 Hey, and welcome to the Vergecast for the week of September 3rd, 2012. I'm Josh Dapolsky. I'm Nilay Patel. I'm Tom Warren. Yeah, he's Tom Warren, and he's not Paul Miller. Paul Miller is sitting this one out. He asked me to apologize to the viewers. He just doesn't know what happened this week, so we couldn't allow him. Well, also, I mean- Also, we have- Everyone in the town. We have the entire... If you wanted to take out the whole Verge team right now, this is the week because they're all here in New York, all 50 plus members of the Verge team. I know that number sounds exaggerated, but it's the same moon and same- You're all in a room today, and there was... I couldn't... Yeah, it's out of control. I didn't know. I was like, wow. So Tom Warren is going to be joining us for the first half of this, and Dieter Bohn, aka the Bohn Zone, is going to be sliding in for the second half. Wow. Wow. That is some X-rated, red band trailer type stuff. X-rated Vergecast. The Bohn Zone. Anyhow, but big news. Hell of a week. Big day, big week. And by the way, it's only Wednesday. Just wait till the announcement tomorrow of the Josh phone. Hey, why do we just fade out? That was weird. The Josh phone, it's got all the features you want, none of the ones that you don't want. And it's going to be free on contract. And it comes in five versions. I forked Android. Forked Android. Forked Android. Obviously. So this is the show where we typically talk about what just happened. Is that it? Were you trying to tell me something from the control room? I think John's very angry at us. Oh, well. This is the week, sorry, this is the show where we talk about the week in consumer technology and technology culture, culture, culture, and there's plenty of that to discuss. So we should get right into it. I want to talk about the event that happened today, just ended, Amazon. Huge event. Amazon just introduced, well, really, four new Kindles, three new fires. I'll just run them down and then we'll talk through them. Well, actually, we should do that. We have time here to talk about Windows and that stuff, and then we're having people call us. You want to wait? We're waiting to talk. Really? Yeah. I wish you'd have told me that. You know that they're there. I wish you'd have told me that before I started introing Amazon. We were talking about it. You were in a Josh place. I was using the Josh phone. That's what happened. No, Ross and David are going to call us from Amazon. I'm sorry. We're going to talk about the news that just happened. Let's talk about yesterday's news. Yeah, pretty much. It's a hell of a week. It's a hell of a week. Yesterday's news, Windows phone onslaught. We were at the Nokia had a, or Nokia, depending on who you are, or Nokia. Which way do you go? He said Nokia. Nokia. Nokia. No, no, no, listen. Say it. Nokia. Nokia. It's like Nokia. That actually to me is... Nokia. It's the least committed. It's like all of them at once. Nokia. Nokia. Nokia. Nokia. Nokia. Nokia. Announced a couple of new phones yesterday, the Lumia 920 and the 820 and a bunch of accessories and city lens. And they showed off this great new camera technology. Oh, God. Which, they didn't exactly show off. Where do you want to start? Tom, this is your... Yeah, you were there. You have control of the board. Where would you like to go first? Let's start with the 920 because the 820 was kind of a sideshow. They announced it at the end. Is that how you really feel about it? It was a sideshow? Yeah. I mean, it was right at the end. It was like, oh, when we got... It was like a by the way. They're like, oh, we could do this cheaper. It wasn't one more thing. It was, yeah, this is the other one. Another thing. Yeah, it was another thing. It was another thing. Sorry. The 920. Yeah, so 4.5 inch display, pure view kind of. I mean, there's been a lot of controversy following the announcement. So just to be clear, so PureView up until this announcement was known as massive megapixel. Massive images. Massive images and it was on a Symbian phone. Is there a band called Massive Megapixel? There is now. There should be. But they introduced this thing yesterday. I talked to Elop and I asked him about this. I was like, so what's now you're calling PureView is both stabilization. It's a combination of technology. Yeah, it's like, well, that's what we call our great camera tech or something. So PureView, but it's only 8.7 megapixels. And it has hardware and software stabilization. Which we'll get into that in a minute. That's the controversial bit. It's a little controversial. Yeah, I mean, great device. LTE. LTE, yeah. I don't know what radio is going there, but it's got like every band. 1280 by 768 display. WXGA, I believe is what that is. That's right. Or WXGA plus. No price. No release date. No carriers. The brass tax on your car. This phone looks amazing. It runs Windows Phone 8. It looks amazing. It runs this next version of Windows Phone. Which we still don't know much about. By the way, that thing I just did where I said Windows and I paused and I realized I had to say phone. Happened all through the event. Kind of. Yeah. It's a great device. It's a great device. It's a great device. It's a great device. It's a great device. It's a great device. It's a great device. It's a great device. It's a great device. It's a great device. Microsoft has to figure that out. Anyway, it's a great phone. It looks amazing. Great design. It's like classic like Nokia's design powerhouse. Great screen. Yeah. The screen is good. The screen looks really good. We're going to get into the controversial camera, but the camera looks like it's amazing. Can I just say I actually... The controversy about the camera is not actually about the camera. No, no. It's about how Nokia is showing people the camera. It's the promotional material. I just want to say that I saw the camera do what they tout it doing, and it really works. So that they had a thing... The thing that's confusing is that they didn't tout it doing what it's really doing. Right. We'll talk about this at length, but just the setup is Nokia has been showing off demo pictures of the camera. Demo pictures and video. That are taken not by the camera. That are not... Yeah. I don't know why they... They've been found out. They've been supposed to be... Yeah. We should get into that. We'll get into that. They're showing all this great stuff, and it's not real. No, no. It's real. It's not vaporware, but it's just like... Apple does this thing that I think is really powerful where they get up on stage, they talk about their great new product. They highlight things that maybe you go, all right, well, everybody has that, but they're kind of playing it up. And then they're like, and it's available next week, or it's available today. And you're like, oh, well, I'm a little bit excited. I'm going to go buy it anyhow. And I think that actually is really effective, and I think it's a big deal when you can say, we're shipping... But they didn't even get half... They didn't say what carrier it's going to be. They didn't say what carrier, they didn't say what price, they didn't say when. There was a serious lack of information. I think what's a letdown is like, oh, wow. I played with the phone a little bit before my interview with Elop, and he was holding it while we were talking. It's a really beautiful phone. It's like the new version of the OS seems to have made some reasonable strides forward. I feel like it's going to be pretty close to parity with its competition. At least that's what they've made us believe. I hope so, yeah. We're talking about Windows Phone 8. And LTE, dual core 1.5 gigahertz Snapdragon CPU, a gig of RAM. It's fully stacked. Yeah, it's got these specs. And the hardware is fantastic. So my thought is like, I'm ready to go on this. I would be very tempted if they told me I could pre-order it yesterday, and I'd get it mid-October or something, or later at the end of the month or something. I would be tempted, even in the shadow of the iPhone 5 and knowing that there's Nexus, I really like the hardware a lot. I would just want to get... I mean, I kind of, look, I spend all of my extra money on crap like this, so that's the problem. But there's no opportunity. There's no chance to create that hype of like, oh, my God, the pre-order, we've run out of pre-orders. Or you can't even pre-order. Just like, when is it coming? We still don't know. We're hearing early November. We don't know when it's coming. We don't know when carrier. We don't know the price. We don't know the price. And we can assume, I'll tell you, okay? Here in the US, it'll be available on AT&T. And Verizon. And maybe in Verizon. No, Verizon's been scattered. I think it's been... All right, fine. It'll be available on AT&T and Verizon, I presume, towards the end of October around the launch of Windows 8. It'll be $199 on AT&T, and it'll be $299 on Verizon. I don't know anything. It'll probably be $199. I think $199 AT&T first couple of days in November. Probably good. You think so? Good guess. I mean, I'm just guessing. No, I'm guessing. This is not actual. This is not factual information. I'm just... If I had to guess, they're doing Windows 8 and the Surface RT on October 26th or something. Yeah. Right? Well, it's supposed to be 25th, and then like an evening midnight launch or something. So I know that they're trying to show these products as like a unified goal. They said that Windows Phone 8 was going to be around Windows 8. I think that's always been the plan, but I think it slipped slightly because of the testing and stuff. But I think we can make an educated guess. Let's say early November, end of October. But I don't know why they couldn't commit to that. Did Samsung on the Ativ... No. No. And Nokia went hard at Samsung. Yeah, they made some jabs at them. They were like, you know, Samsung, anybody can hold up a phone, but we've got the first working Windows Phone 8 device. Because they didn't turn it on. But it's not working yet because the software isn't finished. Yeah, they wouldn't let us... They wouldn't let us... They wouldn't let anybody at the event play with it really. No, I mean, I got into some of the menus and going to like Angry Birds and... Yeah, no, I mean... And then it was like... Actually, let's talk about that. Yeah. So, Windows Phone 8. This is... It's great they updated the hardware. If it was running last year's version of Windows Phone 7, I would still say don't buy it. Yeah. The software is the key, right? Well, we think that there's going to be significant... So, but you've played with it a little bit. You know what's going on. Yeah. I mean, the thing we do know is the start screen, they've changed the tiles and stuff like that. They keep reiterating that. What we don't know really is like the feature parity, whether it's going to come up and be on par with iOS and Android. I'm hoping it will be. They seem to be the strategy of let's add like unique features in that other platforms don't have. But sometimes they're not really picking up on the basics that need to be in there. Did they tweak the multitasking functionality? Didn't they kind of improve? They changed the whole kernel. So my expectation is that all of that stuff, which was here's Windows CE kernel, and then we try to build all this fancy new smartphone stuff and it's a little slow and there's like a level of abstraction. That kind of sense of delay will go away because now it's like real. Yeah. I mean, there were only a few places in the last where that was... I always felt like I was using a layer on top of CE. There's always that sense of... The native apps were okay. The native apps were fine. The native apps were great. But they were pretty few and far between. Yeah. But then you got into the third party and the scrolling got weird. I think a lot of that they cleared up with Mango, like the 7.5 update. Some of the stuff. Yeah. Some of it. It's still some of the absolutely laggy. But that's all better. Is that better? Is it not better? We don't know. Microsoft. I mean, I played with it for like two minutes and it seemed just like Windows phone 7. I mean, in terms of smoothness, it didn't... But I didn't notice any weird stuff, but I didn't go deep on it. And they wouldn't let you go deep on it. I think the biggest thing that they need to change and I don't think it's gonna happen, but is the multitasking. When you open up an app and you go back to the home screen and then you reopen that app, it starts off a new instance. And that's just an odd behavior. Right now there's a thousand people in our chat screaming that that's not correct. I'm guessing. They're not. No, it is correct. If Tom says it, it's true. Tom's allowed to say it. I'm a liar. You've been purchased by Apple. But we have been accused, regardless, we've been accused of trying to take down Nokia at every turn. So, look, the phones are great. That functionality. And I think Microsoft... Nokia is being held back by Microsoft here. Right? I mean, they can't... I don't