 Welcome to The Verge Mobile Show. It is The Verge Mobile Show. I am Dieter Bohm. I'm Vlad Sabo. I'm Dan Seifert. I'm Chris Ziegler. And as you can tell from my ridiculous introduction, I'm totally off my game. Did you screw it up? It wasn't me. No, it was fine. I rolled with it just fine. It is episode 37. We are no longer on episode 35. Congratulations to us. It's the week of February 18th. And obviously, there's only one thing to talk about, the only important thing that's happened in the past week, and that is that Google has finally released the wireless charging orb. It just released it in your room. It was released last week. We talked about it last week. But the important bit is that I have one now. And I can complain about it, because I paid $70 for something that I can't mount in my car, which drives me nuts. And so let me explain why I can't mount it in my car. Because you're chicken. So instead of using smart things like, say, magnets to align the Nexus 4 with the charging area, like, say, the Palm Touchstone did, the Nexus 4 has this sticky pad on it, which is like this rubbery, almost gelatin type of material that sticks to the glass on the Nexus 4. And it's actually pretty sticky when it's new, to the point where it's not even a little bit sticky. To the point where if I lift the Nexus 4 off of it, the orb comes with it for like an inch or so before dropping, slamming down to my desk. But because it's sticky, it also attracts dust like you wouldn't believe. So I assume that the stickiness is going to wear off after a couple of weeks of actual use. But other than that, it's a charged one. YOSSI ELKRIEFEN. Are we seriously talking about the orb right now? IAN NI-LEWIS. Yeah. I mean, that's the thing. YOSSI ELKRIEFEN. All right, listen. I mean, here's the thing. Fair enough. Our first five minutes are dedicated to mobile topics anyway, right? We give that time for anybody who's late, who's brewing up a cup of tea. IAN NI-LEWIS. That's right. YOSSI ELKRIEFEN. Like Dan trying to promote some brand of soft drink. IAN NI-LEWIS. I've been waiting to rant about this since like Friday when I got the thing. So I haven't complained on Twitter. I haven't really ranted publicly. So here's my rant about it so that I can complain about it to people. And yeah, it cost me like $70 after taxed shipping. Not worth it? I can't say it was. I mean, they did the same thing with the Galaxy Nexus where it took them forever to come out with any official accessory. Were there any official accessories for the Galaxy Nexus? Was there a car dock or something? It was the extended battery in the extended battery door. Oh, yeah. And there was a dock too. Yeah, but the extended battery was never sold in the US, I think. It was just in South Korea. No. Well, the Verizon one had the official extended battery. Yeah, Verizon did. Yeah, sorry. I always associate the Galaxy Nexus with the A7. I mean, I bought one off of Amazon. I don't know that it came from something sketchy in South Korea. I have one. Well, yeah, it's an extra like two milliamp hours. It's like the most ridiculous extended battery ever made. But anyway, there was a long delay between the release of the Galaxy Nexus and the release of the official accessories. And they did the exact same thing with the Nexus 4. And to be fair, it was only in the last few weeks that the Nexus 4 really became widely available. But there was still a pretty healthy Nexus 4 ecosystem for the past few months during which nobody could get a bumper or a dock or anything. So we're still not talking about the HTC One. I was just going to say, enough trolling. Let's talk about the HTC One, the big, huge launch event happened today. We got amazing hands on. We got an interview with the CEO, Peter Chow. We've got reporting. We've got the full specs, the full details. We have basically everything you need to know as our story stream explains in its headline. And I don't even know the story. I'll say everything is to know about it. Everything there is to know as opposed to everything you need to know? There is one bit of trivia. I can't tell you what day you could walk into a store and buy it. That's fair. OK. There is one bit of trivia that nobody actually knows yet because I've kind of invented it over the past few minutes, which is that we are running episode 35, which is our recurring episode in the Verge Mode show. Which coincides with the- It's not clear that we were on 37. I declared it. Really? I did. You just deflated Vlad. I can sense it in his voice. He's like, really? I'm sorry, Vlad. This is episode 35 in my heart anyway. The point is we have this recurring episode going on until we nail it, until we're happy that we've completed episode 35. And HTC is kind of doing the same thing with the recurring branding. So there was the HTC One X and the One S and the One SV and the One X Plus and the One XL and the One V and the One something else. And now there's just the HTC One. So the company kind of is recurring with its branding. Also, it was kind of hilarious that HTC was already buying up advertising, just advertising HTC One, which is the name of this phone. And a lot of people were amused by it because last week's football slash soccer tournaments had that HTC One branding all over the hoardings around the stadium. And everybody, because of all the rumors and all the leaks that happened, everybody was like, well, HTC is already pronouncing the name of this device. Peter Chow, he had this freak out a week or two ago where he was waving it about, say, yelling M7, M7. I think that freak out hit the internet a week or two ago. But I think it was actually recorded late last year. It was an end of year company retreat of some sort. It's funny. It was one second still then. So it wasn't like Nokia trying to leak things itself. It was actually a legitimate leak, that one? No, I wouldn't say that. I'm just saying that the video originated from the end of the year. Maybe it took HTC a month to leak it. OK. Well, the broad point I'm trying to make, and it's not a particularly strong one, is just that it's been kind of a funky old build up to this phone. HTC hasn't helped itself with things like Peter Chow and all of that stuff happening. And then today, the perfect combination for me was this simultaneous event, which was actually two completely separate events that just happened, one in New York City and one in London. And we're presumed, and this is actually to Blackberry's credit, when they did simultaneous events around the world, they essentially did one event and then just projected it on massive screens in satellite locations. HTC didn't do that. HTC had executives in New York City talking about the full features of the phone. And they had executives in London talking about the full features of the phone. It's just that London began about 20 minutes after New York. And it was a complete and utter disaster for anybody trying to coordinate between the two. Yeah, that was much different than we kind of expected. We had expected seeing a live stream of one or the other. Because I was at the New York City event with our New York team, Vlad, obviously you were at the London event. While we were communicating, we were trying to tell each other what's going on. And then it was just like nothing was lining up, unfortunately. I mean, for the most part, from my perspective, it was so weird, because I was taking pictures and writing up announcements. And I was like, am I just echoing what Dennis said about 15 minutes ago? Well, from my perspective, not being at either event, it was cool to see the pictures flowing into the live blog from both events. I made a comment about it on Twitter, just seeing those two events happen. And at the same time, covered by Verge staff was pretty cool. But I can see why that would be very frustrating that the news is flowing at different rates. I pretty much just ignored what Vlad was doing. That's just a good policy for life. Do we talk about the phone? We should talk about the phone. So I actually wanted to, I had a segue, a legitimate segue, which is that the European device, Vlad, correct me if I'm wrong, doesn't have any LTE. Is that right? No, it does. Oh, it does. OK, so I have no segue. Never mind. All right, so we need to run down the basic specs here. So it's a 4.7 inch screen. It is 1080p full, which gives it a hopping 468 PPI. And it's some variation of mega super LCD, I'm assuming. Well, no, HTC isn't calling it super LCD this time, but it is an LCD. And it does have actual quality. HTC has given every other feature a marketing term, except for this screen, which is the most prominent feature on the device. And it's not just the most prominent. To me, it's absolutely the best feature. I think it's right up there with every super LCD HTC has had before, and I can't tell you in any way in which the One X is better than this display. To me, this is just, here's the HTC One X display. It used to be a 720p display. We just turned it up to 1080p. That's all I'm seeing here. It's just a really, really awesome display to me. Yeah, it's quite beautiful. On the top and bottom of the display are speakers. There are dual speakers. And I believe the marketing term for that is boom sound. Boom. Yes. Here comes the boom sound. Again, I have to give HTC really big credit for this. Not for the branding, absolutely not for the branding. But when I think about stereo speakers, and when I think about how you should do sound on a phone, a real multimedia device, this is it. Front-facing speakers, symmetrically placed, no messing about. One of them is where the earpiece would be. One of them is where the microphone would be. And they just look good. They function well. I think about every smartphone that I've reviewed over the past whatever many years, except for the iPhone, which has a downward-firing speaker. I always write about how if you put the phone down on your couch or on a table, the sound gets muffled because the speaker's on the back. The One essentially just circumvents that problem entirely by just throwing the speakers in the front, which is great. And when we got to see it and we got some hands-on time with it, they're really loud. They project very well. They put the sound right in front of you. You don't have to do the silly cupping your hand behind it to reflect the sound back to you. So it does work pretty well. I guess it gives you the boom. And it's beat audio, too, if you care about that, I guess. So it's an all-metal construction. Of