 Greetings mobile accomplishers, welcome to the Verge Mobile Show. I don't know what episode it is, it's an episode and we're here, we're back, we took a week off, but we're back. It's episode 66 for the week of October 29th, 2013. The title of today's show is, we missed a show. So welcome to the Verge Mobile Show. I am Dieter Bohm. I am Vlad Savo. I'm Dan Seifert. And I'm Chris Ziegler. And I'm told I'm super loud. Yeah, also your microphone is set too high. You're super loud and I'm super orange, so. And I'm working on an incredibly insane setup because I cleared out my San Francisco office. And so my computer is sitting on top of two boxes and I have to type like this because I needed to position the camera properly for the show, so. Is this better? Am I not super loud now? You're way better. You're awesome, Chris. Yeah. Okay. So I'm gonna find this out otherwise my pedantry is going to get a better of me. It's the week of October 28th. Right. Today is October 29th. It's the show that we broadcast on the 29th. Yes. Look man, I'm just discombobulated, alright? I'm beside myself with excitement because of the new project out of Motorola, which is pronounced Ara. Ara. I gotta be honest, when I was, I woke up this morning and I'm scrolling through my tweets last night and I see this thing flash by and I'm like, oh my god, they're bringing back the Ara, they're bringing back the Ara, they're bringing back the Ara. I got really excited and then I read the article and I was like, oh, they're just trying to do what Modu does. Or tried to do and then I got really bummed. This is more than Modu though. Modu was like trying to sell you the core of a phone and then you like put it into sleeves to make the phone you want. This is trying to sell you the screen and then you slap stuff onto it like… I mean… Not even the screen. It's a different approach but it's the same idea of components that you bolt on, right? And swap out and all that other stuff. You know, you keep on talking about Modu like they were the first people to come up with this and… Oh no. Really, I'm trying to think if there was ever a company that sold a small handheld device… Any ideas Chris? …different modules into to change its functionality? So what you're referring to is literally any expansion slot? Well, that specifically could add like more than just memory expansion but like… Oh, you mean like the Wi-Fi SD card that a lot of Windows mobile devices used for a while? Yeah, but before those were available. Hmm. Yeah. No, I can't think of anything that's relevant. No. Well, this company sounds just like Modu in that nobody can remember who they are. That sounds about right. And probably in the fact that it no longer exists. Would that be a clue? True. Seriously, why can't you guys admit… Get it out Peter. Peter, just say it. Let's admit that the visor phone was 10 years ahead of its time. Because it wasn't 10 years ahead of its time. It was an enormous… Look, first of all, correct me if I'm wrong, you needed to plug in like an earpiece thing to use it, right? No, you're wrong. You're totally wrong. You could hold it up to your face? Yes, you could. No, that's not right. Every single visor had a microphone which ironically was not hardwired to the motherboard so you couldn't actually record anything from it. But it was specifically designed to hook into the visor phone and the visor phone had an earpiece on it. That was one of the advantages over early BlackBerrys which did require you to have an earpiece. So here's my question. If we were doing a tablet podcast, would we be referencing the Apple Newton and the very, very first ThinkPad from IBM and just say, those were ahead of their time. We need to talk about them. No, we wouldn't. We'd be talking about the Grid Pad from Jeff Hawkins who later went on to found Palm. That's right. That's what we would be talking about. Can we talk about the Grid 10 too? We actually can. And the Grid 4. We actually can use the visor phone and its problems as an example of what is going to go wrong for…is it Aira or Aura? Aura. Project Aura. Aura. I prefer Aura but Aura is like a new era. They went from having it be a separate module to an integrated phone. Because there are fundamental things that work better and more efficiently and faster by putting them all in a single system on a chip or on a single motherboard that's just really hard to do with modular design. So if you're going to break out the cellular radio and you're going to break out the camera processing and you're going to break out, I don't know, the keyboard processor, I don't know, whatever other things you're going to stick onto this modular phone, it's fundamentally going to make it fatter just physically but also harder to work efficiently in a way that a phone really needs to be fast and battery efficient. And I think that was one of the things that killed the visor phone plus they really wanted to make the smartphone in the first place. But it's a real fundamental challenge for what Motorola is trying to do here. The other thing is the absence of an established interconnect. Because you need bandwidth to move between the graphics chip and the applications processor and this is why all these things are being integrated like you're saying. And over the past couple of years, one of the huge advantages that Qualcomm has had ahead of the other guys is integrating the LTE modem together with its processing chip and being ahead of everybody else in terms of having better power efficiency and all of those things. And so Nvidia hasn't been able to break into the high end in the United States because of LTE being such a standard. So those considerations being set aside, the whole project behind the Ara and phone blocks which Ara is essentially a part of an extension of a really technical realization of phone blocks. The whole idea is that you want a different paradigm essentially. You want a different phone. You don't want a phone that competes with what you have because frankly you won't. You won't be able to. But you have other motivations for wanting this device. One is that it's more environmentally friendly because when your battery craps out or your camera is too old or your processing starts getting a bit too slow or you want extra RAM, you can just take that out to keep the other parts. And the other thing is that I think that's probably the major thing but you're just not disposing of the device every one year or two years or whatever it is. The premise is you have your phone, you stick with it, you just exchange parts. Well so the problem I see with it, as exciting as this is, and I'm really really stoked about this concept and it makes a lot of sense to me on many levels, I think it's a non-starter in