 So the first time you see something, it can be pretty traumatic. The first time you see fireworks, it might be scary. The first time you see an R-rated movie, it might be too violent for you. Heck, the first time most Americans saw a moving picture, it was of Thomas Edison electrocuting an elephant. Well, hopefully today we won't quite be so traumatic. You are seeing us on video for the first time. Stay tuned for The Verge Mobile Show. Hey, I'm Dieter Bohn. I'm Vlad Savo. And I'm Chris Sigler. And this is episode one of The Verge Mobile Show slash episode 30 of The Verge Mobile Podcast. We are here live on video. It's the week of May 28th. And we're sponsored by the Samsung Galaxy Note, which is one of the reasons you're seeing video right now. This is really freaking me out, by the way. I got to be honest. I'm actually going to turn off the stream so I can't actually see what we look like because it'll just send my computer into a tailspin of flash and doom. Yeah, these MacBook Airs do not deal with this much activity very well. Well, I mean, should we just jump into the news because it's really self-conscious to know that we're broadcasting our faces on the Internet? No, we should talk for at least another five minutes about the transition to video. Actually, first of all, we should give a shout out to Brendan Murphy and Craig DeSimone. Amazing. And yeah, these guys are killing it on the on the back end right now. You don't even realize what's happening in New York where this is all being put together in real time. These guys are the unsung heroes. In fact, they should just do the podcast. We don't even need to be here. In my opinion, they are. They're currently sacrificing small animals in order to make the technology behind this the stream happen right now. It's very true. That's the last I heard. I just want to point out I shouldn't be bringing this up and and Creighton and especially Dieter are going to kill me. But we are looking into Creighton and I as a side project. We're doing a Fast and the Furious themed weekly show called The Fast Cast. Where we talk about all things Vin Diesel and Paul Walker. And and I don't know when that's going to launch, but and that isn't really a Virg project. But but keep an eye out for that if you're if you're a Creighton fan. Anyway, now we can get we can. Yeah, exactly. Now we can go into the news. I'm done with my with my Fast Cast promo spot and and now we can talk. Galaxy S3, right? That's the big news. That is the huge news. It's it's out in Europe. But more importantly, Vlad has provided a killer review of it. Vlad, would you say killer is the right word? I would say killer. I would say amazing. Also stunning. I'm going to let you drop the adjectives and I agree with you. I'm going to turn on the stream because it's completely unnerving. First of all, seeing yourself speak. Second of all, seeing the little lag between when we have a conversation and it's happening in the stream. Yeah. So there's about a couple of seconds. So I hear you guys speaking and then your faces catch up with the things I hear. And it just somebody on Twitter just asked me if if my studio is where they used to film Oprah. And the answer is yes. I'm actually in a studio in the West Loop in Chicago, Illinois. And and yeah, I mean, it's a beautiful space. Oprah doesn't need it anymore. Neither does Rosie O'Donnell. So here I am. I do like a little halo of light behind your head, though, Chris. It's it does look very studio-ish. Yes. Are you drinking like sake or like hot tea or something out of a bowl? What is that? Yes, it's hot sake, which if I'm not mistaken, I'm not a sake expert. But if I'm not mistaken, hot sake is like the lower quality sake. So I'm drinking low quality sake while we're podcasting. So it's heated up to detract from the take away from the low quality. Is that what it is? I think that's the idea. Yeah, it's it's kind of yeah, it distracts you from the crappy flavor of the sake. The good sake is is the chilled stuff. I don't know why we're talking about. Can we please can we please talk about the Galaxy? I saw you drinking on the video and I had to ask because it's a whole new media format now. And we've got a million more ways that we can get off on tangents than we did before. Before before I could get away with drinking this in silence, in peace and quiet, nobody would bother me about it. Now people are giving me crap about my about my sake. By the way, it's not giving you crap. We're giving you questions. You're interrogating me on my delicious beverage. It's actually an espresso. I just want to point out. Is it Dunkin Donuts coffee? No, I saw that you bought some Dunkin Donuts. Come on, man. So I have a two I have a two pronged coffee strategy in my household. I use I use a burger grinder paired with a Zoji Rushi water boiler with a French press for coffee. And then I also have an espresso for when I needed a quick jolt, a quick shot. And so that's what I'm doing right now. I'm hoping that I don't fall asleep on the air. And the only way I can do that is by drinking espresso. Can we talk about the Galaxy S3, please? Yes. Two things to point out. Two things to point out right here. First of all, just because we're called The Verge Mobile Show doesn't mean we're going to be any different from The Verge Mobile Podcast, including the five minutes of Prelude where we do not talk about mobile phones. So we've kept to that little tradition. And the second thing, Miriam, who we might know as Tango on Twitter, she emailed me and she had this awesome typo, which I thought I would share with my coffee loving friends, which was a Tesla roaster without the D. I just thought Chris would love one of those. So it's not a gasoline powered roaster. It's a it's going to be electric, but it's a Tesla roaster. It's it's an electric roaster. I like it. It's going to be supremely designed. Well, probably a rebadge of somebody else's, but whatever. It's Tesla branded. So Galaxy S3. I think we're done. We can go on to the next topic. That was pretty well, I think, actually. Yeah. I mean, I pretty much started out of the review with the question, how do you review something like the Galaxy S3? Because we already had a dedicated podcast specifically to it. Yeah. And the narrative arc of the Galaxy S3 for us, I feel like it was like crazy buildup, huge event. And we're all like pretty disappointed. But then it started building up again as we actually started getting time with it, building up to the second huge event, the review and the release. And Vlad. OK, you're trading off me. Well, and I would say it's another peak. It's a second peak when it's somewhat surprising one because Samsung's event, let's not make any bones about it. Samsung's launch event for the Galaxy S3 was just complete train wreck and a disaster. And so much of what is good about this phone was either obscured or confused by Samsung's message. The first thing to say is that there was so much branding in that event, which either made no sense or, again, obscured the meaning and the purpose of the feature underneath it, that you just didn't grasp what Samsung was trying to convey to you. Like the company is trying to oversell features which are handy and useful, but in one of those like much more limited ways. And this is something that I get is the same vibe that I get with Apple hardware. I mean, yeah, very clearly I'm jumping to Apple hardware. But, you know, if you're not familiar with the iPhone, if you're not familiar with the iPad, there is so much exaggeration going on, not from Apple itself, but from other people about how huge they are and how important they are that when you come to use them, you're underwhelmed. They just work and they do a couple of handy and useful things. But you don't feel like your world has changed or being flipped upside down. You just gradually end up using them more. And I feel this analogy actually fits with the Galaxy S3. There's things like a picture in picture mode, which I believe is only for video that you have on the device itself. So at this stage, it isn't as useful as something like, let's say, streaming a news channel via the Internet, which you can just kind of stick into a corner. You can reposition. I need to interrupt you here, Vlad. Are you actually going to convince me or try to convince me that picture in picture is not a completely ridiculous feature on a phone? Yeah, I am. I am. Because I've thought about this. But that's what I'm saying. Right now, it isn't that valuable because you need to have the video on the phone in order to do that. But I'm somebody who maybe it's a weird habit, but I like watching the BBC News channel. I like watching the live stream of Russia Today, that international news channel as well. And I kind of like the idea of having a little window that you can reposition across the screen on your phone while you're doing other things. Again, it's a limited utility, but it's one of those small things which adds to it. But then Samsung calls it pop up play, which is like, what does that mean? What does that mean to you? If you're not familiar with the actual feature, it means nothing. It means a little more than smart stay, though. You have to admit. Right. Smart stay is the worst thing ever. And actually, ever since Samsung, I actually understood what they were actually showing with that and not just some creepy, your phone is watching you, your phone is watching you. Every time I see my One X screen turn off and I'm still using it, I get really angry. And Samsung has gotten under my skin with that feature. I think I want that. Exactly. And this is exactly my point. It's a subtle feature. It's a neat feature. But you don't have to oversell it the way Samsung is selling it. Like the phone is smart or the phone is more intelligent than other phones. It really isn't that intelligent. You just use the front facing camera. You still have the same screen time out time as you usually do. So 30 seconds, a minute, two minutes. So if you don't touch the screen, the screen switches itself off. But during that time, if you recognize that your eyes are on the display without you touching it, obviously you're reading it, obviously you're looking at it. So it doesn't switch itself off. So that's all that smart stay does. But you give it that silly name and people don't understand what the hell it even is. And, you know, those are just two of the features. And it is just a laundry list of all these additions, which are handy in, you know, most of them are actually unique to Samsung. So Samsung gets credit for that. But Samsung just kind of buries and obscures them. Let me put you on the spot. And I don't want to stop talking about the Galaxy S3. I want to continue talking about it at length. But I'm kind of in TLDR mode right now. And I just I want to know I have a snap Snapdragon S4, one X in front of me and a Galaxy S3 in front of me. Which