course, the display is glass. And there's some plastic ring around the edge. They carve out the metal the same way you've seen metal devices carved out, like the iPhone and the MacBook or whatever. But then in that process, they embed the plastic into it. And then there's bands so that it does proper antenna stuff so you don't have to touch your phone. Actually, the side material, we couldn't establish it when we had the pre-briefing with HTC. It's plastic. Even they weren't sure. Are you sure it's plastic? Because one of them suggested it might be ceramic. No. I mean, they may have lied to me, but it's plastic. OK. But it's a very thin rail of plastic. It looks fine. It looks good. It comes in white and black. As long as it stays clean. The only concern that I had when I was handling the device is because it's white. And the One X was a white device for its flagship version. And that notoriously got dirty quickly. So it would be pretty horrible if the white plastic on this got dirty, because it's not a glossy plastic. You know what's really nice and great from the One X? The camera doesn't protrude anymore. Now it's fully integrated into the back shell. Yeah. And it just looks like a mushroom device now. I'm not saying it's fat. I don't know exactly what the thickness is off the top of my head, but it's not bad. 9.7 millimeters. Yeah. I have a DNA here. And it's virtually the same profile as the DNA. Well, the protruding camera on the One X was functional, right, because you had the speaker on the back. So I think that they needed to raise the phone off the surface. And with this one, they don't. So it's a win-win. Yeah. And we'll get into the camera, but I'm saving the best stuff for last. It's got a 1.7 gigahertz Snapdragon 600 processor, which I imagine just flies on the benchmarks. I'm sure it does. Yeah. 2 gigs of RAM, 2300 milliamp battery, 32 and 64 gigabyte variants. And so when you look at the standard specs of a phone, HTC is doing what HTC has always done, which is just, we're going to have a hugely well-specced phone. We're going to play the speeds and feeds game. We're going to blow that out as much as we can. And we'll see what happens. This is the other thing with the Galaxy S4 in a month. But for now, is there another phone that has better specs in the stuff we've talked about so far? HTC has always played the speeds and feeds game. But in actual real world use, it has not always had the fastest phones. Once we actually use the device for more than 20 minutes, we can really say how fast it was. I can say that in the time that I did use it, everything was very snappy and very responsive and quick and fast and things like that. I didn't notice any lag like I've noticed with older HTC devices. So hopefully the new processor, along with the new software that we'll talk about in a moment, and all the gobs of RAM and stuff like that. So there's basically two more spec things to run through and then the software. The first spec thing, which I'm going to mention now, is that integrated into the power button, which is on the top, is an infrared blaster. IR blaster. So they're shipping it with this thing they're calling. Is it called HTC TV? Is that what it's called? HTC CinesTV. Whatever. And it's basically like a rebranded version of the Peel app, but instead of having to connect over Wi-Fi or Bluetooth to some janky IR blaster to control your media, you can use it right in the app. You can pick your channels directly. But its integration with DVRs is sad. And it's a pretty basic piece of remote software. Now the fundamental problem with this application and the concept of it, I appreciate that HTC is doing this, although it's really, really hilarious to think that phones in the 1990s had IR blasters and now we've come full circle. But they're solving the wrong problem, if you're looking at the industry as a whole. The correct problem to solve is the requirement that devices in your AV rack require IR control in the first place. Everything should be on a standard. Everything is connected to your network at this point. Your receiver, your game console, your TV, everything is on your network. Everything should be controlled over Wi-Fi. And that is where we should be going. It just sucks that HTC had to do this. Well, it gets into the fun of the whole issue. HTC can't build a whole TV ecosystem. They're not Apple. They're not even Samsung. And so they've got to work with the stuff that's available to them, and what's available to them is infrared. Yeah, and working with cable providers. Like the average consumer that doesn't have a super geeky AV rig in their house has a Motorola or Scientific American cable box from their cable provider. And that thing was designed in like 1999, and it uses IR. Yeah, it's not their fault. It's just symptomatic of a AV industry issue that is frustrating. Hang on, I just have a couple of points to counter that, actually. The first one is, having had some issues setting up my Wi-Fi situation over here in my new place, I can tell you that just cramming everything on Wi-Fi isn't the very best idea in the world, just because 2.4 gigahertz bandage is going to be way saturated when you think about the fact that if you're in an apartment building, everybody has a Wi-Fi network, and then everybody's TV has to hook up. Everybody's phone, everybody's tablet, everybody's laptop, their kid's laptop, et cetera, et cetera. So that's one thing. The other thing is exactly what Dieter was raising just a bit earlier. These things already exist. Your cable box is already there. Your TV is already there. Maybe you have a VCR that you can't let go of. Your DVD player. All these things are already in place. And I figure, particularly here in the UK, HT has already signed up Virgin, Sky, most of the content providers. So they have all the program guides integrated into the app, which is already on the phone. And then you have the IR blaster just at the top of the phone, you have the app, which is going to control your TV. To me, it's kind of like there's no downside to this. So it's a net positive. Even if you never use it, it's a net positive to have it there. The only downside, which I completely agree with Dieter on, is the power button should have been mounted on the side. This phone is too big for the top mount and power button. It should have been on the side. They should have just had a little opening for the IR blaster. That's all I want. Yeah. The same problem was with the DNA. I complained about it in my review. You had to do this ridiculous claw type of grip in order to reach the top mount and power button. Right. All right. So the big thing is the camera. The ultra pixel camera, which shoots the Zoe's, which is short for Zoetrope. And so we can come at this from a software and solutions perspective, which is the direction HTC is hoping that everybody will see it at. Or we can come at it from a spec perspective, which I don't think HTC is afraid of the spec side. But there is something sort of scary to the average consumer from there. And I guess let's just get into it. So I think Vlad will agree with me here that as far as the spec goes, I'm perfectly content with the spec. Well, let's say what the spec is. It's technically a four megapixel camera, which is obviously a lot lower resolution than what you see on most smartphones on the market today. But there's this misconception, and it's been talked about in cameras for many years now, called the megapixel myth, which just means that more megapixels equals a better picture. And that's not really the case. In reality, there's many more other factors that go into making a quality image. And one of them is the actual physical size of the pixels on an image sensor. So what HTC has done here is said, we're going to use a sensor that has fewer pixels, but each pixel is larger. And therefore, since it's larger, it's more sensitive to light, and it's able to better capture light for better color, better low light, better dynamic range, all of those things that contribute to a better quality image. And essentially, if you are familiar with digital photography, this is why full frame cameras take so much better pictures than your pocket-sized point-and-shoot cameras, because their sensor is so much larger, and it has larger pixels on it. So HTC is trying to apply this to the smartphone. And if everything they say is true about it, then it should lead to much more improved image quality, which I'm perfectly fine with. Four megapixels of resolution, if you are printing a photo off of that, you can easily do an 8 by 10 without a problem. You could even go bigger if you're not pixel peeping, as they would say. So I'm not too worried about it. But to your point, Dieter, customers have been sold on megapixels for many years now. And seeing it on the shelf next to something that says 8 or 12 or 13 or whatever it might be is certainly something that will confuse a large number of people. To be clear, if you're printing digital photos in your 2013, you need to reevaluate your life. There are better ways to look at photos now than there were even five years ago. I don't know, man. Jack White disagrees with you. Well, I don't listen to Jack White's music. Jack White's album from 2012 is awesome. Just going to say that. You should listen to it. OK, but before we move on to the software side, which I'm sure Dieter is going to break down for us, I do want to give AC Mass a credit for doing what they've done here. Because we say this on podcasts up and down the internet, that companies should be bold, make bold decisions, and stand out, and do unique things. This is unique. Nobody has ever done this among smartphone or even feature phone manufacturers. As soon as they were able to put the word megapixel on their cameras, it's always been, let's get the bigger number, let's get the bigger number. It was one, 2.1, three megapixels, five megapixels, yada, yada, yada. 41 megapixels. So actually, I want to talk about the peer review, because everyone immediately is going to compare this to Nokia's peer review technology for a number of reasons. And because the average picture that you take with the 808 PureView is only five or eight megapixels. So that's lower resolution. But in reality, the way that particular sensor works is it captures 40 megapixels, or 41, or whatever, and then down samples it down to the lower resolution. No, it captures 38. Yeah, it captures 38. And then it down samples down to that five or eight megapixel final