the US and in other markets with either device subsidies or monthly payment plans because consumers at every step along this road are going to be faced with the question of do I want to spend between say $50 and $200 for a new module for my phone or do I just want to get a new phone for between $49 and $199. And I'm willing to bet that the average human being is going to say well screw it, just give me a new phone. But in markets where these concepts don't exist like heavy subsidies, like reasonable monthly payment plans, it makes a lot more sense. We can get a lot more life out of this single chassis over the course of say three, five, seven years. Yeah, I think you're spot on with that Chris because the other thing I keep saying is, I think I said it on Twitter but I don't think I've said it on the show, I call it the Chromebook syndrome which is characterized by the Chromebook and things like the Nikon D3100 which is just a garbage non-starter DSLR compared to everything else you can get. Look it's the worst thing you can get for your money. But the point is because they're cheap relative to the thing that satisfies your needs, you go and buy it even though they don't actually satisfy your needs. And that's the thing that I call the Chromebook syndrome. And this is what happens with people, they just see something that looks to be cheap and they go and they get it. But again I think Project Arrow from Motorola and the phone book's idea, I mean they're idealistic, you kind of have to accept that. I got to say, maybe it's because I was able to upgrade but the D3100 was a very good camera to me. I'm just putting that out there, it helped me learn how to use DSLRs, I'm very happy that I own that camera. I don't feel that it is a bad camera for people as long as they understand what they're getting into. I'm just… Such as the fact that they need to buy an actual camera when they know how to use it. So my whole thing with this is I just can't believe that Motorola is going to be able to make the components either A, cheap enough to manufacture, easy enough to work with, etc. I have a solution for that. Well let me make my comparison first and then you can shoot it down. If you look at the laptop market, it's been going the exact opposite direction for the past however many years. You used to be able to upgrade the RAM, you used to be able to upgrade the hard drive, you used to be able to upgrade your optical drive when it had those and things like that. And now any Ultrabook you buy, any Macbook that you buy are all sealed in components. You can't upgrade anything out of them. They do that for cost, size and power efficiency and all of those things are even more paramount in a mobile device. Do you think that they also do it for planned obsolescence forest upgrades? I don't but it's possible. I don't. Maybe you don't want to be conspiratorial about it. I mean Motorola's solution for how are they going to make all these different plug-in modules and components cheaply is they're not going to make them. They're going to let people, other people make them. They're going to hopefully have a hardware community build up around it. That's exactly like when a company says we have this awesome new feature and we're not going to build any software features for it, we're just going to release an SDK and hope that software developers make something for it. They're releasing, they're literally releasing module developers kit, so an MDK. That works in very rare circumstances and when it does work it can be very good. It works for the visor. But sometimes it doesn't work. When you think about Samsung has an SDK for everything and how many apps are developed for Samsungs that use the S Pen that aren't made by Samsung? Listen, there are apps but if your question is how many worthwhile apps you can maybe count them on one hand if you're lucky. But let me raise a couple of points. Firstly to what Dan is saying about increasing integration and consolidation with laptops, same thing has been happening with desktops and the Mac Pro is the perfect example of that. It really is a perfect example. I mean a lot of people are complaining because you lose a whole bunch of expandability, connectivity etc. but at the same time Apple's pitch with the Mac Pro is the fact that the entire case is essentially a heatsink fan unit. It's all really integrated and helps. And the other big pitch is that it uses like a sixth of the power of the prior version. So yeah and apparently there's a cheese grater in the box or something like that. There was a big controversy to do with it. I don't know what's going on there. But the distinction here though is the phone blocks project on which project error is based. And phone blocks is like the most randomly successful concept video ever. I mean people produce these concept ideas, designs all the time. Our isn't based on phone blocks. Phone blocks created this concept and was building a community around it. And Motorola had its own Skunkworks project and they're like oh well we should really team up with that guy because he actually knows how to talk to people and we kind of suck at it. And that's the point. Even though he doesn't actually have a product. No he doesn't. I mean his concept is just let's do this thing which is better for the world. Which is also amusing because the guy, his name is Dave Hackens, I'm pretty sure his surname is Hackens, he's Dutch. And it's amusing to me because it's another idealistic phone idea and there was that ethical smartphone project which I don't remember how it was done at this point but that also came from the Netherlands. So people there are quite idealistic and they like the idea of doing, consuming technology in a more conscious way I guess, a more responsible way. But anyhow his strength is that community and he has pretty much a million people signed up, they took part in this thunderclap thing where they all did an automated tweet, Facebook, Tumblr message at the same time, synchronize it so everybody could hear about it and their reach is estimated at something like 370, 380 million people in terms of friends, family, whoever else can read their social messages. So that's a big distinction. This isn't just like Samsung, we're going to take a big moonshot of this, it is right, but there's a community of people who are interested at least. I mean we've been spending the past 15 minutes saying all the reasons this is kind of not going to work but I feel like, I mean I do, some of us want to see if they can pull this off. I'm actually genuinely interested to see if like… With the compromises in there that like if you can make something interesting and cool that actually like rethinks how to make a phone. That's genuinely