do I choose? Well, I'm holding the one that I would choose is the HT1X. Really? Yes. I mean, again, there's a lot to say about the Galaxy S3 and there's a lot to praise about it. But the HT1X has this display which you just can't get away from. I stress this in my Galaxy S3 review as well. When you're using the phone, your primary method of input and output is the display. So your most important thing in a phone is the display. So if the HT1X is the best display in the world, which as far as smartphones are concerned, I think we're in agreement it does. It's just kind of a no brainer. At the same time, having said that, I spent half of my Saturday this weekend trying to install a stock Android ROM on the HT1X. And it's such a reverse engineering feat that you have to perform. I spent my weekend reinstalling Bootcamp on my old Mac so that I would have a proper Windows machine because I can't find my netbook so that I could install a custom ROM on my HTC One X. I did the exact same thing. I just didn't quite get there. I think I have you guys both beat. I actually a couple of years ago, I started this project where I wanted to make my own digital picture frame that had some advanced capabilities. And I wrote it in C sharp. It was this whole thing. And it used a Samsung LCD, like a eight or ten inch LCD that had there's some display technology that works over USB as a display. What is it called? Display link. Display link. Display link. It has display link support. And so I connected that to a tiny PC called a Fit PC 2, which I believe is made by an Israeli company. And they have some orders in the US. And so I bought a Fit PC 2 that's Atom powered and has built in Wi-Fi and everything and literally electrical taped it to the back of this Samsung LCD and set it up on my desk. And I could do a few different cool things with it. So I in the last time I needed to to root a device, I think that the last time that I seriously put a lot of effort into it was with my GTX. The stock ROM on that was just a steaming pile of garbage. And so I literally connected I had the GTX connected to this digital picture frame and I was VNCing into it from another machine going through these these insane steps. And like, you know, there's that there are like five or six steps where, you know, if something goes wrong, you're just completely hosed. And so, you know, there were so many layers of communication between, you know, my machine and another room connected over VNC and the phone itself that, you know, if any one of those broke, then the phone was was bricked. And fortunately, I didn't brick it. But I think I'm gonna have to bring that thing back out to do something with the One X as well. Okay. Okay. That's my anecdote. The point is valid. I mean, I first of all stumbled across by Paul Brian over at Motoko. He has a ROM with just standard issue ice cream sandwich 4.0 for the one X is waiting. It's there. You just need to install it. But in order to do that, you need to have root access. You need to have super user privileges in order to do that. You need to unlock the bootloader in order to do that. You need to be part of HCDev, which I registered again Saturday, I believe it was. And I still haven't heard from HTC. So just a whole bunch of, okay, I want to be more adventurous with my phone. I want to install some fresh software. I'll go the extra step. I'll do this. And then, oh, hang on a second. There's another extra step. And then, oh, wait, there's another extra step. And now I need to register. Now these guys need to let me know. And it grows exasperating. On the other hand, and this is the perfect segue back to the Galaxy S3, the Galaxy S3 stock software is actually good. Yeah, explain this to me. I really want to get to the software, but we started this conversation talking about the screen. And I'd actually, before we get into the software, because that's a really long conversation, Pentile doesn't bother you, doesn't bother you as much as you thought it would? What's the story? The correct answer is the last one that you offered. It doesn't bother me as much as I expected it would. You had a macro shot that made it look not great. Right. I mean, but then that's also part of my job, I feel. You know, if it's Pentile, you need to dig it up and you need to show that it's Pentile because other people might care. I'm usually one of those other people. Like, I don't make any apologies about that. I am extremely particular about the space technologies for the aforementioned reasons that I consider it really important. But in the case of the Galaxy S3, yes, it's Pentile, but then no, I don't notice it. And the problems with Pentile are usually things like jagged edges, you know, fine details looking almost imperceptibly wrong. But then once you see them, you can't unsee them. In this case, you have to basically bring the phone right up to your eyes and stare at it and stare at really, really tiny, tiny little details to be able to pick out the fact that it's Pentile. So to me, that is not a relevant issue with this. Actually, a more surprising issue is, well, I don't know about surprising, but a bigger issue for me is the fact that it has this blue cast, which we've seen on a whole ton of AMOLED displays. And, you know, it's just the wrong color temperature for everything. But the display is definitely better than the Galaxy Nexus, right? Bar none? Well, honestly, I don't have that much experience with the Galaxy Nexus. Because the experience that Dieter and I had at CTIA in our brief time with the Galaxy S3 was that it was, but I definitely like some more side-by-side time with those two devices to be sure, you know? Sure, but you know, as much as anything else, maybe if you gave me Galaxy Nexus to use for a couple of days, I'll level with absolutely the exact same complaints and even more severely. But as much as anything else, I also feel like AMOLED isn't as impressive as it has been a year ago, two years ago. It's just kind of stagnated at this level. I mean, okay, that sounds extremely picky when you look at the fact that this is an HD display with 1280x720 resolution and all of that stuff. But the fact is the strengths of AMOLED have not changed at all. Good viewing angles, not perfect. The HD 1X is better. Great vibrancy, extreme brightness when you actually have it turned up to the maximum. And I mean, also the Galaxy S3 is very readable in sunlight. Still, again, the HD 1X is better in sunlight as well. But it's a strong display. It just isn't amazing. It isn't amazing the way that IPS LCDs are looking on the HD 1X and potentially what we can expect from the next iPhone. So I'm actually, at this point, I'm actually in the IPS LCD camp, but I feel like that is a more advanced technology than AMOLED at this stage of proceedings. For a long time, I feel like it was obvious that AMOLED was going to be the winner there, and then I think that that technology kind of petered out. I think Samsung pushed it as far as it possibly could in a very short period of time. It's not to say that they're not continuing to advance, but I think that they kind of hit a brick wall with pixel density and with the black magic of Pentile that allows them to get around some of the pixel density issues. But that's the other thing. With Pentile, you don't actually have as many subpixels as with a regular RGB layout. So yes, it's 1280 by 720 full-size pixels, but because of the way things are arranged, you actually have fewer subpixels. So again, the definition is not going to be as high as a proper 720p display. But also, again, you kind of knew that with the Galaxy Nexus. A secondary issue is actually that Samsung seems to be overaggressive with the auto brightness. Still? Yes. The AMOLED display uses up a very significant proportion of the battery, which is very generous 2100 milliamp hours, but then you also need it because of the quad-core Exynos processor. And this display, it's 4.8 inches, it's going to use a lot of power. So Samsung kind of tries to cheat by having the auto brightness set too low. I mean, particularly right next to the One X, it's just way too low. They've done this, they did this on the Galaxy Nexus, they did this on the Nexus S. I think the GS2s that I've used have all had auto brightness settings that are way too low. And it's super annoying because you turn it off, you turn it off, you're constantly futzing with it. Apple does such a better job with auto brightness because on iOS, you can turn auto brightness on and you can also adjust the slider. So it will still dynamically adjust the auto brightness, but you can say, I want auto brightness all the time, but don't go lower than this because come on, I need to look at the screen. I don't understand why Samsung, if they're going to copy stuff from Apple, copy that because that's human centric design. If you say that this thing is designed for humans, design it so humans can look at your screen. It's not just that though, they need two sliders. They need that one and they also need a slider for adjusting the light sensor sensitivity. That's also true. And that's the other thing is that auto brightness jumps around, it isn't gradual. So when the phone senses that light around is changed, it kind of jumps into a significantly higher brightness or a significantly lower brightness. And it's kind of abrupt. It isn't smooth, it isn't gradual. But honestly, I do feel like those are nitpicks. Now, those are things you can just kind of get used to and accept the overall conclusion that I drew with the Galaxy S3 display is that if you never see this right next to the HTC One X, you'll be very happy with the display. If you do end up seeing it right next to the One X, you'll be like me, you'll be saying, okay, I know sense for sucks. I know touch was in this iteration, it's a ration rather is actually pretty good. And it's a tolerable skin and it kind of justifies the guy who says I gotta have my ways. But all that's being said, I just love this band, the One X and I can't get over it. You know, I will go through the misery probably this weekend of actually installing stock Android four on the One X and then I will have a joyous lifetime. You know what's funny to me about the display on the One X is that I, you know, we talk about displays at length on this podcast and we have for a very long time. And we talk about them on the site. And I kind of believed that, you know, when you get into the top five percent of displays, average consumers or, you know, just pretty much anyone that isn't us can't tell the difference and doesn't care. They just know that it's a high resolution display. When you look at it dead on, it looks fine. It looks great. And that's all there is to it. But last week I had drinks with Polygon's Chris Grant and who is an iPhone user and he specifically I had the One X in my hand and he specifically said, wow, I'm impressed at the fact that