think they can do... Well, they're being held back in the way that Samsung is being held back by Google. Samsung is not being held back by Google. Samsung does whatever it wants. Well, I mean, they... But they're not doing... Samsung was even held back by Microsoft. They announced the phone. Yeah, but they're not allowed to really show it. It was kind of... Well, I was just gonna say that in the way that these carriers are like... Well, not carriers, I'm sorry. That the manufacturers are still running... Beholding the software. Well, beholding the software, but they're really being held back by the carriers probably more than anything. But you see these devices on gingerbread, and you're at two versions later. I get the sense that Samsung can be like... Samsung is this dominant force in the industry. Right? I mean, they're Samsung. So they get to do whatever they want. They get to show up the Ativ S, even though Microsoft probably doesn't want them to. There's nothing Microsoft can do. Because if... Nokia is great, but if Samsung doesn't also pump out a thousand Windows Phone 8 devices, that whole ecosystem has a problem. But I think also when you look at the audience, they showed off the Ativ at IFA, which is an industry show. It does not really have that consumer facing... I mean, it is not... We cover it, and other people cover it, and there's news out of it, but it's not like Nokia holding an event in New York and inviting all the press to come. It was a gang, it was a... It was an event in Berlin, and they invited all the press to come. What are you talking? It was a papable... Did you see Samsung's event? They had a magician, for God's sake. I get it. Zoll was there. Zoll's all grown up, and he's a magician now. It's really impressive. I mean, I think Nokia is... But that was a papable as well, right? Yeah, it was. Yeah. But I think Nokia is doing, I mean, arguably the best hardware work, period. I mean, that stuff looks amazing. Yes. But they can't... Microsoft is scrambling. They've stealth rebooted their entire phone platform again. I mean, it looks the same, but the entire inner workings are different. The networking stack, the kernels are different. From what I hear personally, is that they are having a few issues with that, and that's why it's delayed slightly. And the funny thing is that we... Well, we wrote a report about this, which is introducing... What is it? Introducing Nokia again. Yeah. It's like one of these things where Nokia keeps coming with... They were talking like a year and a half ago about Operation Rolling Thunder. I mean, when did they start talking about Rolling Thunder? Just before CES, wasn't it? For the Lumia 100. Was it before CES? Yeah, it was. But it was like a couple of months before CES. Yeah, it was. It was like with their... Some kind of... Whatever their European launch was. Yeah, it was like, we've done the European launch and now it's Rolling Thunder CES. Yeah, right, Rolling Thunder. And then the Rolling Thunder CES, and then we waited. And that was the Lumia 900. And then till... Right, Lumia 900. And the 710. The 710. But then the 710 was released silently. Not Rolling Thunder, it just showed up one day. And then their flagship phone came out. And then a week later, they're like, oh, we're about to obsolete this with the new operating system. And then now, hey, we have new phones, which is six months later. I mean, not even six months later, I don't think. And it just feels like Nokia keeps going like, we're back. And then you forget that they exist. And then they're like, we're back again. I think this time though, the hardware is a lot better. The hardware is good. Because it was really restricted on the... No, no, no. The hardware is better. The specs are better. I think the software is better. I mean, it's got improvements. We don't fully know. But we don't know. And also, obviously, it's coming out soon. But with them not sharing anything, it just feels like, why am I supposed to be excited about it? It was a joint event. Borma was there. I'm surprised they didn't have more Windows Phone 8 features. We covered a few before. Yeah, Belfiore was like, I've got some stuff to show you. Oh my God, can I... And it's like the little tiles, the big tiles. It's like that. Nobody cares. Belfiore showed off the People Hub integrating social networks. Which we've known since 2010. That was the first thing. They ever showed off. They've been doing the People Hub demo since the first demo of the phone. Yeah. I mean, he's still demoing the People Hub. It's like, here's the thing. Demo something new. It's like Apple doesn't still talk about their amazing keyboard technology. They're like, yeah, we made a great keyboard. And now here's some... I'm not saying Apple's got all of the newest stuff. But they do... They're not pinched to zoom in the first. Every time they do, there's something. They don't get the guy... They don't get... What's his name? Scott Forrest all up to talk about... I don't know what they would talk about. It would be pinched to zoom. Their keyboard, pinched to zoom. That was their key innovation. Or unified inbox, which they did two versions ago in the email. It's just like... You should be talking about something new or you shouldn't be on stage. They've got some really cool features as well. They could have just showed Skype dialing, integrated into Windows phone. They can't do that. They're still begging for a carrier to support them. Right. Is an AT&T gonna say, no way? Yes. I mean, they did with FaceTime. But I think they balanced it with... They're allowing the RCSC stuff, which allows the carriers to put in their own VoIP stuff. Great. In the same really solid integration. I can't wait to accidentally start using AT&T's VoIP software. Let's talk about the controversy a little bit. But I just wanna say this. I know that right now people are thinking, these guys... Here's that Windows is poison guy trying to do everything he can to destroy Microsoft and Nokia. Yes. And I think we're actually... We have a lot of excitement about these things. It's just, what can you do with the excitement but wait for news and information about when you'll actually be able to see these devices? And it's like, you also kinda... I have the sense that they... They scheduled this event to just be ahead of the iPhone. No, I mean, this is... Right. Because when they do announce... Now, what happens, and we've all been through this before with every other company. You announce the thing and now all we're gonna talk about is guesses at prices, guesses at carriers. And when they actually do announce whatever it is, it's gonna be like the world's saddest press release. I actually think that's why, and we'll get to it, that's why Amazon's event was so very different than what Motorola did yesterday and what Nokia did yesterday and what most of these companies do when they do these events. I think it's a bad strategy if you don't have a device that's ready to go and you're gonna announce it. You shouldn't be doing that. If you don't have it... If you don't have a device you can put in the hands of a journalist... Yeah. And let them play with it for 10 minutes, your stuff isn't ready. You're just trying to get ahead of somebody. And that's not... Reacting to somebody else's launch is not a strategy. It's like... Well, it's this kind of strategy born out of fear. It's like scampering away from something that you're scared of. But it's not really a strategy. No one who saw the Lumia yesterday... Well, I shouldn't say no one. I can't generalize, but I think very few people are not like, yeah, this is cool, but let me see what Apple has next week and then I'll make my decision. It's not like somebody saw the Lumia yesterday and said, that tears it. I'm getting the Lumia. No questions asked. I mean, I suppose there are some hardcore fanboys that might've done that, but I think most consumers or most people who are interested in getting a new phone, they're gonna look at it. They're gonna say, this looks cool. And now let me see what Apple has. And the decision is gonna be made based on what's shipping, what's real, what the features are. And certainly if you can't buy it, you can't buy it. No, I mean, they could have done it better. They could have just waited until the iPhone 5 was announced and revealed it and reacted to that. If they'd have done it on September the 20th. With a launch date. Yeah, with a launch date and a couple of weeks later. And software that you could actually use. Yeah, that would have been good. I mean- And they also could have been... I mean, maybe they just, maybe strategically just would have been reacting to the iPhone, nobody's interested. Yeah. But that's a better way because you've got the attention, the media, the focus on new phones and you can react and you can show off your own features. Right. But let's talk a little bit about the controversy and then I wanna... We should talk about Motorola. Sure, a little bit. Well, yeah. So- Go ahead. I'm just pulling up the pages. So I think arguably the most interesting feature of this phone is the camera, right? There's controversy already before the real controversy. There's like the first controversy, which is like calling it a pure view camera. Yeah. Which was the brand they rolled out in February Mobile World Congress. Yep. Describe- 41 megapixels. Yeah, they had this crazy 41 megapixel camera on a simulphone. Yep. And it's a great camera. Yeah, it is amazing. Aaron Siforis on our staff, he bought one cause he's like, I love insane gadgets. It takes amazing pictures. Well, he meant, yeah, that was interesting. It's crazy when you take a picture of like a drink and you can just zoom all the way in, it's just insane. Right. And then what do you see? Well, froth. It was a bit- Wow. It's ridiculous. I mean, it's a ridiculous- He's using it, he has it right now at the office. It's Symbian and it's very strange. I feel so bad. It's just a camera, right? With Symbian on it. It's a camera that makes calls. Right. Yeah. And then Samsung's like, we should make the Galaxy camera. Yeah. It's like the other way around. So there's controversy already cause they said that the new Lumia 920 is going to have a pure view camera, but it's just an eight megapixel camera. 8.7. 8.7 megapixel. It's actually seven. I mean, the funny part- You know, compared to 41, that's like a rounding error. That's like a, you can, you don't make it better- Isn't 41 like an exaggerated, isn't it that- No, that's the full- But they interpolate it down. It's like, it's 41 and then it's really, it generates five and eight mostly, but you can get 41 out of it. I see. Right. So it's not 41. Like the sensor is different. The technology is different, but they say, so Nokia says, well look, PureView is a brand, our brand of cameras. It means that our cameras are really good. Right. But it's still very confusing branding because one means, some seems to mean something very specific and the other means something else. The other one's like- Everyone just thinks it's the, you know, 41 megapixels. Right. If you know of its existence, I think Nokia is kind of betting on the fact that very few people know of its existence. No, it's true. So anyway, so they do that and then they show off the camera and they say, look, the big, the key innovation with the 920's camera is that it has optical image stabilization, which most cameras have. Like it's what lets you take low light photos with point and shoot mostly. Most point and shoots have it. What's lets DSLR lenses like Canon's Nikon, Sony's, they all have it. It's great. It's a proven great technology. It's awesome that Nokia shrunk it down to a phone. Yep. Great. And by the way, when I came back from my interview and I'd seen it- Yeah, that's true. On the phone, I was like, it's really impressive. This is really good. And I even tweeted about it after when they announced it. I was like, I saw this and it's really impressive. Right. They had this thing at the event, they had like a hole in the wall and you could stick the camera, like your own device in there, take a picture, cause it was supposed to be replicating done as well. Yeah. And then they do it and you compare the results. And yeah, I mean it was pretty good results. Just to be very clear on how this works, it's you get to hold the shutter open on the camera longer to let more light hit the sensor. And because it's stabilized, it takes out the motion door of your hand. Correct. It's a very like, it's not like- It's a rudimentary concept. It's a bunch of springs. Well, did he say it's like a floating lens? It's a floating- Yeah, but they actually said little springs during the event. Yeah. And I was like, that's not, you don't want to say little springs. That's maybe the least high tech. It's a floating lens. So there's a mechanical component of stabilization and then there's a software component that kind of plays with it. Yeah. It plays with it. Right. And the digital stable, like most phones have digital