interesting to me and I don't want to just like completely dismiss it out of hand. If Motorola is willing, by Motorola I mean Google, is willing to toss a bunch of money at this idea, let them. I mean that's the point I was going to get at is that like if there's any company that's out there right now that is in a position to do this and has the backing to do this and try this and either waste a whole lot of money or be wildly successful with it and waste a whole lot of time or not, it's Motorola and Google. They're the ones that are going to ride this out and put the investment in. So if anybody is going to be trying it, Motorola is probably the right company to be trying it. And there's another thing to mention here which is that that concept video just got a ton of interest from companies and Motorola weren't the only ones who were interested. So Nokia, Intel, Qualcomm, ZTE, Ubuntu and Firefox all had conversations with the guy and they were all interested in contributing and his vision is something – he also spoke to Sennheiser and his vision is something like Sennheiser producing speaker modules, camera companies producing camera modules, etc. The idea is that this would be an open platform. Google's pitch is also that it's trying to do for hardware what Android did for software which would be absolutely amazing if it does actually pan out. So the potential is there. We just need everybody to play ball. Yeah, everybody just get on board. Sell your phone, buy an Aura. It'll be great. No worries. Chris just took one. If it was an Aura, I would sell my phone. How could you like the Aura but not the Aura or the era? The Aura was undeniably cool. Maybe it's Aura like pirate, like arr. Aura. The advice to you is don't put your computer on top of a bunch of boxes because it's really the worst. You know who shouldn't try and make a phone like this is Nokia. That was the worst transition ever. I don't care. So they got the other quarterly results. They sold a bunch of Lumias but they actually managed to eke out a profit. What's important is instead of just a bunch of Lumias, they sold more Lumias in the US than they've ever sold before. Significantly more. Just in time. Good for them. But we're still talking, how many in the US did they sell? It was double and if I remember correctly it was like 600k the last quarter so that means 1.2 million. Now I have to read the article to find out. Double is not nothing. But you know, we'll see. We'll see if it matters. I mean it's sort of like… I'm probably being slow on my fact check. And then they also of course announced a bunch of devices and we've talked about the tablet which looks fine. 1.4 million in the US. North America. Oh, so it's all Canadians. I mean look, they can't buy Blackberries anymore, they've got to go somewhere. Come on man, I'm not allowed to make fun of Blackberry or Canadians now? The bone zone is the tro zone today man, come on. Hey Chris. Yes. Buy us your phone. Sure, why not. So how about the Lumia 1520? So I got to play with it. Yeah, I have not touched it yet. It's so massive. I got to see the glossy red version which is not only like massive but it's also massive and slippery. So here's the question, there are… I mean it's a 6 inch phone so it's going to be big no matter what but there are phones that seem like magically smaller than they have a right to feel based on their screen size so like the Moto X is a really good example of it feels like a smaller phone even though it's got I think it's a 4.7 on the Moto X. Compared to other 4.7 it's way smaller. And the LG G2. Yeah, LG G2, another good example. But then the HTC Max just feels big. So like does this feel… This sounds so stupid. I'm going to say it. I'm saying something stupid right now. Does this feel like a big 6 inch phone? I just want to know. I'm trying to formulate a response to this. You know it's not the size of the screen that matters. There we go. It feels very large. That is absolutely true. It's not about the size of the screen. But yeah, it's what you do with it and what Nokia did with it was make it feel bigger than any other smartphone I've used except for I guess the Galaxy Mega is the only thing I can compare it to which I think is 6.3 inches or something. But it's really big and it's not easy to use one handed at all. It's not even easy to hold on to one handed. I'm just going to roll with this innuendos be damned. And the thing is, Microsoft is doing stuff with Windows Phone 8 to take advantage of that screen size by giving you an extra column on your home screen and the native apps are showing more of your emails and all that other fun stuff. But I'm still, we still haven't seen and I didn't get a chance to use it long enough to actually test this out with third party apps but how are these third party apps going to scale to a 6 inch screen? Is there going to be a ton of white space? Are the big headers just going to be bigger? You know and things like that. So I'm not sure how well it works in practice. I will say that the screen is typically great for Nokias. It's got great colors and viewing angles and everything like that. The build quality is really great. You know the phone is really fast. It's the first Windows Phone to use the quad core Snapdragon 800 processor so it flies at least in the brief time I got to use it. But it's just a really big phone and there's nothing really differentiating it from the rest of the Windows Phone line up other than it's a really big phone. I think the 20 megapixel sensor is the most important part of the 1520 because it's a compromise, I was talking about this on the Vergecast last week, it's a compromise between you know a normal sensor and the 41 which requires that hump and there's no hump on the 1520 right? Yeah it is smooth on the back. And it's remarkably thin for its size as well. Yeah and to just follow along with what Chris is saying, you're able to do all of the fun tricks you can do on the 1020 with its peer view sensor. You can do that on the 1520 just to a smaller extent. You can't zoom in as far and you can't crop it as much and all that stuff but it still has those peer view camera tricks and features. Right and one of the things that they share from the Abu Dhabi event which to me is quite significant is that the 1520 and the 1020 are getting camera raw support so you can actually output unprocessed image files. Which to the best of my knowledge and lacks research is the first time that a manufacturer is actually supporting raw output from camera. And Dennis taken said which tells you that it really works. There was some Motorola phone from like 2005 or 2006 that did it. I can't remember the model number but it's probably the first one that matters. Yeah kind of matters. But