I can see when you hold it on the side, I can still see the display. And of course, the One X has just an absolutely insane viewing angle. It's basically one hundred eighty degrees. So that was that was very unusual and impressive to me. The fact that HTC is is using a display so good that somebody who isn't attuned to, you know, looking at 20 different phone displays on the market every month is still able to to notice that difference. Yeah. And that's the thing that I'm also saying. As good as Galaxy S3, maybe in terms of software and other aspects, you can't do anything to upgrade its display, whereas with the HTC One X, the display is there and then you can upgrade the software experience. So, you know, neither of them is perfect. Both of them are very good. And I would say that it's just down to what you prioritize. In my case, it's I prioritize the hardware that's there and then I can take care of the software. So let me ask you something, Vlad. Would you talking about the One X and going to stock Android, would you insist on the custom HTC camera app or are you willing to go to a stock camera app as well? I can get I can get on without it. That's kind of the camera app is pretty good on the One X. Oh, yeah. I mean, that's what I'm saying. It kind of feels counterintuitive because it is very good. And the other thing with the One X is when you take a picture, it's so quick that you feel like an error happened and it never happened. Right. It is that quick. So not to take away from it, but it's, you know, given that it's a trade off, I would say, you know, I like it, but I could live without it. Let's get back to the the the the S3 because I interrupted you and you wanted to talk about the software. So how is the camera on the S3 and how is the camera software on the S3? Well, camera software is pretty much identical to the Galaxy S2 software. The only real addition that they've included now is this burst shot mode, which is pretty much like the burst shot mode in the HTC One X insofar as you could take up to 20 photos. In quick succession, then you can choose the best out of them. You can choose one, two, three, seven, eleven, however many you want. You can save those. You can save all 20 if you like. But it's just the burst shot mode. The actual camera, though, the quality of the camera is the best in a phone that I've seen yet. That's just my judgment on it. Like I took a bunch of photos on the display. They look good. Most of the time we take photos with a phone, they look good on display. And then I dropped them off on my computer and I was like, well, where is the noise? Where is the degradation of quality? Like most of my gallery of photos was actually from the center of London where there was just so much going on around you. You know, there are people close to you, away from you. There are details. There are buildings. There's just so much. And the camera captured all of it. It's so detailed. It's amazing to me. I can't honestly compare it to the iPhone 4S because I haven't used one of those for ages, but I do feel like it's better. Well, I was really impressed with the HDR samples that you put up. I thought those were the best. That really was great. I'll be honest with you. The pictures look very good, but at 100% crop, they didn't look noticeably sharper to me than the 1X shots. And you know, I don't know. Are they? They are. I mean, maybe I didn't pick the best ones to crop out, but I mean, it's just a massive difference to me versus the 1X. I mean, HTC, the 1X camera is 8 megapixels as well, but the thing I would say is that its usable resolution is probably close to 3 or 5 megapixels or something more reasonable like that. I feel like the Galaxy S3 is the closest phone to actually giving us an 8 megapixel usable image. Closest phone outside of, let's say, the Nokia N8. It just is that good. And the 808, right? Yeah, the 808, which isn't on sale yet. So, God, don't even start on the 808. That's a camera, Chris. It's not a real phone. It's a camera that happens to have a kind of a smartphone sort of attached. It also, by the way, doesn't matter at all until it's using something other than Symbian. Right. The other thing I wanted to point out about the Galaxy S3 which annoyed me was the fact that you can't tap to get auto exposure, which is something I'm pretty sure you can do with the HTC phones. So, tap to focus also gets you to auto expose for that spot, which is really handy when you have a really sunny day like I did. And maybe you prefer to expose for the sky or prefer to expose for the thing in the foreground because usually the two are mutually exclusive. So, if you get the sky right, the thing in the foreground looks too dark. If you get the foreground image right, the sky looks just washed out and white. Again, the HDR mode helps offset that, but I would like to just tap and get the auto exposure happening that way. Yeah, I'll tell you what. I don't know if it's in the stock either. A good HDR mode. No. Sorry. Go ahead. I was just going to say, there's software for iPhone that lets you actually separate those two things out, which I find really convenient sometimes. I want to expose on this but focus on that. Anyway, that's all. Yeah, no second. A good HDR mode makes such a huge difference for everyday usability. And if you'd asked me a year or 18 months ago, I would have said, no way do I want software interfering with my picture taking experience that much. But it makes a huge difference in what you're able to capture on the street with a bright sun in particular. It really does. I mean, it still doesn't look as natural as you would get with just a straight one shot, which is understandable because of what it's doing. It's compiling multiple images at different exposures and giving you a composite image at the end. But exactly as you say, you can just get so much more detail in there, which actually is perfectly reasonable that you would like it, Chris, because it's the opposite of Instagram. You're not just throwing detail. You're actually adding more detail into the picture. Still making it unnatural, arguably, which is kind of counter to my own. Dude, it's a photograph. Yeah, I don't know why I'm arguing with myself here. But yeah, it's good. The one problem that I've noticed with it, and this makes sense because of what it's doing, like you say, is that if you're taking a picture of fast motion, you get some weird ghosting just because it's taking two or three exposures and compiling them together. Yeah, so Samsung actually, when you turn on HDR mode on, says to keep the camera steady, it has a little warning message, which can bring you back to the software. I don't want to re-review the Galaxy S3 because I'm aware that not everybody is enthused about a 4.8 inch phone, which again, it's big. It's big. It has good ergonomics, but it's a big phone. And I'm still keen to see something like this in the HT1S size range, like 4, 4.3 inches. I'm sure somebody would do it and would sell a lot of phones. Well, there's this philosophy. Go ahead, Chris. Go ahead. No, you. See, we're having just enough sync issues. This is terrible. It really is. We're having just enough sync issues so that it's impossible to talk over each other. I shouldn't call them sync issues. It's just like it comes part and parcel with the move to video. I think that you need to relearn your dynamic when you're talking because otherwise you get this weird train wreck stuff. But anyway, what was I going to say? Oh, yeah. What I was going to say is that I think we've talked about this before, the fact that we're still kind of in this state where consumers, particularly Americans, but I think that they're kind of pushing this philosophy worldwide, believe that there is a one to one association. There's a there's a linear relationship between the size of the display and the high endedness of the phone. And and I think I'm hoping that within a couple of years that philosophy will kind of dissipate. Yeah, we're four point five to five point three inch phones start to become standard place and that no longer becomes a focus of attention. And they can say, OK, well, now we're going to do a four inch or four point three inch. And people won't think that that's a crappy phone. Yeah, no, I totally agree. But yeah, I do want to wrap up the Galaxy three, as I was saying the thing with this version of touch was first of all, it's called nature. You X again, completely useless, pointless, intuitive, unhelpful branding from Samsung. There's pretty much nothing nature you X about it. They have the water ripple on the lock screen and that's pretty much it. But it's clean, right? The app launcher, the app tray is fully customizable. You can arrange it any way you like. You can hide icons. It's pretty much transparent. So you just see your home screen wallpaper behind it. There's just no noise and extra junk around it. It reminds me in that respect, remind me of the other color either. I'm sorry, they got rid of a lot of they got rid of a lot of the the candy color stuff. I mean, this is this has been gone for a while now, but it's nice and subtle. They've got, you know, gradients that aren't completely overwhelming. Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, totally. I mean, most of it, as I say, is just kind of feel sparse and just acceptable. Again, I feel like ice cream sandwich itself is a more cohesive visual experience. But there's very little that you can point to in this version of touch with and say, oh, this is a nightmare. This is dragging things back, holding things back. The thing that is going to hold things back is when jelly beans turns up and the galaxy nexus gets a week later and then your galaxy is free is like, yeah, we'll do it in a month or two. No, that's a beautiful that's a beautiful dream. Vlad, remember how long it took the Nexus one to get gingerbread. Okay. And how long it gets as people have waited to get ICS like the sprint version of the Nexus only got ICS. What, like three or four weeks ago? Okay, but whenever the galaxy as the galaxy nexus gets the next version of Android, you you can be assured of waiting a minimum of one or two months. Like this is the most optimistic projection ever. You can be sure to wait a minimum of a couple of months before the galaxy is free gets. And this is the thing that bugs me about the skin. The fact that its very existence is still going to delay the updating of this phone relative to a stock device. Again, we're not going to hop on this issue again. I just wanted to point out, I mean, the good things about the skin are actually there's a quick settings, a whole bunch of quick setting toggles in the notifications menu. And again, Samsung has done a whole bunch of little tweaks that you can read for review to actually dig into the notification screen. Toggles are the bomb. Like that is one of the very few customizations overstock that I