 Welcome to the Verge Mobile Show. This is the Verge Mobile Show for the week of December 17th, 2012. There's been a remarkable amount of app news to talk about, so we're going to jump in, I think, really, really, really fast. My name is Dieter Bowen. I'm Dan Sievert. And I'm Chris Sigler. And I'm still using a Nexus 4. When did you get that thing? Was it like a week and a half ago? It was like a week, week and a half ago, yeah. It's a review unit from Google. And I know you guys tease that I have lots and lots of thoughts and feelings about it. Yes. But I listen to the show and you've expressed most of my thoughts and feelings. I'm totally nervous about dropping it all the time. But other than that... I will say that I drop mine at least two or three times a day. And actually the Chamford Edgeline is all scratched up now. But it's not cracked? Not cracked, no. I have not yet cracked the screen. I appreciate how you called it the Chamford edge. You bought Matthias' phrase of my own sinker. He's running with it. I appreciate that. No, he took that from Apple. I totally took that from Apple. Yeah, no. Not only did they take the glass design from Apple, they took it using the word chamfer all over the place from Apple. Maybe they took the glass from Apple, but the pattern on the back is very unique to this device. You have to give it that. It looks really great when it spider cracks too. The first Nexus 4 I had I dropped, unfortunately. But it did not crack, just like you, Dan. It just busted up the edge. I am also using a review unit right now. This one I have not dropped. As far as Google is concerned, I will never drop it. If I do, I will not tell Google. Yeah. It's fast. So data speed, not being on LTE, that's hard. But AT&T is better in San Francisco on HSPA than I remembered it being before I made the switch to LTE phones. I'm getting like seven down. Yeah. It's really good. It's like that where I live in the suburbs, but in New York City, like Manhattan, it's definitely still bad. Right. Have you guys had random quits, random crashes, random reboots? No, but my Nexus 7 does all the freaking time. Twice a day with 4.2, it randomly reboots. I don't think I've had anything on the latest patch, I don't think I've had any big problems. There was a pretty significant problem with the first build. You know how when you got the device, you would immediately get an update? And that first patch was the one that I was having trouble with where there were a lot of apps where you'd tap on a text field, the keyboard would come up, and then you'd be able to tap on the keyboard but nothing would show up in the text field, and then you would discover that that was happening in every app and then the only solution was to reboot the device. Yeah. So that was a pain in the butt. I haven't seen that happen on the latest patch, so that's a good sign. Yeah, so I wish I had more feelings that you guys hadn't already said, but if you don't need LTE, it's kind of a no-brainer. So define don't need LTE, because I think that's a very, that's becoming an increasingly important question to answer and it depends on a lot of factors where you physically... Well, if you live in a place where you don't have LTE, for example. So here's my conundrum is I'm actually most of the time in a place where I have Wi-Fi, a large percentage of the time, so it's really not killing me, but the problem is when I'm not, I'm kind of unhappy if I happen to hit a dead zone, or if I need it, I need it. And so we're coming up on CES, right? And I am positive I'm going to desperately want LTE at CES. I'm not 100% positive. Your HSPA Plus won't work anyways, so. Right. And hopefully the LTE will. We'll see what happens this year. But so like, I'm going to need to switch away from the Nexus 4 in a week or so, because I can't be like used to using that phone and then switch right for CES. I need to have a phone that I know is rock solid and LTE. And I'm thinking that it's going to end up being an iPhone 4. 5. That's true, Dieter, but keep in mind that this year, for the first time at CES, there will be tens of thousands of people walking around with LTE-enabled iPhones. Right. But I mean, what can I do? I'm not going to switch to Verizon for CES. Well, no, what I'm saying is that we might actually have crossed that point where HSPA utilization is now on the decline, and you're actually going to be able to send a text message this year at CES, unlike previous years. Now to be fair, every LTE smartphone that's currently on the market is still using UMTS for voice and texting anyway, but the real problem is the data utilization. And a lot more will be offloaded to LTE this year than in years past. Well, if you run into a problem with LTE, you can just go in, turn off LTE, and then you can use HSPA+, assuming that's working. That's true. That's true. In years past, I've had very little luck turning off HSPA and using Edge. I was always kind of hoping that that would be my fallback, but very rarely does that actually work. And I think the problem might be the backhaul in that case, where it's, you know, because regardless of what spectrum you're connecting to, on the back end, it's still going through the same pipe, and that gets clogged. But I don't know how much our listeners care about the intricacies of our CES experience. Maybe they do, I don't know. Do you think they care about having four-square data in Apple Maps? So I have many feelings about this. Oh, okay. Well, let's hear them. So if you didn't hear, the rumor has gone out, and Wall Street Journal reported that AnyQ, the savior of all things that happen to be broken at Apple over the years, is talking to four-square to possibly include four-square location data and the maps, and that would supplement Yelp. And you'll notice it on the off chance you happen to accidentally open Apple Maps instead of Google Maps on iOS. Right. So my problem with four-square, I use four-square pretty religiously, actually. Not because I want other