also a really nice feature that Nokia is adding to its peer view camera is this Nokia refocus thing which everybody went kind of wild about. And it reproduces the effects of the light rail camera. It doesn't refocus your picture after it's taken. It takes a series of photos at different focus at different distances. So then you can take the eventual kind of like composite photo and then tap and it feels to you like you're tapping to refocus a picture you've already taken which is nice. I got to demo that and that was pretty cool. How exactly does it work? Does it just take a bunch of photos? It's like HDR, it takes a burst of photos. And then at different focus points and then it stitches them together and the end result you get to interact with. And that worked really well in the demos that Nokia showed me. It was a really cool feature. I don't know how shareable that is. I guess if they put like some sort of hosting or something you can send somebody a link and they can click around on it. But the same problem with light rail images, they're not really shareable. And the other camera features that Nokia introduced, they combined the smart camera and pro camera app which they should have done from the get go. That's one app and hopefully they do the same with all of their maps apps. I was just about to say maps app is insane to me. There's three? Is it actually three or four now? There's maps, there's drive and there's transit. There might be another one but those are the three that are coming off the top of my head. And they link to each other. Aren't there some Lumia phones where the original Bing maps is still floating around in there if you're not careful? Possibly. Well you know. But the funny thing is they all link together. You can get to drive from within maps. Why make it a separate app? Just put it in the app. Whatever. The funny thing is that the new recombined Nokia camera app is actually just called Nokia camera. And all the other apps that Nokia has customized are called Nokia whatever, Nokia Drive, Nokia Music etc. So it's going to be interesting how Microsoft uses that. Will it still remain and retain the Nokia branding as that software team continues working on those things or does it rebrand into something more Microsofty? Windows camera. Windows phone 8.1 camera. Windows maps pro edition. Windows phone 8.1 camera series. So along with the 1520 Nokia also announced the 1320 which is like another big phone, it's just a cheaper version, lower res display, slower processor, lower in camera, lower in memory. But it's still a big ass six inch screen right? It's still a big ass six inch screen but the thing is I don't think we're going to really see that in the west. I think that Nokia is specifically building that for emerging markets where there is a big fascination with the big screens that we've seen Samsung's had great success with and the customer that is looking for something that replaces both a smartphone and a tablet and maybe even their laptop if they don't have a laptop. So I think that's exactly what they're targeting with that. And then the other thing that I wanted to mention is that the 1520 is an AT&T exclusive here in the US. And the 2520, their big tablet. So like Nokia is doing the same old song and dance with the carriers. Actually I don't think the tablet is an exclusive. Tom Warren found it with Verizon branding over there. So even if there's any exclusivity going on it might be just a limited period. Oh yeah, I see our post says that AT&T will sell the 2520. But the 1520 is an exclusive. So AT&T is going to sell 85% of its smartphones as iPhones and then Nokia gets to duke it out with Samsung for the other 15%. The 1320 is kind of – like it and the Galaxy Mega are interesting to me that we're seeing big ass phones at the mid-range now. That big ass is no longer the exclusive domain of like high end stuff. Weird to me. It's weird to me that somebody would buy a giant phone that is kind of – Who sent a detail just now because your microphone just – It just stopped and then started again. Really? What did I do? Nothing. It was a really smart thing I said. Just assume – You're probably talking on a visor phone. Finally got a chance to send it back. There you go. Thank you very much for that. You're a clever man. I don't know, is there anything else with Nokia? Not really. I mean we should actually talk about Nexus because Google just wants us to see it. They want us to see it so badly. This is deja vu of the Nexus 4 last year. The same exact thing happened with the Nexus 4 except the Nexus 4 got to the point where a Russian website actually reviewed the phone a week ago. Do you know this is a struggle. We actually had somebody in our forums saying, okay, so who thinks the Virgin like completely under NDA and they've been told to shut up by Google until the event happens, right? They think there's this big conspiracy. Then everybody else replied, well, hang on a second. What is there that's actually left to leak and to cover about this phone? Do you want the specs? Do you have them? Do you want pictures? Do you have them? Video? You got it. Price? You got the version number, everything. You got the URL on the Google Play Store where you're going to be able to pre-order and buy it because Google leaked it. You can write your buy script right now that will click the buy button for you and make sure that you get a unit before it sells out. Speaking of that buy script, $349 for the 16 gig version, I had this creeping fear that it was going to be expensive again. Not again, but more expensive than the Nexus 4 simply because they're adding LTE and God, I hope a better camera. But it looks like they're managing to keep it cheap. So now the pendulum swings back the other way and is it going to be cheap build quality or is the camera going to suck? Is what I'm worried about now. My biggest concern is the camera sucking. The Nexus 4 had fine build quality, it's poor design decisions aside. The build quality wasn't really an issue and the speed wasn't an issue and in my opinion the screen wasn't an issue, though I know you guys disagree. But the camera sucked and battery life sucked. Those are my two big concerns with the Nexus 5 is we don't really know how either of those are going to play out until we actually have our hands on it. At least numerically, at least on a spec sheet, appear to be downgrades from the LG G2 which is what this phone is based on. I'm going to say now that I've spent a bit more time with the G2, it's my favorite phone at the moment. There's so many good things about it. But the camera… Wait, wait, wait, Vlad, before you can continue, can I see your home screen of the G2 that has a shortcut to Peter Chow on the home