 Hi, welcome to the Verge Mobile Show. This is episode 76 for the week of January 20th, 2014. Dieter Bohne is actually, I think, at an airport right now, so he is not with us, but I'm Dan Siefert. I'm Vlad Sevo. I'm Chris Sigler. And the rest of us are here, and it feels like it's been forever since we've done a show, but it was only like a week and a half ago that we were at CES, wasn't it? Well I haven't done a show since 2013, I don't think. So there's that. By the way, I would just like to point out that Dieter, the reason Dieter is not here is not only is he trying to get on an airplane, but he's trying to get on an airplane specifically from Minneapolis to New York City, which is going into polar vortex 2.0 right now. Yeah, and he's going from like one tundra to another. Yeah, there's like no chance of this plane actually taking off. I don't know why he's even trying. But my understanding is that his flight as of right now is not canceled, so we'll see if he makes it. Yeah, well, we hope that Dieter gets in safe, but we're gonna carry on without him anyways. So I just had a really disturbing moment while Chris was detailing Dieter's travails. I had a window open with a Verge Mobile Show stream on it, and it started streaming randomly, and he was like, hi, this is episode 76. I'm Dan Seifert, and Chris is still talking about Dieter. He's like, what's going on? I've had that happen before. You know why? So yesterday I was saying on Twitter that... You guys don't use flash block. I don't understand this. You just have flash windows going randomly wild in your browsers. I don't like blocking anything. I want all media to be blasted at my face at all times. How is your computer not at a constant crawl? Has well, baby. That's how. Look, so I was saying on Twitter yesterday that Chrome's sound indicator in the tab bar is like the greatest innovation in the history of computing. That's what saved me just now. Yes, yeah, I knew it. See? It's a beautiful thing, man. That was it. But I would like to point out, I tweeted today complaining about Google's policies. Specifically the issue was that China is now introducing a new policy to say that if you are uploading a video on the Internet, you have to have an account with your real name associated with it. Which my immediate reaction, Thomas Ricker's immediate reaction, basically everybody's immediate reaction was, ah, this is exactly what Google did with YouTube. And it's just kind of ironic when you have Google trying to be the do-gooder in the world and China being the dictatorial controlling nation that are allowed to follow in the footsteps of the former. It wasn't supposed to be that way. So anyway, I had a little tweet about that and I think the Hangouts issues that led us to start today are kind of a reaction to it. You mean Google is actively targeting your account and? I'm pretty sure. We are having some inexplicable issues with Google Hangouts today that none of us can really figure out. So here's the thing with Google Hangouts is we seem to have inexplicable issues with Google Hangouts virtually every week, but they are different inexplicable issues every single week. There's no way to predict or prepare for them because it's always different. In that regard, it's actually a lot like Skype where literally every Skype call I have with Nilay Patel starts with me, one of us saying, God I hate Skype because something bizarre is happening. My current issue that is I basically can't have people call me on Skype now because the Skype app rings but then also something else rings on my machine. So like I'll answer the call but like the Skype ringing keeps playing. Even if I close the Skype app entirely, there's still the Skype ringing for about two minutes. It's the weirdest problem. If a Skype engineer is listening to this right now, please I'm begging you, help me figure out why this is happening. I literally can't take a Skype call now. You sure the Skype ringing carries on your computer or not inside your mind? It might be inside my mind. I can't rule that out. You should just really count your blessings, Chris. You can't take Skype calls. Yeah, that's true. I can make Skype calls but I can't take them. But I wish I could rule out that I'm going crazy but I can't. That's a strong possibility. So this is the Verge Mobile Show so I guess we should talk about mobile stuff, right? Look, Chrome is on phones, Skype is on phones. I would submit that we've been talking about nothing but mobile so far. Touché. But we do have actually stuff to talk about. So the Moto X is coming to Europe soon which is good news for Europe. I know a lot of people have been waiting a long time for it to be available outside of North America and I think it's available in South America but maybe in the Eastern Hemisphere. Well, the Moto G is a bigger deal for South America, right? But the question is in Europe, in Western Europe in particular, did they wait too long? And it seems like it's coming at a pretty high price, isn't that right Vlad? They're going to ask 430 Euro which is like more than it costs in dollars in the US? No, it's always more than it costs in dollars in the US but then also let's not forget that the US price is like the bare minimum that nobody actually pays. Ultimately, you guys have taxes that get tacked on. Yeah, but I mean the 430 Euro that Motorola is selling for is more in like sheer numbers of units of dollars, not talking about conversions, than the $399 that they're asking for in the US. If you convert that $399 to Euro, it's like what, 700 or 800 bucks or 750 bucks or something like that? It's not quite that bad, but yes, actually the Euro is more valuable than the dollar. But yeah, it's expensive. The Euro is more valuable than the dollar. I think the distinction here is that the X is certainly at a higher price point, let's put it that way, relative to where it is in the US. Even setting aside my pedantry about conversion rates in the US, misrepresentations with pricing. But to answer Chris' question, which I think is the important one, I got a hold of a Moto X about a week ago now. Now it is finally coming to Europe and I have to say my immediate reaction was it doesn't matter at all that this is coming six or however many months later than the US release. It doesn't matter at all. The way that this phone has been designed, the way it's been put together, it was never about the specs to begin with. So the fact that a few months have expired doesn't make it any less interesting or compelling to people. That being said, I am a little bit disappointed. It has lost a little bit of its sheen for me now that I've had time to spend with it. I still think industrial design and the screen and the screen bezel are just superb. I mean I don't even know how you can improve on them but the camera on the Moto X to me is like just don't bother with it. It's like you put a front facing camera on the back of the phone. It's embarrassing. Okay and that's a big issue for me and the battery isn't great. I'm not happy with it. So I've actually, I've owned a Moto X for over a month now I guess. I'm going on six weeks or something that I've owned it. Whenever they put it on sale I bought it. And I will totally agree with you, the camera is super disappointing. I've gotten some good usable shots out of it but most of the time the shots are pretty disappointing and it's very hit or miss still. And as far as the battery goes, I was getting really bad battery life for a long time. Like the phone just wouldn't idle or sleep. So this weekend I turned off the touchless control which is the thing that lets you shout commands at it and I turned off the assist function that detects when you're driving which it uses GPS for and things like that. And the battery life has like dramatically improved. Like night and day difference. So it sucks that like I have to turn off the special Moto X features to get the battery life where I need