 Hello. Welcome to the Verge Mobile Show where we have a hard time knowing when we start. This is episode 33, it's the week of January 14, 2012. We have a skeletal crew, we're missing Chris Ziegler, but our other three anchors are here and I feel really good about that. If you don't know who we are, we'll introduce ourselves because that's how we do. I am Dieter Bowen. I'm Vlad Savov. I'm Dan Seifert. We're back from CES. I'm still feeling it. I was really good and then I wasn't so good and that's where I'm at right now. I need to get good because I want to see my three-month-old, two-month-old, I have no idea how many-month-old niece this weekend. If I can't get healthy then I can't do it because she's too young to get immunized against anything. How are you guys feeling? I was feeling great up until like three hours ago when all of a sudden I just got hit with this congestion and kind of a sore throat going on. I was actually making fun of the rest of our team who happened to be pretty much laid out with a flu. Everybody is sick. Chris Ziegler is sick. He's still working because he's a madman, and he literally, if we had him on the show, it would be coughing and phlegm. He'll probably infect people just over the broadcast. He's that bad. Me, on the other hand, I've actually been a very good and punctual human being and I haven't done the whole post-CES staying out until 6 a.m. and then catching a flight at 6.30 a.m. In order to get that I mean the thing is it's cause and effect, right? People do crazy things and then they complain when their bodies can't take them. I only went out one night and I got plenty of sleep afterwards and I feel like I was a very responsible person at CES. As was I. Most of the time that I was losing sleep at CES is because I was working, not partying. I went out once. I think we're all very responsible, but that doesn't change the fact that we're all kind of under the weather at the moment. But at the same time, Dito described our crew as being skeletal. Our topics of conversation are actually pretty skeletal too. There hasn't been that much going on post-CES. No, there really hasn't. But we've got a few things to discuss, but I can't promise that we're going to be here for an hour and a half. In fact, I promise you that we won't be here for an hour and a half. We can bring this out. That just sounded like the challenge going for me. Did you guys know that I worked my way through college at a place called 33 Minute Photo? We developed photos in 33 minutes or less. Wow. That's where I learned how to color correct. I got pretty good at it. When I was in college, we stuck to the one hour limit on our photo developing. Oh man, got to do it fast when you're working at the Lunds grocery store. You can't screw around. Seriously, mobile things. What's happened since we had our get together? I guess let's talk about RIM and Blackberry 10 for a while. The announcement is coming up on the 30th. Just got two weeks. Every single thing has leaked. I don't know what they have left in the hopper. I talked to them at CES. Price and release date. Price and release date and a couple of surprises probably. I'm still guessing it's going to be related to how they're showing video and movie purchases and music purchases. One of the many, many, many things that leaked was a training manual, I think, for Rogers employees that looked like it was produced by RIM. It said there that they're definitely going to be selling music and movies. I think it said they're targeting 70,000 apps for launch, which is a pretty respectable number. There was one bit in the slide that was crazy hilarious. I don't think we posted on it because everything in there we already knew. It was something like, I got to find it now. Do you remember what it was? Yeah. Facebook and RIM. Facebook and Google. I got to find it. While other platforms like Facebook and Google are harvesting information about you and what you're doing online, we have built a platform that protects what's important to you. Wow. That's hard, man. It's all related to their security and blah, blah, blah, blah. That's a big hit Android right there. To be honest, that actually sounds almost exactly to the word the same as what the Chinese government is saying about personal data. It's a case of if you get online, whether mobile or on a desktop, you need to disclose your real identity to your ISP. Then the Chinese government will protect that identity for you. To me, this whole phrasing of RIM will protect your information. The most protective thing RIM can do is not to collect my information. Leave it the hell alone. Then I'm fine. The way that they're doing email is direct over IMAP. We know that it's going to support CalDAV and CardDAV directly for talking to Google. Unless you sign up for BBM and you sign up for the BlackBerry account for MoteWipe, that was the other thing. It's definitely going to support remote wipe. You saw that in the manual. I suppose you don't have to give your information to RIM to use a BlackBerry 10 device. Then yeah, that is great. That is protecting my information. It's not being too nosy. We saw the Z10 leak. Again, there's a 10 or 12 minute walkthrough of everything on the phone. It's stuff we've seen. It's the hub. It's everything. I don't know what's left. Everything is leaked. Everything. It looks fine. It looks fast. I'm excited to try it. I know I'm the only one. No, no, no. I'm excited to play with it at least. I hope that they can get some Android apps legitimately into the BlackBerry app world. If you don't know what my legitimately joke was, there was a... Adam, do we talk about this? There was a drama where Android developers were seeing their apps show up in BlackBerry app world. In a couple of cases, it was because somebody had actually pirated it and then submitted it and was trying to make money off of selling it. I talked to a group of people at CES and they were like, look, this is a very, very tiny problem. Of course, we have to try and stop this stuff. If something gets through, we kill it right away. I don't think it's a huge drama. They did point out one interesting thing, which was a lot of Android developers, they make their app but they don't necessarily distribute it. They let some other company sort of handle that. Submitting it to the market, submitting it to marketers and other things. Sometimes those third party distributors end up submitting it to app world and the developers don't know about it. That stuff gets pulled too. I'm really interested to see just how well these Android apps work on BlackBerry 10. If it works really well, I could force a situation where I would want to somehow hack it so even if it's not in the BlackBerry app world, I would still find a way to grab it off of Android and stick it on there, stick it on a BlackBerry, which isn't, I suppose, technically, you know... Legal? On the up and up, we'll say. Right. But it would be an easy way to solve the app problem if in fact they have an app problem. Oh, they do. Everybody has an app problem. Well, everybody but Apple. Even Apple. Even Apple. Two and a half states, Google. Yeah. No, Apple's app problem, I mean, I mentioned this in last week's podcast, to me is a really