image, which is a different approach than what HTC is using. Right, but the general effect is pretty much the same. Because essentially, you have this 38 megapixels in a Nokia peer view, which fit into a given space. And then you have a smaller number of pixels, 4 million pixels in HTC's sensor, which again, fit into a given space. And I think they're the same sensor sizes. But the general point is that you have larger than average sensor sizes. And you're taking all the information, all the light information, as Steve Jobs used to say, it's all about the photons, man. And Nokia's doing arithmetic and algorithmic work and all of this calculation, whereas HTC's kind of brute forcing it and saying, we're just going to make big pixels, absorb as much light as we can. But the ultimate effect is the same. Both of them deliver better low light performance than most other cameras. And the thing that I would say is I'd rather have a really high quality four or five megapixel photo, and then take my chances printing it, than have a 12 megapixel photo from some of the, let's say, Sony sensors, which are kind of rubbish from like 2011, 2012, which are like 12, 30 megapixels. I'd rather not have that. I'd rather have a smaller one that just gives me higher quality, and then deal with the size utilization. So if he had a, I'm talking. There's one other spec. I'm talking. Oh my god. There's one other spec. I'm not done. No, I'm going to get there. I'm going to kill you guys. You're the best. I love you so much. The other thing you're going to say is that it's optically stabilized. It's two-axis optical stabilization, which also helps with low light. So HTC had a meeting with a whole bunch of tech journalists to talk about this. I was there. And they showed a chart where one axis was the overall area of the whole sensor, and the other axis was pixel size. And you look at most smartphone cameras, and when you start getting up into the 8, 10, 12 megapixels, especially those higher megapixels, 13, you get these really tiny pixel sizes on the sensor that they argue is getting down to the point where the actual wavelength of light makes it so that it can't capture an image, whereas this sensor, the pixel size is up in the point-and-shoot range. And it also gives them other benefits. So having just a four megapixel image instead of an eight megapixel image, there's a couple things. One, there's less processing that has to happen. One, because it's smaller. But two, because there's just less noise and less interpolation that they have to do from a whole bunch of sensors catching the same light and trying to figure out where the pixels are. And so the smaller size and the less processing means that they can take, I don't think they're using the same image chip, but they can take their image processing chip and do more interesting things with the images, both in terms of getting low light shot and processing it, but also this new feature that they're introducing, which they're calling Zoe. I could talk about Zoe, too, if you want. I'm interrupting Joe. YOSSI ELKRIEFENI. There was this perfect moment where all three of you were going to say something. Because Chris seems to be generally more quiet on podcasts lately, I want to hear what he has to say. CHRIS BROADFOOT. Nothing. The moment is lost. But please, tell us about Zoe. What is Zoe, Dieter? DETERI MACHOVERA So basically, like a lot of cameras, you can do burst shots. So you hit the camera shutter button, and it actually captures a little bit before you hit it and a little bit after you hit it. But what HTC is doing is it's dual path encoding. So when you do a Zoe picture, it's actually encoding the light twice. One is a short little movie. It's about four seconds long, and I think it's technically like three point something, and then it's a couple tenths of a second before you hit it and a couple tenths of seconds after it's done. Somewhere in that range. And then at the same time, it's recording a burst shot of the actual images. And the net effect is you get a short little four second clip, and you can take any moment out of that clip and pull an image out of it as a still that is like full fidelity, not blurry, not crappy looking. It's an actual still image. It's not something that it's pulled out of there. And so the net effect is instead of taking a picture, if you've got some kind of action, some kind of thing going on, you can take a Zoe and just record the little four second thing and then pull what you want out of that as appropriate. And then the other thing they're doing is, and this I'm less clear about, but they take the event galleries that automatically get created, and then you can automatically make these little one, two minute movies that are short, little, automatically cut and transitioned things into your still photos and your video. With vintage filters. With vintage filters. Yeah. I think they've got six different tracks that automatically put the filters on it. So hopefully they'll be expanding that soon. But I'm interested to try this new way of taking pictures. So the thing that confuses me about Zoes is that there's other phones on the market that do this. You've got the Blackray Z10 that will shoot a string of images in a row, almost like recording a video, and then you can pull the good one out of that. And I know there's other phones that do that and other software that does it. But what HTC is trying to sell this as are short video clips. These Zoes, essentially. If you're not pulling a still out of it, you're making a Zoe. And it's this new short video clip. It's not a cinemagraph. It's not a vine. It's not these other things that we have been blowing up for the past year. It's half a vine, let's be honest. It's half a vine. And then, so it's this proprietary format. And then to share it, I've got to. Well, I mean, it's not proprietary. It gets saved as a standard MLV file, I think. OK. Well, that's fair. So when I want to share it, though, I upload it to HTC servers, is that correct? Well, you can upload it to YouTube. You can upload it to Facebook. Or you can make this automatically little generated vignette. And you can upload that. Or you can upload that little vignette along with up to, I think, it's 10 of the associated assets from the gallery, so like the vignette plus 10 photos so that you make a cute little gallery. You can upload that to HTC servers. But HTC apparently doesn't want to be in the business of storing your junk forever. And so when you upload it, it only stays there for 180 days, which it's just like I would never, like if I'm going to share something to my mom that is a cute little video clip and some pictures, the idea that I would put it up there and it's not going to be there in 180 days, not going to happen, not going to do it. I love how Deedus' webcam kind of shakes the more outraged he is and the more disappointed he is about things. So obviously this is an Android-based device. And we don't have things like Vine, which is blowing up. But when Vine eventually does come to Android, why would I use a Zoe instead of just shooting a Vine? Well, because you can get the shot of your child's first step, and if you happen to miss the shutter button, you'll have the little thing. HTC's argument, and take it for what it is, is that most people when they shoot boobies on their phones kind of suck at it. Most movies on phones are really boring. But when you're limited to this little four-second clip, you'll catch something interesting. And they argue that they can put these things together and make something overall that's compelling, even if it's from a relatively boring day hanging out. That's their argument. I mean, if you think about Vines and the fact that most people's Vines actually consist of multiple little clips, so they hold the button down, they take a three-second thing and then add a three-second thing and then combine them and try and do something crazy with that. I think HTC's going after the same thing. I need to correct Dieter and say it's a three-second clip that you get from the HTC One camera, not a four-second one. It's like 3 and 1 half. It's like 3.7. Yeah, I think it goes 0.6 seconds before you hit the shutter and then three seconds after. So it's 0.6. No, but I think before you hit the shutter, well, that's the thing. Before you hit the shutter, you get five frames just being shot, and then 15 frames after you hit the shutter. But that's one thing. That's the full-res photos. That's one recording. The other recording is the actual 1080p video, which is happening, and that's three seconds. It's three seconds. You get 0.6 before and 0.3 after. So it's 3.9 seconds in total. So I'm going to say I'm OK at calling it four seconds. Then I've been misinformed, and I apologize for spreading unabashed information. Yes, I'm underselling HTC's product. But yeah, I think HTC's going after the exact same premise as Vine, which is, again, what Deezer was saying, is just short little bursts, which when you put them together makes, to me, it's kind of like a video collage or like a stop-motion animation with more animation in it, I guess. It's something like that. I mean, really, I like this software addition for the playfulness and the toy factor of it, really. So you get the phone, you have all the multimedia capabilities to play back movies and music and all of that stuff. But that stuff, you've been able to do for years now with your phone. So that isn't brand new. This software suite, this camera suite, gives you a new way, I mean, it's such a tight marketing cliche, but to be creative, right? It actually lets you do stuff that's creative. And that's the thing. A lot of creative people do say that the fun of creativity is in the limitations. So yeah, just being able to shoot video gets boring because it's just so expensive. And there's too many options, and you don't really know what to do. But if you're told, OK, you can shoot free clips of 3.9 seconds and then stitch them together into this epic 11 second, 12 second masterpiece, what's the best that you can do? You have limitations. You have kind of a set framework, and then you can work within that and play within that. But having said that, I do still get this feeling. And I am one of the biggest fans of the design of this phone as well. I really like the whole zero gap, as HTC calls it, physical design, optical bonding of the display, et cetera, et cetera. As usual, people think I have a fetish for this, but if this was a 4.3 inch phone, I'd