it to be. But that did make a difference for me at least. This represents a fundamental failure on the manufacturer's part. When some of your main selling points for your device need to be disabled in order to get acceptable battery life, you fundamentally failed in your mission to produce a viable commercial phone. Like that's not acceptable. The average consumer should not need to like research pro tips on how to improve the battery life. Like you should get the phone and it lasts a day and that's it. End of story. Yeah and the thing is like you know Motorola when they launched the Moto X made a big deal about how these features use these low power processors. They've got this X8 computing system and it's not going to affect your battery life. But I can't say that that really is true because my experience is that it definitely directly affects the battery life. And turning those features off made a huge difference for me. So Dan you described the difference when you nerfed the touchless controls as night and day. Does the phone actually last night and day? Because that would be the handy bit. So yesterday I got like 20 hours of battery life out of it with four hours of the screen on meaning that I'm interacting with it and things like that. Today I am at, sorry I'm at 52% after 11 hours. So I'm kind of tracking for the same type of battery life. Which is actually like for an Android phone that's really good in my experience. Well unless it's one of those really generous sized ones, the Galaxy Note 3 and the HTC One Max because those things are hilarious. Like their battery life just lasts and lasts. Yeah but that's because you can put like you know a generator inside the damn thing because you know they're so massive. But in a normal sized phone like this is the kind of battery life that I get on my iPhone 5S which is I always like way better than the battery life that I get on Android phones. So this I'm like happy with. I'm not happy that I had to nerf the features in order to get it. Right and you know to that point, actually ever since Apple came out with Siri and the whole talk to your phone thing, my big concern and reluctance has been it's just really socially awkward. Like it can be convenient but the Google searches that I want to do or the things that I want to activate, I generally want to keep to myself. And even if you're not on the train where it's obviously weird and it's too noisy for the phone to pick up what you're saying, even if you're at home but with somebody else nearby or the neighbors nearby and you just start talking to your phone randomly, it's still socially awkward. We can't get over that hump. But having said that, I've started using the OK Google Now command. Maybe Moto X will pick it up now. But yeah, I started using the command and it's freaking good. It's really, really handy actually. It's really great when you're driving. Like I have a little dock in my car that I can put my phone and I can just like shout at it to like respond to text messages or call people or set navigation and that's like really where that shines for me. But like outside of that I don't really use it a whole lot. But also for me it's surprising that the voice recognition is so accurate because I don't really input the most straightforward of things. It's not like find Justin Bieber videos, you know? I'm asking it for like nutritional information and random crap about video games. Of course you are. And it's picking these things up, you know? So I mean to me it's great but the social hurdle is still kind of another one. It's kind of like Google Glass. You can make it as awesome as you like but it's still going to be just kind of weird. Will have people ever considered, I mean it's one thing now when there are only a couple phones that support that command but at some point in the future you're going to be on a train and you're going to say, okay Google now and half of the phone in the car are going to light up. I wonder if this is... Well in the case of the Moto X like you train it with your voice and it's supposed to pretty much listen to you for your voice and your inflections and things like that. But unlike the Nexus 5, there's no training involved and it's supposed to learn as you go along but really you can just like turn it on and just hold the thing and say, okay Google now and it starts doing its thing. So yeah, that would be kind of interesting I guess. I think the trick is to disable it, well I was going to say disable it when the phone is locked but then that kind of defeats the purpose. Well like on the Nexus 5 it doesn't work unless the phone is unlocked and turned on and you're looking at the home screen. Wait really? There's no limited functionality mode when the phone is locked? Nope, nope. The Nexus 5, so with the Nexus 5's Google experience launcher, that function that lets you say, okay Google or okay Google now only works when you're looking at the home screen. It doesn't work if you're in an app, it doesn't work if the phone is locked or anything like that. Hmm, that feels lame to me. Yes. Yeah, I guess. You know what I've used it a lot is like when I'm arguing with my friends about like who's in a specific movie or how, I should say I'm arguing with my wife about like how old a particular actor is in a TV show that we're watching and I'll just be like, okay Google now, how old is Josh DeHamel? And then it just like tells me. And how old is he? I don't know. Cool story bro. Like did you forget or did you? I don't know, for some reason Josh DeHamel's name was the first one that popped into my mouth right now, or popped into my head right now when I was in a Google experience. How old is Josh DeHamel? Not Justin Hamel. Siri man, Siri doesn't work. See now I have to use Google now and try it. I refuse to be a home business by the way. How old is Josh DeHamel? I bet he's way older than you. It's asking for Justin Hamel too because I can't speak so. Anyways. I bet he's ancient. I bet he's like 55, hold on. Wow so this is the Virgin Mobile show and the conclusion is we're going to do a Google search with our keyboard. There we go. Thumbs up to everybody involved in this. He's like twice as old as Shia LaBeouf who is no longer in the spotlight. Anyway. So yeah, so it's coming to Europe right next month and then the wood editions finally are available at least here in the US if you're able to access Moto Maker which is the other thing that you don't get in Europe is no Moto Maker. The dark one looks tight. Whatever the darkest wood is. Is that ebony? Yeah, so it's like ebony, teak, walnut and then bamboo. Bamboo has been out for like a couple weeks already. And I got to say the teak and the walnut look really tight. But you seem to like the ebony one Chris. Well the teak, my instinct would be to go with the teak because teak is renowned for its like resilience. But if it's something that you're going to be handling a lot, it seems like you'd want a wood that can stand the test of time. So apparently the way that… The way that… Wait wait wait, we have breaking news. Kwami is telling us that we pronounced his name incorrectly. And that's why it's not working. Josh Duhamel. Josh Duhamel. Now I can try it. How old is Josh Duhamel? How old is Josh Duhamel? Oh that worked. Did it? Did you hear that? Yeah it worked for both of you. Wait wait wait, for me it came out how old is Josh Duhamel. I got it, he's 41 man. It worked. I knew he was 41 but that's because I looked up on Chrome. Anyway Kwami, thank you for the correction. What were we talking about? Oh we were. No guys, guys, seriously I need to say this. The whole distinction between types of wood that Chris is drawing and saying that teak is particularly hardy, come on now. Well what I was going to say was in the case of the Moto X it doesn't matter because apparently I think the only wood that they're using is bamboo and the other colors are treated to look that color. So to Street Line