big one, which is that it's wholly dependent on third party developers. Right. None of those guys are going to run away. I mean, nobody's going to abandon a big revenue source such as iOS, but it's still the case that... Like, I've just been using Nexus 7 that you so kindly handed off to me, Dieter, and I look at the first applications that are put on my home screen. Google owns every single one of them. Chrome, Gmail, Play Store, YouTube, right? Wow. That's the first few apps that I stuck on the home screen. If I go and look at an iOS device, as nice as they are, as nice as the iPad, the iPad Mini, the iPhone are, the first thing I do with the first part of the application is stick them in a folder and then stick that folder on a separate home screen so it's not in my face. Yeah, it's funny that you mentioned that on Android, Google owns the main apps that you use because for me on iOS, Google owns like 90% of the main apps that I use. Right, so it's the same situation. I'm still using Chrome, I'm still using Google Maps on iOS. So in terms of the future, I actually think Google and Android is the most secure platform on the app front, which at the moment is the most important thing with devices. So I mean, Remus is really, really like a bully on having enough apps. I asked him, you know, do you have the apps you need for a successful launch? And it wasn't like, yeah, it was like, yes, we do. Everyone's saying that. It wasn't just like we think so or we hope so or we've got a good plan or anything, it was yes. Well, I mean, Microsoft actually recorded having this conversation with them just before the launch of Windows Phone 7 some two and a half years ago, however long it's been. And they were like, you know what, everybody keeps talking about numbers of apps. What we're going to do is we're going to improve discoverability and we're going to focus on quality of apps. So honestly, it's just marketing talk. Until you get a device out, until you actually give people apps that they want to use, and they don't need to be the big brand name ones, they just need to be good ones. If they're unique, if they're ones that you don't already have on Android and iOS, that's even better. That makes it interesting. Well, I don't know. I feel like, you know, a lot of times, especially people that are going to be running out and buying, say, a BlackBerry 10 within its first month of release. Running out, lining up, are people that are going to be already owning smartphones, are you going to have apps that they're using, services that they're using? Well, smartphones or BlackBerries. Or BlackBerries, yeah. Well, hopefully, RIM hopes that people who are using iOS devices and Android devices, et cetera, are going to be interested in buying a BlackBerry 10 platform. And if, you know, you get there and say there's no Dropbox app or say there's no way that I can control my Google Voice account or there's no... There is a Dropbox app. That was one of the, I think, the video leak, the video 10 leak. So we have Dropbox, cool. So, I mean, but if those apps aren't there, then it's a problem. And even if there's like an alternative version, if you're already bought into a system and, say, you own storage or you're paying for cloud storage, you can't access it through a third-party knockoff app or it's because the official app isn't there, then it's kind of a disappointment. And, you know, we're seeing the same thing on Windows Phone. There's a third-party apps. For a long time, there's a third-party Dropbox app that you had to pay for and it offered like a crappier experience than you get on the other platforms. And so it's just like kind of just a crappy experience all around if those, you know, core apps or key apps aren't there available for you. By the way, Dan, I love that kind of sending thumbs up when you heard that there's a Dropbox app for BlackBerry 10. It's like, yeah, good job. Now you need to do... Well, I mean, on the subject, it was just recently announced, slash, revealed that Room got 15,000 apps submitted with its Portathons. So it had a couple of Portathons, which is marathon coding sessions to port your apps, I'm guessing. It's just a cheesy, cheesy name. But in any case, they've been... Well, I mean, that's actually, it's encouraging, but it's also, it's important for these developers to get in at App Launch. I remember, I mean, watching Windows Phone launch and even watching WebOS launch, there's a real chance for somebody that hasn't been able to get traction on another platform to suddenly get traction on a brand new platform because they're the only app that does X or Y and people are looking for it and they just happen to find it. So it makes a lot of sense to be there for that initial wave, whether or not it matters in six months and that's a whole other story. But it makes sense. But Room incentivizes as well. I think there's $100 as a little bonus if your app is approved to get into the store and then, I forget exactly what the conditions are, but you can be entered into a drawer to get a BlackBerry 10 dev alpha device. Well, and there's also the guarantee that if you get, sell a certain number of our apps, but don't make a certain amount of money that they're going to guarantee you $10,000. I forget exactly what the terms are there. You have to make $1,000 with your app, but if you don't make like $10,000, then they'll give you the rest or something like that, if I remember correctly. Guys, that guarantee was issued something like six, eight months ago. Even longer, yeah, that's ancient. I never said it was new, man. The point is Room is just going to be like, guarantee, we don't have archives that stretch that part back. Forget about it. But also, let's actually look at these numbers. I actually find them kind of stupid, frankly, because the really serious and committed app developers, are they really going to be tempted by a $100 incentive? And then if their app is moderately successful, getting entered into a drawer to get a dev alpha device, it's kind of like you just rub your shoulders. And it also reminds me of what Microsoft recently did around the Windows Phone 8 launch where they lowered the entry-level price to sign up for a dev account. Microsoft's problem wasn't getting 16-year-old teenage boys from India to put together apps. That's exactly what has been happening. Look at it this way, honestly, what else can Room be doing to support developers to get stuff? We're assuming they're doing all the biz dev talks. They said, we're talking to everybody we can. With PowerPoint presentations, I'm sure. If it's a technical problem, we'll fix that. And if it's a business problem, we'll fix that. So they're doing what they can for the big-name stuff. They're doing what they can for the little guys. The only other thing that I can think of that they need to do is launch the damn phones. And sell devices. Right. And it's like a chicken and egg problem because if they don't have the apps, the odds of selling the devices are much lower. And if they don't sell the devices, the interest in developers is much lower. But really, it just needs to be, you've got to get these devices in people's hands. People have got to be like, I want this