shopping for my next phone. We'll see. And I understand the need to want something like a bigger screen that you pull out of your pocket and you can actually lay it down. You've got a seven inch display that is four inches in your pocket. I get that. But as soon as you see that hinge in between, how are you going to live with that? How are you going to be okay with that? And how are you going to have to buy new specialized apps that actually use it under design for it? It's a very small ecosystem. I don't think there's going to ever be a big one that actually uses it in a way that's going to make sense. Yeah. And another thing I'd like to say is people use two displays on a desktop, you know, and there isn't a hinge between the two. There's a massive bezel, like at least an inch thick when you put the two displays side by side. People find the benefit in being able to, you know, split up their multitasking workflow, have one bit here, one bit there. Sometimes you can just use one screen to play back a video or whatever. I can see the scenarios. I can't really see them to Ross's point. I can't really see them being as compelling when you're on the move because when you're on the move, you're even more of a single tasker than usual. And a lot of people who've done some research and looked into it realize that we don't, as human beings, actually multitask very well at all. We're just single task in rapid succession. But I can see the value of it and the benefit of it. Once again, Ross is spot on. You need like really, really good software, which nobody has done. And nobody's really particularly close to doing. And to just bring it back to OG, they're not particularly close to doing it either. No, they aren't. And to your point, Vlad, every single mobile platform that has any traction whatsoever right now acknowledges implicitly that humans are primarily single tasking when they're using their phones, right? Because with Android, the multitasking is non-deterministic. You don't know when an app is going to close behind the scenes. iOS shuts down background tasks after 10 minutes, I believe. And Windows Phone has that tomb-stoning thing. There is no way to truly run many applications at once like you would on a desktop. And that alone, unless there's some fundamental change in the operating system that makes sense for consumers, that alone makes a dual screen phone less compelling. Which to your point is interesting because Windows 8 itself, even in the RT mode, has a few interesting development requirements, including the little second sidebar widget, which would make a lot of sense for a second screen, even when that's not a full size second screen. Yeah. Which means I'm going to have to eat a little bit of crow here and say, Chris, you might actually have a good Windows tablet in the works. Yeah, I'm still going to buy a Tai Chi. But y'all can enjoy your surfaces. Okay, we need to give Asus some massive credit here. Tai Chi is one of the coolest names I've heard over the past three years. I actually want a Tai Chi even without crazy dual display stuff. Yeah, yeah, I agree. I feel really, really bad for Asus and Acer, who have been just churning out all these wild form factors and tablets for years now. They just don't... I mean, to what end? Microsoft with one fell swoop can decide that it's going to eat up all of the mindshare around Windows RT and that's that. So we'll see what happens. You can feel bad about them. And yes, Microsoft is... I just don't see an angle or perspective from which Microsoft isn't building up to screwing its OEMs hard. They'll sell because Windows devices just sell. They're popular, they're ubiquitous, etc. But they won't sell as much with Microsoft, as you say, Chris, sucking up all the mindshare. But on the other hand, let's not be too charitable to Asus and Acer because if we actually look at their performance on Android, Asus introduced the Pad phone exactly a year before it brought it to market, Computex 2011. And Acer, its cloud mobile device was revealed by the IFTTT design award that it got just before CBIT, which was months back. And it's not going to come out until sometime in the third quarter or whatever. And that's going to be its flagship coming out in September-ish time, competing on like January 2012 specs against what's going to likely be a deluge of brand new Android phones. Including potentially a new Jelly Bean phone. Right. And tablet. Yeah, these guys have it rough. There are the haves and have-nots, those that own a platform and those that don't. And it's going to be very dicey. These guys are going to have to be very nimble to stay relevant over the next few years, I think. Right? And most of them have done a pretty good job of hedging their bets. They're playing both the Android card and the Microsoft card. I wish there was a viable third card for them. Right. And you've got to say, I'm sure they're all very, very scared of Microsoft buying Nokia and Google actually using Motorola in any useful way, beyond patents, of course. But yeah, because if both of them become full blown hardware manufacturers and put a huge concert effort behind it, where does that leave these third parties? WebOS, open source, yay! Right? Oh, Vlad. This is the second time in the podcast that I've wanted to reach through the screen and strangle you. Wait, wait. Here's a very simple summary of where WebOS is. HP was selling off touchpads on eBay. That's how bad it got for HP itself. It was doing fire sales of its WebOS devices. Let that dream go, people. Yeah. It's going to be a long uphill battle for them. There's Bada. There's Bada. Shut up, Chris. Now you're just doubling up on my trolling. Yeah, I'm trolling you guys pretty hard right now. I mean, like, Tizen and Boot2Gecko both, I think, are interesting initiatives in that they are, in a way, continuing WebOS's legacy of making viable HTML based UXs. And we've seen Tizen do some pretty interesting things. But again, I mean, like, all these platforms, you can make cool looking platforms and devices until you're blue in the face unless you get traction, unless you get developers on board, unless you get big name apps. It's been said a thousand times. There's just no way to make those devices relevant unless they can get that grounds full of momentum. So, yeah, Tizen has a long way to go. We