Production it's not actually teak and it's not actually ebony. That is so lame. Yeah it's… I think it is actually all bamboo and they're all treated. It might be a different material but the three that they just added are not walnut, teak, and ebony woods. They are just treated to look that way. They don't make that clear at all. It's like that furniture that you buy at an office supply store that's compressed fiberboard and it's got a laminate on top to look like real wood. I would buy a particle board Moto X. That's the point I was going to say, you're not buying a wooden back phone because of its endurance or its durability and other such qualities. If you want that you buy the plastic version. I mean it's not lovely to the touch, it's not awesome but that's the thing that's going to last you the longest. Wood has all of these heat sensitive properties, fire sensitive properties. You mean it can catch on fire? Yeah. No it's not just fire. It's humidity, it's expanding, it's shrinking, it's doing all sorts of weird things. This is why people stop making wooden houses. If you want to get that down into the properties of the thing, metal does the same thing. It will expand and contract in heat and things like that. We don't worry about our aluminum phones. I do. I fret a lot. It really bothers me when they code and I have to pick up the phone for any particular reason. That's why I'm not such a huge fan. You call Vlad up and he's like I can't talk right now, my phone is too cold to hold. And I refuse to wear a Bluetooth headset, right Chris? That is true. Yeah, so there we go. Yeah, so that's it. If I'm using an aluminum phone, don't try to call me. Send me a text message. I guess I will say this, even though it sucks that they're, this is basically false advertising because they're calling it teak, walnut, nebony, but bamboo is renewable. Those other woods are not. So I guess from an ecological perspective it's probably the right thing. When you think about the manufacturing and costs and they've got to tool this and they've got to make sure that it meets all the standards and things like that. And obviously it took them a long time to figure all this out because they initially showed off those things like six months ago and now we're finally able to buy them today. And it's only costing you 25 bucks more than a plastic bag, which is a no brainer to me. Chris I know the point you're trying to make, but I would just like to point out that all the other woods are also renewable. No they aren't. If they weren't they'd be extinct right now. No that's absolutely not true. I mean like ebony is not, ebony is like an endangered wood basically. Right, but it's still renewable. Hold on, let's do some serious Google searching. Wait hang on, I'm learning about ebony right now. What you mean is the use of the wood is more sustainable. As a result of unsustainable harvesting, many species yielding ebony are now considered threatened. Africa in particular has had most of its indigenous ebony cut down illegally and for this reason it has become common for street traders to blacken lighter woods with shoe polish in an effort to make a sale. Yeah. Boom. Boom. That doesn't make it non-renewable. I'll move with this along. The other big news that Motorola had in the past couple of weeks was that Google announced that it's carrying or selling a Play Edition Moto G for the same price, the same features and the same software that Motorola is selling the Moto G for. I can't understand for the life of me why the Google Play Edition exists, but it does. So you can buy it from Google and you can buy it from Motorola and I think you pretty much get the same phone either way. Yeah I think, I mean I guess that's just a branding thing right. Like it probably gives them some brownie points with certain members of the community that this version exists, but apart from that. I would just like to point out a couple of things. The Moto X, getting these wooden backs, that's improving the one part of the design that really didn't need improving and the one part of the phone that they don't really need improving. So that's a bit of a let down. It's cool. It's cool. Right, absolutely. Absolutely. And this is the whole reason people buy Vertifos and other things with luxurious finishes and textures that don't really serve any practical purpose. I get that. I understand that. I mean that's why you have sofas that cost you know from a few hundred dollars to a few thousand. That's fine. I'm just saying if you're going to step up or improve the phone in some fashion, that wasn't the bit you wanted to improve on. I would much rather have had one of those epic software updates like the Nexus 5 got for its camera. Like that is still to be like a bit of software magic because the Nexus 5 camera before Google updated was garbage. If you used the Moto X on day one when it before its camera was updated, you'd realize that it already got that update. Like the camera was so bad before and now it's like sometimes it takes a good picture. That's where it's at now. Which is the same story as the Nexus 5. They might have been able to keep that going. Maybe Google has just set my expectations too high because again the Nexus 5 camera was borderline unusable at the beginning. You need to take like five shots to get one half decent one and then they updated it and they did a lot of really good things, made a lot of good decisions. I would just like to see that happen with the Moto X as well because that phone, all it's really missing is a decent camera and a decent battery. Those are still the two hardest things to nail down I know but they're the things that the phone needs. So I just had a viewer tweet at me saying that if you buy the Moto G from Google and you get the Google Play Edition, you don't get Motorola Assist, you don't get the trusted Bluetooth feature and you don't get the Motorola camera app and they're not available from the Play Store. Oh, woe is me, the Motorola camera app. It's better than the stock Android app if you've ever used that. The trusted Bluetooth feature is pretty cool if you're using a smart watch. It's totally cool if you've got a pebble and it just unlocks when your pebble is automatically connected to it, that's pretty cool. So I'd buy it from Motorola, oh, it's just me. Here's what you do if you want a better camera, you wait for Project Ara and then you just swap in a better camera module, boom. There you go. Okay well, so that means I'll be taking good pictures in about half a decade. Yeah, that sounds about right. No, well no, you can just get ZTE's modular phone which they just showed at CES. It was ZTE, right? I think it was. Yeah, and you can pair it with ZTE's pebble knockoff. Yeah. Or alternatively, and here comes a segue, you can get the Oppo M1 which has a massive camera which flips around to the front and the back, right Dan? Segue, boom, segue alert. So we reviewed the, I guess I reviewed the Oppo M1 which is the first phone to ship with Cyanogenmod if you want to buy it that way. You can buy it, Cyanogenmod's already installed, you don't need to root or hack or side-by-side load or unlock bootloaders or any of that fun stuff. It just comes with Cyanogenmod. And you know, Cyanogenmod is actually really good. It's a great interpretation of Android. It's really fast, it's really stable, has really great battery life. The Oppo M1, not that great of a device. And also huge, right? It's massive. It is like, like we were talking about the One Max and those other big phones with big batteries before, but like the Oppo and the One Max have the same size screen and the One Max, or the Oppo just feels like so much bigger for whatever reason. I think it's probably because of that twisting camera design on top and things like that. The One Max already, it feels unreasonably like offensively large. So something that feels bigger than it is just wrong. Yeah, I mean everybody that