fully support. And something that, of course, signage and has been doing for a long time. It's awesome. It's great. Yeah. But so like I say, the skin itself is extremely comparable to Android 4.0 in terms of user experience. It's not going to get in your way. I am just wary about, first of all, the immediate upgrade and when it might happen to the next version of Android. And then following that, the fact that Samsung has a really terrible track record with software updates. Again, this was something I felt compelled to include in my conclusion because as awesome as this phone is today, you're not going to be signing up to the company with the best track record for updating phones. If you want to do that, you get a Nexus phone. One important point I'd like to make is that I feel like in the past year, yeah, about the last year, most major Android OEMs have shown some amount of remorse and an apology around the entire update process. And some have kind of tried to repent a little bit. We've seen Sony Ericsson, now Sony Mobile. Yeah. You know, they did a really early alpha of their I.C.S. update for some of their experience. HTC, of course, has started to become very good about that. Motorola has tried to be very transparent, not fast, but transparent. And Samsung, I think, is kind of a notable exception. And they are a very important exception because, of course, they are a huge, huge supplier of Android devices. And there's no question that the GS3 is going to sell tens of millions of devices around the world. So it would be nice to see them kind of commit to some sort of structure, even if it's not instantaneous, even if they can just put out a roadmap and be very transparent about what's going to happen with these devices once they're out there in the field. That would, yeah, I mean, to your point, that would just make me a lot more comfortable. Sure. Great. But I think we're done with the Galaxy S3. No, I want to talk about... That would be a great time to talk about what happened with WebOS. Because I don't know if anybody, if you're watching the video, may have noticed, but there are currently firemen walking into my apartment. I just moved and they have set up a brand new fire alarm speaker intercom alert system, and they decided they need to test it right now. That sounds really fancy. Yeah, it's great. It's amazing. I've got stupid pipes running all over my apartment and dudes tramping around in the background. So I'll be back when they're done. Hopefully it won't take more than five or ten minutes. Okay. Good luck. If we don't hear from you for like half an hour, we'll just... Just check in on the video feed from time to time, and if you see open flames, the test has failed. Well, like I said, the deadline is half an hour, and if you don't come back, then you're just permanently written off of the show. It's just Vlad and I after that. Yeah, man. I mean, we're going to miss you, but we'll plow on. Well, yeah, we'll move on. So one more thing I wanted to say about the Galaxy S3 before we moved on is that you gave it an 8.5, right? And that neatly straddles the Tegra 3 version of the One X at 8.4 and the Snapdragon S4 version of the One X at 8.6. So I think we can agree that regardless of which of these three devices you buy, you're probably going to be happy. Now, certain regional variants of the Galaxy S3, we've long believed, will not be using the Exynos processor, which has proven pretty superlative in terms of performance. And so we'll have to see what happens with these regional variants, but I'm assuming that even the regional differences will still be S4, which is a great processor. So I don't know if that's going to be a concern or not. In fact, it may raise the score. We'll see. Yeah, I expect it might do because if that 2100 mAh battery stays where it is and you stick a Snapdragon S4 next to it, that phone is going to last you a long, long time in smartphone terms. Yeah. I expect that will be really impressive. That's for SIPs power, relatively speaking. Compared to my old circa 2002 Nokia dumb phone, it's still a power hog, but I digress. I think those days are gone. The days of going a week on a single charge will never come back. It doesn't matter how far battery technology advances. I miss those days. They were amazing days. You don't realize, I'm about to go off on a really philosophical tangent here, but I don't think that you realize just how much worrying about your phone's battery level affects your daily life. It actually has a measurable effect on how you plan where you go and when you go there. And do I need to be near an outlet? Do I need to bring my charger with me? What happens if my phone dies? Am I going to be able to find my way home, to my hotel or whatever it is that you may be doing? Do I need to be connected on email because I'm expecting a really important email? There are all these considerations that didn't used to be there. Yes, but Chris, look at this. And this isn't going to be very helpful to our audio podcast listeners, but there's a massive display on this phone. This is the thing. I mean, look, you can own a BlackBerry today. You know, RIM is going to very kindly sell you a BlackBerry with a tiny freaking screen with a tiny freaking resolution, but you don't want to do that. So it's a trade off that we've basically chosen to make ourselves to have a massive, humongous, gorgeous screen in our pockets, which doesn't have to happen. I think that opens up a whole new set of issues, right? Because to a certain extent, it has to do with shelf appeal. Like you walk into a carrier store and battery life is not the first thing on your mind. You're looking at how cool the phone looks and what it's capable of doing. Can it play these awesome games? So you might buy a phone based on that. And besides, even if you were worried about battery life, sort of natural selection in the phone industry has eliminated a lot of those power sipping options from the lineup anyway. Like, oh, yeah, I'm working on on like I think of what's a good example, like the pixie, right? The palm pixie, which is actually a little premature on this, but would be a nice transition into our next topic. Yeah, if more phones were in that category, I think they might do pretty well. And that's not to say that we don't have we don't have like free Android phones out there, like the Optimus series is still out there. But I would really like to see more devices that have displays between, say, I don't know, two point two to two point eight inches. Single core processors would still run gingerbread and even ICS just fine. Just look at the Nexus S. So, I mean, this kind of gets back to what we were saying earlier about four inch displays, right? There's no reason. There is no good reason that Samsung and HTC can't come up with a, quote unquote, high end four inch to four point three inch phone. It in fact, they have the one S, but the promise that the carriers just don't want to push it. I guess one exception would be T-Mobile's Blaze 4G. But, you know, I mean, who owns a Blaze 4G? I mean, come on, really? So besides that, I mean, it's not just enough to have more devices in the pixie form factor. Everyone is still trying to give you the same smartphone experience in spite of the smaller form factor. And I think that's the wrong way to go about it. Like, if you're going to sell me a phone in the size of the pixie, you're going to have to sell me a phone without all the bells and whistles of a full sized four inch, four inch and above smartphone. You know, right. I don't know exactly what you're going to trade off, what you're going to throw out. I mean, I don't think you should sacrifice the camera, for example. I think there's no reason why you can't fit a good camera module in one of those devices, but there's applications, there's things like mapping applications, which just aren't as useful. So you do have to have a user experience which is custom to that screen size, that form factor. And, you know, the previous user experience that was, you know, Nokia's bread and butter, meat and potatoes, whatever other metaphor you want to come up with was a much more limited user experience, in which case the much more limited screen size wasn't a problem. You mean Symbian? Yeah. I don't want to name names here. Come on. So you're knocking Windows Phone. There's also, no, I'm not talking about the Windows Phone. I mean, we're talking about five, seven, ten years ago, like you were saying about the week long battery life. Wait, let me get this straight. Let me get this straight. You're worried about rocking the boat by knocking a ten year old phone? Is that what just happened? Yeah, but I mean, there's a tradition about not speaking ill of the dead and I don't want to do that. Fair enough. Fair enough. Let's just let sleeping Symbians lie. Seriously, I am actually interested in this new news about NEO and about HP. I think we had a little exclusive on that. I think you wrote it, Chris. We did. We blew the proverbial doors wide open. These two giant open doors were, you know, were out there and I just blew them. I put explosives around the base of this, these giant French doors, solid oak. And I put explosives along the bottom of these doors. You could have opened them. No, I, you know, for a fact, it's a dramatic thing, right? So I put all these explosives around the base of these beautiful French doors and wired them to explode through an Android app and then went off with my with my with my Galaxy S3, my mythical Galaxy S3 that I don't actually have and pressed the button. And these doors flew wide open. Kaboom. It was a complete waste of time. I just wasted like three minutes of this podcast. Yeah. So the story is that a significant portion of the contributing members of the NEO team at HP, which is sort of a, it isn't core to open WebOS, but it is part of the overarching project. And is closely, it is particularly closely related for developers for the platform. But a number of these these these core players in that group left to go to Google, which is interesting on a variety of levels. Right. Because, yeah, I think that as I mentioned in the post, even even if you never were a WebOS fan, I think that you needed to be kind of. Impressed by what they managed to pull off, they were way ahead of their time in terms of implementing an entire UI, particularly on that form factor in in HTML5 effectively. And and so to have members of that crew go off to Google is very interesting. And we don't have confirmation on what group inside Google those guys are going to be working with. But there are two obvious choices, right? One is Android, of course. WebOS to Android makes a lot of sense. But the other, I think of Android. The more intriguing possibility is Chrome slash Chrome OS because. That would be a waste of resources. I don't think so, especially I mean, this is not the place to talk about it, but