app. Yeah. I'll pay for this if it's here. One thing that actually surprised me is the big four carriers in the US, Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, and Sprint, have all said, yeah, we're going to carry BlackBerry 10. And I expected one of them to sort of sit back, kind of. But I mean, RIM's got long histories with all of these carriers, obviously. And we know it's going to be on everything in Canada. We know it's going to be a worldwide launch. So I know people are tired of the webOS comparison, but they appear to have solved a couple of those problems. It's faster. And it's going to be on all the carriers. They're not going to have to wait and be stuck in an exclusive with somebody, hopefully, for very long. So insofar as we've seen somebody try to take on the Android iOS duopoly, we saw Windows Phone take a crack at it a couple of times now. And for various reasons, it hasn't had a huge impact. And I'm sure that our Windows Phone-loving readers are going to be sending me emails. Hi, guys. But it's true. And I don't know that BlackBerry 10 is either. But it seems like they've managed to avoid the biggest and most obvious pitfalls. We'll see what the app situation is really like on the 30th. But in terms of possibility of setting themselves up to have a successful launch, they're doing most of the obvious things. The question is, will it be enough? And I just don't know. It's just what Bez mentioned here with respect to the US carriers. This is something that Lesyan tweeted on Twitter. Lesyan being a character. As opposed to tweeting on Google Plus or tweeting on Facebook social graph. We need to talk about that graph search, which is just bonkers to me. But this is a very good point. RIM is essentially being used as a dummy. RIM is desperate to do exactly what you are saying. It's ubiquitously available. So I'm sure RIM is bending a knee in negotiations with Verizon and everybody else. But all the carriers are using it as a dummy third option, quotation marks, a fourth option, guess whatever, to iOS and Android. So that when they go to talk to Samsung, when they go to talk to Apple about the next device, they can say, well, you know what? RIM is coming out with these devices. So I think that's the major stimulus for all the carriers to carry BlackBerry 10. Just because they need that extra option. Like you're saying, Dieter, Windows Phone has been tepid. It hasn't taken off. It hasn't been a legitimate competitor to the big two. So the fact that BlackBerry 10 is unknown actually plays in the carrier's favor. Maybe in five hours' time we'll know that BlackBerry 10 is a flop. Or a success. Or a success. Well, we also know that just as with Android and with Samsung, at least early Samsung, maybe not so much now, RIM is more willing to play ball with carrier requests and demands than Apple is. And so the carriers might be more interested in pushing BlackBerry devices themselves because they know that they can get whatever little sweet kickbacks and sweetheart deals and extra apps on the phone or whatever from RIM. And they know they're not going to get it off of the iPhone. Yeah, but I mean, how much does that really affect their bottom line? I think what does affect their bottom line is the amount of subsidies that they have to pay on each phone. The iPhone is definitely the highest subsidized device on any carrier's lineup. So if a carrier is able to push another device that they don't have to shell out $450 for upfront when they sign a person up, then it certainly would be appealing to them. And I mean, not to knock the Z10 before I've actually played with it for real. I mean, let's be honest, it's basically commodity hardware. The screen is pretty good. You know, it's using, I think one of the leaks we saw was a Snapdragon S4 processor. You know, it's basically, we can see all these Android manufacturers kick out Android devices and there's no reason that RIM couldn't do the same with BlackBerry 10 devices because they're using the same parts. In fact, one of the things at CES, some executive popped off and said that they're going to have six BlackBerry 10 devices in multiple price points in 2013, which is more than the two we had known for sure, which is hilarious. It could be different SKUs maybe, but I don't know. Because we know that there's going to be different LTE SKUs for the different LTE markets. Right, but he said at different price points. So I mean, that's kind of a big deal because up until that statement, we had understood that BlackBerry 10 would be for the higher end devices and then RIM was still going to be selling BlackBerry 7 and 7.1. Like, it just launched, what was that thing it just launched on T-Mobile a week ago or two just before CES with 7.1 on it. And that was going to be the entry level. But now with different price points, maybe RIM is intending to bring BlackBerry 10 down market a lot sooner than we had expected. So again, that's another point in its favor as far as getting it out there as much as possible. Just like being on all the carriers or all the main carriers in the US, getting it across multiple price points is important. I think Dieter just dropped the mic and was about ready to walk away. He didn't want to talk about the 9320 or whatever the heck that thing is. I mean, wait, wait, but seriously, how bad is it that this is the Verge Mobile show and we're like just riffing and referencing whatever the hell that weird BlackBerry thing was. I mean, we're so disinterested in RIM's current quote-unquote range of devices. Well, it's just not differentiated at all, you know? I know, I know. And it's just so dire. It's such a dire, dire situation. I mean, I can't help but feel that what we have right now, the situation we're all facing right now is basically a situation that us tech journalists face when we get a bag of swag, right? So you don't want it. You're not even allowed to take it because it's swag, right? But the thing is, at the same time, you're curious. You want to know what these people put together to try and seduce you into writing good things about them. So it's like curiosity is the overwhelming thing. You want to see, and then ultimately, just like a bag of swag, you're horribly, horribly disappointed by it. And it's exactly what you expected, even though your eternal optimism kept you going and made you open the bag. And then what you do is you take that bag of swag from somebody like Samsung, you walk over a few booths, and then hand it over to somebody like Fujifilm. I'm cracking up because Vlad and I were walking around the floor the last day of CES, and Vlad did exactly that. So this is not such a hypothetical. Yeah, I mean, Samsung have, okay, first of all, credit to Samsung for having a dedicated area for journalists and bloggers. Like just giving people a place to sit down, have a reliable, fast connection, and have a drink is good. They were serving this blue, hypnotic type of drink. I couldn't find this lounge, by the way. I was at Samsung's booth for like an hour and a half. I walked right by Netflix. It was right outside the Samsung Cube. It was outside the Cube. Oh, it was inside the Cube. Yeah, it's like there's the Borg Cube that's painted white, and then outside