stabilization. It's not as good as actual- And they actually showed me photos. They were like, here's a, well, they showed me photos that were presumably like, I mean, you know, Elop said, he said, I want to say like at the, at our meeting, he said, here's a picture of taking with the GS3. Right. And it was dark and grainy. And here's a picture taken with our camera, the same shot. So then they put out a video to show how great the camera is. And very charming. Very cute video. Very cute video. And there's a scene of a man riding a bicycle, shooting a video of his girlfriend who's riding a bicycle next to him. Yeah. So we have, can we get this video punched up? We can probably show them. We, well- Wait, wait to play our version until- Yeah. So there you see the gentleman there. He's got the Lumia. He's filming his girlfriend. And they show OIS off and the video is all shaky and they split screen it. I just want to be clear. I want to, let's be crystal clear. At no point in the video and when the blog posts went up on- It doesn't say simulated. It doesn't say simulated screen images, simulated image capture. You know, change for effect or whatever. So they show him with the phone. Yep. Then they cut- Show a shaky video. Then they cut to a shot of like lower quality video. It's not what you saw before. It's lower quality video and it's very shaky. And they say OIS on, optical image stabilization on. No off. That's off. That video's off. Right, right. And then they cut to an on. Which by the way, but hold on. The video also had a grainier kind of quality to a slightly more of a, it looked like the same quality video in terms of what it looked like. It didn't look like suddenly it switched to a different camera. That's what I'm saying. Right. Okay. Yeah. And it said OIS on. And you're like, ah, this is the same video shot with the stabilization on. Yeah. So that we can see how effective it is when you're riding a bike. And then they drive by a van. They drive by- Or they're at an ice cream stand. They drive by an ice cream stand with a very reflective screen. Reflective window. And TC Sadek, one of our writers, noticed that in the video that is OIS on, you can see a van riding next to the girl. With an open door. With an open door. And this guy holding a rig. With a lighting rig. And a guy standing with a massive DSLR camera. We can just play it. Can we play the video? Let's see here. Let's get that up. There we are. It's a little choppy. It's a little choppy here, but the details will be- It's pretty obvious what's going to happen. Here they are. Now you see that looks like a camera phone video. I mean, it looks a little bit like, okay, there's the other video. This also looks like it's shot with the same thing. She's having a good time. They're so in love. So stabilized. I mean, she's doing this coy, man biting. And then what happened here? How did they not catch this? This is this right here. Yes. So you can see, and for the people who are just listening to the audio, I'm sure you enjoyed that. Us reacting to something you can't see. So it's pretty- So we put it up. So it's obvious that's on fire. We said, this is a cool technology. And people in DC started getting death threats immediately. I mean, can we just take a second to address- The step back from reality to justify what people lied to. Can we just take a second to address the kind of thinking that's going into some of the, I don't want to spend too much time on our commenters because I do love our commenters. I love our forum members. They often contribute tremendous, tremendous stuff. And I love what they do. But some of the attitudes, and I don't mean attitude, I just mean some of the attitudes that were exhibited in the comments of this post were very odd to me, and I'm trying to understand where they come from. Let me explain how I'm seeing it. Nokia manufactured what I would call a deceptive advertisement for a feature they were touting as one of the main features of this new product. They said, we're going to show you how it works, and it is amazing. So they did a video that we all watched and we said, that is amazing. You watch it and you said, that is awesome. I cannot wait to get that technology. Then The Verge, whose job it is to report news, discovered that that video wasn't being honest with you. Wasn't what it looked like. Wasn't what it looked like. And at no point had anybody ever told us it wasn't what it looked like and nobody had ever told you. And I suspect, suspect would not have ever told you had somebody not pointed this out, that they were filming with a professional camera, with professional lighting, with a professional rig and telling you that it was from the camera that they want you to buy, the phone camera that they want you to buy. But the reaction from commenters, some of them, not all of them, some of them are very reasonable of course, but some of the commenters were like mad at us. For there were a couple of reasons. One they thought it was bad journalism for some reason. For shame. They were mad at the case, but then didn't have a reaction immediately from Nokia. We had reached out as we were writing the post, they hadn't gotten back to us. We weren't going to sit on it. That's how it works in the real world when you have a little story. And they were also kind of dismissive of the issue. They were sort of like, so what if they faked it? And my favorite one was- We believe enough that this is what it'll be like that it doesn't matter if they faked it. And it's like they're just trying to show you what optical image stabilization is like. Yeah, right. This is what OIS- This technology is a decade old. There's no, this is not a- Which would be fine if they hadn't showed the bike with a guy. It wouldn't be fine if they made a video that was like, look at what wonders OIS can do. No phone. They're just like, we're implementing this kind of technology in our new devices. Look how cool it is. And they showed a guy with a camera, a DSLR and it was shaking. And then he turned on his optical image stabilization. And suddenly it was very smooth. He'd be like, ah, can't wait to get that on my phone. You wouldn't have said that. Why are they showing me an ad for a DSLR of course? So but like the weird, it's just such an odd reaction from the readers. Like- Yeah, so that happened. That happened. And then Nokia got back to us. They got back to us. They said it was never our intention to deceive anyone. We just wanted to demonstrate the benefits of optical image stabilization. Sure. We're now looking into updating the original video with a footnote. So it's clear the images are stimulated. And they've, they clarified that they didn't shoot it with the Lumion 920. That's blowing up. Oh, but people were like, people were dissecting the image, like looking for, you know, oh no, that's the phone, but it's in some sort of like people, there were people in comments who thought there was a risk. There were people in comments who literally said with zero information, this is a demo. This is a prototype of the phone. Yeah. Like they were seeing this black box that was clearly the shape of a DSLR. The black box looked to them like their dreams. No, no, no. This is a, it's like a bread box version of the phone. And you guys don't understand this is very, how could you report this? And when you know you're wrong. So then a little bit later after that Nokia issued a full apology. Full apology for our, how could we, they were forced into it by the evil hand of the verge. By the way, we like Nokia. Yeah. We don't have any problem with them. We want their products to succeed. The key line from the apology is the video was not shot with a Lumion 920 yet, which implies that they're going to reshoot it with a Lumion. Heidi wrote this. So anyhow, then today, so anyhow, so we're like, okay, the stabilization stuff was not real, but there are some really beautiful shots. This low light stuff is really impressive. They say the footage, the footage, the video footage and the apology. We're sorry about the video footage. Video footage. Not shot with a 920. They don't say anything else beyond that. So can I just say, I want to preface the next part by saying that when I went in for the interview with Elop, the night previous, I'm going to tell a little anecdote from my life. The previous night we'd had some friends over the house and they were leaving and a spider, a large spider had spun an incredible web over our front door. I'm not making this up by the way. This really happened. And it was like the spider was in the middle of it and it was huge. It was like this big. It was like a chunky. And by the way, we had just been to the spiders exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History. So I knew I'd learned all about spiders. You take them on back. I'd learned all about spiders. I was a spider expert. I was basically Spider-Man really. Or at least a Spider-Man. But so I opened the door and there's this massive web with this beautiful, huge spider in the center of it. And we're like, oh my God, we got to get some pictures of this. So I pull out my Galaxy Nexus. Oh gosh. It's like nine o'clock at night. Yeah. Street only streetlights to light. So I'm like, I'm the editor in chief of a tech blog. I own a hundred cameras. I pull out my Galaxy Nexus. I didn't want to miss it. There was like three micro four thirds cameras upstairs. There could be wind. There could be a gust. You know, I was in the moment. This is what you want with your, this is why you want the phone on your camera for these moments. You've got the moment. You don't want to lose it. Anyhow, I started snapping photos. They were the most terrible looking, grainiest, blurriest garbage photos that I've ever seen. So terrible, so utterly garbage. I mean, I must say so bad, just shameful. And I thought at that moment when I reviewed them after, after our friends had ducked underneath the web to leave, cause we didn't want to disturb it. I thought I have to get rid of this and get a phone with a real camera. Yeah. That's one of the reasons I don't have one of those. And then that, and the next morning I walked into to this interview and that was the first thing he started showing me was these dark pictures of a Galaxy S3 and the lighter pictures of the, of the pure view. And I was like, holy crap, this is like, this is like, like how, what are the odds that this is my next? Yeah. But yeah, right. But there's no reason for them to be faking this stuff. Like, well, we don't know. They want to show the dramatic difference. We have no way of knowing. Well, it seems like the, let's move on to the next. So the next deception, the great next grade. Today someone else is like, uh, we got tipped a photo on Facebook of a model having her picture taken on a street in Helsinki in Finland. It turns out she's, it's obviously one of the stills from the video and like there's a lighting rig and there's like what looks like the lens of a DSLR poking out. And then other people are pointing out that all of the lens flares and the lights in the background, uh, they're being, because they're, they're, they look like stars basically, the lights in the background. And you only get that effect when you take the big lens and you stop it down in aperture, right? And like that, that's how that effect is made. Yeah. Not from a phone camera. And so, okay. So we're like, we post, we put this up, everyone gets mad at us again. How dare you? How dare you point out? You don't know. And now these are the stills, right? And they're also, were there people saying like, cause you can't see the camera in this photo, right? You can see the edge of the lens, but you can't see that it's for sure. But you can see it. Damn lighting rig. Could be a bread box. The point is like in the dark, you take a picture or you hold the lens open longer. This is the point. You hold the shutter open longer. You get more light in the lens. It's not, this is like having a lighting rig. Can I just say, this goes back to the original point that I was making about the video, which is let's say that they were using a prototype version of the camera from the phone, right? It was supposed to be a guy holding it with one hand riding a bike. It was not supposed to be a van with a lighting rig and a professional photographer inside of it rolling along next to the bike rider. So this is, and this is the crux of the, of the, of the issue really. Let's say it's the phone. It's fine if it's the phone. The problem is the lighting rig and the makeup artist. Well, the makeup artists are fine. Let's just say the lighting rig and all of the other lights that are meant to like make it look very bright and well lit. When your whole, your whole premise is we are going to make a dark scene look better because of our camera technology. When they responded to the original video, they posted an updated video, which was actual footage. Yeah. And that looked like fine. That's the confusing part. So then they responded today. They confirm once again that the still photos were not taken by a 920. They do have some out there though. They do. And so they say, it shows, this photo shows a production setup being used for the video, which we've already apologized for. A 920 was not used to illustrate the benefits of optical image stabilization. We regret the error. However, we posted some other pictures from Central Park that we're using in Lumia 920 and no artificial lighting. Their authenticity is not in question. At this point, I mean, I'm not saying it is, but you know, shame on me. Shame on you. Shame on me. What is it? I'm like Bush. Which one is it? Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice. So shame on me. Yeah. Fool me three times. I'm going to kill you. You'd be so confused. I don't know who to go after. Clearly they'd be able to fool you into not killing them. Look, these aren't, they're not bad guys. They did what? How do you blow this? No, how do you blow this? I'll tell you how they, how does anyone think we're making a demo video? Guys, is there, is there, there are marketing people. We're like, we're going to do a great video. It's going to be cute. You know, we'll have actors, blah, blah, blah. And of course, no gives like, you know, yeah, that's what we do. They're probably didn't have the phones ready in time, but it was the lead time you need to actually shoot it. They probably didn't have production. Oh, good. So rushing, rushing to beat Apple means I had to lie about their core technology. Basically. Yeah. Is that what happened? That sucks. We have to get a phone that isn't ready. That doesn't have a ship date. It doesn't have a price. It doesn't have a carrier so we can beat Apple. And in order to beat Apple and say our camera's better, we have to lie about our camera. And here's what's sad. Here's what's really sad about it is when you show off your killer camera technology as Apple often does at their events, what do they always say? They're like, we didn't, these aren't retouched photos. And Google does the same thing when they did the Galaxy Nexus. Actually I had to go back and do some research on that. Well everything was zero shutter lag. It wasn't how great it was. It was zero shutter lag. Like, Matea showed me photos that I thought were incredible. The Galaxy Nexus actually worked quite well in bright daylight. It looks great. Yeah. Don't ever take it anywhere besides bright daylight. But they should just post original photos from the camera. Just do it now. Just like full resolution. Full resolution. I agree. Maybe they should let some real humans use it. But I do think the point is that Apple always is like, we didn't touch these. These are, these aren't retouched. Yeah, and Apple puts them up and you can get the exif data. You can fake all that stuff, but at least they're like, helping. They did show one giant one on the screen from Kevin Shields from his own, like it was a baseball game. Yeah, it was a football game. Yeah, a football game. The Maple Cup. Yeah. Which by the way, that story was very strange. When he was telling it, he was like, I tried to take my son to a soccer game in Finland, but it turned out it was the Super Bowl of American football. And like, how do you, is this how you end up? You just don't know what's going on? And they're like, we're going to use this other camera. Kevin Shields. That's the same as soccer. Kevin Shields is also the guy from My Bloody Valentine, right? Yes. I just want to be clear. Same guy. Who is the other, isn't there another guy in the tech industry who has a name that is the same name as a person, a musician? Who am I thinking of? Tim Armstrong. Oh, Tim Armstrong. That's who I'm thinking of. Tim Armstrong from Rancid and AOI. Our old CEO. Kevin Shields and Tim Armstrong worked together on a, on a, like a super group. All right. Tom, so it's sad that we spent any time talking about this. Sad but true. It's true. Like they lied a bunch. Yeah. I guess, I guess the point is I like what Nokia is doing. I think that they have really interesting new products. I want them, I want them to succeed. I feel like they're trying really hard to do something original. I think that their product design is brilliant. I don't think they had to, it didn't have to be this way. It didn't have to be this way. We could have, you could have just shown us some still shots and a little bit of handheld video that was like, you know, some of the stuff that they were doing at the event where they were doing this and it was like totally stable. They actually shot stuff at the event like that. That would have been convincing enough. We didn't need the cute girl on the bike. I mean, just do that demo for real. You know, the, the, the, the thing is like, maybe they, maybe they tried to do it with like it's open for interpretation. Maybe they tried to do it with the phone and just didn't work. We'll never know. If you watch the video that Vlad did, the report, there's a lot of sort of cuts cut away to the sort of PV tech and you can see it being demonstrated there and it is, it is impressive. Definitely. No, it works. Yeah, it does. So wrap this up. What's your take on the state of Nokia and Microsoft and Windows Phone 8 after this? How long have we been talking about this? For a long time. Like an hour. Well, I think they've always got the two devices, but we know there's more. So these two are like the high end medium. What's coming? So they've got, they've got a couple of low ends coming and then they've got the Atlas and the other Zeal. What's the Atlas? Atlas is their 920 on Verizon. Oh right. It was a 920. It will be a 920, but it'll be extra ugly. Yeah. Verizon has a mandate to make the ugliest phones. Isn't that their thing? They're like, oh, great design. Let me show you how it can be approved. So like junior designers like, he's like, I have an idea. Can you put a bump on the back in an odd shape and make it red? I'm interested to see how that looks, if it looks any different. I hope it doesn't. I hope it doesn't. I really hope it doesn't. I mean, my impressions when I, when I played with the 920 is great, great looking, very similar to the 900 except for you've obviously got the curved display. A little bit bigger. A little bit bigger, but it's a little bit weightier. I did notice that. I don't know. That's probably to do with the wireless charging. It's extra. And they've got a massive radio in it as well. And a big battery. That's a big battery. Yeah. 2000. So there's different factors. It's, you know, I'm cautiously optimistic. I'm cautiously excited about it. I don't want to get. I'd like them to do a four inch because I like using a four inch phone or close to that. I don't like 4.5, 4.7, even 4.3. I do think the phone is larger. Holding them next to each other, it's larger than the Lumia 900. It's like physically larger. I do think, you know, phones have gotten too large, but I will say that going back to the, I was going back and I've been going back and forth between the iPhone and the Galaxy Nexus, particularly in anticipation of the new iPhone. And I do feel the 3.5 it seems so small now. Yeah. If you pick up an iPhone or if you use the Nexus, it's just like. But the Nexus also seems like about, you know, a little bit too big. It's okay because it's thin. Right? Yeah. And it's plastic-y. But if it were like 4.3, I feel like it would just be fantastic. Yeah. Yeah. Somewhere in that range. I always thought 4, the Atrix. I thought the four inch screen on the Atrix. And the first set of Galaxies, right? Yeah. The first place I saw a four inch screen was the Atrix. Which I thought was brilliant. I think the first, they made a terrible screen, so who cares? Doesn't matter. But if you have a thin device, which is four inch. Now you're saying thin. Yeah. Like thin, you know, like the 900 and the 920 aren't particularly thin. Right. They're fairly, they feel pretty solid in the hand, which is a good thing. They're not, it's not a thin phone. No. It's not lean. Like they're not going for, hey, look how lean we made it. No. The thinner you get it, the easier it is in one handed operation. Right. The thinner you lower the surface area of yellow. Yeah. I mean that phone is like, look at how yellow it is. No, that phone's cool. The yellow is cool. It's not like a normal yellow. It's like a neon greenish yellow. It's really cool looking. Yeah. I love the colors they're doing. Also they did this, I like the coating of the Lumia 900, but they did like a high gloss. It's almost like a shellacked kind of thing on the new ones. And they're, it's pretty cool. They're pretty futuristic. I mean, I have to say they look like where we should be going with phones in my opinion, like from an industrial design standpoint, they are doing away with this BS of like, you know, silver rims and you know, glass everywhere. It's like metal and glass. Like I get it, but like there's something way more playful about these designs. And I just think something that's like a lot more human about them. Yeah. I really like the way they're designing their phones. I really like the color stuff they're doing. I think their accessories, I think their accessories look really, really good. Oh, I mean, I mean, I have to say like, I feel like these phones are just begging. The 920 just begging for stock. Yeah. I mean, it's got everything it needs. It's got an S4, right? So yeah, could happen. Well, could it happen? Well, the way that they've done it is there's like, there's new boot technology and stuff for Windows Phone 8. So it's probably locked down a bit. It's even got, it's even got, you know, it's a, it's, it's 1280 by 768. So you've got a few extra pixels, you know, here and there. I feel like I'm sure someone will do it. You think so? Probably. If they can get past Microsoft's protection, which people usually do. I just, I mean, it's just going to be, it's just going to be, it's just going to end up being really hacky though. Yeah. Yeah, of course. It's not going to be like a flawless product. It'd be like the touch pad on ICS, right? Yeah. It doesn't sound great to me. I don't want that on a phone. No. Yeah. True. All right. So are we talking about Moto? Are we going to shuffle in Dieter from Moto? Yeah. So let's bring in Dieter. All right, Tom. Tom, thank you. Thank you. It's good having you. You should be around more often. Yeah, but nobody gets mad at you for saying them. Yeah. It's amazing. No, no, no. I don't always do the best. No, no, no. Everybody knows Tom has been turned by the verge and tainted. Yeah. You have turned me. And. I'm the Microsoft tater. Honestly, honestly, Microsoft guys. I think one last thing is if they announce those devices yesterday and they ship them at the end of the month, things would be a lot different. Yeah. No, I agree. But now it's not happening. But now it's like early November and it's like, hmm. Yeah. We're not even close to shipping by the end of this month. No. You're talking about November. Yeah, it's November. Basically. Yeah. That's a long ways away. Yeah. Here's what's going to happen. Things change in a few months. Here's what's going to happen in the time from now until then. New iPhone. Yep. Probably a new Nexus of some type. I mean, they did the last Nexus on October 19th. October is just around the corner. Yeah. And that's usually the year mark is when they do it. And who else? Does anybody else have phones in store? I mean, HTC is going to do new phones. They've done an event on the 19th. Yeah. That's probably Android and Windows Phone 8. Yeah. So they've got new devices as well. Yeah. So there's going to be plenty of competition. It'd be interesting to see how it plays in with HTC and Windows Phone 8. Right. How they manage that. I've heard HTC's Windows 8, Windows Phone 8. God. HTC's Windows Phone 8 devices are kind of like great. I don't know much about them. I've just heard. I've also heard from sources familiar with the matter. That HTC's phones are, their Windows 8 phones are contenders. Windows Phone 8 phones. Beats and you know. I will say that I think Microsoft, Microsoft and Nokia, they've got to convince everybody that this is viable. Yeah. And if they don't this time around, like I don't think HTC can run around devoting resources. I mean, they're struggling anyway. Two words. I don't think they can run around devoting resources. Two words. I don't know that Samsung and LG are going to keep hanging around. Surface phone. Maybe. Imagine. All right. Get out. They don't need to though. Yeah. Nokia. Yeah. Why do they need a Surface phone? They're not. All right. We got to get Dieter in here. Yeah. I don't mean to kick you out. You're a wonderful man. Sure. Bye bye. Sure. You got a thing in here. Bye. Bye Tom. Yeah. Do I need to take it off? Is Dieter sharing that with you? I feel like that's somewhat unsanitary. Can we get a tech in here? I'll just unplug it. I told you. No. I'm... So, Nilay, by the way, Nilay insisted we get these microphones back. I hate it when I'm like this. We were doing lav mics for