David reviewed David Pierce reviewed this new Chromebook today along with Aura, which, by the way, I'm extremely envious of because I am one of the three people in the world who love Chromebooks. I absolutely adore them. I use a series five basically every day of my life, reason being that it prevents me from doing a lot of things that would be a waste of time. I'm forced to concentrate on the task at hand, whether that be writing a document or doing email because they're just not very capable devices. So it's kind of a very strange reason to be in love with the device. So this new Chromebook is really awesome device, and I think I mean, there's no sign that Google is backing down from this initiative. Right. So and they need to push that story. The story around HTML five apps has come very far. You look at something like the Financial Times app for iOS for the iPad. It blows my mind every time I open it because you cannot. I have yet to find a way to tell that that is a Web app once it's installed on the device. I mean, to the average to the average iPad buyer, you can't I mean, there probably is a way to figure out that you're looking at a Web app, but I cannot. And so that's really amazing. It's really encouraging for the future of this of this way of doing things. And so I think that there's a long way to go in pushing that story forward. And people that are working that we're working on WebOS and anyone particular, which is the underlying application framework and the developer tools around that. But to have those people join a group like Chrome, I think would be very interesting. But again, we don't know. They they could be going to Android, which would be interesting for entirely different reasons. But we'll see. I'm sorry to interrupt you, but the thing that I'm picking up on is, first of all, ever since HP announced that WebOS would go in open source, I felt like that's just a way to avoid saying, OK, we're putting in the trash. So as far as I was concerned, that was the writing on the wall for WebOS. I mean, I don't remember anything coming back from going open source, any piece of software coming back from that, mostly because it's kind of a recent trend with, you know, MeeGo, Mamo previously and now Tizen, different generations, different names for the same software that's never succeeded. Samsung, I believe, was thinking about open sourcing Bada. It's what you do when you put software out to pasture. But exactly as you say, I feel like people should at least be curious about WebOS and its future. And to me, this again signals the fact that people don't see any future in a proper WebOS going anywhere near the mainstream market and moving on to new places. And I think the move to Google is pretty obvious as far as my perspective as an outsider goes, insofar as Deja joining up with Matthias Duarte, who used to be their leader. Yeah, yeah. Well, there are a lot of people from Palm that are now working for Google and other places. I mean, the Valley is a small place, right? Like, people keep crossing paths there. But yeah, I think that this probably signals, if the open source move and the discontinuation of hardware last year didn't signal the end of WebOS, I think this certainly does. To have that many people leave at once and go to a, quote unquote, competitor is a real vote of no confidence. And replacing staff, I mean, it's not like they can just bring people in and boom, they're back in business, right? They need to ramp people. First, they need to find good people, people that are as good or better than the people that left. And then they need to train them. And it's a whole thing. And there's no sign. HP has not, since they made the open source announcement, they have never once indicated a solid, non-wishy-washy commitment to doing anything other than pumping a few dollars into this open source initiative. There's no sign that we're getting new hardware, which is all, I mean, at the end of the day, that's all anyone cares about, is whether this is going to be on any device. And there's no sign of that. So until somebody says, you know, until HP or somebody else says we're making a new WebOS device, it's completely irrelevant. And even then, even if it's a major OEM introducing a new WebOS device, they have a huge uphill battle. Because why are people going to buy this device now when they didn't buy a better supported device with more money being thrown at it a year ago or 18 months ago or two years ago? So it's not pretty. No, it's not. I agree. I mean, it's a sad state of affairs. But then also, I'm reminded of the fact that when HP took over Palm, Matthias Duarte was not the only member of the senior team to leave as soon as that happened. I mean, I believe John Rubenstein might have been the one that held out the longest. But everybody else pretty much, everybody else from the senior team jumped ship. Right. And yeah, John didn't leave until recently. But he had been very, very quiet inside HP for, you know, a year before that. So presumably he was inside HP. He could have been off on holiday just, you know, formalistically being part of the team. It does seem like HP had some idea which coincided with absolutely nobody at Palm or the thinking of nobody at Palm. And HP's takeover was evidently, what was the word, I can't remember the word of antagonistic is the wrong one. But it's when you take over a company that doesn't necessarily want to be taken over by you. I'm sure HP wasn't Palm's first choice. A lot of disagreements happened. And now maybe, you know, the lower members, the guys from lower down the rungs also escaping the ship. Well, I think that at the very beginning of the HP purchase, I think that there was some enthusiasm both inside HP and inside Palm that there might be a way to make this work. And that probably quickly vanished once the CEOs started, you know, you started getting that CEO musical chair stuff going on. Leo came in, Mark Hurd left, Leo came in, Leo was forced out and Meg came in. And, you know, it's, you know, I don't think you can say really anything positive about Leo from a consumer. Is there a crazy thought here about what if Mark Hurd has stayed around at HP and gone through with whatever initial vision they had for the Palm takeover? Maybe that would have been a success. Do you think that is a viable possibility or am I just clutching the straws? No, I think anything's possible. You know, the problem is that there are so many variables. You go back and look at what happened in the past four years to that company. Now, not just post-HP, but pre-HP with the, you know, the fact that they started with a sprint exclusive and the fact that basically a six month delay between announcement release. All these factors could have had a really significantly detrimental effect on the market performance of these devices. And we don't know what combination of those decisions and realities ultimately did them in, but they certainly contributed, right? Yeah, I just realized that I'm shaking my camera. So there's no earthquake in Chicago since I've lived here. I moved here in what, about 10 years ago. I've only lived through one earthquake in Chicago, which is extremely rare. And it was a, I think, a 5.0 in Southern Illinois that we felt all the way in Chicago. So it was like six or six thirty in the morning and my bed was just very gently kind of shaking. That is the one and only earthquake I've ever experienced in this city. So when you see my camera shaking, I just want to apologize. You don't have to worry about my safety or well-being. The earth is not moving. It's just me. Okay. And I can actually distribute a bit. I just did it again. I can distribute a bit of quick trivia that I picked up recently. The Richter scale, which is the one, the scale for the magnitude of an earthquake. It goes up literally in orders of magnitude. So something rated at five is ten times weaker than something rated at six, which in turn is ten times weaker than something rated at seven. So a magnitude eight earthquake is something like, yes, it's a thousand times stronger than a magnitude five. And for whatever reason, yeah, for whatever reason, I had never known that about the Richter scale. I was just like, well, it's a scale. So I kind of know that an eight and above is pretty crazy and scary and five and six is pretty tolerable. But now I know that. If you lived in San Francisco or Tokyo, you would probably have known that by now. Potentially. It's just that London is not really a seismic zone as far as I know. No, we, London is pretty much nowhere near any tectonic plate boundaries. So we're pretty clever in that respect. I don't have to say all these cities that are built just erected on tectonic plate boundaries like San Francisco are just bonkers to me. Like, I really love the idea of San Francisco. I think it's a great city, but it's in the wrong freaking place. There are streets which actually span the San Andreas Fault. So while the ground underneath you, the physical element of which you stand is moving in two opposing directions, you decide that you will build a cement road on top of that and expect it to last how long? I think that there is a very deep sociological study to be done there around the creation of cities in not just earthquake zones, but in like disaster zones in general. Like Miami is another good example. They're getting pounded by disastrous hurricanes once or twice a year. Right. And so, yeah, I think that there's a whole that's a whole that's got to be a whole like topic of why why civilization has created these wonderful places in really dangerous areas. And you're right. San Francisco. I mean, like they had a, you know, just a tremendously devastating earthquake in the early part of the nineteen hundreds. But of course, Chicago, the great Chicago fire in the eighteen hundreds. This is O'Leary's cow. That whole story knocked over a lantern and set the whole city on fire. So, you know, you don't necessarily need a natural disaster to completely destroy a town. Chicago came back to and I'm sure Chris. The other thing is I live in London. London has burned more often than gosh, I don't know, rims stock price. But I see what you did there. That's nice. That was very, very nice. And the news today with respect to rims, let's squeeze that in. Is that it's stuck is halted trading because it has hired, I believe, J.P. Morgan to advise it on a big strategic reassessment, which is likely to result in a bunch of job cuts. So things have gotten so dire and severe that the stock market has decided not to trade shares because expect people might go crazy and just completely nuke the share price, which is already at a very, very low level. It's actually really surprising. You might say they're having an emergency right now. Oh, man. Are you kidding me? It's really surprising to me, by the way, everyone, that was that was Dieter Bohn coming to us live