screen? Well it's gone now. I didn't actually keep it. You should have made all of your icons Peter Chow. One day, maybe on Halloween. See now I'm offending Peter Chow completely unintentionally. But I do have custom icons. Look, I've done this. I've got randomly colored sky drop box and then it's not focusing. Man, are you angling for a job at Samsung with those design decisions? No, HCC. Look, this is how you flirt with Peter Chow. You show a picture of him, you celebrate his presence and then you say I can turn sense around. Just give me a shot. Look at this amazing work I've done. On the LG G2. So the 8 megapixel doesn't scare me on the Nexus 5. It also, the rumored spec is that it's got optical image stabilization. And we have seen photos that were sensibly taken from it leak on Flickr and they looked fine. Yeah, it looked okay. But they were still objects in moderate to decent lighting. Right, that's the thing. Battery is actually the thing that worries me because the 3000 mAh battery in the G2 is nice. I don't want to let go of that. The rumored battery on this is what, 2300 I want to say? 2400 I think. 2300 I think. I'm getting a fact check from our producer says 2300 is right. Okay. See I mean what are we going to talk about next week? Like it's going to be announced. We're going to be like hey the Nexus 5, you know that thing we talked about last week? It's exactly what we're going to talk about. Well maybe we'll have actually used it by then and we can give some impressions. Maybe Chris will have something to say then as well. Chris is obviously on their NDA. So Google has not announced an event or date or anything like that obviously and the rumors have put it as happening before the end of October which is swiftly running out. Yeah, it's the 29th. Halloween, Halloween event. How are they going to, if it is 349 how are they going to position it against the Google Play editions which are like twice as much? I think you just answered your own question. They're not worried about the Google Play editions selling. I mean they really don't care. I think they made the Google Play editions to throw a bone to the like hardcore enthusiasts who are really disappointed with the Nexus 4. They got tired of reading me complaining about bootloaders so you have me to thank for the … So wait, are you guys suggesting that with the release of the Nexus 5 the Google Play editions will go away? No I don't think so. I think they'll just… They'll continue not selling it for $650 or whatever they are? They'll continue not selling it for $650 and I mean I'll lay down a $5 bet that they will not get the next update as quickly as they got the last one. It will take them longer to get it. I'll be really bummed. As an owner of an HTC One Google Play edition I'll be really bummed. Especially since Google said as much that it would be getting updates rapidly etc. Yeah but you're not using that phone right? You're on a 5S. Listen Chris. The HTC One Google Play edition is an excellent alarm clock and it's excellent for checking on app updates and it's got a great build quality. That metal feel, that cold metal feel in your hand when you're waking up at 6 in the morning to silence the alarm is very effective at waking you up. The other thing that surprised me, so today there was this Google Plus event where they showed off Hangouts on Air and a bunch of photo stuff and they also announced a bunch of Hangouts updates so location sharing, animated GIFs and SMS support. Now of course we've seen leaks of KitKat that don't have the messaging app on the home screen so maybe this is part of that. I expected they would wait to update the Hangouts app on Android until they announced KitKat but they just kind of threw that out there which is weird, interesting. I don't know what to make of that. It seems kind of premature. It seems like today's Google Plus event was very focused on Google Plus and then they were like oh yeah, we're kicking these things into Hangouts for mobile too. Well that's because Hangouts is this insane cross product thing. The Hangouts on Air lives on YouTube Live but also Google Plus. The whole thing is under the Google Plus team but it's becoming an integral part of Android and it has Google Voice stuff slowly getting built into it across different platforms and it also has just like their messaging play. It's just this super surreal product that just lives everywhere. What struck me… I'm trying to find my Chrome extension bar because the Chrome extension is the worst, it's so bad. The fact that it doesn't support multiple accounts still to this day drives me nuts. It does if you create multiple Chrome profiles. That's not a solution. No it's not. I've tried it. It's really bad. So what struck me as really funny is we knew that SMS integration was coming, Google has been promising this forever. It's not an SMS service, it is just tying into the SMS that you pay for and get through your carrier or whatever. But the day that Google announces it's coming to Hangouts, Facebook announces that it's pulling it out of Facebook Messenger for Android which I find hysterical. Google releases an API and says hey guys KitKat is coming, if you want to be the official SMS app on somebody's phone you need to use this API because we're making it available instead of not available, instead of undocumented. And Google says here you go and Facebook says yeah now we're done with that SMS. I think they said it was for speed issues but the fact that Facebook says no we don't want to do SMS anymore, here's our new Messenger app, it's not so Facebooky on the same day that Google is like hey guess what you can do SMS now. What's going on? According to Facebook nobody used the SMS integration in Messenger which I translate as reading nobody on Android is actually using Facebook's Messenger app because if I remember correctly when you install it, it prompts you to or enables SMS integration by default. I think it gives you the option. Yeah and the fact that nobody is using it probably means nobody is using the Messenger app which as a Facebook user who occasionally gets a message on Facebook, I've always just used the regular Facebook app and used the Messenger tab. I've never felt the need to use the standalone messaging app. Oh dude, Chethides are awesome though. What? Chethides. Chethides? That's what the cool kids call chat heads. No but you get chat heads within the Facebook app right? Well maybe I don't know. You do on iOS. Within iOS it's inside the app but it's not outside but on Android you need Messenger in order to have Chethides everywhere. See Chethides is what happens when Chris quietens down and let's Theta run amok. But he is a more interesting person. Chris is not actually sitting at his