probably be married to it by now. But the trouble is, OK, you have a great design. You have this great new camera suite. You have the biggest speakers ever fit inside a phone, apparently. It's still just another Android multimedia phone. We've had these already. We've had quad-core phones. We've had 1080p phones. I just don't feel excited. I don't feel like I'm really getting that much new. Well, I think that's smartphone fatigue, not an issue with this phone in particular. Because I don't know what HTC could have done today, apart from show me a Nexus device that would have brought me the same level of joy that the original iPhone or the Nexus One did. Well, it's interesting that you mentioned smartphone fatigue, because I know you've talked about this before, Chris, but one thing that we noticed during HTC's presentation today is that all of the specs that we've been talking about were not mentioned during the presentation. We didn't hear 4.7 inch 1080p display with this. That's a good point, yeah. We didn't hear Snapdragon 600 quad-core processor with 1.7 gigahertz clock speed and 2 gigabytes of RAM. I don't recall hearing a single spec period. The only spec they really talked about was saying that it's all aluminum. And then they just talked about the actual features of what you can do with the device. So it will be interesting to see how that plays out this year with other events. But certainly in the past, we've seen Samsung shy away from talking about specs. Obviously, Apple has never really focused on specs with any of these things. Wait, wait, wait. Is Samsung shying away talking about specs? Well, features and specs are two different things. The Galaxy S3 event was all about smart stay and stuff like that. They put far more emphasis on that than they did on the actual line items, specs of the features. Oh, no, no, no. You guys have very selective memory. Make the phone do what it does. You guys have very selective memory. Because I remember seeing, I was there with the Samsung Galaxy S3. I remember seeing people say, doesn't that noise make you want to go to the bathroom? That's what I remember from Samsung's Galaxy S3 event. OK. No, no, seriously. Samsung had probably the biggest screen in London inside a dome. It was like 60 feet? No, it's larger. It was just a massive, massive screen. And they put up every spec and feature of the Galaxy S3 up on that. It was just a straight bullet point list. It was like GLONASS, GPS, Bluetooth 4.0, yada, yada, yada, which also reminds me, the HT1 is one of the first phones with 802.11ac. So hot news for router fanboys. Your 802.11ac connectivity is ready to be used now. So I want to make a point that I think we should come back to and revisit. But it's really important to note that we're talking about HTC, and we inevitably ended up talking about Samsung. And that's happening to them again, because there's going to be a new Samsung Galaxy S phone, flagship phone, probably next month, announced next month. But before I get into that whole discussion of are they actually going to be able to sell any of these damn phones, we need to talk about the software. We need to talk about the new sense, Sense 5. Although I think nuisance is just calling it nuisance. Which, not sense. Don't say that too fast. Oh, god. Sorry. I just can't believe that nobody in their marketing team was like, what if we say this fast? Or what does it sound like? Oh, it sounds like nuisance. Which is something that we've called sense in not so many certain terms for years. So I'm sorry, HTC, but nuisance is not a good name. So the nuisance is just like the old sense. I asked specifically if they had taken out any features. And the only feature I think they actually took out was the thing where you could set the phone down on its face to silence the ringer. Or you could lift it up to go into speakerphone. Well, and plus the speakers are on the front now, so it doesn't make sense to do that functionality. But all the integration with social networks, most of the widgets, not all of them. They killed a couple. That's all there. And look and feel is a bit better. They got rid of the annoying tabs at the bottom. They switched to the hollow pivots. They toned down the gradients a tiny little bit, but not all the way. And they redesigned all the icons. HTC tells us they touched every single corner. We'll see. Again. Yeah. The icons are 2D now, right, instead of 3D? Yeah, they've lost their cartooniness and their shakiness. On that topic, I just want to say really quickly, the new icon look is apparently very much in the style of Scott Croyle, who is the lead designer for HTC. I don't know what that tells us, other than he was allowed to change the icons and not anything of actual import. Scott Croyle has absolutely fantastic taste in footwear, may I say. I've actually had a conversation with Mr. Croyle about his shoes in the past. Turquoise today, Chris. Turquoise. Yeah, he wore turquoise shoes to the MWC announced for the 1X last year, too. I don't know if that's a running theme for him or what. I don't think they were literally the same pair of shoes, but they were close. Yeah, that was shameful. Wearing the same pair of shoes twice, that would be shameful. I want to point out Scott's got real slowdown about these turquoise shoes, because Chris is wearing them, too. So I've been avoiding saying the most and totally ignoring the shoe conversation, by the way. I've been avoiding talking about the most important feature on the new Sense, which is BlinkFeed. They have replaced your home screen. They've gotten rid of the flip clock, replaced with a more generic clock. And they've basically put Flipboard on your home screen. And I don't know if the people that aren't talking are visible, but Vlad's yawn is pretty amazing. I'm just getting comfortable so I can have a nap while you talk about this nonsense. So the idea is you hit your home button, and you have a feed of snackable content. Your news feeds and your Facebook and some Twitter stuff, and it looks like Flipboard. It's relatively pretty. It's relatively fast. It doesn't work offline, which is kind of stupid. But it's not a tool. You can't use it as a Google Reader replacement or a Twitter client replacement. It's just a thing that HTC put on your home screen so that when you're standing in line at the grocery store, you've got something to do for a couple of minutes. And I really want to know what you guys think of it, because I'm literally holding two thoughts in my head at the same time. And 75% of me says, oh my god, I do not want Flipboard on my home screen. And 25% of me says, oh, Flipboard on my home screen. That would actually be kind of neat. Here's my thought on it. And if you're the type of person that's going to open your phone up while you're standing online at the grocery store to read something, chances are you're already getting information from Twitter. You're already getting information from Facebook. You're probably doing some sort of RSS or Google Reader type of thing. And this is kind of pulling in all that same stuff. So if you have a Twitter app that you like to use and you check it, you look at it, and then are you going to see the same stuff on your Blink feed, I guess, mixed in with all your other stuff? So it's like you're reading the same stuff twice. Or if you have a Google Reader account set up and you're looking at your Google Reader articles, you're going to see the same type of articles again in your Blink feed without a way of marking them red. So if you see it on Blink feed and then you go back to your Google Reader, it's not marked as red. So you're seeing it again. So I mean, it's just. Well, you're not the target market for it then. No, I'm not. But I'm trying to put myself in the mind of someone who's going to use this. Well, it's a replacement. You just have to kind of let go. It's not meant to be a full tool. It's like a thing to do. It's like flipping on the TV. You're not sitting down to watch your binge of West Wing on Netflix and making sure you're going through every single episode. You're flipping on the TV, seeing what's on. You get bored. You turn it off. That's what it's meant to be. This is HTC's way of saying that our way of doing things is better than the users' way of doing things. Because if they wanted to respect the user, they would have made BlinkFeed a widget that you can put on any home screen panel you want. But instead, it is now the home screen, which I find, in terms of an Android device, I find that offensive. We've seen widgets like this fail spectacularly. Right. Blur. Right. And now they're like. They're going to make it a home screen widget and have it be successful. They need to make it look. They need to have it control the whole screen. It needs to be that flipboard experience where it's edge to edge, not in a stupid little border. So I kind of get what they're trying to do. And you can click a check box to make it the classic Android home screen, your default home screen, when you hit the Home button. Oh god, we haven't talked about the buttons. We'll get back to that. But the report that I wrote was basically HTC is taking two giant risks. One is the camera. I think we're pretty positive about that. We're at least happy they're taking that risk. And two is this differentiation link feed. And it seems like a fiasco to me that I want no part of. But there's a tiny part of me that says maybe. Well, listen. Here. I just want to point out where this thing just goes wrong for me. And I'm reminded of Timescape, Sony Ericsson's Android phones. Blurscape. I love how we're just bringing up old, really bad Android customization skins. The trouble is, I have yet to see any one application, never mind a phone manufacturer whose strength and specialties hardware, any one application aggregate all of these things successfully. Everybody has this ambition. It might be one of the most commonly attempted and absolutely one of the most commonly failed things in mobile software, aggregating news, social feeds, and maybe like emails and alerts and things like that. I mean, it's like something that Windows Phone is essentially built around with the People Hub. And we all know how well that works to replace your Twitter app. But everybody's trying. Because with iOS, Siri's trying to do similar things where it alerts you to things. Google now is trying to do similar things where it gathers in information it thinks you're going to want and needs, things like that. Aggregating