saw, that I showed the Oppo to were just like, their first reaction was like, oh my god it's so big and they laugh. And it's also really heavy, it's really dense. Well I think a really important point that Oppo and maybe even CyanogenMod are glossing over is that, you know, CyanogenMod is effectively, I mean it is its own Android skin at this point and with that distinction comes its own problems, right? So you know, you're not going to, this isn't stock, you're not going to get, when Google announces the next version of Android, you're not going to get an update on your M1 the next day. It takes time for CyanogenMod to come out with a new version. That's a good point. So actually the final version of CyanogenMod that is shipping on the M1 right now is 10.2 which is based off of Android 4.3. So it's not even on Android 4.4 yet. They have like beta versions and early access builds that you can get that are on Android 4.4 but the final build or the stable build or whatever you want to call it is still on Android 4.3 and it takes a few months for them to transfer to each version of Android as they come out. But what I think, the thing that CyanogenMod does and it's the same thing that Motorola does on the Moto X is that it takes what is largely a stock experience and just adds a few tweaks underneath and a few enhancements and makes it a better experience as opposed to the things that HTC and Samsung and LG and everyone else do where they completely modify the user interface. And you know, as someone who usually prefers stock Android, I like that because it's like stock but better. So it's cool. Do you guys remember a few years ago, I remember I wrote about it for Engadget, there was a knock off Oppo where they switched the P's nose, so it was the poop. Every time I see Oppo I think about that and I Google your article on Engadget. The poop phone, yeah. It's the poop flip phone. Yep, yep. So if the N1 gets big enough, we might see some more Oppo knock offs and I'm hoping that they're branded poop. The poop N1 running Cyanogenmod would be a pretty sweet phone. It would be the poop number two though. It would have to be like the poop N2. The poop N2, yes. So that's the Oppo, you can buy it if you want, 600 bucks, you don't get LTE, it's really big and the screen's not that great. So I wouldn't suggest buying it but it's a bit important move for Cyanogenmod and I think, to be honest with you, I think Cyanogenmod's end game here is to just be bought by another company that's larger and can put out good hardware and stuff like that. So we'll see. I mean that would be good. Particularly if it's somebody like Sony, for example, that would be really good. Just envision Cyanogenmod being tucked into Sony with Sony being great on physical design, pushing waterproof phones, pushing good attractive and consistent design and just lacking that bit of software polish now. The big issues were the displays, which they actually fixed with the Z1 Compact and the software which was always kind of eh on top of Android. That's a nice vision as opposed to freaking Oppo which I think it was last year CES where they brought their own skin to Android and it was like, I think it was Oppo Find 5, was that a phone? So Oppo's got its own skin, right, that you can buy the N1 with Cyanogenmod or you can buy it with Oppo software if you want. If you get Oppo software it's got this, what they call color OS and it's this heavily modified. It's an atrocity. Yeah, it's designed for the Chinese market and it's very different than stock Android. I think it's just cruel. It's an abuse of Android. And speaking of cruel, I'm taking my second Segway of the day dad. Do it. You're on a Segway roll. Speaking of cruel, there is this keyboard thing which we reviewed which turns your iPhone into an elongated weird Blackberry clone thing. So for starters, I think Chris made this point yesterday on Twitter. I mean they named it the typo and do they know what typo means? Source name ever. It's like, it reminds me of the Chevy Nova which they tried to sell in Spanish speaking markets which literally translates to no go. You don't name a product, I don't need to explain this. I just don't need to explain it. It's too obvious. Don't call this thing the typo. David reviewed it. It's our lowest review score ever, right? Yeah, it's really bad. I used it for a few minutes before David took it to do the review and it's like really bad. The thing is iOS doesn't support a keyboard in this fashion. It's a real pain in the butt to be jumping back and forth between you've got to keep like one finger up here on the touch screen to move your cursor around and then you've got your thumb down on the buttons below for typing and then the keyboard is like unreliable, the auto correct doesn't work. It's just a disaster. I mean it's like Coke coming out with a new soda called Poison. It's literally what this is like. It's not even new Coke. It's just straight poison. If you're not buying this product, press the press if you're watching. I apologize but we can't recommend your awful iPhone attachment. You probably lost whatever you invested but any press is a good press, right? I would just like to announce that while you guys were discussing that keyboard, I managed to get a kink into my cable of my headphones and just as you guys are finishing, I managed to unwind it so I feel triumphant right now. I feel triumphant for two reasons. First of all, we informed the public, we let them know to stay clear of this and secondly, I figured out how to sort out that kink. So thumbs up all around. Nicely done. Congratulations. Thank you. Even though I screwed up myself. So speaking of hardware keyboards, apparently Blackberry is going to, I guess all future devices that the company produces will mostly focus on actually having hardware keyboards as they realize that's the only differentiation for their hardware. And their now CEO, John Chen, who used to be their interim CEO and they're like forget it, we're giving up looking for anybody else and you're now our CEO, said that they're going to be all hardware from here on out. I don't know, because we don't know if they're going to sell consumers or if they're only going to sell the enterprise. It's still all way up in the air. Well what's going to happen is in roughly 12 to 18 months, Chen is going to be forced out and there will be this huge hullabaloo over the fact that he left with a $25 million package golden parachute and then they'll find another interim CEO and this is just going to continue ad nauseum until they're out of money. They have like $2 billion in the bank so this is going to go on for like five years. I just feel like this is one of those things where you're making a decision, you're making a stand just to perform the act. Just to say here I am, I'm now in charge, I'm now leading in some direction so let's take the direction of we're sticking with hardware keyboards. I just don't see that panning out in any sort of positive fashion. I don't care if they're selling to consumers or to businesses ultimately, if anybody is using that hardware keyboard, it's not a computer, it's a person. The thing that people seem to be increasingly recognizing is that the stuff that you like for your personal device is also the stuff you like to use in your business environment as well. People started bringing iPhones, tablets, etc. into the work environment and those things started off as consumer products. If a hardware keyboard is still appealing to people, it doesn't matter where you're going to try and sell it. But I don't think it is. Maybe in some markets where they're really very much prevalent, like let's guess Indonesia, those kinds of markets. I think it's a rapidly shrinking market. Right, exactly. The thing is you've got guys like Sean Hollister who wrote maybe a month or two ago a piece for us saying I come to bury the hardware keyboard and he on our staff was the last person