of that was the journalists. Let's actually discuss that a little bit because Samsung is really working hard to make itself stand out and to insulate itself from its competition. The way it did that at CES was literally... By making itself stand out. Yeah, well, Samsung has always had a big booth, at least for the past four years when I've been at CES. It's always had a big booth. It's always competed with LG for how much real estate it occupies, and Sony. But this year, it actually built a Cube around this booth so that you couldn't make any mistake about when you're in Samsung's territory and when you're out of it. Everybody else, you can kind of just walk through their booths and into somebody else's. It's kind of communist in that respect. There's no walls. You can just walk through LG, stride straight into Panasonic, and then stumble into Sharp. With Samsung, there's a big-ass Cube. Humongous Cube, where the whole thing is contained, and it's all Samsung. And not only that, but one of the entrances to the Cube had their giant 85-inch easel 4K TV. And so not only could you only go in one way, there are two entrances. One of the entrances was the entire show mobbed with people. So you had to fight your way in and fight your way out. It was crazy. Which is exactly what Samsung wants. It wants crowds, and it wants to crush people. If there are deaths there, Samsung would be like, yes, achievement. We have so many people coming that they can't even survive entry. Internally, someone gets promoted while Samsung pushes out a PR saying they're very sorry for her. Oh, that's so terrible. I'm sorry. You said, Vlad, you said you had something to say about Graph Search, Facebook's Graph Search. I mean, I was there at the event. I mean, it looks fine. I don't know. We've got a couple of reports up on it. I think there's another one. I'm sorry. I couldn't be more bored by that. I was so looking forward to something vaguely mobile related. It wasn't a phone. There was no phone, and there was no mobile product. So even all the way at the whole event, not a single thing mobile was mentioned until the Q&A section when somebody got up and was like, when can I use this on my phone? And Zach was like, ah, we're working on it. Eh. I don't know. Okay. Well, thankfully I've had enough time to censor my question, which is, what the funk is this garbage? Wow. Like, Facebook has been such a data mining operation for such a long time, and now they're giving us a social search which is, in order for it to quote unquote work, we need to give Facebook even more data. And we need to create, I mean, this is a stimulus to make us create even more connections and have even more, you know, barely acquaintances turned into quote unquote friends. It's just, I mean, I see, listen, from Facebook's perspective, this graph search, it's a perfect idea. It's perfect. It's like a supermarket loyalty card. Like, minimum expense for them, maximum ceiling in terms of obtaining even more stuff which is valuable for them. What does this help me? I mean, it helps you. The picture search is really great. I mean, I look at it this way. People are analyzing this through the same lens that people analyze the change in Instagram's terms of service. And Neil made this point really well. We fundamentally mistrust Facebook, and everything that Facebook does, we look at it through that lens of distrust. If you can step back from that lens of distrust and be like, well, Facebook needs better search. So if Facebook is going to build good search, what's the natural search for Facebook content that makes sense in the context of Facebook? And I think it's pretty close to what they built. The interesting thing to me is, like, how influential is this kind of searching going to be in the future? I mean, you don't search for this kind of stuff on Google, right? You search for a different kind of thing on Google. And you search for a different kind of thing on Facebook. And so will those two worlds kind of collide at some point? Like Google did search plus your world and stuck Google plus stuff into its core search. People got pissed. Facebook is kind of like their Bing stuff is kind of like an add-on. It's way at the bottom. It's pretty terrible. But neither one of them are colliding. And so the big question for me is, like, it's fine that Facebook has added search. And I hope it gets on mobile soon. That's great. But what happens in two years when, you know, the stuff that I want to search for is an amalgam of the stuff that's on Facebook and the stuff that Google can find? And for the audio podcast system, the theater just did a dance. That was his amalgamation dance. It's my I need to stay awake and I'm standing up amalgamation dance. Well, I mean, I should caveat any impressions I have about it by the fact that I don't have it yet. So I haven't used it. And Dieter is I think the only one of the three of us that's actually used it. So yeah. Have you guys signed up? It's up on my account. I signed up. But I'm on the wait list. I didn't get let into the cool kid party yet. Yeah, no, I got I think I think they let people at the event get on the wait list early. And so we went and shot a video, Ellis hamburger and I right away. And the video was terrible because I was like I was tired. I was shaky. I forgot my little tent pole tripod, which I feel stupid about. And so it was a terrible video. And so I go back and I start cutting the video. I'm like, this is really bad. And then I checked and I had it. And so I gave my Facebook credentials to Thomas Huston. I was like, don't look at my junk. Have fun. Do a real hands on with a proper video producer. And it worked out great. He did a great job. The video producers. See, that's the kind of trust that Facebook wants. The kind of trust you had in Thomas Huston not to totally destroy your Facebook world. Yeah. That's something that he totally could have. And the rest of my world too because my world is completely on Facebook. That's the point. I think Dan's point is very, at least a very important thing, which is that Facebook is increasingly being designed for people who use it in a really committed way. Like me, for example, what I did recently was I just trimmed down my Facebook friend list to 18. I've been trying to. I try to trim down my Facebook friend list. I go in. I've got, because there was a while where I was adding everybody. When I started at the first, I was like, oh yeah, sure. Come on in. I want to be able to talk to you guys. But now I'm trying to trim it down. I only managed to last about 15 minutes before I get tired of it because there's so much scrolling and waiting and clicking and waiting and checking and blah, blah, blah. It's really hard to just like de-friend everybody or just quickly get rid of people. There's lots of clicks. It's super exciting. That's my design, I'm sure. Dude, everything about Facebook is really hard and frustrating. Sometimes I post Verge stories to the Verge Facebook stream. Today I will click post. It will not show up. It will seem like it's still loading. But I will know it's posted. If I go back to the Facebook page, it's there. The whole interface is kind of busted. I got to be honest with you. I think our