people to see where I am. Yes, so there's badges. No, it's not because of the badges, even. It's because I like having a record of where I've been, how many times I've been to different places, and it's kind of the most convenient way to do that. And keeping track of what airports I've been to, what cities I've been to. How many mayorships do you have? Yes, how many mayorships I have. No, how many? I'm asking. Don't pretend like you don't know off the top of your head. No, I just lost one, so I think I'm down to two now. I remember the days when I had 15 or more concurrent mayorships back in 2008 or 2009 before everyone discovered four-square and owned a smartphone in their pocket. And now I might have two or three tops, and I can never hold onto them. I have, hold on, I'm looking at my stats. I have two mayorships. I bet you I have zero. But I don't use it as religiously as you because I'm not obsessed with getting badges. I know I have the Super Mayor badge from when I had 10 or more. How do you find how many mayorships you have? From the stats menu, if you go into Me, and then Stats. I've got badges. You've got 21 badges. I have way more than that. There's no stats menu here. I'm on an Android phone. I don't know what bogus version of the app you're using. I have 39 badges, which still isn't that many, actually. This is totally not interesting to me. Yeah, I don't know what you're saying. What are your feelings about maps? So here's my problem with it. I do enjoy four-square, and I use it pretty religiously, but it is still very much a problem today that no matter where you are in the city, I mean Chicago, but I'm sure this holds true for pretty much every major city, you get a lot of bogus POIs, just random things that people created because it's a free-for-all. It's less protected. Yelp has that problem too, right? We talked about, what's his name, the pot dealer a few weeks ago. Yeah, but I think the problem is 10 times worse with four-square because the barrier to entry for creating a bogus POI is much, much lower. Normally I would say, well, who cares? If you create a bogus POI, it doesn't have any effect on me, but it does because then when I go to an area of the city that has a bunch of legitimate POIs around me, I want to check into one of them, your bogus POI gets mixed into that list along with the real one, so I need to sift through it. I try to be pretty good about flagging bogus venues, but I don't know how quickly Foursquare gets around to actually curating those and I don't know how many people are flagging as aggressively as I do. This is a major problem for Apple, right? Or anyone else who wants to take Foursquare data seriously. They're going to need to just apply some top-level filters of, it's got to have a certain number of check-ins or something in order to be legit. Maybe. I don't know about that because it could just be whichever one of the wrong locations or inaccurate locations got popular first and then everyone checks into that and everything. So unless someone is manually going in and editing them, Foursquare has these super users that can edit location data and make sure that the address is correct and the phone number is correct and all that jazz, unless someone's going in and doing that for every single one. I don't know, it's the whole problem of crowdsourced data that's inaccurate crowdsourced data. Google Maps has crowdsourced data that's based on your actual GPS location of your phone, which you can't really spoof for alter, but Foursquare's not that way when you're adding a location. So I think that that on the whole, the values, I'm sure that Foursquare's database has immense monetary value to a variety of institutions, no one more so than Apple right now because they're in desperate need of a reasonable base map and POI database. So here's the thing, you're concerned about the data not being accurate. I'm sure that these negotiations are like, we're going to need to be able to mess with your data however we want in order to make sure that we don't have more problems because Foursquare's got an STK. Really Apple could just go in and start using it. So they clearly need more access to go in there and mess with stuff. Right. And there's probably, I mean, I don't know the details of the terms of service for using Foursquare's API, but there are probably some limits on how commercial you can take it and or how heavily you can use it. I know that with some of Google services there's a trigger where if you go beyond a certain number of hits per day or per week or per month or whatever it is, then you need to start paying per use. And it could very well be that Foursquare is structured the same way, I'm not sure. But regardless, I'm sure that database has monetary value. The question is how much is it devalued by the bogus POIs? And what can Apple do about it to your point, Dieter? What kind of crazy algorithm can they develop to make it cleaner? I don't know. But they need to do something. I still believe, and I know we've talked about this in weeks past, I still believe that Maps has significantly improved since launch, since iOS 6 launch. And that's purely just gut check, like my feeling just casually using the app. I don't have any empirical data to back that up, but it feels like it's getting better. And then of course there's the 800 pound grill in the room, which is Google Maps, which makes this entire conversation perhaps moot. Yeah, and I love Google Maps on the iPhone. I think it's great. Did you guys talk about it last week? I don't remember. No, it was before the launch. Well we should, so Google Maps with the iPhone. That's a minor thing. I guess we could talk about it. Yeah, I totally assume that that was last week. Yeah, no. It's great. I think that there's some issues with it not being immediately intuitive and there's a little bit of tapping and swiping and whatever. But once you get past that, and they've got a couple prompts when you first launch the app to do that for you, it's great. It's super fast. And 10 million people agree with you. 10 million people? Yeah, that's right. 