information in an intelligent way and in a way that you find helpful and useful, more so than, as Dan was saying, just jumping into Twitter or just jumping into a discrete application in question, like your email client, for example, is really, really tough. And HTC is not. I want to express the, there's a couple of things I want to express that's different about BlinkFeed than what we've seen before. And it's funny that you mentioned Google now. Because Google now is very different from BlinkFeed in that BlinkFeed is just purely for entertainment's sake. Whereas Google now is going to give you directions, it's going to give you weather, it's going to give you local things nearby that you can check out, and your calendar, and all that other stuff. BlinkFeed doesn't do any of that. And I've heard a lot of people compare BlinkFeed to Microsoft's LiveTiles because it looks very similar. But in reality, it's not. It's not giving you email notifications. It's not giving you messaging notifications. It's not giving you missed call notifications. It's just giving you entertainment. And it's a big thing. Priorities were the thing for me. So OK, you're my BlinkFeed. And I'm supposed to trust you. Because as you say, if you're going to replace at least part of the Twitter app, or the email app's functionality, or your newsreader's functionality, you want to trust whatever you're replacing it with that is better. So I'm supposed to trust you. But at the same time, you have no hierarchy for the information that I want to see. So I asked about things like, what if I have calendar alerts coming up? Are those going to float to the top of the BlinkFeed? What if I have important emails coming up? Are those going to come to the top? And this is the thing. We have alerts. We have all this incoming data and information that Android just provides to HTC. Why isn't that integrated into the BlinkFeed? I'll find it so much more useful to unlock my phone and to say, oh, here's the news. But then, wait, I actually do have some alerts and some meetings coming up, which I need to address first. Those things aren't surfacing. They aren't coming up. And that limits the usefulness of it, whereas it's trying to be kind of universal to you. Here's how I see it. HTC is screwed. They're 10th place in the global smartphone market. Mobile phone market. Excuse me, they can't spend as much money in marketing as Samsung can. They're not Apple. And on the software side, they had two choices. They could go the standard stock Android route, which they seem terrified of doing. It wasn't a choice. This is the thing. I'm not a tear man. But they couldn't go the standard stock Android route because they're afraid of Motorola, because Motorola is going to do that. And then they won't be differentiated from Motorola. So they had to try and push forward with Sense. And they believe that Sense is great. OK, whatever. So in order to make Sense a real differentiator that people care about, they have to provide a tool that people actually need that they can't otherwise get. And the tool of giving me crap to read when I'm waiting in line, that problem has been solved very well by a ton of apps. So the only real thing they're fixing is for the few people that don't know how to find Flipboard, and the few people who don't want to have to hit the Home button and then hit the Flipboard button icon. Those are really small problems. And so that's the thing. If you're going to differentiate, differentiate in a way that actually matters, it solves a real problem, not a fake problem. And I'm vehemently agreeing with you, Vlad, that this is a version one of a thing. And they're promising that they're going to make it better, and they're going to add algorithms, and blah, blah, blah. And they're also promising that they can do it off of the standard ROM update cycle. They can update it directly. But until they do, this is a feature that I'm only a tiny part interested in. That's the thing. That's a great point, actually, that you're raising. This is a version one. This is the horrible thing and the horrible situation we face ourselves as smartphone buyers. When I get a version one of something, I know for a fact that I'm not going to get version two in a month's time, version three in three months' time. I'm not going to get the iteration speed of something like Firefox, which has reached between seven versions over the past 10 weeks or whatever. You get version one of something on your phone, you're stuck, basically. It's like, version two is going to come next year. And by next year, I have to buy the other new phone. Yeah. So we would judge this so much less severely if we could trust HTC to just iterate like crazy on this and innovate on top of it. Here's the thing. All those things that you were asking for, Vlad, of your calendar notifications and things like that, Google provides in Google Now. And Google has been updating Google Now outside of ROM cycles, I mean, the Google Search app. Well, no, BlinkFeed can be updated outside of ROM cycles. It's just do we trust HTC to actually do it? Exactly. Google's already doing it and has done it. And it's extended Google's Now functionality. HTC could have just integrated it. Or if they were daring enough to actually launch a phone supporting Android 4.2, let you put the stupid Google Now widget on your home screen. But it's not doing that. And now we have to rely on HTC, who designs hardware more than software, to update the software. I just want to also add the extra notes about sense. Like Dita was saying, I did an interview with Peter Chow today, and we spoke about that. First of all, I've basically lost hope. If you're hoping for an HTC-made 4.3-inch device with stock Android, please just stop hoping. Just kill yourself. Learn about Albert Camus, a French philosopher, French Algerian philosopher, and absurdism. And learn to live without hope. That is the best advice I can offer you. We've got to talk about these buttons. Very quickly, but essentially, to Peter Chow, sense is really important to the company, because the company needs to differentiate itself. And he says, and I don't agree, but he says you can't build things like BlinkFeed without sense. I don't see why you can't. And you can't build things like the camera experience without sense. I don't see how sense facilitates the camera app. I think those innovations can be done in a standalone fashion and put on top of stock Android. Or just take Android and customize it less. But the company's just resolute and determined to be different for different sake. And I think that is one of the things. We need to be clear that sense applies to all of their software customizations, all bundled up. So it's more than just a skin. So when he says you can't do the camera without sense, the semantic or the pedantic reason is that that's part of their overall branding for all of their customizations. But yeah, I would like to see something. What I would like to see is HTC have the confidence in its own software and offer a stock ROM download on its developer site, and I will void my warranty to go get it. And I'm sure that it costs a bunch of money to develop that. But if you think that sense is the bee's knees, give me the choice not to use it and see what I do. And that's the thing that I think the people that are really into HTC's devices and are really excited about this particular one, et cetera, are the enthusiasts. They're the people that are most likely going to take that device and customize the crap out of it. So that's just like throwing them a bone, and it gives them that halo status among the geeks that they can be like, I love my HTC, and go tell everyone else to buy it. And it's never going to happen. Yeah, they need to move beyond that crowd, though, if they're going to be successful. I mean, just like the flip-flop. It's a halo thing, though. It's like when you think of a car manufacturer has a halo sports car that very few people buy, but the people that do buy it are influential. And that car that they only sell a handful of units of influences the entire line down. But so BlinkFeed isn't about those power users at all. HTC knows they're not going to get them to care about BlinkFeed. They're going to install a ROM, or they're going to click the checkbox to get the default home screen. What it's about is the store shelf experience. They need to have people walk into a carrier store and play around with it and go like, this is cool. That's what the old flip clock did back in the day. It was about the store shelf experience. That's what BlinkFeed is now. If I'm Peter Chow, I could give a good god damn if people use BlinkFeed a month after they buy it. If it gets them to buy it, that's good enough. So let's talk about these buttons. Yeah. That's good. Somehow we missed this in discussing hardware, but it kind of relates to software anyways, because I used it. So HTC last year used three capacitive buttons on this device, you have a back, a home, and a recent apps or multitasking key, depending on how you want to call that. But this year, it's only got two buttons. And the one that's been axed is that multitasking key. And HTC claims that the average user doesn't care and doesn't use it and doesn't want to use it and isn't aware of it. And so they've buried the function under a double tap of the home key, which is located on the right side of the phone just above that bottom speaker. And the back button is on the opposite side on the left side. So they've buried multitasking under a double tap, and they've buried Google Now under a long press of the button. And then the menu button appears at the bottom of the screen by default, but you can turn that off and make a long press of the back button toggle the menu. Yeah. So you can open up all these long press options, which are like the way to bury features. This is why, if you want users to not care about multitasking, this is how you do it. You just hide it from them. So here's the thing. HTC's not wrong that most users don't care about the multitasking button. Probably not. But at the same time, if it's there, they're going to hit it and they're going to see it and they're going to see what they can do with it. And if they bury it under a double tap of something which you know, how many people are really going to figure out that a double tap of the button launches this, then they're never going to use that feature ever. And this is perfect evidence for my point about HTC wanting to be different for