who actually appreciated keyboards. Everybody has moved in transition to using touch screens, software is transitioning that way. I don't see how you're going to make that work with Android app compatibility if you want to maintain that because nobody is developing apps for hardware keyboards or taking account for hardware keyboards or capitalizing on their benefit, whatever it is anymore. It just doesn't make sense. We need to move on. It's like using a quill and ink when you have refillable pens. We just got to get with the times. So what you're saying is that in like three years all the hipsters in Brooklyn are going to be carrying around QWERTY smartphones? Why? Because they're going to be retro? Yeah. It will be like using a quill and ink pen. I guess. I mean I'm not that savvy with how weird Brooklynites get to be honest. I don't know how weird they'll get. But I'll tell you what, a little deviation here. Neil deGrasse Tyson, I was listening to his podcast recently and the man is a genius. He's my idol as far as podcasts go because you can listen to him for days. But he had a really interesting story about that sort of writing with a quill and ink the old way. And he was saying that if you do that, when you dip to get some ink, you can only rewrite something like six or eight words before you need to dip again. And he was saying that that gives you a good rhythm for how people understand and hear things. So you should try and make a point every six or eight words or a sentence six or eight words. So when he writes his speeches and things, he tends to do that. He likes to do or write in that rhythm. So there's like, I don't know how, I don't think it's very scientific but it's like a really odd little benefit to using the old school method. Which I would like to point out does not apply to hardware keyboards. They have no discernible benefit anymore. By the way, I'd like to point out that celebrity blackberry sightings are still online and going strong. You mean celebrities are still using blackberries? Yeah. There's like recent updates? Yeah, I mean the definition of celebrity is starting to work a little bit I think. But yes, there are still celebrities using them. I saw a guy in the street, that's a celebrity. So it's funny because our office in New York City is in Midtown Manhattan, which is like there's a lot of like businessmen there. And so I've seen quite a few dudes in suits using like blackberry Z10s. Like walking around in them and things like that. And it's like the only place that I've ever seen anybody using Z10s. But I've seen more than one. Wait, Z10s not Q10s? Yeah, Z10s. Yeah. Weird. Yeah. I stole Dieter's Z10 and I don't know what happened to it. He's probably going to ask for it at some point. Probably not. And the thing with those businessmen is all I can think is company issued hardware. Yeah, I mean that's probably why because like their company has a best server and they have to access their email and they drop their other phone or whatever. Or they like stumbled into the phone shop and accidentally paid for one. It was like Android phone, oh I slipped and picked something else up. Maybe I should buy a Z30. Yes, you should Chris. You can get one unlocked for like under 500 bucks. You can also get a lot of things unlocked for under 500 bucks including an Nexus 5, Moto X. Dude, 25 hours of battery life? I mean, come on. Dude I'm sure the battery life is actually longer because you're never going to be using the phone anyway so you will lose. Oh wait, never mind. You can only buy from Verizon. Never mind. Done. I don't even think Verizon is offering it in the stores. That's what I heard. Like you can only buy it online. Yeah, that sounds about right. Anyways, that's enough about Blackberry. So we've got Mobile World Congress coming up in about a month's time and so the annual rumor train is kind of starting to gain steam and there's been like a whole lot of crap rumored in the past couple of weeks. Because either whether it's going to supposedly happen at Mobile World Congress or just it's like that time of year when there's not much else news going on so rumors start bubbling up and people are anticipating the next thing. It seems like we're in the thick of it and the first one was this new HTC One is supposed to be coming soon in March according to a report from Bloomberg. It's going to have a bigger screen and a better camera which are two things that nobody could predict ever that a new phone would have. But apparently, I think the most interesting thing about this is that the Bloomberg report says it's going to use the HTC One name again. So maybe HTC is going to do the Apple iPad move and name like three successive years of phones HTC One or something like that. It makes sense. They kind of painted themselves into a corner with the name because obviously they can't call it HTC One 2. And HTC Two sounds weird. So I could see them doing that. They could just you know, yeah this has been Apple's move for years. They just have like product name and then parenthesis the year that it was released. So I could see it. Which Apple tends to get away with because it's products are more or less culturally iconic at this point. I think a company like HTC that is kind of stuck in a rut now for many, many months just needs to step away from. I mean it needs something novel. It needs to hit people with something new. I think they ran out of names. If you look back at HTC in like 2009 to 2012, they released so many phones with so many different names. They're just like, we're out of names. Right, but it's bad. It's bad right now because you have the Desire range which is supposed to be affordable, emerging markets, etc. etc. But all you're getting is like Desire 200, Desire 600, blah blah blah. And I can't keep them straight. I've seen those devices and they have nice designs but there's just no differentiation. There's no way for me to remember them because they're just tacked up with random numbers after them. It's just, I don't know. It's hard to excite people. And just repeating the name HTC One, this will be the third year with the One X being the initial flagship phone with that name. The two previous ones, even though they've had very good things about them and some not so good, particularly the camera, haven't sold. They haven't been successful. And the company reiterating the name and apparently looking at a post written by Adi reiterating the design just doesn't sound promising to me. You've got to come out with something new. To be honest with you, the design and the hardware of HTC's phones, especially in 2013, was not the problem. Like the design of the One is great, the hardware is phenomenal, it's really well put together, it still has like one of the best if not the best mobile displays on the market. It has a fault with the camera and the battery life is kind of mediocre. But the phone itself, as far as Android phones go, it's like the top of the heap as far as design is concerned. Why people aren't buying HTC phones, I mean you could come up with a million theories coming down to maybe the marketing isn't there, you never see an ad for an HTC One, at least not here in the US. I mean the other thing is, yeah the marketing is confused because the company has been pushing quietly brilliant as its tagline for a long time. But wow it stopped and then it reiterated it and at the same time it's pushing things like boom sound. And when it had the Beats Audio partnership going, it was kind of trying to be brash and hip and urban like Beats as well. And it just kind of lost its way. Honestly I think Beats Audio is like, there you go, we can just say that. That's not true. It is a fact, I don't know that anybody has something that they immediately identify with HTC phones anymore. It used to be together with Samsung, just pushing specs really really hard and just having the best specs. But then Samsung won that race. I think what