desk. I think he has a still image in front of the camera of him and he's left. It's like a Ferris Bueller type of thing. Chris has left a sort of 3D print out of himself. Or no they did that in speed right? Like they had a looping video to make it look like the people were still on the bus. Yeah. So if this is speed that makes you Keanu Reeves. I guess that makes Vlad Dennis Hopper. Sounds about right. I'm down with that. Who of us is Sandra Bullock, me or Dan? I think Dan is less facial hair so we'll give that one to him. Who's Jason Patrick? That's my question. That means you're Jason Patrick Peter. I'm just going to say that I haven't seen speed in 20 years so I can't even like answer this conversation. You need to remedy that tonight. Ditto. But here's the other question though. Do you feel the need to send SMS's anymore? Yeah. Every day. All the time. Really? Yeah. What do you use? Vlad do you use WhatsApp? I mean don't forget we're insanely fragmented over here. We've got Facebook Messenger, Hangouts. Vlad uses BBM. BBM I forgot about. We need to talk about BBM. Nobody talks about BBM. No we do not. Oh my god. Because I am an active user. Oh no I was right. I was kidding but I was actually right. Vlad and I are actually BBM buddies. We sent one message back and forth. Dan is my first BBM friend ever. I'm just going to say, I'm going to take it to the side. No ever Dan, ever. This was my first experience with BBM. No I'm just saying that it's 2013 and I am now your first BBM friend. That's right but there is something about BBM, something intangible which is it struggles so mightily to handle the very basic thing of sending a message back and forth. It makes such a big ordeal out of it that it feels precious. If you get one of those really smooth, immediate, awesome messaging services where everything moves too quickly, you don't appreciate it. BBM, you just kind of feel like there are these little people behind the scenes just struggling to type out your message, carve it in stone and then send it over to the other person and just present it. Then you get that read receipt and you're like yes, I sent something across the ocean. I achieved something. Basically what you're saying is BBM is the Harold and Kumar go to White Castle of messaging services. It's so much effort to get it that even though it's kind of crappy, it's amazing. Yes. Yeah, basically. It's a journey. It's about the journey. Do you guys like it that you can see me reaching up to use my mouse while I'm over here chatting? In any case, yes, I use SMS all the time. I will say that when I'm using an iPhone, I use it far less because my circle of friends and relatives all have iPhones so it just defaults to iMessage there. When I'm not using an iPhone, it's all SMS to them. They're not going to go sign up for a different service. When you switch away from the iPhone, do you remember to turn off iMessage every time? I never do lose messages so I've sworn off of iMessage completely. It bit me once or twice and I now remember to do it. If I don't remember to do it, I realize it very quickly and then I jam my SIM back in the iPhone and do the whole dance and stuff like that. I've never been burned horribly on it. I missed maybe a handful of messages. I know other people that go through the whole process of turning iMessage off and then taking their SIM out and then still have messages lost in the ether. I'm just thinking about that issue of SIM swaps. If you take the nano SIM from your iPhone, how big of an adapter would you need to get that thing into a visophone? Just the standard micro to mini is fine. Really? You're going to give me a straight answer, Dieter? The thing runs on the SIM card. The visophones use this size instead of this size? Instead of the credit card size one? It didn't use a full SIM card. It's like a floppy drive. You have to press a button to pull it out. The visor is the important thing, not the phone. The phone was just one of many modules. You could get the module that lets you use CF cards for memory expansion. You get the module that lets you take.3 megapixel images. You could get one that played MP3s because the Palm OS wasn't capable of playing MP3s back in the day. This is a great little expandable thing. I'm just trying to picture walking around with all these modules in your pockets or bags and you want to do something so you have to pop out the camera, throw your music module in. If you wanted to access this file, pop out that, put in your CF reader, and then, oh, let me take a picture. I'll pop out this module and throw in my camera module. Yeah. Girl who wore cargo pants, what can I say? Also I was doing this in like 2002. What were you doing in 2002? Do you want me to answer that question? Going out and doing things. Yeah, you were meeting girls. Well, some of us didn't have that luxury. No, I'm pretty sure I was meeting girls. I was meeting girls. I was meeting girls. I was meeting girls. I was meeting girls. I was meeting girls. I'm pretty sure I was customizing desktop icons at that time. I've moved on to mobile icons. Oh my god. Oh, speaking of ridiculous things, the self-healing Wolverine screened G Flex from LG. I know Chris has something to say about the G Flex. I want to hear Chris rant on the G Flex. How do you do anything with this phone? Why is it shaped like a banana? How do you put it in your pocket? You put it in your back pocket and it curves around your butt. Yeah, it's got a self-healing screen. So you can sit on it and it's fine because Wolverine's up in there. Everything about this phone. This is like failed. Compare that and the Galaxy Round to Project Ara and tell me which kind of innovation is meaningful. Wait, wait. On the topic of the Galaxy Round, Raymond Cineiro, the guy who does all the display analyses, he put together a piece where he says that it does have a benefit to that particular curve, the Galaxy Round curve rather than the G Flex curve. Apparently, I mean that's his analysis. You can take it or leave it. But apparently it helps minimize the glare of external light which then means you don't need as much brightness. You don't get as many reflections. So it's actually kind of better for you as of this point. Why doesn't Samsung tell us that? I don't know. That is a very pertinent question then because I wrote the article about Samsung's Galaxy Round ad in Korea and that is completely incomprehensible. I don't even think Samsung can justify that advert because it included an avocado being swiped with a thumb. No, no, no. The avocado was not swiped. Let's be very clear what happened with that avocado. It was being caressed. That avocado was caressed, yes, exactly. Okay, yeah. No, I mean for me. You guys don't caress your avocados? They're