generation or our demographic has a version to Facebook that is not shared by the rest of the world. People older and people younger. I feel like we came on, it was early, it was hip, it was cool, it was way better than MySpace. And now it's kind of like all of our old college friends and older friends are there and some family stuff. But the majority of people are still loving life, playing words with friends, hooked up to Facebook. They're still posting photos. So there's a bit of a... It's hard to get a sense of how the vast majority of people really feel about Facebook because the vast majority of people are just using it and just fine with it. It's the internet for them. I don't mean to sound like an elitist, but I feel like that's just lag. Perpetual lag between the guys who tack on to the more useful and more functional things first and then the guys who catch up later. Lag is the reason that AOL still exists. No, the reason that AOL still exists is because have you ever tried to cancel a dial up AOL plan? It's harder than unfriending every single person on Facebook individually. Or one billion is what you're saying. Yes, all one billion. So if you were to friend all one billion and then go ahead and unfriend all of them, you'd have an easier time than trying to cancel your dial up subscription with AOL that you've had since 1995. Yeah. But that's good to know. I'll keep it in mind and try to stay clear of AOL services. But also let's drop a quick mention for MySpace because they just this week launched their new service. Justin Timberlake, baby. I haven't listened to the song yet. No, it's terrible. What's his nickname? How do we refer to Justin Timberlake with only like four or five letters? I have no idea. What do you mean? Isn't it JT? JT? Just call him JT. I thought it was JT. Just call him JT. Too many syllables in his name? We can't... Yeah, exactly. I mean, we can't go to that effort. Welcome to The Verge Mobile Show, everybody, where your favorite mobile editors display just how out of touch with pop culture they are and how sad and ancient their music tastes are and how much they're not like you because they're just old. Hey, hey, hey. Even Justin Timberlake is getting a bit ancient now. I mean, he's been around for over a decade. Okay. So this is really funny because just last week at CES, I think I was complaining to a bunch of our coworkers, and Dieter, you were probably in the car at the time, about how Justin Timberlake hadn't released anything since 2006. And I was like, what's he doing? And then like Monday, his new song comes out and I'm like, what is this? This is not what I asked for. So I'm on the up and up. I'm sorry, Dan, you asked for more Justin Timberlake in the world. I liked his last album. It was great. Okay. There you go. We'll leave that for Dan is weird podcast. Why? No. Okay. No, no, seriously. Okay, they did this cross promotional thing where he launched a song and they launched the new MySpace to the public. It was really accessible via invites. I jumped into it. I got into it. It's really bare bones. I think the whole idea is for your content to be highlighted and to be prominent. It tries to have a more modern UI. If you just start typing, it does this massive screen dominating search, which I actually kind of enjoy. I find that fun, interesting. But it's just bare. So I've had a beta invite for months now and when I first got it, I clicked in. A beta invite? Yes. A beta, yeah. I clicked in and I think I filled out half of my profile and then I just was like, I give up. I don't want to go through this anymore. There was nothing drawing me there to like, give me an answer. Okay, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, what makes you guys happy? Because when all the stuff is there, you complain that all the stuff is there and Facebook's trying to pull all your junk in and make you fill stuff out and have content. You're like, oh, that's creepy, I don't want all that stuff. But then when nothing's there and it's an empty, what's your perfect happy medium where you feel good about a social network? I've got two points to raise. First thing, you just said Facebook is trying to pull your junk in. Well, they did release a Snapchat clone. They did release a Snapchat clone. I mean, I'm just saying. Where is it with MySpace? Fair point. I mean, listen, if you force me to pick between Facebook and MySpace's interfaces, it's an easy, easy win for MySpace, granted. But Dan's point is with the new MySpace, what essentially you're doing is, oh, here we go, another new social service. In order for me to make this useful, I need to hook up with other people I'm already hooked up with via Twitter and then start sending MySpace messages between us, which is what I already do on Twitter. Unless you're Brad, who doesn't follow anybody on Twitter. Hey, I follow 78 people. I think that's plenty. How many of them are... Never mind, I'm not going to... I was going to make a carrot joke, but it's mean. It's played. It's tired. No, but dude, just diversify. Use like yellow turnips. Kale? Oh, yellow turnip. Wow. What else have I got? Parsnips. Parsnips are good today. He also likes cauliflower and broccoli. Oh, yes. I don't know how people live without cauliflower. I'm not even joking. Why? It's like a non-food. What can you do with cauliflower except soak it in butter? I mean, that's kind of how I feel about every vegetable, if it's not soaked in butter or cheese or something unhealthy. Well, no, I can appreciate vegetables, but cauliflower, it's just like a... I don't know, it's terrible. You know what the worst though is? The worst is watercress. Watercress is... I hate it. I hate it so much. There's nothing good about watercress. Dude, with cauliflower is the texture, first of all, and then secondly, you do have to refine your palate and not destroy it every weekend with In-N-Out burgers and salty, freaky stuff like that. I didn't get any In-N-Out burgers in Vegas and I was actually quite mad. I was really hoping for an In-N-Out burger and... I have to tell you, this is a little aside. One of our UK... It's not so little anymore, man. Well, a little aside to the digression, okay? But one of our UK writers was crazy enough, and I don't know who's been talking to him, but I will find out, but he was crazy enough on the last day in Las Vegas to walk 45 minutes to the nearest In-N-Out joint to have one of those burgers. Because he was told that it's so very good, he couldn't miss out on it. I'm waiting for the part that sounds unreasonable. Yeah, okay. All I know is that I have to be back in Vegas for CTIA in May, so In-N-Out is going to be top of my list. Exciting. Well, I need to go back to stuff. We're going to be back in Barcelona for Mobile World Congress, all new venue, it's the end of February. Now that is exciting. Yeah, and leaks are starting to come out, and the HTC's M7 flagship, it was basically a render from a demo video or something, and I've got my link wrong in our show notes, so I can't look at it right now. But it looked like, take the back of an iPhone, add an extra grill to it, and make it the front of the... I don't get how people, I guess because of the two-tone design, people are saying it looks like an iPhone. It doesn't look anything like an iPhone to me. It does! No, it doesn't. Oh, I'm looking at it again. Look at the ridge, look at how it's just a square with the round... You know what it looks like? It looks like an Evo 4G LTE. You know what it looks like? It looks like an iPhone. Yeah, it does. Dan, it's two-tone, and it's also the proportions of the bits which are two-tone. The shape is an Evo 4G LTE to me. You're trying too hard, man. Just look at it. How big is the screen supposed to be on this M7 device? 