from San Francisco. There is apparently an earthquake. Yeah, his fire alarm. So it's actually really surprising to me that this kind of set up set off this firestorm on the stock market because it was known there was that Bloomberg. I think it was Bloomberg piece that went around. Was it two, two and a half, three months ago where they were talking about the fact that they were going to hire both a Canadian and an international bank to advise them on what their next move should be? I think that that Torsten talked about it a little bit on the last earnings call. So I don't understand why this is a surprise. The fact that they're bringing an outside help to figure out what to do. I don't get it. Now I'm with you. People should have been already projecting for that. I mean, I believe two or three days ago was it most. It was over the weekend that this popped up. There was speculation that room is looking to chop 2000 jobs out of a six thousand five hundred overall number of employees. So that's something like 12 percent of its whole workforce just being chopped off. So, you know, that projection, that expectation materialized over the weekend. But maybe maybe the market didn't buy into the rumors until it was actually materialized in this hiring of the company. But then, as you say, Chris, room has already foreshadowed its own demise. We should have seen I wouldn't be I wouldn't be quite necessarily. But yes, yes, it's a demise, Chris. I believe we're witnessing a demise. I hope for the for the sake of the market, I hope that you're wrong, not because I'm a particularly big rim fan, but because I'm a fan of competition. I think that I am going to be happy that I don't have to learn everything about WebOS and whatever rim does with its next failure. Blackberry operating system is going to keep my life simpler to only have to know about Android and iOS. But it isn't as diverse. It isn't as way windows phone. Windows phone. We're just going to have to prove itself to me. I'm honestly I'm tired of Windows phone. I'm tired of calling you the 30 because it's by default. I'm excited to step up the game, you know, make it to five percent market share. You know, step off. I'm excited for Apollo. So I don't know. I'm not a hater of Windows. Nokia has actually made some strides in China, right? That kind of made the rounds in the past few days. In fact, they're really kind of gaining some inroads there. And that's not to say that China is particularly high margin market for them probably. But but that's good. And I was actually curious the data about Windows phone in China. Somebody came up with that saying Windows phone had more market share than iOS in China. And then somebody else, I think much more liable statisticians showed data that it doesn't. Well, look, I mean, we just want to China. We can say that I'm trying to spin Windows phone as hard as I can here. I will say this, you know, I've been saying but before the launch of of of Mango, I was saying, oh, I can't wait for Mango. And actually, I could live with Mango. I could realistically live with me. I'm still trying to live with Mango Tango on the 900. The only big problem is the lack of a decent Gmail client. And the fact that when you go to Gmail's mobile view in mobile Internet Explorer, it doesn't it takes you to the website, which is like such a slap in the face. Like I totally get why Google hasn't bothered to invest the time into making their gorgeous iOS WebView work on Windows phone. But for goodness sakes, I mean, like Google, perhaps more than any other company in the in the world is known for spending random amounts of money and time and time on things that aren't necessarily going to pay off. They aren't necessarily going to see return on investment with. So, you know, for the for the benefit of the the Windows phone users out there, however few there may be, please just get that that WebView working. I would be in hog heaven if if if if they got that working. I would be I would finally be in a situation with Mango where I could use a Windows phone device full time and not feel weird or or paralyzed by it like I do now. And so but anyway, back to my original point, I was saying I was really excited about Mango. Mango came out. It didn't it wasn't the blockbuster that anyone wanted it to be. Tango, of course, isn't really anything. And then Apollo. Once again, I'm saying, oh, I'm excited about Apollo. But, you know, at some point we need to stop being excited about versions of Windows phone and just, you know, see a really good platform out there. So, yes. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know, man. Like, I feel really weird about it because there are enough compelling third party apps on that platform now so that I really do have my nine hundred within a stone's throw of being usable full time for me. Gmail is the killer. I can't think of at the top of my head. I can't think of any other single thing on there. I guess that I am experience isn't great for a variety of reasons that the multitasking system is just wonky enough so that it doesn't work very well. And you store your credentials on a remote server that you don't know anything about. But I have I have Google two step authentication working with it because there's the third party client that does it just fine. Google Voice works great. It's you talking yourself into it, man. It has to give you so many reasons why it's worth doing it now. I mean, to me, I can't even begin to start listening to reasons why I like using Android. I like using it. Why do you need for it? Well, you're trying to by the way, I think Peter's back. I'm back. Now, yes. Having lived through the greatest nightmare of my entire life. That was horrendous. And I'm sorry for letting some of the audio get through a little bit. But I'm back set up. I heard Chris's rant about Windows phone and I agree. Wait, you agree with what? With what side of it? That you should keep trying and failing to make it your primary main phone until it is and that Vlad and I can sit back and watch you make excuses for why you're still doing that. Look, we're very, very simple. Microsoft needs to stop cooking and serve up something that's actually done. All right. No more excuses. This is like, you know, if you guys talk about it's not it's not done in a place where we use it. It's being served up, but it's not cooked. No, no, no. Here it is. Windows phone is done. It's just that there's they put it on a menu along with T-bone steak and lobster. But really, it's just tarted up mac and cheese. Mac and cheese is delicious. What is delicious? But they should they should quit selling it like it's gourmet, like it's a smart phone. It's not just a bad, but a really good analogy for you. If you think back to MWC of this year, are you thinking with me? Barcelona? I am imagining sunny weather. OK, well, think think about that time when you and a group of my colleagues were really, really hungry and you had me as your guide to take you to a place to eat. OK, if you remember that time and how long it actually took me to find the proper place for us to eat and the fact that you nearly killed me on the way there, because I said it was like two blocks over and I think it was something like 10. That's where Microsoft finds itself right now with Windows phone. It's it's not. Oh, no, seriously, it's one. It's one block over. It's one block over. Well, where is it? No, here's the thing. OK, and you need to take this challenge for yourself. I sound like a total Microsoft show right now, but it needs to be said. But I challenge you to use a Windows phone device and tell me exactly what's missing. I've told you exactly what's missing from my experience. I need better Gmail. That's it. I can't find anything else that prevents me from using the 900 full time. So I put it I put it on you guys to tell me exactly what it is that's missing from Windows phone for you that prevents you from using it full time. What prevents me from using it is proper, not proper, because I mean, what's proper? I mean, really, but a more robust backgrounding and multitasking experience. You know, I need to know that the IAM app and Skype are going to be able to receive incoming messages when I come back to them. If that if that means full multitasking, great. If that means what IOS does, where like some things are sort of multitasking but not, but at least there's some really clear defined boundaries of what is and isn't running fine. If that means all those apps actually using Microsoft's currently defined boundaries because they're just not doing it right now, fine. But it's just it's just not there yet for the specific tasks that I need on a phone. And I'm multitasking that's as good as the multitasking on the One X. That's what you're looking for. It's not much to ask, is it? No, it's not. It really isn't. I've got some alternative answers for what's missing. First of all, there isn't a robust gathering area for notifications. I still feel Android is the leader in that respect. I feel IOS caught up, but still isn't as nice and clean with pulling your notifications together as Android is. And I think Windows Phone is behind both of those. I think Windows Phone is severely missing a properly usable home screen, which is going to be controversial. But ultimately, I'm only ever really seeing six or eight tiles on my home screen. And we've heard this tale about lifetiles for ages, but I don't see much live action or activity on my home screen with a Windows Phone. I don't see any use to any animations apart from letting me know that the phone hasn't frozen up. I actually really like the immediate and glanceable nature of seeing forum-read emails, free missed calls, two messages, etc. But that only takes three tiles, and you're taking up 60% of my screen to do that. I don't like that. It's not mature to me. Maybe for some people who only use those particular things and use them extensively and really in-depth, and maybe the Facebook integration works in that respect, Facebook messaging, maybe it works for them, but not for me. I really like to have a home screen that can give me access to a whole bunch of things. I like to actually stick to just one home screen with Android and just stack it up with folders and icons and applications and useful things, and then maybe have a secondary one for the rare few widgets that I use, and that's it. I have four screens on Android. I've got just a mix of calendar and contact widgets and folders. Windows Phone has a really easy solution to this. Give me a pinch to zoom option where the current view of the home screen can just be shrunken down. All the tiles can be shrunken down. Maybe if I have a bunch of contacts that have been to my start menu, I don't want to scroll 15 times to get to them. I just want to be able to see more of it, basically. This also works really well with the expected increase in resolution for Windows