should talk about our LG L7 review. These devices, the L-style series was announced at MWC. We first got hands on back then. There's the L3, which is their little tiny phone, L5 and L7. I thought the L3 was, like, really cute. Kind of has an Xperia mini feel to it. But the L7 is their flagship product in the line. The entire line is a mid-range line. So calling it the flagship in the line doesn't mean that much in terms of flagship Android devices overall. LG still has the Octamus range above the L-style range. But the L7 is still a pretty cool looking product. It's squared off, has a pretty sexy UI, I think. You know, LG does a custom skin, but I think it's a little less offensive than some of the other ones out there. But it still didn't get the best review. I don't know what to make of a phone that doesn't have a built in ambient light sensor these days. Like, what a weird way for LG to save 30 cents off the build cost of this device. That is a very valid point. I think, I mean, the L7 is held back by LG in costs in, like, really, really obscure and weird ways, exactly as you mentioned. And also they're using an ancient, ancient processor in this thing. So actually the, I think it's called, yes, the Optimus UI 3.0. This is LG's skin on top of Android 4.0. Some of the first comments on Aaron's review of the L7 were actually to say, is it just me or does this just look like TouchWiz on Android 4.0? Does it look like a rip off? I'm not sure that it's necessarily a rip off of TouchWiz, but then Samsung's TouchWiz skin on top of Android 4.0 has been quite clean and minimized and restrained and actually not pushing itself forward. It's actually been pulling back from skinning the main interface. So LG has gone for the same look and for the same move. And I've actually had the chance to screw around with that on a better phone because I've had the Optimus LTE. And when you're not hamstrung by the fact that the L-style has a horrible ancient processor, it works really smoothly and really nicely. I mean, one of the really neat things is the unlocking thing where you drag out. I love the unlocking thing. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, this is in the review. Aaron has done a video of it and it's really great. You have this circle which starts around your finger and then as you drag out, it expands and shows you the last thing you had on the screen of the phone before you locked it, which functionally might not. I mean, it might be really rare that it helps you, but it's just a really cool thing. It's a really cool thing to look at. Yeah. And I think that physically, LG has moved in the right direction in terms of industrial design. I can't speak to it. It's been a long time since I've held the phone personally. It was in late February, but wow, time flies. But physically, looking at the design of the device, it's a very attractive phone. Yeah. Yeah. And actually, when Aaron first pulled it out and showed it to me, I confused it for Galaxy S3. It's more squared off than a Galaxy S3. But it was attractive and it was one of these things that my first reaction was, hey, that looks interesting. Yeah. That looks like something I might want to play around with at least for a little bit. And if I can just segue really rapidly, I would say that the Orange San Diego doesn't look like that. Oh, the Orange San Diego. What a complete piece of garbage. Intel should have been doing everything in its power to make sure that the world's first introduction to Medfield on Android or Medfield and mobile period would be like a groundbreaking monumental experience in every sense of the word. And that's just not the case. Right. Right. And Intel designed this. This is a really annoying thing. Intel designed every single piece of hardware inside the San Diego. This is the Intel, what was it, the prototype device, the demo device, which now Orange is just branding on top. Yeah. Yeah. And the skin is miserable, right? Yes. Yes. The whole thing is an Intel production. Carriers have never been into Intel chips. They've never liked the idea of x86 chips in smartphones because they haven't really been power efficient enough, even though they've been powerful. You don't have the battery life. What's the point? So Intel has still been forced to, first of all, work with really small carriers in small countries. So this is why we're seeing things like the Lenovo K800 being introduced in China before actual Western markets getting these devices. But then even if you have to design all of it, as you say, Chris, if the best thing you could say about the design of your first phone is that the back cover kind of feels nice to the touch, something hasn't really gone very well with the design stage. Right. And you know what sucks? You remember it was CES 2010, I think, when LG introduced that. What was the predecessor to Medfield? Worsetown? W990. Yes, Worsetown. Yeah. Right. Yeah. And so they showed this prototype LG that they said was going to come out later in the year. And of course, it never did. But it was like a really beautiful device. And I think it would have been an interesting differentiator for both for Intel and for LG had they actually come through with that device. The problem was that at that time, Android was not mature and it was running some proprietary LG thing. And only recently has Google fully embraced x86 as like a fundamental part of Android. And now they have it like a native x86 emulator and stuff. So that's encouraging. And there aren't that many app compatibility problems with the platform. But yeah, if they had been able to deliver two years ago, I think that Intel might be in a very different situation than they are now. Yeah. Actually, it's surprising in terms of app compatibility. Because Aaron broke it down in terms of the top 100 paid and 100 free apps and the top 100 paid and free games. And the San Diego at the time of release isn't really doing much worse in terms of incompatibility than things like the Galaxy S2, the Galaxy S3 and other Android phones which you would actually expect to be compatible with everything. And pretty much every phone when it's released has incompatibilities and has some apps that it doesn't work with. But it's a very high proportion. Something like 90%, over 90% of apps that the San Diego is compatible with. So it will work. And the