 Greetings, mobile accomplishers. Welcome to the Verge Mobile Show. It is the week of November 11th, 2013. Today is 11-12-13, which means that we're all doomed. There's a comet in the sky and it's going to spell the end of humanity. I am Dieter Bohm. I'm Dan Seifert. I'm Chris Ziegler. And I am Evan Rogers. Welcome back to the show. We're so pleased to have you here. I think that our last mobile show with Evan was not just a fine mobile show, but the finest ever. And I'm sure that our listeners and viewers would agree. So we're all very, very excited to have him back. Now, was this a function of Evan's presence or my absence? I think it was a function of both. Okay. Well, for those of you who don't know, Evan usually serves the role of producer for the Verge Mobile Show. So he's actually, he hasn't relinquished those duties this week. So I'm curious to see whether he's able to multitask and still run the show while being on the show. Listen, you know, things are going to happen in the background. Just pay no attention to the man behind the curtain and in front of the curtain. It'll be okay. Alright, so these new Hangout thumbnails are not okay. You don't like them? I mean, is this, are people watching the live show seeing what I'm seeing, like my eyes hovering above Chris's head, just like creepily? Or are they looking at me ducking down for no good reason? They're looking at you ducking down. To the rest of the world. Really? Okay. Yes. All I see is like my mouth is gone, where I'm speaking Chris's head is, and it's very creepy. So if I look up, it's like I'm looking up at the giant head above me? Well yeah, as long as you're not talking, then yes. So yeah. So okay, what do we got for Steph to talk about? We've got Moto Maker. Moto Maker is available for everybody in the US, not in the world. Yeah, people in the world wish it was everywhere in the world. I don't know if anyone on this program can do a good Vlad imitation, but I bet Ellis Hamburger does a good Vlad. But anyway, if he were here, he would complain that it's still not, as far as I know, it's still not in the UK, right? No, it is not. It's only available in the US and Canada, I guess. It's tragic. Moto Maker is great. You guys think people are still excited? Like, after this exclusivity has ended? Look, I've used a Moto X pretty consistently over the past few days now, and I was reminded at just how great of a phone it is. I would not hesitate to recommend it to pretty much anyone looking for a new Android phone, and I think I would recommend it over a Nexus 5. I just briefly touched Nexus 5 when I was in New York last week, but it's just an awesome phone. It's the perfect size, software is great, the camera improvements really helped, yeah. I mean, it's awesome, and the configurator just makes it that much better. I know that some folks, Dan, I think you included, are waiting for wood. Yes. I didn't blame you. Bit of a double entendre. Phil, can I ask you about the camera update? Because Dieter, you've also had the Moto X and gotten the update. That's right. Is it like a real improvement? It is a real improvement, but I mean, a 3 is better than a 2. I don't know, actually, I have no idea what we scored the camera. And also, it's better than that because the Moto X camera is, I think, demonstrably better than the Nexus 5 camera, which again, we're in the realm of not saying that much. But it's better. It handles low light slightly better and it's just less noisy, but it can't handle genuine low light nearly as well as an iPhone 5S, or of course, if you want to go crazy, a 920 or a 1020. It can't do Lumia style stuff. But as long as you're not in the dark or in twilight, it's great. It's pretty great. I mean, I can, I did this last week with the Nexus 5, I took a selfie, I could do it again. I mean, just while Dieter does that, all those things that Chris mentioned are great and then also the price dropped to $100 on contract across all carriers. So it kind of makes the Moto X pretty enticing proposition for anybody that is shopping for a new Android phone. And just to echo what Chris said, I'd recommend it for the average person over the Nexus 5 pretty much any day of the week. And a lot of that has to do with the way that the average people in America, in the US or whatever, still buy their smart phones. Very few people are buying unlocked phones and using them off contract, mostly because AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, they don't give you a discount to do that. So there's really very little incentive unless you're a T-Mobile customer to pay for a phone off contract and then use it on your plan. So for most people, if you are eligible for an upgrade on your respective carrier, $100 for a Moto X is more attractive than $350 for a Nexus 5. Well the incentive is the latest version of Android, but I just don't think very many people hold that in that high of a regard. Right, again the average person… $150 extra. Yeah, for the average person it's not worth it. The Moto X is a nicer size, it's plenty fast enough, the camera as we mentioned is better. The actual Motorola software enhancements are actually genuinely usable. So the screen is way better on the Nexus 5 and it's also larger. I know that a bunch of people are down on the Nexus 5 hardware, but I think that it actually feels a little bit better than the Moto X. The Moto X is more like, I don't know, comfortable in your hand, it's got a curved back, but the Nexus 5 feels a little bit more premium to me, just a little. And I'm willing to believe that they can fix the camera to have the shutter speed not be 4.2 seconds on the Nexus 5, which would be pretty amazing. Yeah, that's the biggest problem with the Nexus 5 is it takes forever to focus and snap the picture and then it misses focus so often. If you're taking a picture of something that's like still and not moving then it can take a great photo. So a lot of that does have to do with software, so hopefully… Yeah, people have been sending me XDA developer links to people that are trying to hack the software to have it, to change with the low-level settings to make it better. I am not rooting my Nexus 5 any time soon. Not even rooting it? Dude, I've been doing enough of that lately. I completely break my One X, I mean hard. And I did it to my One and I just need a break, man. Too much rooting, too much effort. Well, because I rooted, I actually have a version of Android 4.4 on my One somewhere. Boom. So that's cool. So