Phone Apollo, right? You raise the resolution, you give people the option to see more of the home screen, more of the live tiles, it's a win-win. But it doesn't exist. I think that some more flexibility for the size and shape of the live tiles is actually in order. I'd like to see some more. I get that Metro is all about the whole square look, and they can still be rectangles. They don't need to be like rhombuses or trapezoids, although that would be cool. But having, say you have, I'm trying to think of a good example, the calendar application in Windows Phone should have a number of selectable live tiles for size and for display, for what it looks like, for the information that it shows. And right now, I don't think that I've ever seen, there might be a couple weather apps I've seen it in, but by and large, you don't have a lot of configurability for what ends up showing up in the live tile. I've definitely never seen a Windows Phone app that allows you to choose between a half-width and a full-width live tile. I've never seen that. I don't know how we get on the tiles, because this is a really awesome digression. I was living the nightmare of the 20-minute long smoke detector test. I'm pretty sure we got the Windows Phone via RAM. It usually happens that way. We talk about how the disappointment we bring, and then we stumble into Windows Phone. Have you guys, when I was living that nightmare, talked about the new iPhone backplate images that leaked out? No, we haven't, because I would like to. So, a couple images have leaked out at 9-5 Mac. They show a slightly elongated iPhone with the headphone jack at the bottom of the device, next to what looks like a larger area for speakers and the smaller dock connector. Supposedly, it will probably add up to a screen that's 1136x640, which is just shy of a four-inch screen. I've got to say, it's not a radical new design, but I like it better than the straight glass. It looks like they're going to have some sort of two-tone thing going on there. Maybe that's a metal back there. I think it looks pretty good. The one thing I don't like about it is the grill along the bottom. It doesn't look micro-drilled the way they do on the MacBook, or of course, HTC is doing with the One X. They look like giant holes, and it looks bad. Yeah, that's what I'm hoping. Another thing that I'll point out is that the new dock connector looks about the same size as an MHL slash micro USB port. I'm sure it's not either one of those things, but it's about the same size. What I was going to say is I'm in agreement with data. I think we are getting a really good idea, even if these are not legitimate images, because we've seen them coming from a couple of different sources, and they seem to corroborate each other, this elongated four-inch-ish iPhone case. Even if they're not legitimate images, they're shaping up to be showing us where the next iPhone is going. We're most likely going to get this four-inch iPhone where the screen has just been stretched vertically. I can't offer many complaints about the appearance of it, about the look of it, but it bothers me that Apple is keeping the straight edges all around the sides. It's probably to be expected, because it's consistent with the appearance of the iPhone 4 and the iPhone 4S, but I still don't think they're good ergonomically. So you prefer the iPhone slash iPhone 3G? Yeah, I didn't think I did. The first time I saw the iPhone 4 design, I was like, yeah, this is a manly phone. This is a phone for me. Finally, none of this fancy-schmancy curved iPhone nonsense. But actually, what turns out is that the devices with the curved backs are the absolutely most comfortable ones you can have. I do feel like a lot of companies are making this trade-off of going for more angular, more rigid-looking phones because they know they're more appealing to people, because they know they will sell better. They will be, as Chris was saying earlier, they'll be more appealing when you just see them in the store. But actually, the ones with the rotund back, the ones that just kind of look frumpy, I guess, are really comfortable ones. And this includes, like you say, the iPhone, the early iPhone generations, the 3GS. It includes the Nexus S, which I love. It's one of my favorite phones. And it includes the Galaxy S3. Yeah, yeah, fair enough. But the Galaxy S3 is not the most attractive phone in the world either. No, exactly. And I know that because I've had a lot of grief for my rating for its design. People are like, no, dude, you do not know what you're talking about. Do you have your glasses on, et cetera, et cetera, about its appearance? And I really don't care because when you start using the phone, the only thing you're looking at is its display. The actual back of it, the design of the back of it doesn't matter when you're using the phone. How it looks doesn't matter. It physically matters how it feels in your hand. Yeah, fair enough. And it feels just fine. So the larger screen, do you guys think we're going to see something significantly different with iOS 6 to take advantage of that extra space? Or is it just going to be extra icons, whatever? Yeah, I mean, that was pretty much extra icons and stretching out content within apps, maybe adding maybe more menu roles or something. But that would be it, I guess. I think that they, you know, so I think it's a foregone conclusion that iOS 6, they're going to do something more with the widgets in the pull down. And I don't think that long term those widgets can live in the pull down alone. And it would make a lot of sense to me that you would be able to position those widgets on the home screen, you know, taking up the full width of the screen, maybe. I don't know. But if you could have those interspersed with icons, I don't know how that would work exactly. I'm not a UI expert, but I hope that they don't long term, that those widgets don't only live in that pull down because they're useful and they're cool. And obviously, we want to see developers be able to take full advantage of those. And you don't want them just buried up in that curtain. Something with that. Yeah, I mean, they'll have to rethink their home screen experience, though, because I mean, right now it's just app. With Android, there's a separation between home screen and app drawer. I think that Apple doesn't want to have that separation. But I mean, how would you manage widgets? You need some way to do that. They're like, they're right up against the ragged edge of like what they can do with the current. I mean, we've talked about this a bunch, right? But it seems like if they're going to go to the larger screen, if they go to the four inch screen, and all they do is add an extra row of icons, and give out the APIs to have a stretched app area and whatever, and that's it. I will be very unhappy because that extra half inch of the screen space, I think will really show like, okay, this is tired compared to what other UIs are doing right now. So one thing that I would point out, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that this is an unusually long amount of time between the last iOS preview event and now, right? Like, it's been a long time. So I'm sure we'll see that. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. Because I think the last event was in maybe March 2011 for iOS 5, something like that. Yeah, so they'll obviously show that at WWDC. I'm hopeful that considering the amount of time that has lapsed since the last iOS event, that it's going to be kind of a pretty significant version bump, and we'll see some cool things. All they need to do to make me happy is make the stupid 72 degree and sunny weather icon do something else. Just show me. That's it. Just show me the local weather. I will become an iPhone user for life. Especially now that Sparrow is out, like I can make do without notifications. It's not the end of the world, but the email experience on iOS is, of course, terrible. But then again, like I was saying earlier, you have the web view, which is actually very good. But now that you have Sparrow, give me live icons. I'm good to go. Never touch Android or Windows phone again. That's not true, obviously. But no, I mean, I'm sure. I mean, look, I've owned every iPhone that has ever come to market. I'm sure I'll own the next iPhone. And how long I remain on that iPhone is going to depend almost solely on the software, not on the hardware. Because the 4S is still a really fantastic device. The only complaint I can really lodge, well, two complaints. One is lack of LTE and two is the small screen. But neither of those are deal breakers to me if the software is perfect. And I think that… I would actually say the screen is a deal breaker for me at this point. Well, even at that resolution… Yeah, you can adapt to 3.5 inches, but every time you put it right next to another display, you're kind of like, why don't I have that bigger one? There's so much more information on it. I can read so much more. Yeah, fair enough. It does help that there's no lag on iOS. So like dragging stuff around, you get more information. You don't have… like it's always exactly paper movement with your finger. Right. And you can off-frame, I'm moving and pretending like I'm just scrolling an iPhone. It's amazing. It's blowing my mind. It makes me want to switch back, honestly. So that helps. I don't know. I think they need to move up the orange. You know, there's another thing. To Chris's point about excitement, a couple of retweets I've seen in my Twitter stream, particularly from Steve Trowell and Smith, were from WWC attending developers. And they were actually looking at WWDC's schedule, which is Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference. It just got released. The keynote will be on June 11th. It lasts between June 11th and June 15th. And the thing that they were actually looking at was how many sessions there were for developers which were to be announced. Because that is actually their metric for telling how much is going to be new and exciting. And there are a bunch, apparently. So we can look forward to some new hotness. Just don't know what yet. I'm going to… When is WWDC? It's really soon. Yeah. June 11th? It's coming right up. But unfortunately, Vlad, I'm going to have to reach through the video feed and punch you in the face for saying new hotness. I draw the line with that phrase. I just can't get down with that phrase. I'm sorry. I wish we could see… You're okay with sweet tips and talking about Fast and the Furious for a half hour a day, but new hotness, you can't handle. Not half an hour a day, Dieter. It's going to be 90 minutes a week. Big difference. Oh. Chris, I am going to invoke something. That was split up like, you know, like 20 minutes. That would be terrible. I am going to invoke something. What's that? Many Black 3, I have been led to believe, is in cinemas over in the United