kind of expensive. You want to keep care of them and I don't know. I love them but in a different way. I don't caress them. It's just weird. And the other thing is 90% of the advert had convex objects. It's eggs, lemons, a baby's hand. What a baby's hand has to do with a concave thingy and then it took card and they folded the card so it became concave. It's like you just did the same thing with your Galaxy Note 3 screen and you're not telling me why I would want to do this. Because of round interaction, Vlad. Don't forget round interaction. So like how does this thing, does it like, would people be able to hear? Would it fit your ear better if it's rounded? I would rather have the banana phone. Yes, right. Any flex? That's the other thing. It's like, yeah, there's absolutely no reason for the phone to be shaped that way. Apart from this like ridiculous like theoretical reflectivity nonsense, there's no like practical reason for the phone to be shaped that way. I mean again, I think I said this a couple weeks ago, like this is a great and very important step toward flexible devices. But this like, this sideshow, this like circus act in between of like phones that are bent for no reason, is like frankly a little like disconcerting to me. Look man, the buttons are still in the back of the G Flex, okay? Well that's important. I mean, goodness knows we don't need buttons on the front. Or the side. That's right. I mean, if LG doesn't sign up 50 cent to promote this phone, then they've failed. Yeah, you know, if I have to sign myself up as a fanboy of any company, it's LG right now. I, for whatever reason, I like the G Flex. I like just how crazy and weird it looks and I'm a huge fan of the G2. And something I found out also, they didn't have to put the power button and the volume buttons on the back. They could have them on the side if they wanted to on the G2. And the thing that LG cites as evidence for that is the fact that the Korean version of the G2 includes one of those pop out antennas in the side. And it still has the same thin bezel around the display. So even though the bezel around the display on the G2 is the thinnest, the tiniest I've ever seen, that is not the reason why the power button is in the back. That's just LG being crazy. I mean, how are you doing the LG software, Vlad? Oh, I squint and I pretend. Do you hold back the dry heaves? When you open an app and it's LG's atrocious skin and you try not to spit up your cauliflower? Actually, as long as we're talking about atrocious skins, Chris, Dan, you guys are full time iPhone users. How are you living with iOS 7 now that you're a month in? I love it. Yeah? I love it. iOS 7 is probably the least of my complaints with the iPhone 5S. What's the greatest of your complaints? Touch ID is a total lie and a falsity. Dan, that means that you didn't set it up correctly because it has changed my life. Yeah, I set it up three times. You're the only person I've ever heard complain about it. It doesn't like my left thumb, which is the thumb I use the most often. I don't like your left thumb either. Dan, did you used to be a man in black because that might explain it. I mean, I did minority report style, shaved my fingerprints off in high school. No, that's men in black, not minority report. Maybe it's minority report too, I don't know. Men in black, they flash you. Anyways, no, I don't have any problems with iOS 7. I have a problem with my iPhone 5S resetting all the time and going to the Apple logo home screen, Apple logo boot screen or whatever you call it. But I don't, the 7.0.3 update where I can turn off the Zoomy animations to open up folders, it makes the whole platform feel a lot faster and a lot less annoying. I mean Chris, you tested this, didn't you? Tested what, sorry? The Zoomy animations versus the simple fades, there's no speed improvement there. I don't know. It just feels faster without the animation. I mean, even if it isn't, it feels faster and that's a better result for me. But I don't know, it just feels a lot faster. Right now Dan, I'm pulling up the scene in Men in Black where they take his fingerprints off. Wow. But that's not unique, Chris. There was that movie with that guy and that thing, they did that too. That's good to know, Vlad. So look, the camera is amazing, touch ID is great and yeah, iOS 7 is fantastic. I've just been fully absorbed into the machine. It's not to say I won't buy a Nexus 5, I will, but just being on a platform that consistently produces this many great apps has not been a terrible thing for me. Yeah, but Chris, do you have knock on? I don't have knock on, that's true. I don't have knock on, I don't have smart stay. You don't have Y screen? You don't have slide aside, you don't have quick menus and quick apps and quick slide. I don't have round interaction. You have OK Google Now. I don't. Unfortunately. You do have many things, Chris. The Google app does have voice. It does, but it doesn't. You know, you're better off Chris not having Google Now because I told it Google Now to ask Chris if he has OK Google Now and it thinks that ask Chris if is ask Chris P has, which yeah. Usually it works pretty well for me. Although actually Verge Mobile Show listeners, tweet at us at Verge or at Backlant or just email us, I want the absolute smallest Bluetooth low energy device. It doesn't do anything except transmit a Bluetooth signal for as long as possible so that I can stick it in my pocket or inside my wallet and have it be like my secure trusted Bluetooth device so I don't have to unlock my phone when it's nearby. Aren't you still wearing a pebble? No I'm not wearing a pebble right now because it's ugly as sin. Oh that's the other thing, I gave up wearing a pebble with iOS. I just can't do it. Because it's terrible, right? Yeah. It's terrible. So what is the tiniest Bluetooth device possible, known to man, that transmits a signal and has a long battery life but I don't want blinky lights, I don't want it to make noises, I don't want to find my keys, I just want a Bluetooth radio that I can stick on my person like a secret agent so that my phone stays unlocked. I want to say the answer to that question Dieter is Moto Skip. Skip isn't Bluetooth, it's just an NFC sticker, that's all it is. Oh right yeah. If I had a Bluetooth I would be super happy. Why is the HSE fetch? How big is the fetch? I mean they're sticking fine but it's got like a flashlight on it and like come on, really? I've got one of those fetches around here somewhere but I don't know where. Stop trying to make fetch happen. Not going to happen. What's the problem with using a smart watch, a pebble? Because every single smart watch is a piece of garbage, I'll probably switch back. No not the pebble. Dude listen, my