4.7, I think, 1080p. Oh, cure me. Cure me now. I give up. Listen, if... Vlad, did you know that you got a shout-out on Jon Gruber's last podcast, talking about why nobody seems to want to make a flagship 4-inch screen phone? Yeah, somebody tweeted at me about that on Twitter. I'm just going to keep saying that. That's fine. Anyways, looking at this render, okay, iPhone look-alike or not, if the final product is anything like that, that would imply that it's a really small border around the display and a really small bezel. That could be really cool, right? A small footprint, maybe? Yeah, I can't wait for HTC to release another piece of awesome hardware, hobble it with middling software, and have nobody care because Samsung spends almost a billion dollars on marketing. I don't know how much they actually spend. They spend millions upon millions upon millions of dollars on marketing. I don't know how HTC wins at this point. The One X was great. The One XL was a nice spec bump. This thing looks like it's going to be cool and compelling and awesome. I'm sorry. I wish that it would make a dent, but I'm afraid it's not going to. How many HTC commercials do you see on TV? Zero. I see a couple here and there when a device first hits the market, but you see Samsung commercials all the time, all day long for all of their flagship devices. You guys don't need to worry about that because Peter Chao has promised he's going to spend more on marketing because he's convinced that if he markets a 4.7 inch phone with sense hard enough, people are going to buy it. It's true. People would do it. That's wrong. Oh, yeah. That's totally right. If he's right, then it's time to bring out the Nate Palm because people are going to be... Seriously, I'm giving HTC advance warning. If I'm the guy who gets his hands on this 4.7 inch device, the first thing I'm going to say is, he has HTC's latest phone. It's too big. End of story. It just is. No, and you know what? I'm not even going to... What if it feels remarkably small? What if they manage to have a... It won't. It's a 4.7 inch display. It's physics. It's the same reason we don't have an F1.4 lens which is the size of a coin. It's physics. You can't get around it. Here's the thing, and I will completely avoid sounding like a fanboy for any other brand. I'll give you guys the perfect counter example, the HTC One SV. First of all, because of HTC's still confused branding, you don't know what that device looks like because you're not really sure which of the One series it is. But what I can tell you... I mean, come on. Be honest. You don't. Maybe you guys do, but most people will be like, One SV, let me look that up and then I'll know what it's talking about. It's a 4.3 inch Super LCD 2U display. It's the most recent one. It just came out on EE with LTE here in the UK. It's on Cricket here in the US. And it has a flame red back cover and some accents. It looks so good. It looks so good. And you know Eric Lin who works at HTC, one of our good friends, he was saying, now that you guys have the One SV in your hands, you can tell what I mean about it being the best design at HTC since the Nexus One. He recently tweeted on Twitter. And I think he has a point. I don't know that I necessarily agree with him 100%. But it feels good in the hand. It feels like it's the right size. Sense feels like sense, which is bad. But the size of it is right. The 4.3 inch size and form factor is right. It could be slimmer. It could be, you know, it could have high quality materials. It could have more things that convey a flagship device. But it's so much better. It does remind me of the One X in terms of its, as I say, here in the UK it's white. It has a matte white rear cover. It reminds me of the One X, but it feels like the One X in, you know, much more palatable proportions. It just fits. It makes so, so much more sense to me as a device. I expect that it's a WVGA. Right. I mean, I do also feel as much grief as I'm giving to these companies, I do feel like if they want a headline grabbing display, they have to go to 4.7 inches because they can't get those 720p displays. Well, this goes back to the point that I made at CES. The BlackBerry is doing it. Well yeah, they're doing a pretty decent job of it. It's not quite 720p. Isn't it a little over or something? Anyway, what I was making is we need to stop giving these companies engineering credit for building big ass phones because it's easier, I think, at this point than building something that's directly competitive with the iPhone. The iPhone is a marvel of design and packing stuff into a tiny form factor. You know, it's just like you can build a big huge phone with a big huge screen. Well, of course you can because you've got more space to work with. Try and do it smaller. See what you can do. And HTC is capable of it. If you look at the Windows phone 8X has a 4.3 inch 720p display. It's not a massive bulky phone. It's a little too square. It could be a little more ergonomic but it's thin, it's light. I would love to see an Android phone in HTC's lineup with that hardware. And there's also the ReSound which also has a 4.3 inch 720p. Right, now you're just trolling man. Have you held a ReSound? Those two iPhones stacked on top of each other. But ultimately I'm totally on board with what Dieter just said. If you're going for yet another big phone, you're playing it safe. And if HTC looks around at guys like Nokia and Blackberry, the one thing it shouldn't be doing is playing it safe. Because that's what Nokia and Blackberry did for years. I know this for a fact because years and years ago, two or three years ago when I was still writing for Engadget, it was the case that every single article that criticizes Nokia being sluggish in embracing touch screens, Nokia being slow in rolling out an updated touch friendly symbiont, people were like, look at Nokia's market share, they're fine. Nokia took way too long, played it way too safe. RIM, Michael Ziridis, Jim Bausili, they were way too cocky and arrogant about their market share. Took way too long, still taking way too long until this freaking Blackberry 10 thing happens. Played it way too safe until now when they're desperate. I don't think HTC should carry on waiting like this. And I don't think HTC should just carry on doing the same thing because it isn't working out. So just freaking do it. If HTC needs to make a loss on displays but give us an amazing 4.3 inch device, I think it should do it to get some of that competitiveness back against Samsung because at the moment, the way things are shaping up, I mean Samsung is selling phones like crazy. It's building up a brand cache, it's making itself insular from the