10 million in 48 hours. No, just in the first 48 hours. So they've had plenty more since then. And if you go to App Annie and look at the top downloads by country, I think it's in the top app in 48 countries, top free app, and in the top five and the rest that they offer the Maps app in. There are some countries where they don't have all the transit data and stuff yet. So some people are yelling at me on Twitter about that. But I mean, whatever. If you've got it, it's good and it's really nice to have that transit data back on an iPhone. Because I've been using Transit, I've been using HopStop, I have a whole folder full of mass transit apps and I hate them all. I hate them all a lot. They're all terrible. You mean like my navigate folder that's got 10 apps in it right now? Yeah, yeah. I finally moved it to my second screen. Like HopStop, Routsy Pro, Transit, CD Transit, Embark Eye Bart, Caltrain, and then I've deleted like eight others that I gave up on already. Nice. They're the worst. It's like I need to rename this folder like Broken Dreams, Sorrows. It's almost like I'm turning into Dan with weather apps. It's really embarrassing. Yeah, Dan, what is it with you and weather apps? How many weather apps are installed on your main phone right now? I see. So iOS 6 made me really happy because I can now have more than 12 icons in a folder to feed my weather app obsession. So I've got 15 on my iPhone right now and I think I have four or five on my Android phone right now. So what you're saying that the built-in weather app in iOS is not, it doesn't meet all your comprehensive weather needs because it's such a comprehensive app. Not only does that, it also is really ugly. So I have this like obsession with finding this like the perfectly designed weather app that gives me all the information and data I want and need, well need, but still looks beautiful at the same time. And so I'm constantly spending money on weather apps. I think if I budgeted how much I spent on weather apps in a year, it would be really embarrassing to find out. It would put my kid through college or something. But yeah, I mean, and I'm never satisfied. And the thing is like I use like multiple at the same time because I never trust one of them. I'll open up one, it'll say it's 42 degrees out and it'll rain in the next hour and I'm like well no, he must be lying so I open up another one to double check. Well you need to start saving up your money Dan because a company called Dual just released a Bluetooth ADS-B receiver for iOS which allows you to download like real time FAA like radar, like you know, like NOAA radar to your iPhone. Wow. It's designed for aircraft, not for you, but you can use it if you want to spend 800 bucks. It just means it's going to be really ugly and I'm not going to like it. It's a huge ugly gray box that you need to pair to the phone so it's probably not worth your time. So this came up in chat but I want to mention it here. I guess you can have it launch Google Maps from Siri if you add by transit or via transit to the end of your Siri query. Although Chris Welch said that it worked intermittently for him. I haven't tried it yet but there's that so you can get to it from Siri. I don't know, maybe I'm turning into a Google services fanboy and we're going to get to that in a minute. But man, Google search is just faster and better on the iPhone. Google Maps is better, you know, has more comprehensive data. Gmail is better than, for Gmail stuff anyway than Apple's built in stuff and like I've got this like little mini Google world on my iPhone now. Like my home screen has got three Google things on it I believe, Gmail and Google Maps. It really torpedoes the notion, you know, people would obviously naturally like to believe that Google has it out for all mobile platforms that aren't Android but I think this latest release really torpedoes that notion and tells you, you know, it gets back to the core of Google's business model which is spreading in services as far and wide as it possibly can but maybe not. There is the Windows phone situation which we should talk about shortly. I'm going to take a moment here to see if I can deal with this situation. To your point Chris about how everyone says that Google is not concerned about other mobile platforms except for Android, just yesterday this app for YouTube called YouTube Capture which allows you to upload videos directly from your iPhone to YouTube is being launched on iOS first. Google says it's coming to Android and it will be released on Android at some point but the fact that it's being launched on iOS first and Google went through the effort of getting it through the app store and approved and stuff like that before launching it for Android just goes to show how important iOS is to Google. Not important enough to continue to offer Exchange Active Sync protocol support to iPhone users. Yeah, but that's, I mean, it's a secondary thing for iOS. I mean, we will all hold a funeral for the death of Push but at the end of the day this doesn't have as significant an impact on iOS users as it does on Windows phone users. Yeah, simply because they can get something like Push, although not true Push from the Gmail app. You can get notified but you can't get Push. And it is really convenient to just, even if you don't have connectivity, to know that you can go into your email app and do some email. And so, I don't know, I'm thinking I might be on my iPhone, I might set it up to just sync every 30 minutes and not alert me just so I've got it there in case I need it instead of having it not sync at all which is the way I've got it set up now and then use Gmail from Push Alerts. But it is, it's a nice thing. And so if you don't know, Gmail or Google is pulling support for ActiveSync Exchange to sync contacts, calendar and email from its services and this primarily, they're still going to leave