it has come down to, at least in the US, I mean global markets might be a different story but in the US, smartphones have just become a big boys game and HTC is not a big boy. It's Apple, it's Samsung and frankly even Sony is starting to muscle its way into the market because they want to and because they are huge. HTC doesn't have that muscle and I don't think that they have the same level of bargaining power. I think that actually your example of Sony speaks to how difficult it is. Sony is a massive company, it's huge, it's making profits in other parts of the world that it can use to try and push into the US and it's still really really really difficult for Sony to get anywhere in the US. It's only able to get its phone on one carrier, it comes six months later than it comes to other parts of the world and frankly I don't think I've ever seen an American walking around with a Sony mobile phone and certainly not a Sony smartphone. So that just speaks to how difficult it is for HTC. HTC managed to get the one eventually on all four carriers here in the US. It's available in multiple colors, it struck deals with Best Buy to get exclusive colors and things like that and other promotional things and it's still not able to turn that into massive sales. So it's a really uphill game for it. And plus they spent god knows how much money on Robert Downey Jr. last year. Whatever happened with that? There was like one ad right? Yeah but it was, yeah I think there was just one ad but it was pretty long. Like the full uncut version of the ad I think was like two minutes. But there was one ad and there was a million puns on the letters HTC. I never saw the ad on TV. It wasn't run during like the Grammys or you know other big things where people are going to see it. There was no billboard ads for it that I recall seeing unless I'm just keep my eyes closed or something. So I don't know. Shall we discuss this twin sensor camera? Now this is intriguing, it's part of the new one rumor. Yeah I don't know what to say about it because it's like, is it another 3D camera? That's what made me think of like there's going to be another camera on there and then TC is going to buy it just because it's got more than one camera on the back. But if it's… Value for your money man. Twin sensor makes me think of a better autofocus system. I don't know. I really have no idea. I could just like hypothesize about it. Like the Canon 70D is an SLR camera that's got this dual pixel sensor that is like, it uses the sensor to autofocus and it's like really high tech and crazy but I'd be shocked if that came to a phone already. The 70D is a pretty new camera so. Well apparently Toshiba have these dual sensor chips which do appear to have two cameras in the back, yes. And it has to do with refocusing images. I guess if they're taking you know, one photo at a focus, this is from the camera and then another photo further away and then giving you a choice between where you want the focus to be, do you want it near, do you want it far and fluctuate between the two maybe with some fancy processing. I don't know. Well that's no different, I mean that's basically the same thing as what Nokia is doing, right? So Nokia and Sony are doing that trick kind of. Ah but the thing is they're not taking the photo at the same time. Right. Nokia is doing a series of photos at different distances. But man I mean like putting you know, I mean the camera sensor, especially a good camera sensor is probably one of the most expensive components in a good smartphone. So doubling that up just so you can get a gimmicky feature like that seems like a complete waste. It seems like a gimmicky, if that is indeed what it does, that seems like a novelty that'll be cool like to show off but what people want in their smartphone cameras, they want it to be fast, they want it to focus reliably and they want it to work well in really crappy lighting conditions and they want it to be able to use a fast enough shutter speed so that their kid isn't a blur when they're running around taking a picture. And it doesn't seem like that technology, if that's what it is, would resolve any of that. We'll see. Like I say, Barcelona is a month away. It is a month away, we're going to hear a whole heck of a lot more rumors I'm sure, it always seems to happen. For what it's worth, Bloomberg says that the One replacement will be released in March which is actually after Mobile World Congress. Do you think they'll keep going with the Ultra Pixel branding? Oh, should double pixel. Double Ultra Pixel? I think if they continue to do the thing with like using bigger pixels in lower resolution like they did with the One, then probably. I would just like to point out before we wrap up with the HTC and the One stories, that the One X is apparently not going to get an upgrade to Android 4.4 which given that we're less than two years away from its big massive release right around February, I guess say two years ago, is disappointing. It is. They're pulling a Galaxy Nexus. They're pulling a Galaxy Nexus and they're pulling an HTC One S because they kind of did the same thing with the One S. They marooned that on Android 4.1. I forgot the One S even existed until you just said it. So that's kind of like the problem, right? So they marooned that on Android 4.1, they were marooning the One X and the One X Plus on Android 4.2 or 4.3 but the thing is like if you look at their sales numbers, like HTC sold no One X's. Like how many do they have out there to support and at some point you've got to be like, yeah I kind of understand that the company is like we've got to just like cut our losses and move forward and put our efforts towards something new. You know why they're, I guarantee you the reason they're actually doing this is because for reasons only clear to HTC, they made One X's with both Qualcomm and Nvidia processors and they're like… I mean, the first One X that came out internationally had the Tegra 3 chip, the Nvidia chip and it did not have LTE because there was no LTE available for the Tegra 3 and then when they released in the US, they released it with a Qualcomm processor because it supported LTE. At first, but then they released a version on AT&T with the Tegra 3. Because it got LTE. Right, right, so I'm just saying like they're staring down the barrel of like this fragmented oh crap, we need to deliver every Android update for this phone on at least two different chips. Right. And instead they're just like, well screw it, we're just going to move on, we're going to cut our losses and move on. It's not good, I would just like to say it. It's certainly not good for consumer confidence, that's for sure. Exactly. I haven't forgotten about the One S, unlike you guys. I reviewed that phone and I still love it dearly. Again industrial design, screen quality, screen quality wasn't… Yeah the screen quality was bad on that one, it's a QHD display. Right, right, but I mean the industrial design was really nice. It was one of those phones where we saw leaked pictures of it and I was really brazen about it. I was saying, oh it just looks like another HTC. But when you felt it in your hands, it was really well designed, really well put together. So I mean this story needs to like just end. Where you say, HTC has great industrial design, may cameras, iffy software and unreliable software updates. The latter parts of this need to change if HTC wants to sort itself out. And then it needs to get people to buy them. Yes. But people will. That's the whole point. If you deliver on these things, people will buy your phones, but right now… No, they won't. That is why the smartphone industry is so fundamentally broken. That might be true in Europe Vlad, but in the US, the quality of the phone has very little to do with whether consumers will buy it. The power ultimately is in the hands of the carriers, which phones they are pushing, which phones they are marketing. And of course