the last one, which I think is better because you don't have this microphone in front of your face and you don't have to worry about where's the microphone, where's my head. I'd like to lean back. I can't do it. You can't hear me. You can't hear a word I'm saying, can you? I like to lean back. I'm pretty sure that's... I'd like to have the option of leaning back, but it's not doable with these stupid microphones. Yeah. I'm sorry that you can't relax. Anyhow, while we're waiting for Dieter to join us, Dieter Bohn, what else is going on? What's going on in our chat? Tell us what's happening. What are those people saying? They just love Tom. Tom is great. Yeah. Tom is great. He says Fin for Fin. I'm sorry. I was like, I don't know what you're talking about. Free-D, HD, and Fin. Yeah. He says other words wrong too. Not wrong. A Vlad-Tom mix. Have you ever had a conversation with Vlad and Tom? I can barely understand anything that Vlad is saying. I mean, he is impossible to understand. I'm just saying, every time he's talking to me, I hear sounds, but... Vlad has this new trick. So we're all together in the office, all 50 plus of us. And every now and again, I'll just feel a very strong pair of hands give me a back massage. He's got strong hands. That is the best part of having Vlad around. Yeah, he's great. He does pushups. We were talking about a pushup strategy. You have a pushup strategy? No, he has one and he was telling me about it. Any questions from the chat room while we're here? Well, now everyone wants to know about the pushup strategy. It's just, he does pushups whenever possible. He'll do like drop and do five. He'll drop and do five whenever possible. I'm surprised he doesn't talk about this on the mobile show. Surely he does. No, no, no. He told me that he was an Ifa. I don't want to steal a story from him, but he told me he was an Ifa and he drank some milk and then he realized that it was actually cream that he was drinking. And he's lactose intolerant. You're really learning a lot about Vlad. I'm sure he didn't want me to share with you. And he was like, I was like, what happened? He was like, oh, you know, I just did a few pushups and went on my way. I was like, to what? To rid your body of the cream or like what? I got us out of work. And yeah, he's great. He's great. The whole crew is here. I just want to say like, it's so great. Yeah, it's ridiculous. I mean, there are people I've never met in person before. You've met me before. Like Dieter. You slid right into that. As I said, you would. But it's great. Like I'm so psyched. I'm so psyched about this team. And we got such cool stuff. And we like, it's been fun. Like we all actually Ross and David Pierce and Jordan, one of our video guys, they're all at the Amazon event in LA. They had to go to the Amazon. I wanted to go, but we couldn't do it. But like a big chunk of our crew was like covering the event in New York today. And we're all sitting around the ping pong table on the sales side of the office. And I was like, this is like it. We have like a startup and like, this is the moment. Sales had to leave the office. We had to put them. I don't know where they are. We had to send them away to another office because we have so many people. Sales sits on one side of the office. There's literally a wall, a physical wall between the sales side and the editorial side. But we had to move them out. And now the office is full of editorial. It's full of us. Verge editorial. It's full of people. It should be full of. Well, we're moving to a new office very soon. Yeah. Which will have a lot more space. Okay. So here's the deal. What? You went to Motorola yesterday. I did. You went to Moto. But we've got the guys at Amazon. Oh, we gotta go to that. Ready to come in. So let's do that while we're working. Okay, we're live, live, post Amazon. The post Amazon glow. Yeah. Who do we have? Ross and David. Oh, wow. Look at these guys. Very pro. This is pro as hell. Can you hear us? We can't hear you. I mean, they look very good. You're on. You're talking to an iPhone. What is that? There they are. Hello. That's how they hear us. They've called in. Can you hear us? Can you hear us? Yeah, we can hear you now. Yes. Yeah. A little bit of a delay. Beautiful. You guys sound lovely. Is there a plane? Is there a plane flying by you right now? They're in an airplane. Yes. Amazon's event is actually in a hangar. Yeah. We're in a park field hangar. Is that what? Something like that. There are a million planes flying by us at all times. Wow. Sonic booms all over the place. Yeah. It was a madhouse. A little bit of a bad planning on their part, isn't it? Can we get these guys up on the screen back here, by the way? What is it? What's going on in the control room? You can't. There they are. Look at that. This feels very unfair. We cannot see you at all. We're just looking at a lens. We're all fully nude. We hear you great, but this is just so not good. We're 100% nude in here. Can you hear me? All right. So there's Josh naked, Neil, I naked. Who else is naked? Dieter. Dieter's here, and he's naked. This background noise is insane. Is there a camera? No. This background noise is insane. That's actually what I picture every time. Is there anything we can do about the background noise, folks? No. How about like a gate? Do you have a gate? I don't think so. Noise gate? Let's ask them what happened to this event today. All right. Talk about the Amazon event, guys. All right. You want to go first? Sure. So it was a bunch of things. The announcement took forever, and I've never seen Jeff Bezos so excited. But the big things were the new Kindle, the Kindle Paperwhite, and two new Kindle Fire HDs, a 7-inch and an 8.9-inch. They updated some of the older stuff, but it's not particularly interesting. It feels like they just have kind of extra hardware they need to sell. There is notable stuff. The Dispect boosted the original Fire. They're going to continue to sell that at $159. They're going to do the Paperwhite Kindle. Not Kindle, sorry. The $79 Kindle is now the $69 Kindle. It's the same thing, a little bit of a different color. It's still the lowest tier of entry for buying Amazon content. That was the point that Jeff Bezos wanted to make is, we have great hardware, but we really just want to sell you things over and over and over again for years to come. But then at the same time, this whole thing felt more like a technological achievement than any of their events I've seen before. It's normally like they want to talk about their software, and every time they just keep coming back to Amazon Prime. But this, it was much more about, look at this great thing we've built. He talked forever about having two antennas and all the interesting Wi-Fi. That was hilarious, by the way. It was like this was the first time I've ever felt like they're a huge hardware company. It was bizarre. We were talking about this at the office. We had a big kind of round table, like what does this all mean? It definitely felt like Amazon was saying, we're a consumer electronics company now. We're making consumer technology. It's not just about, hey, we thought we'd try a color Kindle and see how it does. I think that was the first one. They were kind of like an experiment. Now it seems like they're really saying, we are what Apple is. We are what Microsoft is. We can make hardware that's competitive with Apple. We can do what Samsung does. We're making real hardware with real innovation. I don't know how much real innovation there is here. Pretty familiar. The Mimo thing, I thought, and you guys were there, so tell me if this is true, but to me it was they, and Tim Carmody on Team Soda's too, they just needed to produce a slide that had some metric that was quantifiably better than the iPad. The one they picked was our Wi-Fi speeds are faster. Then he talked about it for like 15 minutes. Really long, let's explain Mimo technology. Mimo is a commodity technology. You can go to Best Buy and buy those routers today. But if there is demonstrable differences between the speed of the Wi-Fi on an iPad 3, or new iPad, did they call it the iPad 3 by the way? They did. Yeah. Oh really? Yeah, they did. That's odd by the way. And the Kindle. Yeah. Kindle Fire HD. No one's sitting around complaining about their Wi-Fi speeds on the iPad. Well. The whole thing that it seemed to me, and Ross, I don't know if you had this opinion too, but it seemed like this whole thing was more of a shot at the iPad than anything else. Because they even talking about like, oh we have these stereo speakers, which is legitimately a really great innovation if they pulled it off. But they show like this is what most tablets have. And they could have showed anything on the planet and they slide down the bottom part of an iPad. Of course, because if Amazon, if Amazon's entering the hardware system, it's like we're going to shoot for the big time. Well, they did the stuff. We have a dual stereo speaker, our number one competitor. I mean, they would put it on. They did the stuff with the 499. Sorry, they did the screen. They did the stuff with the screen where they were saying our treatment is less glare. They showed this cutaway of the iPad. Yeah. So let me ask you about that. Let me ask you about the screens on this stuff. Two different screen technologies are interesting from Amazon. The Paperwhite stuff and then the Fire HD screen. So let's start with the HD, the Fire. Is it good? Is it bad? I mean, they went on and on about it. The iPad doesn't have a laminated screen and they were like, this is a laminated screen. So that's like already one place where they're better. I mean, is it better? I think it's good. The screen is really good. The reflection stuff, I think, it's weird that they spent so much time on because to me, like, my iPad screen is so obscenely reflective that 25% better is still like obscenely reflective. And these are too, like, you can see in the videos and the photos that we have that like it might be better, sure. But like if there's a light over me, I still can't see a thing on the screen. But beyond that, the screens look fantastic. 8.9 inch with the 1920 by 1200 display is amazing. What's the resolution on the 7? What's the resolution? Is it the same resolution? It's 1280 by 800. Oh, interesting. So it is a little bit. And so talk about it. Really avoid talking about that. But it is HD. You know what else they avoid talking about is they didn't brand anything. They could have given a, you know, written a optical something something to name the screen or even their Wi-Fi technology. They could have slapped cutesy names like Sony and Samsung and Apple do to all the different components. And they just said, here are the specs. Prime Wi-Fi. Yeah. Yeah, prime. Prime. And all of it, all of those branding was like, you know, the ecosystem. It's WhisperSync. WhisperSync is now a much bigger thing for them. It encompasses all their cloud strategy for like, go from one device to the next. I think that's what they care about. They're branding the content, the ecosystem, which we've heard so much from you for last week with Sony and Samsung. You know, obviously, Microsoft's playing a big play on ecosystem. Amazon's come out saying we have the content and now we're going to make way more compelling hardware to go with it. So can you talk a little bit about what do these products feel like? Like what are they, you know, did you pick up the 8.9 inch and think like, you know, I could live with this in place of an iPad? Did it feel like a high quality piece of hardware? Because let's be perfectly clear. The original Kindle Fire kind of feels like a piece of crap. Yeah. I mean, it's a cheap piece of crap. And like, I get why. But like, what do these feel like? I will say that we were running around after the event and trying to find the devices to get hands on and stuff and they were all kind of weirdly hidden. They do that. I walked around and I had just played with the Fire HD for a couple of minutes and then walked away and came back and accidentally picked up a Fire and knew immediately and I was like, oh, this feels awful. So like that says something to me. It seems much better. We haven't actually they're weirdly reticent to let us touch the 8.9 inch. They'll show it to us. And like I touched the back of it, but we can't actually spend any real time with it. I have the same interview with the event. And the 7 inch feels really nice. Yeah. So what's the difference? I mean, so between the difference in feel between the regular Fire and the 7 inch Fire HD, are there any other like major differences between the two besides the resolution, the build quality? I mean, it knows anything in terms of like UI. I think the design is obviously the same. It's much smoother. And when we played with the Kindle Fire, the original, it would still stutter. And, you know, you know, update after update after update. This felt really smooth. Yeah. And then design wise. Yeah, it's definitely a more compelling