actually, so rooting CyanogenMod OS is now, they've got a one-click installer apparently on Google Play? Apparently… They've been talking about it for a couple of weeks now, like almost a month, haven't they? Yeah, well I think it still needs to be paired with the Windows app that they launched or announced earlier on. But this Android app that you can download from the Play Store I guess makes it that much easier. Which is cool, I mean if you're into rooting and modding your phone, it's never been easier to install a custom ROM if you have a supported device. So I haven't tried this… How do you feel about them calling it CyanogenMod OS? That's what it's called, CyanogenMod OS. Yeah, that makes sense to me. We talked about this last week, how the Nexus 5 doesn't have, we don't think, like there's always been that talk of like stock Android and AOSP and you know, bare bones Android or whatever. But you know, when you look at the Nexus 5, it's not stock Android, it's Google's OS. Yeah, but if I asked you what OS the Nexus 5 ran, what would you say? I would say it runs Android, but if you ask me what OS… If I asked you what the S4 runs, what would you say? I would say it runs Android. Okay, so… I guess I see your point, but you know, I don't know, CyanogenMod is more than just a skin. Yeah, well that's true. It is more than just a skin. There's a lot of customize ability in CyanogenMod and whether or not that really warrants an OS moniker is kind of, I feel like probably not, but it sounds cool and you know, it's the device… I mean it's worthy, I mean it's a flavor of Linux, right? Like it's worthy of the OS label just the same as Ubuntu or Red Hat or… Well, but I would say, I would argue, just to you know, argue against my own point, I would argue that it's no more of a customization than TouchWiz is that Samsung does and Samsung doesn't call it TouchWiz OS on its devices. Well, I don't think Samsung has used the TouchWiz label in their versions. I mean it's just the Samsung experience now or you know, whatever. The Wiz. The Wiz. … operating system really. I mean truly. I mean it is running on Android, it does run on top of Linux so… and then on top of that you've got Dalvik or now for crazy people the whatever the heck it's called. Which actually I want to get into that. ART, yeah. ART. But before we get into ART and it's super good that you're good for ART here Evan, I interrupted you before, you said you hadn't tried this but you were about to say something else about CyanogenMod. Yeah, no I have not tried this one click installer. I'm kind of curious about how CyanogenMod is going to posture like bundling exploits for phones because they're definitely not going to get permission to bootload or unlock phones especially from the phone itself. And like I said I have not used this one click installer but if they're actually including exploits with the APK and the Google Play store I'm pretty sure that violates the terms of service like hands down. Well that might be one reason why it requires the Windows installer. Yeah, I think that's probably the story. Well there have been, by the same token there have been apps that require root in the Play store for ages, right? Right they don't actually root the phone for you. No but they take, I mean they require an exploit in order to. Actually there is a long history of Google Play root exploits but they get taken down pretty fast. Do you guys remember when it was possible to jailbreak an iPhone by visiting a website? Oh it was like jailbreak.us or something? Those are the days. But I've actually been using the latest snapshot of CyanogenMod on a G2 and shout out to Dan Rosenberg for being the most elite hacker ever for creating the Loki exploit. But kind of playing with this G2 hardware without the crime against humanity that is LG's skin kind of makes me think of what the Nexus 5 could have been if it weren't cut down for price reasons. But Evan, you know what you can't exploit are the back buttons. There's no way to hack around the back buttons. You can't get rid of those. But does it have double tap to work? Hardware platforms. Yeah does it have knock on? That's the big question. It does still have knock on. So there you go, he got around those back button issues. It doesn't have knock off though so it's totally half baked. Wait is knock off a real thing? Yes. I don't even remember. I'm not sure what the official title of that feature is. What does that mean? How do you double tap the screen to turn it off? I don't think that is an actual feature. I could be high and I could be wrong. It's absolutely, it's 100% You double tap to turn it on and you shave in a haircut to turn it off. But no, using Cyanogen Mod and the KitKat apps on this G2 actually makes me feel really good about the Nexus 5. I think they made exactly the right compromises to achieve the price point they wanted because the difference between the two and even the difference between the cameras, and I have used the camera a lot in the stock firmware, it's very negligible. What? I don't think there's any I'm going to call your bluff there. The G2's camera is way better than the Nexus 5's camera. It's way faster, focuses faster, takes better pictures, it's a higher resolution for starters, but it's like night and day between those two. Did you guys hear that? It was a shutter click. I hit the shutter button on the Nexus 5 before the podcast started and it just now took a picture. They made those compromises to hit that price point and that's great if they wanted to hit that price point which they clearly did, but I would much rather have, if they want to do that to hit that price point, by all means go ahead and do that, but also give me a $500 or $550 Nexus phone that doesn't make those compromises because I would much rather buy that. Yeah, I mean, I really, really don't think that the cameras have that much difference. Maybe for a connoisseur who's used every phone and seen every camera. Evan, you probably remember, we talked about this on the Virgcast last week. Neelai brought up the point that he doesn't think, as far as he knows, the sensors in most of these cameras including the Nexus phones are the same. It's that it's all done in software and Google isn't putting any time or effort into making the camera software in the Google experience formerly known as stock Android any good. Now I believe that 100% because the stock app gives me unending focus problems, but just playing around in camera FV5, which