it there for professional Google Apps users so it affects consumers but it's going to hurt the iPhone and it's going to hurt the big one. And Tom has written a great piece on a Windows phone. And what kills me about this is Microsoft, Microsoft basically said, what was their quote, we're surprised? Yeah. Yeah, they were surprised by the announcement. I think Microsoft was the only one that was surprised by it. Right. Yeah, somebody at Microsoft is not doing their job if they were genuinely surprised. I mean, Google has been telegraphing this for, Google has been telegraphing this for at least three or four months, if not longer. Yeah, I remember, like one of the reasons we wrote that whole ecosystem wars piece was because we saw this coming. I mean, I was talking to Kevin Mitchell from crackberry.com at the last Blackberry World like a few months ago, like he saw it coming. Google is presumably paying millions, probably millions of dollars to Microsoft in licensing fees for Exchange ActiveSync. You would think that like whoever has that contract and manages that relationship might give them a heads up that maybe something's going to change in the near future. Maybe like it's insane. How could they not be ready for this? I mean, the playbook is ready for this, right? RIM was ready for this. I mean, even dude, even webOS works, it's still going to work just fine because it's using like the straight Gmail sync protocols and CalDAV and it does IMAP idle for push. Like webOS will do native Gmail and Google services better than Windows Phone starting on January 30th or whatever it is they're killing. Like that's insane. Oh, that is extremely depressing to hear that the pre will be better. I mean, in all though, it's a really fix for Microsoft to correct it. They just have to pump out CalDAV and CardDav support. You're right, Dan. I'll just throw it into their regular updates that they've been pushing out for Windows Phone 7. Well, they've got a couple out for Windows Phone 8. But like we're 7.8. Like what's the story? Well, yeah. That's one concern I have is that it's going to take them a while to get this update out. They're going to have to pass it through all the carriers obviously. I don't think there's any way they can get it done by the January deadline. But what I'm worried about is that Microsoft is going to mistake this as an opportunity to just say, well, no, we're not going to play ball and push everybody into Outlook and the remainder, SkyDrive, et cetera, et cetera. Which I mean, not to knock these services. They're good products. But you're alienating a huge contention of people who really don't have the time or energy or desire to move out of the Google ecosystem, myself included, but who want to try Windows Phone. So I don't think they have the luxury of doing that. And to be clear, JDoc just asked us in the chat, so is Google just going to make a Gmail app for Windows Phone? No. They said, we're not really planning on doing anything for Windows Phone. We're not really interested. Like that's harsh. And so Tom Warren, our Microsoft guy, is like, if you think about it, Android is really competitive with Windows Phone, almost more than it is with iOS, because it's the same business model. It's get the OEMs on board, convince the carriers to work with you, allow some customization, da, da, da, da, da, da, da. The whole reason Android even exists, if you go back and look at the testimony from that Oracle core case, I think it was, was they were afraid of Windows Mobile back in the day. So it kind of makes sense that they're just not going to help Windows Phone become a second ecosystem at all, or a third ecosystem at all, because why should they? They've already lost, they're not going to get rid of iOS. They're not going to get those numbers way down really quickly, so they might as well play on that. But what's the incentive for them to be on Windows Phone? Or RIM, or whoever, MeeGo, I forget the, what's the name of the? Yalla. Yalla, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it bums me out, because I was just starting to, I've been testing Illumina 8.22 this week, and it has made me appreciate, let's give you a sneak preview of my review, it has made me appreciate the 8X much more than I had before. Oh really? I love this, I knew when you were like, guys this 8.22 is the best, I'm like yeah, I didn't talk to you in a week, you'll see how you do. I have some thoughts, which you will read in the review. But no, I would seriously, especially after seeing the yellow and red 8Xs in person, which are super awesome and hot colors, I would strongly consider having another go at Windows Phone 8, perhaps after this next update comes out that fixes a few issues. But this is a total deal breaker, I know that that is an overused term, but in this case it's not an exaggeration, it is a complete deal breaker if they don't implement dev and allow me to sync my Google services with the device. I can't move over to an all Microsoft stack, especially since it becomes much more difficult to then go back to other devices, which I'll inevitably have to do. Yeah, it's a crappy situation, and again, like I said before, I think there's a 0% chance that Microsoft, even if they work through the holidays, get the updates squared away, they can't push it through all the OEMs and carriers in time for this deadline, I don't think. I think they can do that quickly. I have nothing else to say, they need to fix it, and if they don't, they're going to, people still use, I think, is Yahoo still more popular, does it still have more users than Gmail worldwide? I don't think so, I think Gmail surpassed it. I think Gmail has finally surpassed it. It's a big important service, and it's a big important service amongst people that you need to get liking your platform, and they just got to make it happen. And the fact that they didn't see it coming is they're either straight up lying for some strange PR play, or that's the only explanation that could