rest of the other brands and people are starting to really associate with the Samsung brand more so than with Android nowadays. Not entirely, but people are like, it's a Samsung phone. Which matters. And they anticipate the next Galaxy. They're everywhere. I love when one of us makes a point and the other people have nothing to disagree with. We just kind of wait for them to trail off because we have nothing to jump in and say, no, no, you're wrong. Well, just to add to his point, Samsung did announce, I think just this week, that they sold 100 million Galaxy family phones and twice as many Galaxy 3s as Galaxy 2s. They're out there. And every time I travel, I always notice on the plane, say, what people are using or if I'm on a train, what devices they're using. It used to be years ago, it was all Blackberries on a plane, then it's all iPhones and now it's like as many iPhones as I see, I see various Samsung devices in different colors and stuff like that. So the one thing I don't see are HTC devices. Yeah, I mean, Samsung has been just not, how the Galaxy Note became a success, I still don't know. And now the Galaxy Note 2 is just yet another success. It's just kind of crazy. But that's what I'm saying. The only way you can counter that, the only way you can counter that is to be as aggressive and as bonkers as Samsung. Like HTC tried. I mean, before the Galaxy Note, there was something very close in the HTC Flyer, it's just that you were crazy. First you mentioned the ReSound, now you bring up the Flyer. You're really bringing up all of HTC's hits. So the thing is that goes back to what we were talking about, RAM, how it's appearing that RAM is going to be able to get its device on all four carriers at the same time. HTC has not done that yet. It has yet to have a similar device or very close device on all four carriers at the same time. Samsung started that with the Galaxy S2 with minor variants and then the Galaxy S3 blew it out and then the Note 2 blew it out where every carrier, major carrier in the US pretty much wants to have that device on their line up and they're not insisting on dramatically altering it. If you look at HTC in say 2012, they had the One X come out on AT&T but then it was a totally different device on Sprint. Verizon still doesn't really have anything except until the Droid DNA which was again a totally different device later in the year. And so there's a lot of things that HTC has to do if it wants to mimic Samsung and that's just one part of it as I trail off. Man, we don't even need to talk about the other crap that we've got on our list. We'll see what HTC, Mobile World Congress is HTC's show. It's a show that HTC does its big stuff and I don't know if HTC owns Mobile World Congress. They did the One X last year so yeah, and the whole One series actually. I don't think we're going to see Samsung try and do anything huge there. I think people are just going to let HTC have their day in the sun and hopefully they'll manage to eke a couple of weeks out of it once they do. I don't, I mean we've had a bunch of T-Mobile news that the CEO said that the subsidies are going to end in three or four months and just amazing quotes about him going after AT&T's crap network in New York and even making fun of Verizon. We'll track and see how T-Mobile does but basically at this point I'm just super excited that T-Mobile has a rabble rouser in charge and they just love saying crazy stuff. Totally, I'm totally in agreement with that. Yes, and also I didn't know what this guy looked like until I saw some pictures from our coverage of his CES appearance. He's amazing. And the way he was dressed in that CES appearance. He dresses like Jimmy Iovine. Yeah, I mean he had like sequins on his jacket and then there was this brightly colored big T t-shirt underneath. I was like that's the CEO. Yankees cap. Yeah. The dude was out there. Listen, compared to previous CESs where we were like which CEO has the best mustache and we were looking at the Verizon and AT&T competition. In the chat, Sparkling Cyanide says he looks a little bit like Willem Dafoe. He's like a crazy CEO version of Willem Dafoe. I totally see it. Yeah, I can see it. He's like the Green Goblin from the first Spider-Man movies but in charge of a company. As far as the scale of CEOs, you've got Dan Mead from Verizon who's like super straight laced, suit and tie every appearance and Ralph de la Vega and AT&T is again super straight laced and then you step down to Dan Hesse from Sprint who will loosen his tie and pull his dress sleeves up. Well, you can step down because even when Dan Hesse is on a lower step, he still towers above the other guys because he's 18 feet tall. He's physically tall but he'll take his jacket off and he's known to open his shirt up and loosen up and then you've got T-Mobile who's just like I don't even know how to describe it, straight cash. Permanently inebriated. That might be a good one. Actually, isn't it fun though that the way they covered those Dust Bowl states with LTE I think is admirable. Man, first of all, actually it is admirable that you can go in the middle of nowhere in America and get LTE on Verizon. I honestly think he was complimenting Verizon there. He went between this flip flop where he would say that it's a beautiful network and it's really great and he loves it and then he would say something like once you start to watch porn on your phone, your shared data plan is just going to go evaporate. I think the Dust Bowl comment was on the flip of the positive. I saw more honesty on a match.com ad than AT&T's coverage maps. Wow, come on. How do you not love this guy? I was just going to say it's kind of amusing and fun that the two underdog networks in the US actually have the two most likable CEOs among carriers and actually among, even if you include device makers, nobody is as amusing as Dan Hesse and this crazy new T-Mobile guy. I mean, honestly, from among the CEOs, I would say Jensen Huang from Nvidia is the only one who kind of goes out there. Huawei's CEO is a bunch of fun. He doesn't care. He lets it rip. He drinks peace on China. Nobody matches Monster's CEO. Oh my god. Don't even. Actually, can I pull us back to MWC because a little way too early MWC previews. I'm not even healthy from CES yet. Yeah, go ahead. No, I mean, there's a thing. We're way too early to previewing MWC, but I do feel like now that we've had CES, it's also kind of a relatively timely time to assess how companies are going to strategize. I agree with you insofar as I think Samsung is going to repeat a strategy from last year which is pull back from MWC with flagship announcements, do its own event, and again, repeat the successful strategy of having no connectivity wherever that event happens. So then you have me sitting in the front row having spent three hours trying to get into the event on time and just getting 2G and texting people updates about the magician on stage. And Samsung's crazy, crazy presentations. But aside from those guys, yes, HTC is going to try and blow out the event. LG didn't really bring anything special to CES, so they're going to try and have something major. And LG said specifically during... View 2, baby. View 2. It's going