is just one of my apps that I like for taking pictures, it locks the focus a lot better. I'm not sure if it just continues to focus until it does actually autofocus confirm or whether or not it actually can communicate better with that library file. The second is a little harder to believe, but the software definitely makes a difference. I'm getting way more good to pretty awesome shots out of FV5 and I have terrible problems with the stock app. Software makes a difference and the firmware makes a huge difference, but it's harder to extrapolate the differences between those. Yeah, I haven't really had focal running on the Nexus 5 at all. If there are other good camera apps that I could try on the Nexus 5 to help alleviate it, I would totally do it, but it needs to talk to the firmware properly. You know where there aren't any app compatibility problems is on the iPhone. That's right. And also you know where I consistently get some of the most amazing pictures I've ever taken with any camera, period, the 5S. I'm just putting that out there. You're not wrong. Yeah, you're definitely not wrong. The 5S is $750 for phone. Yes. Are we talking about just cameras in terms of like how much they matter to the consumer? Because we've seen a lot of discussion on whether or not having a slightly subpar camera really ruins the Nexus 5, whether or not it actually ruins the overall product. I think it matters hugely. I think when you look at Flickr, the number one camera on, not camera phone, the number one camera on Flickr, actually like the top three cameras on Flickr are iPhones. Everybody takes photos with their smartphones and they take a lot of photos with their smartphones. Anecdotally, I've tried to give my wife phones that are not made by Apple time and time again and every single time they last a week and then she hands it back to me and wants her iPhone back because the picture quality and the speed is not up to par and not what she's used to. Do you hide the iPhone in the meantime so she can't get it? And then she hides the Oreos and then they don't talk to each other. She replaces all of the Oreos with candy corn Oreos. No with hydroxids. Oh, boy. That would be an improvement. Hydroxids are way better than Oreos. Oh, snap. Look, I totally agree. I would love, in my dream world, Google would have pricing tiers for its unlocked direct to market phones. There would be a low end, a medium range and the Nexus line, as it stands today, probably qualifies as the medium range and then they would have an absolute no compromise high end experience that would slide in above the Nexus 5 and it would be best in class camera, but I guess everything else kind of is already in the best in class. You could make an argument for more premium materials, but the plastic that's on the Nexus is pretty good. If you get the black one. The white one. The white one has terrible plastic. Does it? Yeah. It's just glossy. It's not hardcore plastic, it's just plastic plastic. It's got this glossy, you can see my fingerprints on it in a webcam. Let's just put it that way. It feels bad, man, but the black one feels nice. Well, it makes you wonder if, you know, at this point in the Nexus's existence, if Google isn't very deliberately making room for Motorola to own a number of market segments that Nexus itself is not intended to. Clearly Google could if it wanted to make a high end, you know, no compromise Nexus. They could devote the resources that are needed to making better camera software, use better materials, etc. etc. They're not and maybe that's because they want Motorola to own those markets instead of cannibalizing their own sales. Sounds like a recipe for a modular phone design to me. Yeah. I forgot about RL already. What does that say about RL? Wow. That's, I mean, you know, it's been a week, two weeks I guess since they unveiled it. It'll be a long time before we see anything. Yeah, it's all concepts right now. It's all dreams. Okay, so we brought up, we were joking about CyanogenMod OS and then we made the joke about what is an OS and then, so there's Linux and then there's Android running on Linux and then the apps are run with this thing called Dalvik which basically like looks a lot like Java but isn't Java and so Google didn't get sued completely into the ground over it. But now there's a new thing that is the app engine called the Android Runtime. Is this, have I got this right? Yes. Is that summary right? What is the Android Runtime? Why do I care? Why can't I just like stick with Dalvik? Like it's a thing that a developer can turn on and apparently it breaks things but it's the way of apps going forward. Why are they changing it? Somebody know? So my understanding is that it's kind of two different ways to do the actual compiling of the app. So the way I understand it and this is all pretty low level stuff but Dalvik uses a just in time compiler to compile a lot of the Android code on the fly and you know that works great. It works great on a quad core device at like 2.2 gigahertz but the way ART works is that more of that code is actually compiled at the installation of the app and the significantly more or marginally increased portion is actually compiled to native code at the introduction of the app. So it's two different styles and there's been a lot of research on Reddit and XDA developers on whether one actually yields higher performance than the other and from everything that I've seen it's kind of a wash because like in some situations and for some types of apps ART works really well and provides like better performance and lower power usage at those performance levels and some applications just work differently and just have been pretty well tuned for the Dalvik engine. So for right now it seems like a wash. You can understand and I don't know if XDA research bears this out or not but it stands to reason that things like ultra high performance games would do better with as much pre-compiling as possible. Pre-compiling isn't the right term. Being a computer scientist I know for a fact that pre-compiling is not the right term but compiling before it reaches the JIT compiler makes more sense for something like a game right. Whereas I guess other kinds of apps it doesn't necessarily matter. At this point it's still really early on. You have to go into developer settings, you have to enable it, it's not enabled by default. Very few people know it exists or know that it's there and frankly unless the developer has a Nexus 5 