make any sense, that they're like, no, we don't know what's going on. So this summer, Gmail passed 425 million users to be number one, passed Hotmail. Yeah, that's not a contingent that could be ignored. People always tell me, you know, whenever I complain about something Gmail related, I always get a bunch of tweets saying, you know, not everybody uses Gmail, and I'm like, that may be true, but guess what, a lot of people do. This is not a group of people that can be readily ignored when you're trying to build a platform. So I guess we should, we're probably going to let Nilay get into this in depth in the Vergecast, but we should at least touch on this drama about Instagram's terms of service. You know, we talk about Twitter's grab filters, and now Instagram, and how Facebook owns them, has updated their terms of service, and everybody's freaking out that they're going to sell your pictures, and then they're going to put ads on them, and blah, blah, blah, blah. What's weird to me is that the backlash against what are relatively innocuous and unsurprising terms, I mean, they're not great, but I don't know that they actually go all that much further, any further than I would have expected from a Facebook owned company. But the backlash is way stronger than I thought. Yes, I totally agree with you, and B, people need to stop flattering themselves. Your pictures aren't good enough for Instagram to sell them. Just stop the illusion that your pictures were taken by God himself, and Instagram is now going to sell them on the open market. What really blew me away here was the vast majority of people I know that use Instagram have public profiles. I know it's possible to make them private, but most people don't. Most people have a public profile, and I'm seeing all these tweets that are like, oh, I'm going to be really careful posting pictures of my kids, and posting my house and stuff. I'm like, you had no problems posting it to a public service before, and now all of a sudden this sentence changes, and now you're going to have taken issue with posting a picture of your kid to a public internet service, which I find to be very amusing at least. If there's one, part of me kind of wants the drama to continue and get worse, because part of me is still rooting for Flickr to come back. They just released their new iOS app. It's pretty good. The thing that is underappreciated about Flickr is for years, for a decade, they have had really clear, well-established Creative Commons licenses that you can apply to your photos as you upload them. You can say, these are the rules for this picture, and it's right there on the site, it's right there in the picture all the time. That's great. I would really like to see Flickr come back as a photo service, because it does a much better job of archiving and keeping your photos and searching and so on. We know that Flickr is way behind the times, but if Marissa Meyer at Yahoo is doing anything other than walking into the Flickr division and throwing money and resources at them, then I don't even know what to say, because there's a huge opportunity there. Why does nobody ever talk about Picasa? I like Picasa. Picasa sucks. Why? Because. Tell me why. Picasa is the Google Wave of photo services. There's nothing wavy about it. It's as straightforward as you can possibly imagine. You know what's wavy about it? Nobody uses it. Nobody cares. Yeah, but photo archival, if I need to drop a link to somebody to show them a picture, or if I need to upload and store all my photos in the cloud, I don't need a service that everybody uses. I just need a service that works. Wouldn't you like to have some sort of social element built into that? Picasa is integrated. Well, first of all, it has Google Plus integration. Second of all, just let that one slide. How do I kick you off of the hangout? Do I have the power? Just let it slide. And secondly, Picasa is integrated into Android. So you can go into Gallery and upload a photo straight to Picasa from there. Don't care. So I really think that, I know there's been a bit of talk about this, and I think there's been some rumors or whatever about how different services could be applied here, but Dropbox seems like the perfect service to me because I already have a ton of storage for Dropbox. My phones all automatically upload all of my photos to Dropbox, so if I wanted to share it with somebody very quickly and easily, I can do that. But the only problem is right now, everything goes into this crazy camera uploads folder which is totally disorganized and a mess unless you are writing a script to organize it, which I think I know someone who actually did that. But if Dropbox saw the opportunity where it's got users that have 50 gigabytes, 75 gigabytes, or 100 gigabytes of storage, and it offered some sort of organizational system where you could directly upload your photos into specific folders automatically and things like that, I think it would be great. That's exactly what it sounds like you're using Picasa for, Chris. It's just Dropbox is way more ubiquitous. So I just had a dream, I think because John Gruber during Fireball was talking about Dropbox again and that Apple should have bought them back in the day when they tried or they were considering it or something, I don't know. Imagine if Yahoo bought Dropbox. Why am I all pro-Yahoo today? I don't know. But that would show that they're smart and they get it and they're back. Integrating Dropbox Flickr in some way? I'd be on board. So I'm a total Flickr amateur. Can somebody explain to me why everyone in the world has a Flickr Pro account? So I used to have a Flickr Pro account. And I had to review my account for years. You needed to get back to your old photos and there was a cap. So back in the day, storage wasn't free and unlimited and easy to get. And so they needed to have a cap on the number of photos, the amount of space you could take up. And so it's just sort of a legacy from that. But if you let your Pro account