other thing Aaron found is that the performance is indeed strong. So this is, you know, the thing with the San Diego is that it's priced appropriately. Like yes, we would love for Intel to make a massive splash and just do this whole new thing in the smartphone arena. But it's priced as a mid-range or slightly less than mid-range phone, but gives you high end performance. So what you need to do is become color blind, first of all, so you can ignore the orange skin and figure out ways that you can maximize its usefulness. So the real question is will Motorola deliver on a compelling med field device? Because that was one of the big stories out of CES this year was the Intel partnership that they announced. And we haven't seen any devices yet. We believed at the time, and I still believe that Intel was heavily incentivizing Motorola to make that commitment because they would have no reason to do so otherwise. But we still haven't heard a peep out of them. I think at the time they gave summer guidance. And yesterday I think was the first day of summer, wasn't it? Something like that. So we're now in summer. It's time to hear about Motorola's med field efforts. I wonder if Google's purchase has influenced that strategy at all or if they're continuing to move along with that effort. But hopefully they can deliver something a little bit more compelling than this. Well, I mean, they've promised. Motorola have promised that they'll do multiple devices over multiple years. So you can't expect that partnership would have been codified in some form of contract between the two. And you expect they'll have to execute. But that also kind of paints an interesting picture. The one that you were alluding to earlier, Chris, which was, you know, what if this is the thing that we're staring down the face, this scenario where Google starts to do x86 and ARM tablets and phones and starts increasing it to produce them itself via the Motorola ARM and then Microsoft starts doing the exact same thing, you know, branches out the surface effort into the phone arena. We're kind of going to get stuck with just three major companies who have the ecosystem services software and hardware. And that would be our choice. I think I would be OK with a world in which I could get my phones and tablets from one of three companies, Microsoft, Apple or Google. I think I would be OK with that. Two shows how much of an American you are, three I would be totally OK with because I think, you know, on some level, on some level, on some level, I trust all three of those companies to make very intelligent design decisions and all three of those companies hate each other, hate each other. So like, you know, they're very incentivized to to compete. And and, you know, they all have some very, very bright design people. So I think that we could see some, you know, and the rest is kind of I mean, like Samsung continues to be Samsung in terms of the materials that they're using. HTC, I love HTC in many ways, but, you know, I think that they're, you know, in the long term, they'll probably get bought. Do you think that that's a reasonable assumption to make that HTC will eventually be bought by somebody? That would be so sadly poetic. I mean, it started as a no name manufacturer to make phones for carriers, your T-Mobile branded, your Verizon branded, had a few years, arguably a couple of decades with its name out front and then slowly withered back into irrelevance. I mean, that was sad, but poetic. Well, not not not irrelevance necessarily. I just think that like I think that they are HTC is in this interesting position where they're small enough to be a compelling purchase for a giant company. And maybe maybe that opportunity has vanished since Google has bought Motorola and HP has proven that it has absolutely no idea what to do with the mobile company and and Microsoft. If it buys anyone, we'll probably buy Nokia. So yeah, maybe that's a completely ridiculous notion. So I mean, so Vlad to answer your question to Chris's point, in terms of hardware, I yeah, I'm fine with just having three choices. But also it goes back to what do you think hardware is turning into. And it's just it's just a screen for the software. I think you're talking about software companies. Yeah, those are the big three. You may still have HTC because like it or not, since it's a compelling argument. Samsung has TVs and processors and chips and materials, and they're still going to thrive with that. And they have a PlayStation brand and everything that goes with it. But yeah, I do see a special trouble for people who can't make good skins on other people's platforms who don't have other compelling software solutions and who make hardware that looks like everyone else's. I mean, kudos for the Padfone for trying to be different. The Transformer certainly was a success story in a way. And if Google does use them for any rumored Nexus branded tablets, that will definitely be a boon to their industry. Other companies, though, that can't stand out in terms of software design, I don't see them really having much of a future. And I personally don't care if their stuff is on my shelves in Best Buys. So as usual, yeah, as usual, you know, I think that it's it's it's only appropriate that we end the show on a depressing note. Oh, I'm so sorry. No, no, no, no. This is this is this is kind of our thing. We always end the show on a depressing note, and I don't think that we should break from tradition. I sincerely hope that the dear Dieter Bohn will be back with us next week because I am completely incapable of running the show in any sort of meaningful way. But for those of you who stuck through this complete train wreck, I appreciate it. Train wreck on my part, not on my dear guest, Ross Miller's part or on Vlad Seva's part. But this has been a complete nightmare for me. If you want to reach us by email, it's mobile show at the verge.com on Twitter. I am Z power. Dieter is back lawn. Vlad is what's up and Ross is Oh, no, Roscoe, which is spelled exactly how you would expect it to be spelled, I think. Apparently, there's apparently there's supposed to be an E, but I don't buy it. It's no E. No, no, no, no. Design wise, these are very ugly. I'm sorry. I've decided. All right. Well, thanks so much for listening, guys, and we'll be back to you next week. Bye, guys.