tablet. Actually feels good. Yeah. How is nice like textured back. Very soft. Yeah. How is the weight and the balance? Because the you know, the Nexus 7 is really great. The Kindle Fire is terrible. So how is how is the fire? She did it. Did it feel better to feel lighter and better in the end? It did like it markedly felt better. We had the Nexus 7 with us. It's kind of a weight comparison. It's pretty close, at least, you know, in a qualitative analysis, just holding both. You know, it's clear like VWin after like that 7 inch design. It's probably one of the better ones we've seen for sure. Yeah, I mean, I think it actually feels a lot like the Nexus 7. It has the same kind of tapered back. One of the things I never liked about the original Fire was that it's really blocky and they have like the rounded corners, but it still feels bigger than it actually is because it's so kind of sharp. This is much more sort of soft and small and it feels it feels a lot better. It feels a lot like a Kindle now. Yeah, it's a very compelling consumer product. And we kind of knew this last year that Amazon's strategy is to release a really crappy piece of hardware, see how it goes. And then like Kindle 2 was so much better than Kindle 1. And this is clearly the same kind of thing. This is actually a compelling piece of hardware on its own merit. Wait, so one thing that I thought was really interesting was they never they opened up Bezos opened up and said Android tablets suck. Nobody uses them. But our tablets are better. And then they never said the word Android again, as far as I could tell. Oh, yeah. So what's the software like? Is it something way different? I mean, we saw the leaks and they look different. And it looks like this is even farther different from Android than anything else. What's it like? And just to piggyback on that is do you know what version Android this is running? These are running. I'm not sure. Did you find out? They won't tell me. I'm sure that we can figure this out once we get our hands on one of them. But for now, they're and they don't want to say Android. He distanced himself from Android by saying Android tablets suck. There are on screen keys, you know, like ice cream sandwich and above. So it's probably at least that. There's a notification pane, which we had last time. They're still using the carousel. You know, it's OK. It definitely feels better. Yeah. It's performance better, but still. So what are the so they had they said they had like a new email client and you some other new stuff, right? The kids stuff. Is that any good? Because to me, what was interesting about this, the fire was it was a terrible productivity device because emails sucked and there was like the browser is OK, but now they're like coming after the iPad harder. So is that stuff better? I can't get into the email. It's the email thing. So I don't know. I'm yeah, I'm underwhelmed. The Gmail experience on Android is just so good that anything else. This felt kind of like a like the native client on an Android phone, which I if you use, I'm so sorry. But like the kids stuff, the was it the Kindle free time, I think it's called is actually pretty cool. And like all this stuff, it feels really nothing like Android. And it's kind of cool. Like it feels like Amazon. They have all these apps that look and feel similar and work similar. And it feels like a device that is a full operating system. It doesn't feel like it's based on Android. It's just this is Amazon. Yeah. Right. So the point like we we try going kind of deep into the system. We couldn't find the Android fits like they've done a very good job of masking that very far down. Even even even more so than they needed to do, even more so than the that on the last fire you think that they've kind of because there is still some kind of, you know, hints of Android in there. You think they've gone further now in in getting rid of it completely? I mean, there's still some things that are obviously Android, like the like you said, the notification pull down, like as soon as you pull it down, you're like, oh, this is an Android device. But it feels, you know, it feels very different. And you never enter a menu where or at least in the few minutes that we've had, you never we've never seen something that's like, oh, this is the Android video player or this is the Android settings. It's like they've it feels much more complete now. Well, so what are the tablet apps like on the on the bigger tablet? Because, you know, Android tablet apps, they sort of work OK on seven inch devices. They work OK on Nexus 7. But Amazon's never asked for tablet apps. And now they've got a bigger screen. Is that OK? I mean, that seems like the biggest danger zone. I we didn't see that much of that. They're pretty because it's not the reason we can't touch it. Yeah. Yeah. No. And yeah, and I think that that's you know, that's one of the things that he that Jeff Bezos didn't talk about was, you know, here's what we're doing in the App Store. That's really important. And here's why we think this is great. Like he talks about all this other stuff and kind of talks his way around apps. And there's you know, there's all the content. You can buy all this stuff. You can get books. But like I'm like, I just want to raise my hand and be like, how is there a Twitter? I'd like to tweet from my Kindle. Is there a Twitter? And that's like I honestly don't know the answer. So what's the what's the overall sense out of this? Are they this Amazon? We were talking about this in the office a lot. Are they? I don't it doesn't feel like they're competing dead on with Apple. It feels like they're saying we can make hardware that's as compelling as Apple. But we have but you need it. You need a lap. You still need to buy a laptop. Right. You don't have a fire to consume content with. Whereas Apple seems to be saying, eventually you will just have an iPad. Is that mean is that the sensor getting or is it something different? I mean, it's kind of like what we did when we talked about before going to this, like Amazon is a content delivery machine and everything, every piece of hardware, no matter how nice it looks kind of toward that end goal. I mean, even though the upgrade email and the kind of kid friendly stuff, it still feels like that's the ultimate goal for them. It's not a productivity device. Other than email, which is kind of a weird thing, I don't see any strides to make anything else than, you know, an Amazon service. Yeah, right. Yeah, I mean, it felt to me like the whole pitch was like, we sell you everything you could possibly want to buy. And this is the best way to get all of those things ever. Right. It's like it's like Bezos said, we'll sell this to you at value, because we want you to keep using it and keep buying our stuff. He was very explicit about that. So you can if you buy the fire now, you're still buying apps, you know, five years from now, even two years from now. And that's where the profit comes in for Amazon. That's where they want to make their money. All right. So so I guess I kind of want to know, do you think was this event a success for them? What's your what's your estimation? You were there on on the on the, you know, as it happened. And do you do you feel like, you know, are they I mean, has this solidified their place as this in this whatever the post PC world is? I mean, even though Nila is saying like they don't want to be post PC, you know, was the event a success? Are they like now at the scale of Apple in terms of doing these like doing actual products? And and are they you know, is this now second place? They're second place. Yeah. In tablets. Right. So like this is it kind of has changed the dynamic. I kind of want to hear what your take is on that. That was a not really much of a question. Yeah. Just like give me some meandering thoughts on your on your takeaways. This is very novel. I'm just saying the days of that you both look very handsome. Yes. You could say their second place without trying to go after the iPad. That's the tape delay. I just figured it out. I was got it down perfectly. You know, the second place without trying to be that productivity suite that the iPad has become just a year after it kind of came out. I think that's the point. I think Android tried to go after the iPad by being something like going one to one on features. They said we've got all the services, we've got this name brand for content. I think it's what they want to do. I think they want to serve a complimentary role where you might have both. You might actually work with your iPad, but you'll still watch movies and read Kindle books regardless of the device. But hopefully it's a fire. So I think that like I think that's almost like a double edged sword for Amazon because if they're going to come out and say we have the best device, but if you don't think we have the best device, we have all our stuff on everybody else's device, too. So like I don't see this as like I wouldn't recommend that you buy a fire over an iPad based on what I've seen today anyway. But that's in large part because all the Amazon stuff you want you can get on your iPad. I think the Kindle Paperweight is amazing. Yeah, I want to ask you about what's going on with that screen. Is it what how does that work? I mean, it feels like I mean, looking at we had the $79 Kindle next to it. It looks like the exact same screen except they just have this now like very well done front lit technology. I mean, it was very what do you think you you play with the Nook light more than I did. So yeah, well, so the thing I remember about the Nook light was it was really bright up at the top and then would kind of there were like peaks and valleys of brightness as you would go down the screen. And this felt really even and looked really good. And it was interesting that he said during the press conference that a lot of people who try it never want to turn the light off. And I kind of get that because it looks really good. And with the light off, it doesn't look as good like the paperweight thing really only works when the light is on when it's not on it. It's it looks is it actually marginally better than they said they increase the resolution. Is that noticeable? Because Kindle is like kind of rough. I mean, it's fine, but it's not great. And I mean, it seems like increased resolution to help, but I don't really believe it. It seemed to help on small text like we there was one over here that had text on like a like the smallest setting. And on the Kindle that I have now, it's barely readable at that point. And you're losing a lot of pixels and it doesn't look very good. And that was noticeably sharper. But at any normal size and resolution, it it seemed like it's probably a little bit better, but it didn't seem like it would be a giant leap forward in the experience. All right. Well, I know you guys have a plane to catch. You got to get back here. We have a lot of stuff to do tomorrow. And we have yet to talk about Motorola. Yeah. Right. So look, she's very excited. I want to say great job at the event today. Killer job. Look at the time. We got to go. Great job on the event today. Really killer live logging and great, great coverage all around. And have a safe flight. We'll see you guys when you get back to New York. Thanks for having us. Later boys. Wonderful, beautiful men. Beautiful, wonderful men. Can they still hear me? Yeah. I think they can. Good. Here's what I want to know. What, why didn't they have mics? Can anybody tell me? They had their lav mics. No, they didn't. Yeah, they did. I saw lav mics. No, they didn't. No. They were using a phone. No, they were listening to us. I know exactly what's going on. Well, they sounded like they were on a phone. No, no. They were listening to us on a phone. Those weren't lav mics. There's no way those were lav mics. Are they lav mics, John? No, they weren't. Oh, one lav mic for two people. Yeah. Wow. So there was a problem. Okay, good. Yeah, but they weren't, the phone was just a monitor back. I stand. But I stand correct. To cut down lag. I stand. You stand. I stand somewhat correct. All right, let's, no wait. Is there other news besides Motorola? There must be. I mean, there's other news, but like there's this story today, this iPhone 5 story. I don't know if you heard this. I don't want to go into it, I guess. Just to wrap up the Amazon thing. Let me go into it. Oh, go ahead. No, no, no. No, no, no. No, no, no. No, no, no. No, no, no. No, no, no. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. No. We just wrote an editorial earlier this week. Yeah. About what Amazon is doing in tablets. Yeah, I re-tweeted it. I was like, oh, this is still true, tweet. Yeah. It's actually more true. Yeah. Like Android tablets, the bigger ones don't work. No. Nobody buys them. They're not a useful class of devices. There are no apps that make that platform great, right? been their problem since the first day. And it's not and now it's like like the real loser is Google. Google is, I mean, yeah, I mean, I mean. Amazon just took all of Google's work, they've completely co-opted it, now they're not even saying it's Android to get, like Google isn't even getting the branding back out of it, like the good feeling about Android. And we were, I mean, I think what's really interesting is that because the market lags so far behind the update schedule, it's not a big deal that these are on ice cream sandwich and not jelly bean. Yeah, right. Like at all. Well, and well we suspect they're on ice cream sandwich. Well, whatever. I mean, the bigger deal is it's like, you know, Amazon gets all of the effort of Android. Yeah. They get all the developer effort. Now if they're on ICS, let's say presumably. There's some overhead, I mean, like getting an app into the Amazon App Store requires a different set of requirements. Yeah, but you can code for. It's just overhead. But like 90% of your work is gonna be on Android and then you're like, okay, I'll make a few tweaks. And if that ends up being the bigger market, especially for tablets, then you're gonna do the work, right? Right. But I'm just saying like Google, the Nexus 7, they're selling it at break-even or close to, right? Yeah. And it's designed to do exactly what Amazon is doing with its devices. Yeah. It's designed to make you buy stuff. But the only problem is that they have no compelling marketplace. Yeah, they've got Google Play. I mean Google Play is compelling in so far as like any marketplace is compelling because it has stuff. Right. But it is like in comparison to Amazon or what Apple offers. Right. And I think the Nexus 7 is great. The Nexus 7 is the most successful Android, like pure Android tablet besides a Kindle because, not because it's a great tablet, because it feels like it's just a really big good Android phone. Yeah. It's an iPod touch. That's what I keep saying. Wow. It is. Like there's no getting around it. You know what it's good at? It's good at running phone apps from Google Play. It's not. There are some apps, the Google specific apps that have been tweaked for that screen size, which is great because... Gmail. Tweaking things for that screen size is great. Their work at tweaking Gmail for that screen size is horrendous. Yeah. I think it's better than any other Gmail tablet experience you have. Right. But I'm saying like what it is to me is it's a really... It's the finally Android has an answer to the iPod touch. It is not an answer to the iPad. It doesn't work that way. I see what you're saying. It's like I... But I come home and I go through... But I wouldn't read on an iPod touch. Well, because the screen is... Right. But like there are no 3.5 inch Android phones. But I'm saying I do read ironically with often with the Kindle app. In fact, almost always with the Kindle app on the Nexus 7. Well, it just proves like Amazon's point. Yeah. Right. Although they won't put their Amazon store app on the Nexus 7. That's still not compatible. Really? Yeah. I don't remember even... Actually, I think they just updated. Oh, did it finally update? Yeah. I think they did. I've been waiting. For me, that's always like... I need to buy... Why do I need to... Jujubees. I don't know. It's like it's the same apps, right? The thing for me is that's great. Google has this thing with this tablet that finally addresses a hole in the market. But the hole in the market they need to chase is the iPad and the big tablets, not you can finally buy a cheap great Android device. They have to do something that Amazon actually did today, which was give a reason why you should choose their product over the iPad. I mean, I will say this, they have a 499 version, 32 gig, 499 version of the Fire HD. That thing is just to prove a point. Nobody's going to buy that. But one... No. We should talk about the price. No, no. But that's interesting. But yeah. So with that, it's a 4G version, LTE, and they offer for 50 bucks a year. A year. $4 a month or whatever. 4G service for 250 megs a month, which is crap. Well, it's not designed to like check your email in a pinch. Yeah. But you could check your email in a pinch or download a book or do the stuff that you need to do that's not like downloading movies, TV, or music for the most part. The things that the thing is designed to do. When you're in at the airport and you're boarding a plane, you want to get a book and there's no Wi-Fi or you want to download a few songs or whatever. Or a download movie and work through your allowance. You want to check your email. You're in the cab from the airport to your hotel. I can see myself doing these things and it's like 50 bucks a year. That would actually make you go, well, I was going to get the iPad 2 for 400. I spent another 100, ultimately 150. I get all my Prime stuff. Plus I can, you know, that I mean, there is an actual reason you might consider it. If that plan was available on all the Kindles, sure. I'd buy it at 499. Yeah. You'd buy it. You would definitely buy it. I would say like, it's an actual attempt, right? At 499. It's a lot of money. Yeah. That's a lot of money and it's not a terrible, useful plan. But they at least have made some, I find like relatively compelling argument. Yeah. Everyone said, what are they going to do? I think that when you look at the 199. So we were wrong about the phone coming out today. The phone, I know for a fact. Well, you said it could. I will. Yeah. You were 100% confident that they are working on a phone. There is a phone. We were a little bit confident, 70% confident that they were going to announce it today. So we put it out there. They didn't want to do five products. We were wrong. Whatever. It would have cut into Bezos' time talking about Mimo. Yeah. He was like, I got this wifi presentation. Actually, the truth is they had a phone thing in the Mimo space. They had to cut it for some reason. They were like, well, let's go on about the wifi for a little while. Anyway. No, but I think the 4G stuff is them. It's obviously AT&T. The 4G logo they're showing is AT&T's logo. Yeah, definitely. I think this is them working with a carrier partner saying, let's try out this on a very niche product and see if this kind of pricing works and people are attracted to it. And that sets the stage for them doing it. But I do think they have- The important products here are 199 Kindle Fire 7 HD. That's a terrible name. Kindle- Kindle Fire HD 7. No, it's just HD. Oh, they actually put that out there. Because the 8.9 is also an HD. Yeah. It's bad. And they could have come up with a better branding. Hey, at least there's no max version. And the important one is Kindle Fire HD with 4G LTE. That's the full name of the product. Yep. The width is in there. Anyway, so the 199 and the 299. 299. 299 8.9 inches is a fairly- That's gunning for the iPad. That's saying, you can buy this thing. Well, and what you're going to do on it is watch videos. When Apple introduces the iPad mini, their price point has to be 299 or lower. Sure. Because they've got a 399 product. Yeah. That's the iPad 2. Yeah. Got it. I was going to keep saying things you agree with me. They have a 499 product. Their CEO is named Tim Cook. It's the new iPad. Yeah. They have a CEO. Yes. So they got to go lower than 399. Who knows what they're going to do. But I'm saying- Well, but they're doing- Amazon, they're fighting this battle on two fronts, right? They're saying to Nexus 7 customers, at 199, you get a better product. I guarantee you it has a better screen than Nexus 7. Yeah. Nexus 7 screen is just okay. Yes. So you're going to do a lot of content consumption on this cheap tablet. Buy ours, better screen, bigger ecosystem. So here's the thing. I'm sorry, wait. It's 299 and then 499? Yeah. Why didn't they make it 399? I don't know. Yeah. I mean, I just feel like, because the $100 is the kind of range where you're hovering over the buy it now for the 299, you're like, well, I could get it with 4G for another 100 bucks. Yeah. Maybe I'll just go for it. But another 200 is like a bridge too far as far as I'm concerned. I'm telling you, I just wanted to prove the point that they can play in that game. High end. Yeah. Nobody can ever say, well, you can't, you can get the iPad with 4G. I would like to see the person who, well, you know, the 4G iPad is 629. Yeah. But it's there, right? I mean, I wrote a piece about carriers saying, look at the Nexus 7 on the surface. They couldn't get the carrier deal. Yeah. I mean, nobody can say that about Amazon. So we've been talking about like, they're taking on Apple. So like they're going to fight Apple with these products, but it's not because they want to take Apple's land. They want to take land on the other side. Yeah. They want to sell their services. They want to sell you toilet paper and they want to sell tablets that help to do that because why not? We can do it. Dude, they showed a demo of in game, like you're playing a game and then it pops up that you want to buy a new character in the game, but for slightly more money, you buy the new character in the game and you get the action figures sent to you in the mail. I mean, this is Amazon. That is like next level. We were talking about this at the office. This is not Amazon trying to be Apple. This is Amazon trying to be more like Amazon and their business is selling content and stuff. Right. And the piece that they were missing, and I think that's why they spent so much time talking about wifi antennas and had the perfect amount of storage space for a tablet, which was just insane. Bezos spent like five... Eight gigabytes, rest in peace. Yeah. RIP eight gigabytes. When he was like, you guys, 16 gigabytes, like it was a huge deal. The entire Verge office just erupted in laughter. I think the funny, I think the gravestone was just like a total, it was like one of those Apple style jokes. Like they always do stuff like that in their keynotes where they have some like funny graphic. And I think this was just like, where can we stick one of those and like, okay, this is good. We're going to kill the eight gigabyte model. Yeah. Whatever. I mean, it was just like, anyway, I think that they're proving what they were trying to do is prove that they can build hardware as good as Apple because that's been the knock. Well, that there is innovative because they put up a slide. That's a hardware still really important or ecosystem. I mean, they were on a mission to say we've built something as innovative as the iPhone or as the iPad. They didn't say that. They not in so many words. They intimated it. But it was a very, I mean, we got to wrap. We got to have a Motorola. They released phones. I mean, I couldn't go ahead. One thing that we missed all these products are ad supported. They all have ads in the law. They're all cheaper because of the ads, which is crazy. And I, you know, I have a $7 Kindle that has ads on the lock screen. Yeah. Even the 499 model looks that way. Yeah. That's a little gross. I don't care. I mean, like, great. I mean, you have, you're going to have an iPad, but I mean, I have a car. I'm carrying out. I'm ordering the paperwhite Kindle. I mean, like the paper white is a, it looks pretty cool if you're into reading. Yeah. I'll be getting the paper white. And I actually put up a, this is my next paper white Kindle. Like while we, while we're on. Oh man. Yeah. I get that. That makes a lot of sense to me. Well, turns out I know Lord. I know. I know a little bit about her and that makes a lot of sense. All right. Can we please talk about Motorola? Yeah. So they, uh, this is their first big event since Google officially acquired them. So Eric Schmidt came up and introduced CEO Motorola who then came up. Actually, no, before all that happened, they had a band. Oh my God. The band was called the Kin. Oh, and they were really bad. They got off the stage and began serenading the audience, walking through the audience. Yeah. They played like 45 minutes and then they needed to take the junk off the stage so that the CEOs could stand there and look awkward. And so they like walked up and down the aisles and tried to get us to sing along with them. It was horrible. It was really terrible. It was one of the worst things I've ever seen. And I've seen, we've seen some pretty bad stuff at events. Yeah. It was extremely cringe-worthy. I felt bad for this guy. So before the event even started, they had the names of all the press people streaming across the monitors. Welcome Dieter Bohn. Really? Yeah. I was like, what are you doing? We're Google and we know everything about you. We're browsing last night. That is really interesting. So they announced it. Okay. So we've got the- Eric Schmidt goes up. Eric Schmidt goes up and then he's like, hey, you know, history of phones is great. And here's the next- We think phones are cool. We think phones are cool. Yeah. It was basically just there to acknowledge that Motorola owns them. Right. Yeah. It was very strange because you don't typically buy a company that acknowledge its rich history because the reason you ended up buying the company is because their history had failed them. Right. Well, here's their line. Google's history of innovation and Motorola's history of engineering. Yeah. Well, dude, it's an accusation, but it's one that was born out by Eric Schmidt being like, well, this company needed was great leadership. And I'm proud to say we found that leader. And it's like, not Sanjay Jha. Yeah. Like let's bring up the other guy that we put in to lead this company. Anyhow, he's been there for 90 days, which means that everything that they showed was like, he like showed up and like they were, you know, in production. So like, this is, you know, Motorola after Google, but it's also like, it's the stuff that Motorola has been working on for the past year. Yeah. Right. And it's also like the very least they could do. Yep. It's like they're back to Razer era. Motorola is what's going on there. Here's what they announced the, the Razer HD. Yep. The Razer Max HD, HD Max 4g and the Razer M the Razer M which is like the mid range razor. It's like the low end 4g. Yeah. So we don't know what, what it, so, I mean the, the Razer M is 99 bucks and basically they took a Razer and they refreshed it, but it's like, it's basically the same 1280 screens. So it's a 208 by 720 screen on the HD version on the HD. And then 960 by whatever crap they've been doing. Right. All Pentile. Right. All running ICS with, with Motorola's garbagey ass skin. No, no, no, no, no, no. The skin is great. Yeah. It's good. It's really easy. The lock screen thing. When you swipe to the left, you get, you get like, I always put all my settings on them. They started this with the Atrix, Atrix HD. I played with the latest Motorola skin. It's, it's, it's ice cream sandwich. They make arbitrary changes to what? To icons, to some of the functionality. It is ugly as sin. To wallpaper. The functionality is the same. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. There is no explaining arbitrary changes that look worse to me that is going to convince me that it is somehow an improvement. If they improve the lock screen, that's great because the lock screen on ICS and on Jelly Bean stinks and has not been improved and sucks. If you need to use a lock on it, by the way, totally freaking useless. You know, it's fine. I'm not upset. They added a quick setting screen. That's really cool. I like that. I really like the home screen. And then I just feel like the things they added could have basically been apps and they could have like left the beauty. Oh, they added apps. Oh, I know. Yeah. I know they added it. Yeah. Verizon is preloading Amazon apps on all its mid range phones. Yeah. Anyhow. Cool. Look, they showed an image of this phone when, who was up on stage? Probably Woodside. Woodside. The CEO. Woodside was up on stage. They showed an image. I tweeted it. Yeah. It is so, it is so fundamentally gross. Yeah. It is so ugly. Which one? The one of the, of the wallpaper with like the droid eye and the electric bolts coming in and then like their shitty icons that somehow they think like are better than the Google icons, which they're not. No. Like they're ugly. You are bad designers. They should be fired. They stink at their job. And just like their whole extra bits of skinning just make it look like it looks so. It's arbitrary. So ugly. It's changed for change sake. But look, I like Motorola's products. I just want to say, I like Motorola's products. I actually am excited about them putting HD and ICS and Jellybean by the end of the year, they say on these devices. They, the Razer battery life is out of the Max battery life is outstanding. So, you know, one thing they are doing. To couple that with the same body size, but a larger screen is a huge deal. And I'm very into it. I would like be, I would be pre-ordering right now. You just pre-order the developer edition. Yeah. Stock on it. Well, that's what they're making them. No, it's not stock. I don't think. It's still not stock. I'm not sure. They weren't clear on that. What developer edition? Okay. So Verizon Android phones ship with a lock bootloader so that you can't hack custom ROM into it and play around with it. No, those aren't stock. They just don't have a lock bootloader. So yeah, they're just making, and so you can buy the developer edition unsubsidized. You can only buy it at the full price. Okay. You know, around the same time. I'll do that if they have it, if it's stock Jellybean or stock ICS. So I mean, I've been used to like Sense and TouchWiz and compared to those. No, it's way lighter. I agree. They don't mess with the contacts. They don't have that crappy multitasking. They pulled back considerably on the last iteration of their skin. Yeah. So much that I believe everything they've done is essentially arbitrary. Right. And arbitrary changes to an excellently designed OS is offensive to my design sensibilities. So we got to talk about the screens. Okay. Cause they're still AMOLED. The Razer M screen is miserable. Yeah. The Razer HD screens, I didn't have a problem with like the Christmas, but I mean, I've been using that image up that you have up, but you know, they talked about their color fidelity and their idea of color fidelity. Yeah. Just like great. This looks nice. This is nice about your so blue. Here's this nice about your hands on photo. Can we talk about this for a second? Get the image back up, please. Get that image back up. Just put it back. Okay. Let's talk about design for a second. Number one, the wallpaper. Yeah. You can blame that. Okay. Hold on. The thing you see at the bottom of the phone. Number two. Yeah. Number two, the, the design of these circular widgets, which does not really match the aesthetic of their icon design, which does not really match the aesthetic of jelly bean or ice cream sandwich. Their icon design also doesn't match those things. Their icons are over, overly cartoony. There's skew, there's skew morphs, but they're also like very cartoony. They're also like just crappily designed, like crappy icons from like the internet in 1996. Yeah. And this is just one very basic screen. This is just one look, one little look into it. Yeah. Oh, oh, they changed the, they changed the back home and multitasking icon slightly. Yeah. Just enough that they made them like more, they're more droidy. They're more like Terminator-ish. Yeah. Oh, you know, I don't know if it, I didn't get a chance to see if it has the pop-up widgets anymore. That was one of the best things about the, the, the skin on the H-D, I can't pronounce H-D. I'm sure it does have whatever it has. You can flip it up and you like flip up on an icon and it pops up. To me, all that is is RAM eating poorly coated garbage that Motorola put into its phone. I mean, if I wanted Motorola to make a software, I would, I don't want Motorola to make software. Well, so they're Google now. I mean, so this is a- They're not Google though. Well, well, they're starting to be, they're promising they're going to be. I like how they have, they have Schmidt come up and they're like- And then they ran a video, So Happy Together. Oh my God. And they're like, there's a firewall and then they're like, we're so happy together, but there's a firewall where it matters in the product. Yeah. Like, you know what? Put a firewall between Eric Schmidt and your presentations and remove the firewall from, from, from your software and your hardware. I asked them, are you guys going to ship stock Android devices now? And they're like, well, you know, if we happen to get into the Nexus program again in the open competition for who gets to have a Nexus device, we will. But otherwise, you know, we think we're making improvements on Android. We're doing what's best for the consumer. It's terrible. Yeah. They're wrong. So Dieter and I have this theory and we've been working on a piece. I don't want to get too into it. Don't get too into it. But I think there is, I think the story of Motorola, I just, there's so much to unpack. Motorola has, has been the puppet of Google and Verizon ever since the first ever droid. That's right. And that like Google made like their devil's bargain with by the way that droid stock stock stock Google made. Well, that was, if you look at it, I believe never updated. Yeah. But that device, that device changed Motorola. It changed Verizon. I wish they had learned a lesson. It changed Android. That was the device that was directly competitive with the iPhone. Yes. And they, that was a deal between Google and Verizon. That was Google saying, we will back off net neutrality if you push Android as a competitor to the iPhone. And they were like, what sucker can we get to build this phone? What sucker needs help? And they picked Motorola and they've, Motorola is synonymous with the droid brand on Verizon. They have, they work every product they make is at the behest of Verizon. And these products are puppets to Verizon. But to Motorola's credit, like they actually do make really nice hardware and, and they do have engineering chops. I mean, their phones sound great. They have really loud speakers. The earpiece sound really good. You know what? None of that stuff made them any money. They had to sell themselves. Great batteries. The screens are, but you know, like I could, the screens are miserable. I could live with a, with a bad HD screen. If it had stock JB on it. You do every day. I know. Here it is right here. I'm living. Well, it's at my point, you know, what software trucks hardware. I'm just saying, I mean, what's tragic about that whole narrative that you just told is Google didn't need to give up on net neutrality. Verizon at the time was desperate for somebody to save them from rim because they had no answer for the iPhone. They had the Blackberry storm. That's what they're going to take up. What sucker can we get us to build us an iPhone competitor? Remains like, yeah, sure. Here's your press. And like, I'm just saying Motorola has always been. All right. It's had two masters. Let's go. What else? That's it. That's we have a whole wrap up. I got a lot of work to do. We got to be, we got to be arguing about it tomorrow. Tomorrow's nothing. Thank God. Tomorrow is something. What is something? There's Friday. A lot of stuff going down on Friday. Giant events. No, no, no events. Personal inter inter office stuff. That's what I'm referring to. We're going to have events together. We're having events in the office. Is there a ping pong tournament? No. All right. That's the verge cast for the week. If you'd like to get in touch with us, you could email us at vergecast at the verge.com. You can find us on Twitter. We're at verge. Also, I'm Josh Wotopolsky. Neelai is reckless. These are Twitter handles by the way. And Dieter Bohn is, is, why am I blanking on it now? Backlon. Backlon. Thank you. I know your Twitter handle well, because you have a story, a great story you like to tell about it. Ask him about his Twitter handle. Backlon. B-A-C-K-L-O-N. People are very mad at you for saying that Motorola should fire people in this economy. Sorry. People who do bad work at their job shouldn't get to keep doing the job. I mean, that's just a kind of fundamental, that's kind of a fundamental way the economy keeps moving forward is if you put the right people in the right positions and get rid of the people who are the wrong people in the wrong positions. They can be demoted. They don't have to be fired. They can be demoted or moved. Put them in a, in mail filing. Put them in the mail room. Put them in some job that doesn't require design skills. Yeah. Like they probably did let the engineers design the icon. Or they just, they just bought an icon pack on like some sort of like line art. They put out like a call like yeah, they just use the icon pack and anyhow. Anyhow, and what else would I have to say? Oh yeah, you can, you can email us. You can leave a message in comments, which I'm sure you'll do about our video player and that's it. Or Twitter. Go away. It's been a long, it's been a really long. Leave, leave this place. It's been a really long. So that's the, that's Vergecast for this week. We'll be back next week. Oh, by the way, this time next week, we will be talking about the iPhone, the new iPhone. Boom. That's right. Apple event Wednesday. Yep. The September 12th. 10 AM PT 1 PM ET. Yeah. Sometime in Europe. Some. Don't even pick a pick one of them because if you do, you'll pick the wrong one. And, and, and I think that our plans are by the way that Neely and I are going to be out there and we're going to have some live analysis following the event, which should be fun. So you'll be able to tune in for that. Anyhow, we'll be, this will be a very interesting conversation next week. Yeah. Okay. That's our show as always. I wish you and yours the very best for the upcoming days and weeks ahead as you, you know, live out your final moments here on the planet before the destruction of the 2012. What? And, and end of days, 2012 end of days destruction. Rock and roll.