its own sake. The multitasking overview, the visual multitasking, is different again from last year. Yeah. It's better. So last year, it was some sort of three dimensional card system where you slide left and right. With the worst inertial scrolling ever. Right. Now it's nine thumbnails and you can swipe up to dismiss them, yada, yada, yada. It looks like the Nokia N9 is multitasking. Right. But it's just nine and there's no option to just shut down all of them at the same time. Which is again, it's in the freaking stock Android. You take good software and you destroy it. You take things away. You slather on nonsense on top of it. You know, honestly. On the stock Android, there's no dismissal, number one. Number two, I can only see 3 and 1 half apps on the multitasking button. There's no dismissal on stock Android? No. No. Not for all of the apps. You can do it one by one, obviously. OK. Well then everybody else has been doing that, I guess. That's a good skin customization. All right. I take that back. I take that back. OK. But still, to me, it's like I'm seeing all these changes. I'm seeing all this work. People have gone into the office, spent time doing this. And I just feel like this is not where you need to change about your phone from last year. This is not the reason you haven't been selling phones. Samsung has been selling phones. And that's where we find ourselves. Well, it's interesting. I'm railing on this two button layout pretty hard. I really want to use it in an actual workflow and see if I can live with it. Because the fact of the matter is I use an iPhone often. And that only has one stick and button. And I have to double tap that to open up my multitasking tray or whatever as well. So I could be making a big deal of nothing. But I do like that multitasking button on the old phones. And you know where else you need to double tap the home button is the GS3. This thing is getting released on like 180 carriers worldwide. 185. 185. In the US it's getting released on AT&T, T-Mobile, and Sprint, but not Verizon. Sorry, Verizon. Sorry, HTC. Yeah, I was going to say, sorry, Verizon has nothing to do with it. This was Verizon's decision, actually. I was saying, sorry, Verizon users that want this phone. The real story is sorry, HTC, that it's being left out of Big Red. Yeah. So I mean, yeah. It's just terrible. They can't catch a break, right? They have no leverage with Verizon. And it's just, if they can sell a bunch of these phones on other carriers and build the brand the way that they didn't in 2012, maybe they can start to get Verizon to be like, yeah, sure, we'll carry it. What the heck? Give us a Droid 2, but give us this. But until then, I don't know. It's basically kneecapping them from the start at launch. It should be coming out in March, and the dates are kind of fuzzy, I think. But the other thing that's kneecapping them from the start is, just like last year, there's going to be a bunch of people that are going to be looking at this and waiting to make their purchase decision until they see what Samsung has on deck. And Chris is cute. Yes. Well, just to wrap the discussion with Verizon, let's not forget the fact that the Droid DNA just came out a few weeks ago. So HTC is still on a cycle with them. It's not like they're getting shut out of Verizon. And I think that Verizon is just continuing to exercise its extraordinary purchasing power on OEMs that can't afford to standardize across the range, HTC included. So I don't know. The Droid DNA is a good phone, right? Dan, I think that you may be the only one among us who've used both. Do you have an opinion on which one you'd rather take home? The one versus the DNA? I would rather have the one, just because it's slightly smaller. The DNA is very frustratingly large. And the one, I do like the aluminum chassis. The DNA's got the soft touch plastic. But I like the aluminum body on the one. And the DNA has last year's camera technology. And the one has this year's camera technology, et cetera. So I think as far as a device goes, I would go with the one over the DNA. It's fair. Sounds prudent. But yeah, about this GS4 rumor. So Eldar Murtazin, or however you pronounce his last name, I'm sure I'm pronouncing it incorrectly. And I apologize, Eldar, if you happen to be watching our show. You're probably not. He has a long, long, long history of breaking news and also spreading incorrect rumors, to be very blunt, going back to the early Nokia Symbian days, back when it was still at 60. And so he tweeted yesterday morning, I think it was yesterday, that there would be a big event on March 14. Didn't specify Samsung, didn't specify GS4, just said there was going to be a big event on March 14, and that it was going to kill the HTC One, basically. And Sammobile, which is a site with a pretty good reputation for Samsung leaks, posted about that tweet and then followed up saying that they had confirmed that that would be for the GS4. We did a little research on our end, talked to some sources who have a very good track record, and they basically came back and said, yeah, that's definitely the date, March 14. It's going to be a US event. Which is interesting. Yes, it is. The last event was in London, so it's in the US this time around. And yeah, it may be a coincidence. It's hard to tell how much industrial espionage is actually going on here. But it does suck for HTC that this phone is being announced literally days before the ones start shipping around the world. The timing couldn't be worse for them. That is, of course, assuming that the date doesn't slip. But as of right now, 3-14 is looking like the date to watch. We don't know anything about it. That's the other thing to know. We know that it's going to be another very feature-heavy announcement, and Vlad and I were debating about this earlier, about just how feature-heavy the GS3 announcement was. I thought that they put a lot of emphasis on these weird gimmicky features. That's smart to say, always comes to mind. And our source says that with the GS4, it's going to be even more pronounced. It's going to be the biggest leap in feature set since launch of the Galaxy S series, and bigger than the Delta from the GS2 to the GS3. And then we also heard that the phone's industrial design would mirror that of the Note 8.0, which has been leaked recently, which is Samsung's new mid-sized tablet that we're actually expecting to see debut at Mobile World Congress next week. I think that's going to be Samsung's big announcement there. So the final ID for that product that we see next week should give us some hints as to what we can expect to see with the GS4 in terms of ID. But that's about all we know. I mean, I think that 1080p is obviously a very safe assumption. We've been seeing Samsung's 4.99 inch panels with 1080p resolution. But what's interesting is that you're saying that's all we know. And that's such a stark contrast to what we were talking last year at this time about Samsung. Like we're maybe just over three weeks away from this alleged launch date, and we haven't seen a single leaked image. We haven't seen a single leaked design or anything. Whether they've been replaced last year or not, there's been nothing. So it's pretty interesting to see how different that is this year. And I think that, to be honest, I think that Samsung is starting to get a little addicted to the PR aspects of product security and all that. Because you remember last year, leading up to the GS3, there were all those incorrect leaks. And then the phone was announced. And then Samsung actually came out with this big blog post basically congratulating itself on fooling everybody. And I think we're about to see this same cycle again. I think that we're hearing the Note 8 leaks have been incorrect in terms of what the device actually looks like. Right now, the leaks that we've seen basically make it look like a giant GS3 or a giant Note 2. So we're hearing that that's incorrect. We haven't heard squat about the GS4, like you say, Dan. So I think that Samsung is really putting their nose to the grindstone on security, and they're super proud of it. I guarantee you, after March 14, we're going to get another blog post from them saying how they did it. I just want to, on that topic, I do also want to point out that Samsung and HTC and all of these Asian manufacturers consider just the basic quantity of people that attend their launch event part of their self-assessment and part of their success of a launch event. They don't really give a rat's ass whether you're connected and whether your live blog actually exists and whether they're connected with actual consumers. They just want to see how many bodies they can fit inside a massive hole in a big city. But on that topic, nice bit of trivia from HTC's event today. Peter Chow, when he came in, he came in very early and just kind of snuck in because nobody noticed him for some reason, so it's kind of like a random Taiwanese dude just walks in, and I'm like, that was Peter Chow. Why didn't anybody freak out and try and take his photo? But then I think his wife still, Chae Wang, who's the chairwoman of HTC, I believe she is the chairwoman of HTC. Well, anyway, she's also the boss of VIA, which is another big Taiwanese company. She's a big deal in Taiwan. When she arrived, man, it was like she had an entourage of 20 people with cameras and video cameras and DSLRs and things like that. And she was the focus of attention everywhere she went. It was really weird because Peter Chow was there, and people could see him floating in and out of the event. Nobody chased him. When she had anything to say, people with lights on their cameras and all sorts were just all around her. I don't really understand that. I don't really understand the dynamics and how she's a bigger celebrity than him over there in Taipei, but it was just kind of a curious thing for me. The only thing I have to say about that is I want everybody to appreciate just how awesome this photo that Vlad took of Peter Chow is. It's amazing. He looks like such a boss. He's just stupendous. Nice job. And he is indeed the boss. That's right. That's true. Yeah. I mean, he's kind of a laid back guy. Also, just another thing to point out because the comments on that interview suggest that it kind of sounds aggressive. We're angry at each other and pointing a finger when I'm asking questions, and he's kind of giving me a dirty look when he's answering. But because it's just transcribed in text, I think the tone of the