that has nothing to do with which phones are best. I mean for God's sake, we have two carriers now that have announced they are going to carry the G-Flex. Three carriers. Three carriers, excuse me. So that should tell you everything you need to know about how much they care about putting the right phone in consumers' hands. Okay, right, fine, fair enough. But would you not accept the countervailing theory that LG is only able to push the G-Flex on people because of the success of the G2 and of its participation in the Nexus program? Maybe they have confidence there. I think the G-Flex has its own novelty of being a stupid phone with a curve and that's easy to put on a poster and like market. That much is true. That much is true. So we don't, I mean like we also don't know how many people are actually going to buy the thing. I don't think there will be many. I don't think there will be many. As novel as it is weird as it looks. It's also expensive. AT&T is going to sell for $300 on contract. Yowch. Yeah, it's pricey. Yeah, well let's just mention that it's coming to Europe in February as well. So it's actually getting so much wider distribution. It's only been available in Asia so far. The whole world is getting blessed with the G-Flex. And initially we thought it would just be kind of a quirky one-off thing just for Korea. So it's getting… Well that's kind of what's happened so far with the Galaxy Round, right? That hasn't really left Korea. Yeah, and funnily enough when I played with both of them at CES I completely changed my mind. I messed up playing with the Round and I totally forgot. I thought the G-Flex was really fun as an idea and looking at it in pictures and video. But when you put it in your hand it's just weird and doesn't feel great at all. But the Galaxy Round in the other hand is just kind of nice. That's all I can really say about it. It's nothing that I would pay extra money for relative to the Galaxy Note 3 which this basically is. But it's just nice. Did you try putting it against your head? Yes, and in my pocket. And it was okay? I had both of them in my pockets, the Round and the Flex and it was better with the Round. The whole idea of the G-Flex being curved to the shape of your face is nonsense. It's a six inch phone, it's a slab. You have a slab next to your head. You might as well put a book right there. It's crazy. A bendy book. Did you do the little thing where you put it on the table and you tilt it? Of course, that was the first thing I did. Like flip it over and just flex it. No, I mean on the Round. The Round, you put it on the table and then you tilt one side and it's supposed to wake up and show you your notifications or some other nonsense. I believe Samsung has a trademark term for that. It's called Round Interaction, right? I'm not making this up. It's called Samsung Round Interaction. I gotta look this up. Make sure I'm not making this up. It's not S branded? What sort of an admission is that? S Round? S Round. Yes, Samsung Round Interaction. I knew it. Be proud of yourself for knowing that one, Chris. Speaking of Samsung, so we've seen some leaks and some rumors that the Galaxy S5 might have this like crazy new home screen that looks kind of like Google Now but almost better which is like really hard for me to say about a Samsung software product. With all these contextual cards and things like that that's supposed to show you your upcoming appointments. The only question I have is whether when you turn it on out of the box is it gonna say Life Companion. That's the only thing that matters. If it doesn't is it really a Samsung? Right. My issue with this is yeah, it looks promising but remember it's Samsung doing it. To me it boils down to something as simple as that. I have confidence with Google when they do things like Google Now and again the thing that I commented earlier, the voice recognition, that is not easy to do or to achieve. Particularly someone like me who has the weirdest amalgamation of Bulgarian, American and English accents. To get clear and consistent voice recognition is hard and Google are doing it. So aside from their decisions which are a bit iffy, Google do good software. But Samsung, when have we said that about them? You can make really pretty looking cards but the information that underpins them like all of my flight info, it's gonna want me to probably open up a Samsung account and feed it all that data. That's a big question. It's not gonna be using Google Now data and stuff like that. Where is it gonna get, obviously Google gets all that data from your searches and it scans your email inbox and things like that but where would Samsung get all that data? Look at things like the games hub or the music hub or the Samsung app store and all of those things. I mean let's be honest, they're just garbage. You can lose them from your phone one day and you will like, you won't know it. Somebody might tell you in a few weeks after that or a few months after that, hey your Samsung app store is not available on your phone anymore and you will be like, oh okay, my life has not changed. That's a really quite frustrating thing with new Samsung phones and it's gonna happen with the Galaxy S5. We're going to be hit with a freaking deluge of specs and features and added content and whatever, whatever, whatever. You and I, we're gonna spend our days, we're gonna spend a week trying to detail all of these S features. Well speaking of S features, apparently Samsung is going to bring things back to basics and add an iris scanner. Yeah, bringing things back to basics means not adding things, it's taking things away. And an iris scanner is just like, bonkers to me. But just to finish the point, I was saying we're gonna spend a week detailing all these features and then a couple of months after that, nobody's gonna be using them. That's a frustrating thing. The phones themselves are gonna have great specs, they're gonna be really good in some aspects and others. But it just frustrates me that Samsung just throws all this garbage at you. Why do you need an iris scanner? I mean, give me an answer to that. I mean, I don't know, but Samsung sells these by the boatload, so I mean, I don't know if people care about the Samsung features or if they care about an iris scanner or whatever, but people are going to buy whatever the new Samsung phone is when it comes out and they're gonna buy it by the truckload. If the iris scanner actually works well, I will actually celebrate that. I mean, I use Touch ID on the 5S, so it works okay. But I'm always looking for a better and faster and more secure way to get into the phone. And the iris scanner might be that, we'll see. That's what I like, that's why I like the trusted Bluetooth feature on the Moto X. If you've got any Bluetooth device on your person, if you're one of the people that use a Bluetooth headset or if you've got Bluetooth headphones or you've got a smartwatch, you know, your phone is unlocked and then if you get separated from your phone, it locks. Yeah, but that doesn't prevent the situation where you're at a bar and your phone is out and when your jerk friends takes your phone out of your hand and then starts going through your text messages, it doesn't help with that. I'm just gonna point that out. You gotta get new friends, Chris. The Bluetooth range is too small, so the phone still thinks that you're connected to it. But Chris, let's be honest, that's kind of a limited usage scenario. I think all of these biometric identification methods, they just kind of add a layer of awkwardness. Like, if you think about the ultra sensitive touch that people put, Nokia, Samsung, etc., everybody's putting it now, to let you use a phone with gloves on, that's a great way or a great example of adding technology to a phone where it immediately and materially improves your life, makes it more convenient. But on the flip side, if you have an iris scanner and you live in