they don't even have access to it yet. And Google doesn't actually want anybody to like really genuinely make production apps with this. It's just like a thing they're trying out. Right I think that Google made a big to do about how KitKat is going to be running on lower end hardware, less powerful stuff and you know ART might be the thing that enables that if it allows the processor to do less work at the time that the app is launching or running then you know it's better all around. I'm just not surprised that we're not seeing huge performance gains right now. Apps haven't really been optimized to use it. The feature itself probably isn't fully baked and fully complete yet. Well it's not, the way I understand it is that the actual compiling happens at the installation of the app so like I don't think there's a huge possibility for runtime performance gains but I do think that you know a lot of people complain about the stutteriness and lagginess of Android and you know as someone who uses Android all the time and iOS like it's definitely there it's not made up but if you're compiling lots of portions of the code at runtime, as the pieces become available you know some of those are going to lag behind others but if a lot of the code is natively compiled and doesn't need to be compiled again or compiled at runtime then as those resources become available it should be a lot smoother. So I don't know about lower end devices but hopefully this could yield some smoothness gains that would be well received. Thank you, now I understand but the gist is… Not now, ain't happening now. I guess so like Moto G is coming, we've seen rumors I think last night Wall Street Journal teased or like leaked something, they said it was going to be cheap, what else have we seen about this? They said it's going to be under $250 right? Yeah that's what Wall Street Journal said, no there was a retail promotion card that leaked that had specs on it. And we've seen pictures of it right? It looks just like a Moto X. I'm looking at our pictures now and yeah. The concept of making two identical phones in your lineup that are at different price points is pretty novel. The closest analog I can think of is the Galaxy Note and the Galaxy Mega but it's pretty rare for OEMs to do this right? Yeah to not make the cheaper one look cheap. The only thing I can think of is Apple with the iPhone 4, the 4S and then… The 5S and the 5C. But even though it looks, based on what we've seen of the Moto G versus the Moto X, the 5S and the 5C look further apart aesthetically than the G and the X. And also the 5C is still very expensive. So they are announcing it tomorrow as we record this so I guess we will find out more. In Brazil right? Yeah. In Rio? Is this supposed to come stateside? I mean who knows? If everything pans out with the cost, if the Wall Street Journal's predictions are correct and this is going to be a phone that's going to sell for under $250, I don't think the US is the market that Motorola will be targeting with it. It is the emerging markets, it is Latin America, it is Asia, it is Europe, it is all the areas where smartphone penetration isn't over 50%. And there's a lot of people that have not upgraded from a feature phone just because the sheer cost of ownership. And you know, Nokia has been in that market for a long time and they've had their Asha lines and things like that and then there's of course the Chinese companies that have built Android phones in the past couple of years that have entered that market. But you know, all these phone companies talk about the next billion users or whatever and I think that if this thing turns out to be the price that it's been predicted at and it's got the features that it's predicted to have, then that's Motorola's play for the next billion users. I can't wait to not hear about the next billion users anymore. I swear I've been hearing about it for five years now. I just want everybody to be given a smartphone at birth and then we'll all… I mean I suppose the next billion users is a little bit of a reach. It's probably like the next 500,000 users because in that same Wall Street Journal article they said only about 500,000 Moto X's have been sold. Well they were quoting like strategy analytics or something, weren't they? Yeah I think they were recording some research but I mean it's kind of been apparent that the Moto X has not exactly sold well but the price has now dropped. It's 99 and then everybody else moved along to 99. Yeah but you know broader availability of Moto Maker, the price drop, maybe it will get a little kick in the pants before the holidays. Actually, answer me this, other than the original Droid, maybe the Galaxy S3, has there been a phone that is like alternative to the iPhone for real and a marketing campaign that hinted at that that actually like really took off. I mean the Galaxy S3, I mean it wasn't directly marketed in that way but that's what it worked out to be. What do you mean it totally was? It was totally marketed as being the iPhone. All of Samsung's ads about the people lining up in front of the Apple store, they couldn't do all the cool things that the Samsung could. I know but like were they hyping it or were they just like selling the phone like straight up like I'm talking about like the Droid launch like hype. Like everybody knew the Galaxy S3 was coming, we all knew what it was going to be and it was fine, it was great but there wasn't like here's the phone that's going to remake this company. The Droid did that, Palm tried to do that, it didn't do so hot, Moto X has tried to do that, lots of Lumias have tried to do that now. It seems like every time we see a phone that's like this is a big last great hope for this company to take on the iPhone, it doesn't do so well. With Samsung it was like yeah it's Samsung, they're going to sell it to them. Well that wasn't proven before the Galaxy S3. I mean they sold a lot of Galaxy S2's. The Galaxy S2 did well but it didn't do iPhone well and Samsung didn't run with Apple at being the top smartphone maker in the world until the Galaxy S3 and then the Galaxy S4. So what's the Galaxy S4 doing? Honestly I'm not up to speed on the latest numbers but I'm sure it's selling. How's the Galaxy S4 doing, is that what you asked? I'm sure they've sold 11 trillion of them. I see them on the streets now, it took a while but I see them out. They're everywhere. It takes a minute to recognize it though from the GS3. I still see a lot of