actual interview wasn't really conveyed. Like, there was a bit of a language barrier because English isn't perfect. And where I pressed him on things, I did so gently. Yeah. And he smiles when he gets those questions. He's like, yeah, I know what you're doing. I'm going to give you an answer now. Yeah. I have nothing else to say about the HTC One or the Galaxy S4 or the wireless charging orb. You guys want to talk about the Ubuntu phone and that it's not coming till next year? Peter, you didn't answer the most important question of all, would you rather have the HTC One or the Galaxy S4? I'm going to wait and see. Yeah, what's your next? I'm going to wait and see. I'm going to tell you guys right now. Here's the thing that I would love to be proven wrong on. And it's like, I'm convinced, even though we haven't seen anything, we really know nothing about the Galaxy S4, I'm convinced it's going to be made out of plastic. And that will make me want the HTC More on a hardware level. I would love for Samsung to just prove me wrong and make me shove my foot in my mouth and release an aluminum device. But that happened last year. I just feel like we're going through an absolute recurrence. And maybe we should call this episode 37 instead of 35. We should move with the time. Deja vu. This is actually, we live in the Battlestar Galactica universe. Everything that has happened before and everything will happen again. And so we're just reliving 2012. Only the Cylons. Maybe this is the Matrix. Same situation. It's a similar story. It's an alternate universe, similar story. Minor details are different. This is what happened last year. And the year before, HTC was first with the Sensation before the Galaxy S2. HTC was first with the One X coming out before the Galaxy S3. And both of those devices had higher quality materials. The One X versus the Galaxy S3 is just no contest in terms of physical design. The One X is just so much nicer. It has a better display. HTC, in terms of hardware, just keeps winning. It keeps having the better device. And yet, Samsung keeps beating it with those dumb features. I mean, even this is a similar thing. It's not beating them with commercials, dude. It's beating it with the marketing push. I mean, if you turn on a TV and you see a commercial for a cell phone company, you're usually going to see Apple or Samsung. And Samsung's going to be, lately, thankfully, it's been talking about its features instead of just trying to make fun of Apple buyers. Whereas you don't see an HTC commercial. You might see it initially, like right when a phone is released, you might see a handful of HTC commercials. But they're not running for like six months at a time. I still see Galaxy S3 commercials on TV. And that phone was launched in, what, June or July? So this time around, HTC is going to take a bigger role in the marketing of its own phones instead of leaving it to the carriers. It's going to do it in specific cities because it doesn't have a ton of money. And I don't think they're going to be spending at the company money. But they are going to try and market this stuff directly to consumers themselves. And I mean, that's smart insofar as the carriers certainly didn't help them out with the 1X or the 1S at all. And I don't think they're going to be spending that money in any appreciable way. But does HTC have the resources to do what they need to do to actually compete with this phone from a marketing perspective, especially given the fact that they have this camera and this link feed UI that is going to initially put consumers off if they don't market it just so, just right? Go ahead, Chris. We thought that it had a couple more months of leeway. Yeah. I was going to say, the camera point is really good because that ultra pixel situation and the low light performance are so easy to demonstrate. And they're so easy to promote. You can trust carriers to just pimp them out in a very easy and approachable fashion, so long as the carrier's interested. But the thing to me, when you think about the scale of Samsung's achievement with its marketing might, the freaking phone, when you unlock it, has water ripples. And it makes these plunking noises. You pick it up, and it acts. It doesn't treat itself seriously. It acts like a freaking child's toy. And in spite of that, and in spite of junkyard things like smart stay and just nonsense features, it keeps succeeding. So I don't know what to say. It just makes me sad because I still continue to think that Android is the best smartphone software out there. And watching these people just futting around and screwing with it and not doing a good job, even Sony. I mean, Sony is generally restrained. But then the Xperia Z or Z should have been out by now. Because HTC might actually get the one out before the Xperia Z, and it already has a higher pixel density. And it absolutely has a better display. So what's the point in the Xperia Z? Who cares about the Xperia Z today? Nobody. I mean, at this point, as far as Android is concerned, I just kind of feel like I'm going to mute everything out and just wait until May when the K-branded pastry comes out and we get a new beautiful Android. And we get the X phone, the Motorola X phone. Yeah. OK. I'll tell you what. I'll step up to 4.5 inches for that device. I won't go all the way up to 4.7. But if it's 4.5, I will spend actual money on it. Wow. I'm going to hold you to that. What about you, Chris? What are you going to do? I think I'm going to hang on to the iPhone 5 and the Nexus 4 at least until the GS4 announcement. And then we'll take it from there. But I mean, that's going to be easy for us all to do anyway, because the one won't be out by then, which is exactly HTC's problem. I don't want to talk about the Ubuntu phone. It's not shipping until 2014. We got a great report by Sean Hollister up on the site. You should read it. And the developer previews are coming very soon for Galaxy Nexus and the Nexus 4, so you can play around with it. Go ahead, Chris. Well, I do want to just mention one thing very briefly about the Ubuntu mobile effort in general, which has me concerned, which is that they appear to be moving in some ways in the same direction as Tizen, where they're going to end up ceding a lot, if not all control of the platform to the carriers that are launching these devices. And it's going to become more about branding these phones as carrier devices with very, very deep carrier, quote unquote, experiences, and less about what they're going to be doing about a consistent Ubuntu experience across phones and across carriers. And that's very scary. But we'll see. We have a long way to go until we know for sure how this is going to play out. On that ridiculously depressing note, I want to Oh, oh. Should we briefly mention what's going on next week? No. Yes, we should, actually. You're totally right. We totally should. So next week is obviously, or maybe not so obvious to you, but it's Mobile World Congress, starting on, essentially the event itself starts on Monday, but for us it starts on Sunday. All four of us will be there in Barcelona covering it, as well as some other people from the Verge. We've got a pretty good staff that will be there. And it should be interesting to see what happens. Obviously HTC did its thing already, so it will have a muted presence at MWC instead of the big presence it normally has. And as far as the show goes, I believe we're planning on doing a show. Is that correct, Dieter? Sure. Yeah. I don't know. I mean, here's the thing. We never know when we're going to get back from events. We never know when we're going to have time. And we especially never know exactly what our bandwidth is going to be. So if we can do a show, we will do a show. And we'll endeavor to give you a heads up on when that show happens. But follow Verge on Twitter for like, hey, we're broadcasting in five minutes because we feel like it, because that could totally happen. Pretty much. But at the same time, rest assured that our textual, photographic, and video output is not going to be diminished. Because we're bringing out professional video producers who put the rest of us amateurs to absolute shame every single time and somehow make us look presentable. Like for example, my wall isn't as yellow as it looks. But it is actually really yellow. So my webcam's white balance has been broken the entire show. So I look kind of orange and weird. And then the wall looks like it's painted with custard, according to somebody on Twitter. So we'll have a higher level of professionalism at MWC. And we'll make sure not to miss anything. Because that's a joke. Yeah, it should be fun. I'm looking forward to it. And on that slightly more upbeat note. Optimistic, upbeat note. Thank you very much for watching and or listening. If you want to follow us on Twitter, you can and should. I am backlawn. Vlad is Vlad Sabov. Dan is DC Seifert with an EI. Chris is Zpower. Again, we are all at Verge. You can email us. It's mobileshow at theverge.com. We will completely read every single email that you send to us and then forget to talk about it on the show. And we may or may not see you next week on the mobile show. But definitely watch for us covering MWC. And it's definitely going to be episode 35. That's right. Thanks, guys. Bye.
 Welcome to The Verge Mobile Show.
 It is The Verge Mobile Show.
 I am Dieter Bohm.
 I'm Vlad Sabo.
 I'm Dan Seifert.
 I'm Chris Ziegler.
 And as you can tell from my ridiculous introduction, I'm
 totally off my game.
 Did you screw it up?
 It wasn't me.
 No, it was fine.
 I rolled with it just fine.
 It is episode 37.
 We are no longer on episode 35.
 Congratulations to us.
 It's the week of February 18th.
 And obviously, there's only one thing to talk about, the only
 important thing that's happened in the past week, and
 that is that Google has finally released the
 wireless charging orb.
 It just released it in your room.
 It was released last week.
 We talked about it last week.
 But the important bit is that I have one now.
 And I can complain about it, because I paid $70 for
 something that I can't mount in my car, which drives me nuts.
 And so let me explain why I can't mount it in my car.
 Because you're chicken.
 So instead of using smart things like, say, magnets to
 align the Nexus 4 with the charging area, like, say, the
 Palm Touchstone did, the Nexus 4 has this sticky pad on it,
 which is like this rubbery, almost gelatin type of
 material that sticks to the glass on the Nexus 4.