dumb E Ink Phosphor watch is way cooler, I enjoy looking at it more and I get like just straight up I get more compliments and I'm a vain person and I need to be complimented and more people notice this watch with this sweet curve. I've got a Meta watch but I mean that thing is terrible. The watch's primary purpose is telling you the time and that's why I won't get a Fitbit Force because I need to look at my wrist and see the time. I'm going to agree with you there Dieter, your watch is very stylish and I agree but I actually find the pebble is quite stylish. I just got a hold of this Sony smart watch too and the one thing it doesn't do is tell the time that you – actually it does, I haven't turned it on. But yeah it's big and it's clunky and it's got this awesome – Do you have one of those Wim Labs, the one that Google purchased? I do not, Chris might. I do yes. Is it awesome? No, it's the worst for a couple of reasons. One is that – Good purchase Google. Well no, I mean like if you tear it down to what it is fundamentally it's like a really compelling prospect. It's like a tiny, it's like a one inch by one inch module that has a color display and runs Android. So if you think of it at that level it's obvious the kinds of things you can do with that. But as a watch it's terrible because one, you have to slip it into this really nasty band. It's a generic module that can be adapted. It's almost like an iPod Nano, like a last gen iPod Nano. But then the other problem is that it doesn't have Bluetooth, it only has Wi-Fi. It doesn't connect to your phone. It syncs itself which makes absolutely no sense. So yeah. So in theory that makes it more of a smart watch than anything we've seen before because everything else doesn't have any smarts. It requires your phone for all the smarts. Well it depends on your definition of smart watch. To me a smart watch is a smart phone companion. I don't think of a smart watch as being like a separate, you know, monolithic device that doesn't connect to your phone. Oh hang on, the Gadget Priest has suggested a Bluetooth device to me at Alibaba. So I'm going to go check that out. Alibaba? Yeah, oh I don't know, this is pretty big. It's a big old Bluetooth key chain from Shenzhen ZEN-EAR technology co-LTD. Dieter, do you have one of Phosphor's crystal watches? No, I do not have one of Phosphor's crystal watches. I did back their most recent Kickstarter campaign which is, first of all, they do not need, like these people that make Kickstarter campaigns just to release a product, don't. You don't need it and you're already laid on it anyway. So thanks a lot Phosphor for taking my money for no good reason. You're talking about the TouchTime. Yeah. Well hold on, I'm going to drop this image into our chat. No, no, check out this version of the crystal watch. Like it used to be just like blingy white crystals but now they have an all black one with red crystals, it looks kind of baller. Yeah except it doesn't. That is nice. Yeah right? Our producer is going to share it to our Hangouts so this is a private conversation. I was going to say this is terrible. We're going to get better at sharing stuff. If we end up sticking with Hangouts long term, the new Hangouts stuff that got announced today we might be able to do some interesting things with the show. Stay tuned, stay tuned. While he brings that watch up, okay I promise we wouldn't talk about it but screw it. Like 10.2 Blackberry, it exists. That's all you need to know. Go update your Z10. I was saying this before the show, I haven't unlocked Z10 that I've been trying to get the update on and I even went to as far as installing whatever Blackberry calls its desktop software for the Mac to try and get it through that which didn't work so I have not been able to see the update because it has not come to my phone yet. Actually it's so crazy to me that BBM on iOS and Android follows the Blackberry 10 design conventions exactly. It's got like two menus. It's insane. It's a terrible app. I would just like to point out something. My experience with the Blackberry Z30, I've had only one of those and it was perfectly random. I did not pick on the device at all. I just stumbled upon it. I didn't look for it. We met. It happened and here's what happened. I was at one of the… It invited you up for a drink. You were thirsty. You know, it's not your fault. Listen, I was at one of the UK phone retailers was doing their holiday season preview. So they have all the devices out there. They've got the LG G2, the Lumia 1020, all of their big devices and I had one Blackberry Z30 and I'm like, oh is that the Z30? I haven't actually seen that in person. Can I touch it? Can I play with it? And the lady was really nice, really obliging to let me handle it but she said, well actually we're sorry but the software's frozen. So I mean this is… Like the one time I get a Z30 in my hands and the software is just like locked up and she couldn't even recover it. I will say to give Blackberry some sort of credit, you can see the watch now. I don't know how to make it big. We need Apple to make noise, make some sound. Is it big? Oh I did it. There it is. There's the watch that Chris was talking about. We're going to have a watch section here in a second. Anyways, so Blackberry 10.2, it's pretty funny that Blackberry beat Android and iOS to the whole quick message response thing. So kudos to them on that. So you can respond to a message without jumping into your messages or leaving whatever app you're in. I know Cyan Engine Mod has had for quite a while as a custom ROM thing but Android proper doesn't have it. iOS proper doesn't have it even though Mavericks has it. So it's a great feature. You know I don't think the visor phone had that either. Did the visor phone support SMS? Yeah dude. It was great. Was SMS… Do you guys remember when it was a big deal to have threaded SMS messaging on your device? I remember installing third party apps on my Windows mobile phones so that I could get third party. Do you remember when it was a big deal that you could send an SMS to or from somebody on Sprint's network? That was huge. Yes, I do remember that actually. Was that like the American version of the Berlin Wall falling? Basically. They didn't fix SMS and in fact in some ways they still haven't but the less said about SMS the better. That ladies and gentlemen is the Verge Mobile Show for the week of October 28th, 2009. If you want to follow us on Twitter you can, you should. I am Bacalan, Dan is DC Seifert, Vlad is Vlad Savov, Chris is Zipower. We are all at Verge. You can email us. It's the Verge Mobile Show at theverge.com. And we'll be back next week. Probably you never know but there's a good chance. So thanks for watching everybody.