GS3's but I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that the GS3 is still being sold and it's like 50 bucks or 100 bucks when you sign a contract now. I mean Samsung totally bought into the Apple playbook of selling last year's model at a discount. I'm sure they'll do the same thing with the S4. So speaking of trying to recognize the Galaxy S4 from a distance, I haven't had this actually happen, but how often are you riding public transit and you're staring at somebody's phone and then they think that you're staring at them and then you're like, no, no, no, I'm just looking at your phone. But you actually are but then you're a creeper. Every time I see a smartphone in public, every time I'm like making sure I can identify it and especially with the Samsung phones, it takes a second and I'm becoming that guy on the subway that is kind of staring. I don't want to see what's on your phone. I don't care that you're playing Candy Crush Saga. I just want to know what phone you're playing it on. So let me just say that A, this is me 100% of the time when I take public transit and B, my favorite game is to play which imported Sony is that because it is a hard one. How many imported Sonys are you seeing on the subway, Evan? Are you kidding me? Are you even kidding me? There are so many. First of all, Sony sells so many cool phones overseas. We get nothing. It is so dry here for Sony phones. Come on, guys. But also, they sell lots of phones at lower price points overseas and they just get in here. I like Sony phones a lot, even the lower end ones. So that's why I notice for sure but I see them all the time. I'm looking for them but I see them all the time. Back to Dieter's point, yeah, I do the exact same thing. I think what it is is like I've gotten really used to doing the quick look and then the look away. This is like so, these are like creeper tactics. Let's talk about creeping on the subway. So you just got to look by a few times. I do it too but because I look homeless, the additional danger is that everyone thinks that I'm about to steal their phone. So I need to say, no, no, ma'am, I'm not about to grab your phone out of your hand. I'm just wondering what phone you're using. I have people like straight up ask me like there was this one guy that saw that I had the HTC One before it was actually released in the US, it had been released in Europe and he was like, how did you get that? Let me look at it. I was like, whoa, there it is. Just look at it from over there. But it wasn't so bad. Like somebody saw the Nexus 5, they asked about the Nexus 5, that was cool. So maybe instead of just like, what kind of phone is that? I should just ask, what kind of phone is that? And then the thing will be over and they'll know I'm not a creeper. The difference is when some guy asks you what kind of phone it is because it's like some unreleased phone, it's like one tech nerd asking another tech nerd. Whereas if you just ask the poor lady on the subway, it's like a tech nerd asking someone who probably like doesn't care. Come on, you don't know that. She could be a tech nerd. Yeah, you're right, she could be. Whatever, this whole plan would involve actually talking to people. Yeah, that is not happening. That's terrifying. What you do is you just subtweet about them and see maybe if they see your tweets. I should just take pictures and tweet them anonymously so they don't let them know that I'm doing it. That's exactly what I should do. Yes, yes. Before Sony's were my jam, creeping on Lumia owners was my jam because like they look very similar, it's also very hard. What? Oh, I thought you meant Lumia's to Sony's. Or do all Lumia owners look the same, is that what you're saying? No, no, no, no, I'm just saying my old jam was to try and find out which candy colored Lumia people had. Right, fair enough, fair enough. Because that's rare. Actually, I can't make this transition work. You know what else is creepy? People talking on the phone on the plane. That looks creepy. Yeah, it's seriously going to be the downfall of Western civilization. Well, it's not going to happen. I think that if airlines dare to turn this feature on, and I don't think that they will, but if they do, I think that it will end up being perceived as a security issue in the FAA or you know, someone will shut it down. A security issue? Yeah. Guys, I'm sorry, I just got five emails about CES and Marissa Mayer is speaking there. Yes. Marissa Mayer is delivering the keynote address at this year's CES. No, no, it's Kaz Harai. Nope. Yeah, it is. Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer to deliver keynote address at 2014 International CES. Well, I guess. A keynote or the keynote? Yeah, like the traditional big Bill Gates one is Kaz Harai. This is the Tuesday keynote. I'm sorry, I totally derailed this, but I just got so many CES emails and that makes me sad. Yeah, CES is coming up so fast. Yes, yeah, yes it is. But to return to the phone on airplanes question, like how is it any different than a bus? People are on their phones on the bus all the time. It drives me nuts. The difference on a bus and a plane is on a bus you can get up and move to another seat. Or you can get off and get the next bus. I guess that's true. Or you can sit in a pool of urine, you can do that on a bus also. I mean you can do that on a plane as well, but much more difficult to negotiate. Not as common. I personally don't think it would bother me that much, but I can see how being in a closed space. As somebody who takes a commuter train pretty often, when there's somebody who's gabbing on the phone, it gets to the point where I will get up and move to a different part of the train. And like on a plane you can't do that. Why don't you just go to a quiet car? There's only like ever one quiet car and it's like packed. There should be a quiet car on the plane. I believe that's called first class. So how much do you think a text on a plane is going to cost? Probably like a dollar or something. I bet you it's a buck fifty. Easy. Buck fifty easy. Sounds about right. That's so stupid. Per text? It's wifi. They just can't price it at that. People would go insane getting like $400 texting. I don't know Evan, they have no problem charging you $22 for an hour and a half of wifi access that probably won't work. Yes, well that's true. What do you think a text costs when you travel to Europe? I think it costs 25 cents per text message you receive. I still have that guide up. Well speaking