lapse. So like say I think the free account has a limit of something like 200 photos and like four sets or whatever. And if you make a Pro account and you upload all these extra photos and create all these other sets and you let it lapse, you can't access more than 200 of your photos unless you renew your Pro account and then somehow download all your photos to your hard drive. Well at least it doesn't like just get rid of them. It could be worse. No, it just holds them for you. It holds them ransom until you renew your Pro account. You guys, you know actually I'm holding out for Text America to come back. Did you guys ever use Text America like before Flickr? I can't say that. To like share photos? No. Yeah, it was uploading pictures from my Trio 600 on this thing. And you know, they were like literally like 200 by 300. And then I would post them onto my web log that I had at the time. Your live journal? Yeah. I'm reading up on Text America right now. It was an amazing service. I was like, you guys, this is awesome. And they're like, okay, whatever. And now, you know, the same kind of idea has turned into something like get bought for a billion dollars. So you're saying that Text America is the friendster of photo sharing services. That's what you're saying. It could have been. It's like the live journal of photo sharing. Yeah. Oh yeah, hit the Deadpool on December 1st, 2007. That died early. Yeah. Tragic. What other app news? I mean, there's just been a ton, like Snapchat added video. Facebook is rumored to launch a Snapchat thing so you can send self-destructing pictures and videos to people. You mentioned the YouTube capture thing. Facebook is native on Android now, which I'm really happy about because it was so terrible before. And then Facebook is apparently going to try again with Nearby, which is based on Gowalla, right? Or like it's like the people that worked on Gowalla were happy. I believe so. Yeah. They integrated the team, if not the technology, when they bought Gowalla. So are they going to break that up into a separate app? We've got a bunch of apps from Google. We've got a bunch of apps now from Facebook. It's not enough just to have a popular app. You need to start trying to take over the whole screen. Right. Yeah, I can totally envision a world five or ten years from now where Facebook basically resembles Google in almost every way with deep search, not just across people but across the entire internet, and then all these other services that, like you say, Dieter, are broken out on your device. They're all going that way. Apple's going that way. And so I think it's going to be a very challenging environment for Google in ways that they're not accustomed to being challenged. The chat is all up in your junk, Chris, about not understanding Flickr Pro and why it's awesome. I'm a Picasa man. I don't know what to tell you. So there was even rumors that Facebook could be going for Google's bread and butter in advertising with a purchase of Microsoft's whatever it was called, which is an ad displaying platform just like AdWords. And they were going to move to, no, that was Amazon that was going to move to a bidding model, which also goes after that. That's another thing entirely. Let's talk hardware. Yeah, so the HTC M7, 4.7 inches, 468 PPI, Sense 5. I hope Sense 5 is like, you know what makes sense? We're just not doing it anymore. This is called Sense 5. It looks like it enjoyed 4.2. Any manufacturer that doesn't do a 4K sub-5 inch display in 2013 is dead to me. Like 4K or die. Another 1080p garbage. I've moved on. Well, and we've got the Sony Yuga coming out in 2013. Great name. I hope that's the retail name. Or Xperia Yuga, I guess it would be. And then, so I think what we can expect is like Sony's probably going to show their stuff at CES. And then HTC is going to show their stuff at Mobile World Congress. And then Samsung is going to be later in the year again. We know that the S4 is not, it's definitely not going to be CES. I'm betting it's not going to be Mobile World Congress again. I'm hoping that Samsung brings a sequel to the Galaxy Beam to MWC. Oh god. Because their show stopped at MWC last year. Well they just announced the Grand, which is a 5 inch device, but it's mid-range. So welcome to a world where giant Android phones can now be kind of sucky. Galaxy Grand is another winner of a name. I think we're not going to be able to escape 5 inch devices next year. It's just going to be like every single manufacturer is going to have them between, you know, HTC's already got it, Samsung's already got it, Samsung's moving it down market. There's this rumor of a 6.3 inch Note 3, Galaxy Note 3. Which kind of has some credence. It's not solid at this point, but there's some credibility to it. So that's scary. Very scary. I mean, like the Note 2, I think both of you guys have played with the Note 2 at this point, right? Yeah, I can just barely, like you want to handle it like a phone, but realistically you have to handle it like a tablet, otherwise you're going to drop it. And at 6.3, there will be no getting around it. Because even if you, like I said in my post last week about this rumor, even if you took the current chassis of the Note 2 and extended the screen out to the very edge, you'd only be at something like 5.7 or 5.8 inches. And that's assuming they can completely eliminate the bezel like on the Razr M. So they're going to have to expand the size of the chassis anyway you slice it. And that's a very scary thought. That's a frightening thought. Well, just think about a phone. When this thing comes out and it's this big, it's a small tablet. Just think about the size of the battery that will be in that thing though. It will be 4,000 milliamp hour minimum. Yeah. Well, HTC is not going to make a big screen Windows phone, speaking of big screens. I mean, that makes sense, but it's a bummer. The whole point of Windows Phone 8 was we were supposed to let manufacturers go crazy on weird specs. How many Titan 2's do you think they sold? Oh my god. I mean. Well, they sold enough Titan 1's to make a Titan 2. And it's all relative, I guess, right? Because HTC hasn't released a 4.5 or 4.7 inch Windows Phone 8, but Nokia's got a 4.5 inch one and Samsung's is. How big is the Samsung display? 