to be the view 2. I'm telling you right now. Well, they said during their press event at CES where they're trotting out the intuition and talking about how great it was because so many people loved that, they specifically said stay tuned and MWC will have our big mobile announcements. They already had the Optimus G. They completely dominated what was even there at the last CTIA and it's the base of the Nexus 4. If they are going to try and out Optimus G, the Optimus G, one, I don't know what specs they put in there, it wouldn't be completely ridiculous, and two, they didn't nail the Optimus G. I don't have a whole lot of faith that they're going to nail the next thing. Don't get me wrong. Compared to LG from a couple of years ago, they're firing on all cylinders, right? But it's still, I mean, it's damning with faint praise because we're comparing it to what they used to be. They're firing on all cylinders and moving backwards. Well, I mean, last year, what LG did, and I know you remember this fondly, Dieter, is they did a deluge of phones. And you remember it fondly because you had to take pictures of all of them. The L3, the L5, the L7, the View. The L9. Oh, the 4X HD. You forgot about that one. And then there was a 3D phone as well, whatever that was. That was the Optimus 3D 2, right? Yeah, yeah, I think so. I basically had a spreadsheet of what gets grouped together, what is an actual flagship. It was a huge pain. Yeah, I mean, they carbon bombed the show with phones. It was nuts. I hope, I'm not sure it's a hope that we justify, but I hope they try and streamline that and they focus in on a couple of devices. I mean, even if they do three, but they segment them properly. So you have an entry level phone, a mid-range, and a high end. And the high end can be just like a group of people. That's the HTC One strategy that they did last year, right? Yeah. Right. I mean, it just makes more sense to me. I don't, and yet at the same time, I keep saying that, but then Samsung's successful strategy has been the carpet bombing approach as well. When they say 100 million Galaxy devices, that's Galaxy S1, Galaxy S2, Galaxy S3, but also... Right, but what Samsung does is they carpet bomb, but they only put their muscle behind the GS3 and a little bit of note. Right. Yeah, yeah. And then the rest is trickle down. It's trickle down economics, man. Yeah, I mean, voodoo economics. I'm just wondering, it kind of feels like there's a limited number of companies who will make a big splash at MWC, because Sony made a splash with the Xperia Z, or Z. Right. Or Xperia Zebra, whatever. Hopefully, I mean, if we don't hear anything before MWC, hopefully Sony will announce some carrier partnerships for that. But I can't imagine them to announce another flagship device. Right. So we're kind of stuck. Who else is there? Motorola doesn't ever do anything at MWC. Yeah. It'd be nice if that changed. Yeah, I don't know if I see that happening. I really don't. But there's Nokia. There's Nokia. I guess if there's one thing to be intrigued about, yeah. So HTC will do, obviously, an Android flagship. They'll probably do yet another Windows phone device, I'm guessing. But Nokia, there's been the Lumion 920 replacement rumor with an aluminum or aluminum back, aluminum construction. So that could be interesting, you know, going back to the N8 slash E7 designs. Way back in the day, with the fresh hardware. Could be good. Yeah, I can see Nokia. I'm betting that Nokia wants to save something super flagship for a separate on their own event. But I don't know. We'll see. I'm running out of steam. How about you guys? I don't think I've got the energy to talk about ridiculous Apple China rumors that came out and then were immediately debunked. Yeah, I don't care. Yeah. There'll be something, maybe. Who knows? Who cares? Some kind of iPhone China. I mean, who knows? Okay. Well, if we can dedicate a couple of minutes to Apple, I just want to make mention of the iPod touch. I know it's really random, but I played around with my colleague Sam Byford's iPod touch. He's got one of those most obscure devices in the world. He's got a 64 gigabyte iPod touch, which he still feels really good about buying. He should. It's great. Most people think it's crazy. Well, he double fists with it. He uses whatever phone, which I think he usually uses a Windows phone, and then he actually, for apps, he carries around his iPod touch. That's right. He's got a Lumia 920. He uses a Lumia 920 for his phone and the iPod touch for all his apps and Apple stuff. The thing is, I actually really love the design of that freaking thing. It's great. Yeah, it's gorgeous. It's got a button that you can click in and out, which is what I did one afternoon in the trailer. I just sat there and pressing the button on Sam's iPod touch. How's that different from the iPhone? No, no. For the loop. You can click the back of it. That's right there. Then you click to open to put the loop in. You double click it. It's just very satisfying to click. Okay. I didn't know about that. I didn't notice it. Seriously, this new design and the curvature of the back and the sides is so much friendlier for holding it in the hand. The first thing is, it's thinner than the iPhone, lighter than the iPhone. The curvature of it and the feel of it in the hand is just much better in my opinion. I was thinking, if Apple's next big redesign for the iPhone is to bring it in line with that design, maybe not as thin because it has to have a bigger battery, it has to have OT and those things. I would be quite content with that. I would consider that a significant upgrade. What do you guys think? I agree. Sorry, I got distracted by a link. It's not your fault. I completely agree with everything you just said. You give me the thumbs up there. Nice. Anyway, now that Apple has our design ideas, I'm sure they're listening in as well. Tim Cook has some. Of course. Yes. Tim Cook has signed a first time fellow. It's known that they watch the Verge mobile show. Yeah. It's also known that the Apple podcast app came out just for the Verge mobile show's sake. God. That app is the worst. I hate it so hard. And also it's known that if you want to find a Verge mobile show on iTunes, you have to look in the blues genre. I think that was a mistake for CES. We don't know how that happened. We're sorry. Sorry about that. I think that was appropriate. We tend to sing the blues most of the time anyway. I think it was appropriate for that show that we shot because we were enjoying some libations and just jamming to some blues. Yeah. I don't know. That friends is the Verge mobile show. Thank you so much for watching, for listening, to us talk about vegetables and to trailing off so that we can crash and die in our beds. If you want to follow us on Twitter, you can and should. I'm Backlund. Vlad is Vlad Savov. Chris is DC Seifert with an EI. Chris Ziegler who is already dead in his bed is ZPower. And we're all at Verge. And we've got an email address. That is DC Seifert by the way. Chris Ziegler. Did I screw that up? Did I flip that? Whatever. Whatever. We're tired. Goodbye everybody. Thanks so much for watching and we'll be back next week. Who knows? Maybe. Possibly. Later. Bye guys.