States. That's true. And the same new hotness, as everybody knows, was invented by Will Smith in Many Black 1. Therefore, because there is a Many Black movie in theaters at the moment, I am technically allowed to use new hotness without sounding old and busted. Sure. I'll let it slide this once. Okay. Well, you actually brought that one. I'm glad. I'm not letting it slide, but I'm not letting it slide in the same way that you don't yell at your grandpa for calling somebody a hep cat. It's just not his fault. Okay. I'm sorry. I take it back. We discussed everything. I mean, I was gone for half the podcast listening to Insane Fire Alarms. Is there anything else that you guys want to hit quick before we sign off for our first show? Yes. Yes. I don't think that we can sign off without talking about the renewed Facebook phone rumors. Oh, yes. This is a—so, you know, there have been Facebook phone rumors on and off for, what, 18 months at least? And I think, you know, where there's smoke, there's fire. I don't think it's plausible at this point that there isn't anything going on. I think that at the very least, Facebook is exploring this idea. I think that, you know, famously over the past few months as they've gone through their IPO, they've been talking a lot about the fact that, like, they haven't found a monetization model for mobile yet. And, you know, it's very easy to believe that Facebook believes that creating a smartphone, or at the very least, a smartphone platform, might be central to that strategy. But, man, getting into the smartphone market is not easy. Just ask Palm. Just ask HP. Just ask RIM. I mean, RIM is in trench. Ask RIM in a year. Yeah, so, I mean, I just don't know. And, you know, I know they're riding a wave of money and greatness right now, but it's going to be tough for them. It really is. Best case scenario, it's still going to be tough for them. I think that a very likely scenario for those guys is that they're going to pull an Amazon, right? They'll fork Android and go off and do whatever with it. And, of course, Facebook, you know, they already have an app platform. It's very easy to sort of build in your mind exactly how this would work. But, yeah, I mean, so what? They're going to launch exclusively on AT&T or Verizon or whatever, and then what? What's the next step after that? Yeah, it's an issue. And it's also one… The issue for me is what defines success for a Facebook phone. Like, if they need to get to, like, 20% market share in order for this thing to count as a success, they're in a world of hurt. That's going to be super hard. But if they can just get it out there as a way to, I don't know, pressure other phone manufacturers to start doing more with Facebook software and sign up more partnerships, and maybe they can use it as a way to gain some market share in certain emerging markets or something targeted where they're not trying to compete in the same way that Windows Phone and Android and iOS are trying to compete, then that could be interesting. But I just don't know what that looks like. I don't know what Facebook does either. I don't understand how Facebook would be able to do that, what you suggest, Dieter, of competing without really competing. Like, if you're going to go after the smartphone market, like Chris says, you have to have a really, really clear idea of what the hell it is you're going after. You know, you can't just be, well, we're going to compete with you guys, but if you integrate Facebook really deeply into your phones, we'll compete less hard. And that will somehow be okay for Facebook's bottom line. It's going to be a really confused idea. I also don't understand how they're going to do it because their problem is Facebook wants to be ubiquitous on mobile devices. I don't think Facebook can afford to not be on Android. I don't think it can afford to not be on iOS. And the same goes for Instagram, which is its, you know, prize capture. It's the most recent and most expensive piece of software that it has captured. So you can't just introduce the Facebook phone and say, okay, you know what? We're going to keep Instagram exclusive to this phone, and this is what's going to give it a selling point. We're going to keep these Facebook features exclusive to this phone. You need to have your features all across mobile platforms. Everybody says it's about Facebook and about how it's going to adapt to people moving to mobile devices. And Facebook's goal is ubiquity, and yet the goal with coming out with your own phone is exactly the opposite, is to have some sort of exclusive special selling point. So how do you do that? How do you have something that's special about your phone, while at the same time trying to have your platform on every phone? Right. It could be smoke and mirrors, right? They could be, you know, trying to fake somebody, or they might be hiring some sort of ancillary crew to support the development of a Facebook phone through somebody like HTC, or maybe Apple wants deeper integration. I think that there are lots of other explanations that don't ultimately lead to a quote-unquote Facebook phone, Facebook-branded phone on the market. I mean, that's exactly what happened with the ChaCha, right, and the status. Everybody thought that Facebook was working on a phone, and then boom, all of a sudden, it's just a standard-issue HTC Android device with a Facebook button on it. So who knows? I mean, it's just this idea of Facebook going for its own phone doesn't compute for me. That doesn't mean that Facebook isn't intent on doing it. I just don't see where the motivation is. I don't see the clear idea and the clear goal behind it. I don't really think that Facebook's ultimate success as a company lies in monetizing the sale of devices, whereas the previous strategy, the one that Mark Zuckerberg has been stating over and over again is there won't be such a thing as just one Facebook phone. We want every phone to be a Facebook phone, which is a nice catchphrase, and that he wanted to distribute Facebook services as widely as possible. That makes more sense to me. That is more intuitive to me. But then again, like you say, Chris, Amazon used to be all about that, just being platform agnostic, and then all of a sudden came out with the Amazon, with the Kindle Fire rather. And as you know very well, Chris, there will be an Amazon smartphone by the end of the year, right? Oh, it's happening. It is. I'm not so sure. Amazon used to be all about being platform agnostic. I'm not convinced at this point that it's going to be end of year, but we'll see. It's definitely happening. One way or another, there will be an Amazon. I think that the opportunity is like within the Android ecosystem. If you don't have to beat Android and you don't have to beat iOS, but if you can be the de facto go-to answer within Android, the way that the Kindle Fire basically is for Android tablets, within a smartphone space, that's a real opportunity to make some real money. And you don't necessarily – it's a smaller hill to climb than gaining market share just for your thing. And so I think Amazon and Facebook, they'd be kind of stupid not to see if they can give that a go, because it does actually give them some leverage to make sure that they get on other phones, because those other phones need to be competitive with the Facebook phone, and Facebook's perfectly happy to be frenemies with these other companies and say, yeah, sure, we'll make software for your phone while we continue to make it for our phone. They're happy to do that, I would think, unless their phone takes off insanely, and then they're like, no, no, only Facebook for our own hardware. I think they'd be stupid to do that, though. I wouldn't expect them to. Right. I mean, if Facebook would need to own the smartphone market to do that. I think back to the Kin, which on one level it's kind of easy to see how Facebook would say, well, we can do the Kin right. I could see them having the hubris to go into that sort of attitude. And then I was thinking to myself, well, that's an expensive mistake, because it cost Microsoft half a billion to buy Danger and half a billion to come out with the Kin. But in reality, that's pocket change these days, especially to a company like Facebook. I mean, if Facebook ultimately tried and failed and it cost them a billion dollars, yeah, it'd hurt on the quarterly earnings report, but it's not going to end the company, that's for sure. Right. That's all right. But then there's another question, which is, how is the Facebook phone by Facebook going to differ from all the Facebook phones that we've seen so far? Because, okay, the most famous ones are the HTC ones from last year. But let's not forget companies like Inc. and some other smaller companies. I think Huawei might have done some, maybe not Huawei. But a whole bunch of companies have tried to tailor their low-end budget phones around the idea of being Facebook phones. So it was the Inc. Cloud Touch last year, I believe, and there was another Ring phone, which were really cheap and affordable and were really centered around Facebook. They were Android phones. So my question is, if Facebook wants to approach the market from the affordable side of things, which kind of makes sense since you want to have the Facebook services available to everybody, it's already been done. How is it going to be different? I have the answer. They are going to perfect the haptic poke using the new, what is it called, the new haptics that are unlike the— they debuted on that new Pantech tablet. They're going to have that really advanced poke haptics. Does anybody poke anymore on Facebook? I don't know that poking is still done. A super poke, whatever the case may be. I don't know what Facebook— Is there a super poke? Yeah, at one time it was one of the most successful Facebook apps, if not the most successful. And now it's just Farmville. Yeah. Okay. See, that's the thing. Chris, I'm going to take your idea under advisement. It needs to run Flash because they need to be able to— or they need Zynga. They have to develop it with Zynga and get HTML5 Facebook apps fully up on it. If the Facebook phone doesn't run Facebook games, it's a total failure. Right. Yeah, that's sad. I'm serious. No, yeah, absolutely. It's a good point, actually. I thought D2 was trolling, but that's a really good point. Yeah. Sometimes you can troll and have a good point at the same time. Which is, I think, the perfect sentiment to end the inaugural Verge Mobile Show on trolling and sincere at the same time. If you want to send us an email, you can. It is mobileshow at theverge.com. Totally set that up. Otherwise, we are also on Twitter. I am at backlon. Vlad is at VladSavov. Chris is at ZPower, and we are all at Verge. So, catch us next week. We'll be on video again. It'll be awesome. Thanks so much for listening and watching. Absolutely. Bye, guys. I'll see you guys.