4.6 or 4.7 or 4.8, something like that. Yeah, I think it's... What? What did you say about Nokia? Well, Nokia's got the 4.5 inch 920. Yeah, and the ATVS display, I think, is sourced from the Galaxy S3. Right, since that'd be 4.8 inch, so. Right. Speaking of the ATVS, where... It's out. Somebody in our forums has one. In the US or in Europe? I don't know, I just saw the forums. I think Tom said that it went on sale in the UK for like half a second and they sold like two of them and we're like, we're out of stock. Because I know he's been trying to get one. I want an ATVS only because it's difficult to get. That's the only reason I want it. If you have one, Chris, it's like a crappy Galaxy S2 is what it feels like. Ouch. A Galaxy S2? Yeah, it feels like a crappy GS2. Ouch. That's interesting. I wonder why Samsung... I don't know if it's the specs, sorry, but... What do you think Samsung's motivation is for like half-assing a single Windows Phone 8 device? I don't know. You know what it was? Samsung really wants to be in with Windows RT for convertibles and tablets and stuff like that. I bet Microsoft was like, yeah, well you gotta throw us a bone with Windows Phone 8. Yeah, no, that's exactly what happened. And Samsung was like, okay, package and ship. Yeah, we'll put our B team on that right away. Yeah. And you know how Samsung can... If they put their mind to it, they can probably turn around a new phone from quote-unquote scratch in probably like 10 days. Well, it's part spin, right? This is the GM model from the 90s when GM, Buick, Pontiac, and everyone else, they all had the same car with a different badge on the front of it. This is the... Oh, what was that car called? The K-Car? No, the Cadillac Samaran of... What? I've never heard of this. The Cadillac Samaran was the Cadillac version of the Cavalier in the 80s. You are lying to me. Cadillac would not rebadge a Cavalier. I wouldn't challenge Chris on this, to be honest with you. My mother has worked for GM for 45 years. I know a thing or two about GM vehicles. Which Cavalier were they rebadging? Was it the boxy one? Yeah. Because I owned like three of those. So you know what this really reminds me of is if you're familiar with the Pontiac Solstice, which is literally a sports car for Pontiac that GM went and dug into its parts bins and was like, we're using a suspension from this, an engine from this, and an interior from this, and then we're just going to wrap a slightly new shell around it. And that's exactly what the Solstice was. And that's what a T-vest feels like. Yeah. I just dropped a link to the Samaran in our Hangout chat, by the way. Which I don't have open. How many chats? So many chats. Put it in the post, man. Is that how you pronounce it? Samaran? I don't know how you pronounce it. It's got to be Sim-a-ron. No, it would have to be two M's to be Samaran. I don't know. I'm not good with English language, but you can see what I'm talking about. It's a cavalier. Anyway, yeah. This is such a dumpster fire of a car. Oh my god. No, it is. It is. It's one of the... This is the car that nearly destroyed GM. GM's path to destruction started with this vehicle. And it culminated in them going bankrupt. But so anyway, the T-vest, I think, is the Cadillac Samaran of... Wow. My god, this thing is hideous. Wow. Yeah. OK. So, yeah. The only reason I will be buying in a T-vest is because it's hard to find. Not because actually... How much will you pay to import it? That's the question. Yeah. No, not a penny more than $850. That's my limit. That is where I draw the line. So let's talk about the Nexus 4 and the supply issues. They're putting the blame squarely on LG. Yeah, but then he took the Google Plus post down, didn't he? Oh, did he? Yeah, I think he did. So this Google guy posted... He basically was like, I'm totally sorry that we suck at shipping Google Pluses. Or Nexus 4s. Wow. They suck at shipping Google Pluses too. Where does that come from? Dieter hasn't woken up yet. If you notice, we're a little bit earlier than usual, so that hour and a half. You are absolutely right. They do suck at shipping Google Pluses. That was not an incorrect statement. Yeah, I don't know if the comment's still there or not. Anyway, it's LG's fault for not being able to get it to them. The supplies from the manufacturer are scarce and erratic. That's pretty harsh. That's pretty damning, yeah. I'm totally not surprised by it. But that just makes it worse. Not only are supplies scarce and erratic, but Google can't get their storefront together. We've been complaining about it over and over again. Yeah, they have no idea how to run a retail supply chain. It's retail 101. The hardest part with retail is customer service. You're face-to-face dealing with the customer. And Google barely has to do that because people just click buy and they have to deal with the problem after the fact if it happens. The simple part is making sure that you have enough of product X to sell to the customers and telling the customer whether you have it or don't have it. At this point, I don't even know what the Nexus program is for. They can't sell devices. They're not trying to be really serious about getting big volume with it. They say that they want it to showcase what the best of what Android can be, but every single Nexus device is just some slightly repackaged version of an Android phone that's already out there from another OEM. It's nerfed in some tragic way. With the Galaxy Nexus, it was the camera. With the Nexus 4, obviously, it's LTE. What will it be with the next one? The only thing I can think of why the Nexus program even exists is they're like, well, we need some modern hardware to develop stock Android on because that's what we