of, I'm going to completely derail the conversation now. But speaking of traveling to Europe, so I've been testing, you know Republic Wireless is releasing the Moto X this week, which is what I've been testing the past few days. I'm going to write something up on it. The most compelling use case I think for the service for someone who already has another like main line is you buy the $5 a month wifi only service and then that's your Europe phone. Because you can connect to any wifi hotspot and you just use it like a phone and you get unlimited texting. And it's $5. It's a no brainer. It's pretty sweet. Yeah, yeah. And it works great. It's weird, they do some weird voodoo to make the connections for the phone calls and somehow it's actually faster to connect to somebody using Republic Wireless than it is with a regular phone. Like if I dial a number and I'm on wifi, the second I hit send it's ringing. It's really weird. It's kind of creepy. But it would be a perfect Europe phone. A perfect travel device. And if you're using a Republic Wireless phone as your main phone, if you get the $10 plan which adds cellular in the US, then boom, you just take it over there. They don't have any cellular agreements for roaming in Europe but any wifi hotspot, you got your regular phone number. That's pretty cool. $5 a month wifi phone. Is Republic CDMA or GSM? CDMA. Yeah, so you can't roam at all. Well, does the Moto X have, do the CDMA models of the Moto X have GSM? I believe that they do not. I think that Verizon requires that all of its phones be able to roam on GSM. To be world-famous now? Yeah. No. But regardless, Republic doesn't have any roaming agreements so it's irrelevant. Interesting. Yeah it looks like the Sprint model. Is it irrelevant if you can put just a foreign SIM in it and then it works? That's true but the phone is locked to Republic. Ah, yes. Do you have the, hold on, I don't know. I don't know what's going on with this Moto X. I can't tell. There's so many variants in this, I can't tell which one's actually. Are you using mine, Evan? What? Are you using mine? No. Is that my Moto X? Okay. No. What happened to my Moto X? Chris has so many Moto X's he doesn't even know where they went. I think it's just in the studio, honestly. You guys are in completely different states. How can Evan have your... Well I gave... Chris just leaves them around, he travels around the country, leaves Moto X's behind. He's like the Johnny Appleseed of Motorola. They're like bastard children. I gave 490,000 of Motorola's 500,000 Moto X's bought by Chris to give away as he wanders the country. Yes. Yes. Like Shane. Yes. That's exactly right. What's his name? Never mind. Continue wandering the country, Chris. What's the next, I have nothing else to say about Republic. What's the next attack? I mean... I want to know who is the... Who is the actual target demographic of Republic Wireless? Everything about their technology seems awesome and the pricing is really, really good. But is it reliable enough to have as a mainline? Because a lot of these seem like edge cases. Right. So I had a good sit down with their CEO last week and one example he gave is if you have a parent who doesn't care at all about data or any advanced capability for that matter, it makes a great, even a landline replacement. You get either the $5 plan which is if you're just going to keep the phone around the house or if you want to be able to take it with you, the $10 plan. And they don't restrict you. It's unlimited minutes and texting when you're on the cellular network and they don't restrict you like they don't throttle you or cut you off if you use it too much on cellular. Even though at some point I'm sure it becomes profit negative for them if you do just use it on cellular all the time because they expect you to be on Wi-Fi for the most part. But they've said, you know, they launched in beta, what was it like two years ago I think using some really crappy LG or something. It's like Motorola Defis or something like that. No, but even before that I remember Paul was testing when they were still by invite only. He was testing it on, I don't know, some like super low end Android device. And it had some issues then and they've been working a lot on making it more robust. And now one thing you can do now that you didn't used to be able to do is transition over from Wi-Fi to cellular without hanging up your call. And he claims that it's bulletproof. Like it just, it works. And one of the reasons it works so well is because of the way they connect the call. You're not holding the call with the person you're talking to over just a single connection. There's an intermediary which is them, Republic, and they hold two connections. One from them to the person you're calling and one to you. So if your call disconnects, they hold the other one and you reconnect on another network. Whether that be Wi-Fi or cellular. So he even gave the case where if you're driving through the middle of nowhere and you drive through a pocket of no signal, it'll keep the call open for a few seconds. So if you come back into reception, the call will still be ongoing. But that's how they're able to do these really seamless Wi-Fi to cellular handoffs, even better than UMA, which never worked very well for me. You may work fine on Wi-Fi, but as soon as you tried to move from Wi-Fi to cellular, the call would usually drop. Or it would be janky in some way. Either it would drop. Oh yeah, no way. T-Mobile's Wi-Fi calling, my mother actually is super into it because she works in a hospital that is just impervious to cell signal. It doesn't matter which carrier you're on, it just cannot penetrate into that building. And it works really well, like you're saying, when you're on a Wi-Fi access point. But that handoff is like, it works so poorly I'm not actually sure that there is one. It works so very few times. So yeah, and I mean it's kind of like, it's kind of like, it's kind of like when Minnesota tries to make a play and they try to hand it off to the running back and the quarterback just drops it. You'd like to make a Lions burn, but you can't because they're the first place in the division. Oh guys, sweet sports jokes. It helps when everybody else in the division is hurt. Otherwise the Lions would, you know. You guys have like eight quarterbacks. It doesn't matter how many quarterbacks you hurt, you have like eight more just waiting to play. Somebody, we've got, look, we're coached by an