somewhere like Dubai where it's sunny 99% of the time, how are you gonna wear your sunglasses and unlock your phone? I think your point is moot because in Dubai you only buy Porsche designed Blackberries. Ah, that's a good point. That is a very good point. I actually saw one of those when I was in Las Vegas for CES. I was walking through one of the casinos and there was a Porsche designed store, so I ducked in to see the Pananana or whatever it is, the 9982, under its little case, and they had a gold one there. Did you buy it? It was like $25,000. Oh my god. Dude, I'm sorry, but I really want us to make this Pananana phone happen. It's happened twice. There's two of them. No, but literally a Pananana phone. We need to call our virtual and be like, how do you guys feel about making a phone called Pananana? No, there would have to be a Blackberry. It would have to be a Blackberry Pananana. Okay, you know what? Throw down the gauntlet to everybody. Sony, HTC, LG, make us a Pananana phone. I'm down. I'm down. I mean, we'll give it our first 10 rating. Okay, here's what you do, Vlad. You call Samsung and you say, hey, this is US cellular. We want to put a phone on our network next week. We want it to be called the Galaxy Pananana, and we'd like it to be a downmarket Galaxy S4. Samsung would be like, no problem. Next day you'd have 10,000 Galaxy Panananas on your doorstep. They're like, no problem. We're going to put 1,000 engineers on this. Yep, we'll have it tomorrow. Branded and everything, Galaxy Pananana, US cellular silkscreened across the bottom. We're going to launch a really awkward commercial for you. Starring Lionel Messi. Yeah, sadly, that is not that far out of the realm of possible. All right, I'm losing my voice, so we've got one last rumor to talk about. This Nokia Android phone won't go away. It's popped up in a prototype form now, so it's actually not a render, but a physical thing. It exists somewhere in the world. You know what it feels like to me? It feels like to me that there's this team at Nokia that was assigned to work on an Android phone, and then Microsoft came storming in, and they're just super bitter, so they are leaking things out left and right. This is like, there's that story a couple days ago about how that Japanese soldier during World War II, he held out in the jungle for 25 years after World War II ended. He just died recently, but that was his claim to fame, is that he kept fighting for the Japanese long after the war was over. This is exactly what's happening with Nokia. There's this team, and they're like, we don't care that Microsoft is buying us. We're committed. We're heads down. We're staying on this. But all kidding aside, so here's what I think. Tom and I have been talking a lot about this. I think what's going to happen, and I don't know if Tom necessarily agrees with me. Tom is about to chat me right now when I say this. I think what's going to happen is the Microsoft deal, my feeling is that this phone was originally intended to be announced at MWC, but the Microsoft deal will close before MWC, and Microsoft's very first move as Nokia's new owner is to kill this project. There's no way Microsoft is going to permit an Android device to be sold with the Microsoft name on it. The thing is, it's a forked version of Android, so it's not even like Android Android, because it's not going to have the Google Play Store, it's not going to have Google services. So Microsoft actually makes apps for Android phones, and it could just load these up with its Outlook app and its Bing app and its Bing Maps and all that other crap, and still get all the data that they would collect from those apps. So I see your point that there's this pride thing of not wanting to release an Android phone, but it's also like, in the same way that it doesn't feel, when I'm using a Kindle Fire, it doesn't feel like I'm using an Android device. It feels like I'm using a Kindle device. I think that's because it's like so separated from what Android actually is recognized as. I would just say my perspective on this was exactly the one that Chris expressed, the fact that whatever Nokia flirtations might have been with Android would have just been put to a dead end as soon as Microsoft decided to take over the company. But there's just been so much talk and so much information coming out about this, and like Dan says, it's in prototype form, it's floating around, and also let's not forget, this isn't supposed to be a flagship or in any way something that competes with the Windows phones of the company. This was essentially supposed to be the thing that goes in between the Asha range of low-end Series 40 or whatever the software is called now, devices and Windows phones. It's kind of supposed to be bridging the gap. Or even replacing those Asha phones eventually. Right. So it's like, yes, the obvious conclusion is this will never see the light of day other than these leaks, but then so much conversation is going on and people are taking it kind of seriously, so it's like odd to me. I don't know how to feel about it. And also, to Dan's point though, if you don't have the Google Play services, if you don't have Gmail, if you don't have Google Maps, if what you get on there is like some Android version of Outlook and Bing Maps and Bing Search. There's Android apps for Outlook, there's Android Bing apps, there's Android Bing Maps I think. Verizon actually tried to sell an Android phone that took out all the Google stuff and replaced it with Bing stuff and it's a horrible, horrible thing. Sam, what's your continuum? Well, the continuum was one of them, but it wasn't the first one. That's exactly what I was going to say. That's exactly what I was going to say. As much as everybody else might hate it, a big part of Andrew's appeal now is still the Google Play services. You want those apps on your phone. It's that simple. Well, I think if the value is important, sure, but in emerging markets, you don't get those on the national phone now and you don't have that option unless it's like a low end Huawei or ZTE phone that is being sold. Okay, that's fair. That's a fair point. I take it. But ultimately, we are still talking to more of an audience in the developed market and the fact of the matter is, as far as I'm concerned, the strength of Andrew's appeal is still in things like Gmail and Chrome and being able to sync it and Google Maps and all of those reliable things. Replacing them with Microsoft alternatives just doesn't fill me with any sort of confidence. So yes, we all had that beautiful dream of a Nokia Android phone, which kind of looks like the N9, but runs some quality apps and some software via the future. I don't think that's going to happen, even if this phone is released. So there are two scenarios that I see happening here and either one, I'm really excited about it. One is this phone is released with some garbage custom Android build on it and it's immediately torn apart by the CyanogenMod team and we get a sweet build of CyanogenMod for it. Two, the phone is never released and then the prototypes become collectors items and I hustle literally everyone I know to try and dredge up one for my collection. Either scenario I'm totally okay with. Okay. So that's pretty quickly covered, but the rest of us keep waiting. But I think that wraps up the Verge Mobile Show for this week, the week of January 20, 2014. This has been episode 76. Thanks for tuning in if you're watching this live or listening to it live or thanks for listening if you happen to catch the recording. I'm Dan Seifert. You can follow us on Twitter. I'm DC Seifert. Vlad is Vlad Savov. Chris is Zpower. Dieter, who will hopefully be back with us next week, assuming his plane ever makes it from Minnesota to New York, is back on. We're all at Verge. You can of course leave comments on the post and things like that or tweet at us and we'd love to hear from you. So until next time, thanks everyone.