do. So we'll have somebody give us something we can put stock Android on and, well, what the hell, we've already got to make 5,000 of them for Google employees. We might as well make 100,000 because screw it. That's what the Nexus is. It's a playground. We've got to make fun of it so screw it. It's a playground for the stock Android developers. Where else do you see stock Android except for on the Nexus devices? You don't. Exactly. Yeah. As tragic as that is, maybe we'll start to see it more with Motorola beginning in 2013. Maybe with Motorola, but we won't from HTC. We recently, Jeff, one of our guys out in Japan, interviewed one of HTC's design directors and he pretty much flatly said that Sense is the way that we're going. And hey, I give them credit for developing a plan and sticking to it. I do not give them credit for being able to make a UX that doesn't make you want to throw the phone at the wall. A lot of people love Sense or at the very least tolerate it. I know a lot of people, a lot of normals with HTC devices, they've just come to understand and expect that this is how their phone works. So the fact that they've created an experience that can be comprehended by normal people is good, I guess. There's nice bits, but at this point I can't get over the feeling that there's something slow here. And their design aesthetic and big, huge gradient buttons doesn't help with that either. So I think the problem is that all of us know what stock Android is really like and how much better it is and how much more intuitive and nicer looking and faster. The person going into the average phone store doesn't because they never see it because it's only on Nexus devices. So that's why Sense works. Do you guys think Motorola's going to do it? Do you think Google and Motorola are going to like, here it is, Motorola? Well remember we pointed out... Well okay yeah, when I interviewed them back in the day, when I went to the Droid M launch event, not the launch event but the really giving review units out to people event, they're basically like, yeah, you know, Verizon makes us do it. I've got to find the exact quote. But they just don't have the power. And I don't know if they will now with Google, and I'm betting not. I've got to find this thing. Somebody in chat, find me this post. Crowd sourcing, I like it. Oh, but yeah, no, Motorola calls stock Android the right thing but bows to Verizon customization. Going forward we're going to try and be as close to the base as we can be because we think that's the right thing for users. Well I've got to wonder though how much Verizon's customization that means. Because like, if you look at Motorola's Android 4.1 phones now because they've got the HD X and the HD up to 4.1 and the M, there's still like these UI tweaks that are definitely Motorola. They've got that special access bar on the left home screen. The home screen layout is actually really different because you only start with one and the launch is a little different and things like that. I don't think any of that is mandated by Verizon. I think Verizon is like, we want the My Verizon app on there, we want VZ Navigator, we want our suite of apps and if we're getting paid by Amazon, we want you to put all these Amazon apps on as well. So I think they really could do essentially stock Android and just shove the Verizon apps on there. Because that's more than likely what Verizon is looking for. Yeah. Yeah, I love Motorola's hardware. I love the directions that they've been going. I don't love it. I wouldn't say I love it. No, I mean, I think, yeah, love is the wrong word. I am encouraged by the direction, the things that they've been trying to pursue in the past 18 months with their devices. Not at all. The Matrix HD is kind of a stinker. But I think the Razer series is a very promising line. But I think Google's CFO made a point in their last earnings call. They made a very, very specific point of saying that when they bought the company, they had this long pipeline of pre-committed devices that they needed to get out before they really started to take control of what was coming out of that division. So I think that that was a tell. I think they were trying to point out to people that there would be a very different kind of Motorola device coming, but until 2013. Whether the partnership with Verizon continues, I think, is another question altogether. I think it would be pretty amazing to see a Nexus-looking device come from Motorola because it's well known that Google has a very influential design directive on the Nexus devices. And the Galaxy Nexus and the Nexus 4 are virtually identical looking until you get really close to them. And if that's Google's design ethos for smartphones and it makes the Motorola team do that, that'd be kind of cool. Yeah. I would love to see, like, they continue the thing with Verizon and Verizon gets the Droid, but they're like, you know what, we're just making the same thing and releasing it GSM Unlocked and it's with LTE and it's the same thing but stock. Because that's what they did. You know, they did it with the Milestone, I think, back in the day. Remember that? Yeah. There's a Droid. Just saying. Yes. Yes, I do. Yes. I had to write my brain for a minute, but yes, I do. Yeah. You know old crappy Cadillacs. I know old crappy Motorola phones. That's how it works. Well, I hate to say this, guys, but we actually have got some stuff we need to run and do in like two minutes. So we got to keep this podcast short so you won't get to hear us complain about lawyers and Samsung injunctions, which have been lifted or aren't happening. They're not going to get banned in the US. Or Blackberry 10 or Sprint buying Clearwire, but those are all boring stories anyway, so you know. Sorry, Blackberry 10. If you want to follow us on Twitter, you should. I'm back on Danisdcc for Chris' Z-Powered Gladys. Vlad Savov, we will hopefully see him again soon. We will see you next week. Thanks for watching. Bye, guys. See you later.