entomologist, alright, and he looked at the word quarterback and he's like, oh well obviously we need four so we're holding. Wow. That's how it works, right? No. It's not. Denver is like seven and one or eight and one until they play Kansas City later this year and then they'll be like eight and four. Yeah, they're playing Kansas City twice. Once we dive into this conversation, there is no way back. There's just no way back. No, Dieter was going to say something about Republic and he was interrupting. Yeah, well I was going to say something about Republic but first I was going to help us get back by saying that the Detroit Lions are the Tizen of the NFL. I would love to hear you explain this. Oh my gosh. Nobody cares about them except for a very small select group of people who think that Tizen is incredibly awesome and amazing but in the end it fails. And they never win. The people who are excited about Tizen are excited about how much money it can make them. There are no users who are excited for the Tizen platform. Tizen is a little bit like the Willis Tower, just not as tall as the one in New York. You didn't even try. That isn't even an analogy. You just didn't even bother to put any effort into it. I just had to find a way. How do you feel about that by the way? Oh and it's also changed names multiple times. It is a lot like the Willis Tower. The Willis Tower has changed names once, not multiple times. So what was it before Tizen? Was it Bada before Tizen? Migo. Migo. Well Bada merged with Tizen but before that it was Migo and before that it was Mimo. Mimo? Yeah but it was also, it's pronounced Mimo. But there was another, what was the other one? The Intel platform. Oh god, what was it called? It was… I cannot know. How do you not have the Wikipedia page already open for this? The Intel platform, you mean Moblin? Moblin, yes. Moblin, yes. Wow. Should have just been page, sorry I had another CES email. So Moblin and Migo merged to become Tizen, right? I think Moblin came into Migo. This whole conversation is just a world of hurt. And there was Lima. It was like horrible, pathetic, bad concepts and ideas and operating systems that never materialized and just when they do materialize they are like so anti-user that… According to Wikipedia it is a common misconception to say that Tizen is a continuation of Migo. In fact it built on the Samsung Linux platform reference implementation delivered within Limo or Limo and Intel bailed, Intel was making Moblin, that got merged into Migo and then they bailed on Migo to join the Tizen group but I think most of the people that were working on Migo just said whatever and started doing Tizen stuff. So can we talk about what… The saddest part about all of this is the guys that make… I just was going to make an awesome joke and I forgot that the cute, guys that make cute apps are still making stuff for all of these platforms. You know what uses cute is the Tesla Model S. True story. So one of the things… And the majority of Tegra 4 chipsets are in cars. So that's true. So one of the things that binds Limo and now Tizen together is the fact that as we were saying before, users could not possibly care less about them. They are like reference platforms that are designed to appeal to carriers because carriers can do literally whatever they want with them and create like self-branded phones that just have a morass of carrier branded crapware on them which is the exact same market that Firefox OS is targeting. By the way, I'd like to remind everybody that Sprint once committed to releasing a Firefox OS phone in 2014. I wonder if that's still in the cards. I can't wait. So yeah, I mean like when you say… Carriers are literally not going to be able to say we're selling a Tizen phone because like that doesn't mean anything to users and like there's no benefit to be able to describe to users that Tizen has. Like there is no benefit. I just don't understand with it, you know, especially in… Maybe the conversation is different for emerging markets but like especially in developed markets where you know, either the smartphones are so well known that people know what to look for, they know what they're getting, they have friends that have them and you know, you can get an Android phone for free on contract or you can get an iPhone for free on contract. What is the play for like, why bother with Tizen? Or even Firefox? In developed countries, I think there's less than no chance. When you can get Android handsets for free on contract and older iPhones for free on contract like that, I think it's just impossible. But for ultra cheap phones that are bought off contract, where those devices are great, I mean it all depends on how much margin they want to get and how much branding they want to associate. Right, because keep in mind, Tizen doesn't have… Like if you're listening to this podcast right now and thinking, gee, I'm racking my brain, I can't think of what Tizen looks like, that's because it doesn't look like anything. There's a reference phone with like a reference UI, but the whole concept of Tizen is that carriers can tear it apart, put whatever skin they want on it and like I said, load it with crapware and then sell it as like, you know, a phone that is inherently like guaranteed to boost our poop. It's like that Verizon tablet that was just announced last week. Yeah. Verizon tablet. This is a direction that Android is going in and this was the original dream of Android, it just got staved off for a while because they needed to make it good enough. They've made it good enough and now Google is going off in its Google-y direction. The last screens I've seen of Tizen was like a story in 2012 of them running like HTML5 applications and just demonstrating like how smooth like this like spiraling 3D render was in HTML5 and since that time I have not seen a single screenshot or like product demo with Tizen. Yeah. It's all framework. It's all framework. I can't think of a single – I can't even think of a single news hit about like potential benefits or features for consumers that like you would use as like marketing spin for this like even, you know, just like horse crap features that don't actually exist. I can't even think of anything. Well, if you go back and look – if you go back and look at – if you go back and look at Limo phones which were primarily sold in Japan but if you go back and look at them, there is no UI consistent – there's no meaningful UI consistency to speak of. There's no like – I don't even think there's like a consistent – there's like an app market and, you know, the story has changed now, you know, because Limo is years and years old but still that should give you like a very foreboding preview of what to expect and what not to expect from Tizen. I think it's going to be – it's going to be completely meaningless to the developed market. And let us never speak of it again. Indeed. I agree. All right. Should we wrap up? Is there anything else you guys really want to talk about? Oh, you can buy a Z30 on Thursday from Verizon. But here's the rub. Is there something he really wants to talk about? What I find like so hysterical about this is like Verizon is so half-assed on this. Like you can't go into a store and buy it. You have to buy it online. Right. Like they're making it available for sale but you can only get it online. They're not even bothering to stock it. Right. That means that they're not bothering to train sales reps on it or anything. Any of that investment that normally goes into a phone launch. Well like I said last week, if you have a Z10 and you're thinking to yourself, gee, I wish I had a slightly better Z10, boom. Your dream phone has arrived. But if you're in the other 99.997% of the population, please, I beg of you, one human to another, don't buy this phone. Did you guys see the Funny or Die Dave Foley last Blackberry employee? That was so good. So I guess the big question for Blackberry is like what happens now? Like is the Z30 the last phone in the pipeline that they had or like what's going on? Well I think the next thing that happens is they get their kneecaps broken by the people that loaned them a billion dollars. Okay. And then after that, they're carved up into little itty bitty pieces and sold off to the highest bidders. I don't know. Like I have no idea. There's no precedent. Will we ever see a new Blackberry? Yeah. Well I think they're certainly going to try. At least that's the message they're sending. I think that there is. Every company searching for emergency funding says. Right. There really is no precedent in the mobile or in the consumer electronics industry for what's happening with Blackberry right now. So I don't think there's any real way to predict how this is going to end up. But like I don't see as a non-executive amateur who's observing this situation, I don't understand how they climb out of this. I see no path they can take. I see no path to success for the new CEO. I don't know how they do it. I certainly don't know. What's next for them is just like waiting for the weekend where they get to party with the mayor of Toronto. That's as good as it gets for them now. I think that two years ago, or even 18 months ago, they had an opportunity to just like really swallow their pride and go full on Android and market themselves as being like the secure Android. Like what Samsung is trying to do with Knox now, if they had just eaten that market 18 months ago, they could have possibly survived as a niche player. Not even a niche player, like frankly a pretty big player for enterprises who believe in the Blackberry name and want all the advantages of having access to the Android ecosystem, which you kind of do with Blackberry OS but not really. A ton of Blackberry fanatics that are still addicted to BBM or at least were 18 months ago would totally have come over to anything Android branded, you know, Blackberry. I think Blackberry feels like they're there now and that they've got, I think it's a Jellybean runtime on Z3B or whatever. Yep, the Jellybean runtime. But you know, come on, you're not there. I think they also do believe that they could get like full on government security clearance for an Android based device at the time. Right. Making the decision between going with QNX or going to something else. So like, I don't know. That's a tough decision. Yeah, and like they made the wrong one. Lose all of their government contracts or they ended up with a chance of surviving. You mentioned QNX and the funny thing about it is that that is still, that side of the business, they kind of have a Nokia situation going on because that side of the business is still actually quite healthy. They license a ton of QNX to auto makers just as Nokia prior to the Microsoft purchase. Is it pronounced QNX? That yeah, although I've mispronounced so much stuff on this show, I wouldn't believe me anymore. I thought for sure it was QNX. I believe it's QNX but don't quote me on that. How do you pronounce a word with no vowels? It's a good question. As close as you can get I think. You just take a stab at it. So if you go back prior to the Microsoft purchase of Nokia's handset division, you know of course they have or they had the legacy Navtec, the Hear business which is still very healthy in part because of licensing their map data to auto makers. So it's some very interesting and surprising parallels between those. So the point is long term something meaningful is going to happen to the QNX side of the business regardless of what happens to Blackberry as a whole. Question is whether they can make it work as a single company or if they will have to get carved up. I don't know. There's a lot to be said for QNX. Its architecture is really admirable and its memory management architecture is just really cool and it was one of the first truly object oriented operating systems to exist out there and the history is really interesting and the product that's out there right now is actually pretty cool but it's like it's already over. Well, I'm going to call that, we're ending on a down note again, but that's okay. Things are going to get better next week. It's going to be amazing next week. Just you watch. If you want to follow us on Twitter you can and should. If you want to follow me, I'm back on. If you want to follow Dan, he is at DC Seaford. If you want to follow Evan, is it Evan R. Rogers? It's just Evan Rogers. Just Evan Rogers. Sorry, why did I get an R in there? Oh, because Rogers starts with an R so it's Evan Rogers. Yes. Is there a D in Rogers? There's a D in the Rogers. There's a D in the Rogers. And if you want to follow Chris, go to the Willis Tower, go up to the roof where he is brick by brick trying to make it taller so that New York is no longer better than Chicago in his mind. You can also find him on Twitter, he's at ZPower. We're all at Verge and I promise to be better next week which means we'll be here too. Thanks for watching everybody. Take it easy.