 And it's actually pretty sticky when it's new, to the
 point where it's not even a little bit sticky.
 To the point where if I lift the Nexus 4 off of it, the orb
 comes with it for like an inch or so before dropping,
 slamming down to my desk.
 But because it's sticky, it also attracts dust like you
 wouldn't believe.
 So I assume that the stickiness is going to wear
 off after a couple of weeks of actual use.
 But other than that, it's a charged one.
 YOSSI ELKRIEFEN.
 Are we seriously talking about the orb right now?
 IAN NI-LEWIS.
 Yeah.
 I mean, that's the thing.
 YOSSI ELKRIEFEN.
 All right, listen.
 I mean, here's the thing.
 Fair enough.
 Our first five minutes are dedicated to mobile
 topics anyway, right?
 We give that time for anybody who's late, who's brewing up a
 cup of tea.
 IAN NI-LEWIS.
 That's right.
 YOSSI ELKRIEFEN.
 Like Dan trying to promote some brand of soft drink.
 IAN NI-LEWIS.
 I've been waiting to rant about this since like Friday
 when I got the thing.
 So I haven't complained on Twitter.
 I haven't really ranted publicly.
 So here's my rant about it so that I can complain about it
 to people.
 And yeah, it cost me like $70 after taxed shipping.
 Not worth it?
 I can't say it was.
 I mean, they did the same thing with the Galaxy Nexus
 where it took them forever to come out with any official
 accessory.
 Were there any official accessories
 for the Galaxy Nexus?
 Was there a car dock or something?
 It was the extended battery in the extended battery door.
 Oh, yeah.
 And there was a dock too.
 Yeah, but the extended battery was never sold in the US, I
 think.
 It was just in South Korea.
 No.
 Well, the Verizon one had the official extended battery.
 Yeah, Verizon did.
 Yeah, sorry.
 I always associate the Galaxy Nexus with the A7.
 I mean, I bought one off of Amazon.
 I don't know that it came from something sketchy in South
 Korea.
 I have one.
 Well, yeah, it's an extra like two milliamp hours.
 It's like the most ridiculous extended battery ever made.
 But anyway, there was a long delay between the release of
 the Galaxy Nexus and the release of the official
 accessories.
 And they did the exact same thing with the Nexus 4.
 And to be fair, it was only in the last few weeks that the
 Nexus 4 really became widely available.
 But there was still a pretty healthy Nexus 4 ecosystem for
 the past few months during which nobody could get a
 bumper or a dock or anything.
 So we're still not talking about the HTC One.
 I was just going to say, enough trolling.
 Let's talk about the HTC One, the big, huge launch event
 happened today.
 We got amazing hands on.
 We got an interview with the CEO, Peter Chow.
 We've got reporting.
 We've got the full specs, the full details.
 We have basically everything you need to know as our story
 stream explains in its headline.
 And I don't even know the story.
 I'll say everything is to know about it.
 Everything there is to know as opposed to everything you
 need to know?
 There is one bit of trivia.
 I can't tell you what day you could walk into a store and
 buy it.
 That's fair.
 OK.
 There is one bit of trivia that nobody actually knows yet
 because I've kind of invented it over the past few minutes,
 which is that we are running episode 35, which is our
 recurring episode in the Verge Mode show.
 Which coincides with the-
 It's not clear that we were on 37.
 I declared it.
 Really?
 I did.
 You just deflated Vlad.
 I can sense it in his voice.
 He's like, really?
 I'm sorry, Vlad.
 This is episode 35 in my heart anyway.
 The point is we have this recurring episode going on
 until we nail it, until we're happy that we've completed
 episode 35.
 And HTC is kind of doing the same thing with the recurring
 branding.
 So there was the HTC One X and the One S and the One SV and
 the One X Plus and the One XL and the One V and the One
 something else.
 And now there's just the HTC One.
 So the company kind of is recurring with its branding.
 Also, it was kind of hilarious that HTC was already buying up
 advertising, just advertising HTC One, which is the name of
 this phone.
 And a lot of people were amused by it because last
 week's football slash soccer tournaments had that HTC One
 branding all over the hoardings around the stadium.
 And everybody, because of all the rumors and all the leaks
 that happened, everybody was like, well, HTC is already
 pronouncing the name of this device.
 Peter Chow, he had this freak out a week or two ago where he
 was waving it about, say, yelling M7, M7.
 I think that freak out hit the internet a week or two ago.
 But I think it was actually recorded late last year.
 It was an end of year company retreat of some sort.
 It's funny.
 It was one second still then.
 So it wasn't like Nokia trying to leak things itself.
 It was actually a legitimate leak, that one?
 No, I wouldn't say that.
 I'm just saying that the video originated
 from the end of the year.
 Maybe it took HTC a month to leak it.
 OK.
 Well, the broad point I'm trying to make, and it's not
 a particularly strong one, is just that it's been kind of a
 funky old build up to this phone.
 HTC hasn't helped itself with things like Peter Chow and all
 of that stuff happening.
 And then today, the perfect combination for me was this
 simultaneous event, which was actually two completely
 separate events that just happened, one in New York City
 and one in London.
 And we're presumed, and this is actually to Blackberry's
 credit, when they did simultaneous events around the
 world, they essentially did one event and then just
 projected it on massive screens in satellite locations.
 HTC didn't do that.
 HTC had executives in New York City talking about the full
 features of the phone.
 And they had executives in London talking about the full
 features of the phone.
 It's just that London began about 20
 minutes after New York.
 And it was a complete and utter disaster for anybody
 trying to coordinate between the two.
 Yeah, that was much different than we kind of expected.
 We had expected seeing a live stream of one or the other.
 Because I was at the New York City event with our New York
 team, Vlad, obviously you were at the London event.
 While we were communicating, we were trying to tell each
 other what's going on.
 And then it was just like nothing was
 lining up, unfortunately.
 I mean, for the most part, from my perspective, it was so
 weird, because I was taking pictures and writing up
 announcements.
 And I was like, am I just echoing what Dennis said about
 15 minutes ago?
 Well, from my perspective, not being at either event, it was
 cool to see the pictures flowing into the live blog
 from both events.
 I made a comment about it on Twitter, just seeing those two
 events happen.
 And at the same time, covered by Verge staff
 was pretty cool.
 But I can see why that would be very frustrating that the
 news is flowing at different rates.
 I pretty much just ignored what Vlad was doing.
 That's just a good policy for life.
 Do we talk about the phone?
 We should talk about the phone.
 So I actually wanted to, I had a segue, a legitimate segue,
 which is that the European device, Vlad, correct me if
 I'm wrong, doesn't have any LTE.
 Is that right?
 No, it does.
 Oh, it does.
 OK, so I have no segue.
 Never mind.
 All right, so we need to run down the basic specs here.
 So it's a 4.7 inch screen.
 It is 1080p full, which gives it a hopping 468 PPI.
 And it's some variation of mega super LCD, I'm assuming.
 Well, no, HTC isn't calling it super LCD this time, but it
 is an LCD.
 And it does have actual quality.
 HTC has given every other feature a marketing term,
 except for this screen, which is the most prominent feature
 on the device.
 And it's not just the most prominent.
 To me, it's absolutely the best feature.
 I think it's right up there with every super LCD HTC has
 had before, and I can't tell you in any way in which the
 One X is better than this display.
 To me, this is just, here's the HTC One X display.
 It used to be a 720p display.
 We just turned it up to 1080p.
 That's all I'm seeing here.
 It's just a really, really awesome display to me.
 Yeah, it's quite beautiful.
 On the top and bottom of the display are speakers.
 There are dual speakers.
 And I believe the marketing term for that is boom sound.
 Boom.
 Yes.
 Here comes the boom sound.
 Again, I have to give HTC really big credit for this.
 Not for the branding, absolutely not for the branding.
 But when I think about stereo speakers, and when I think
 about how you should do sound on a phone, a real multimedia
 device, this is it.
 Front-facing speakers, symmetrically placed, no
 messing about.
 One of them is where the earpiece would be.
 One of them is where the microphone would be.
 And they just look good.
 They function well.
 I think about every smartphone that I've reviewed over the
 past whatever many years, except for the iPhone, which
 has a downward-firing speaker.
 I always write about how if you put the phone down on your
 couch or on a table, the sound gets muffled because the
 speaker's on the back.
 The One essentially just circumvents that problem
 entirely by just throwing the speakers in the front, which
 is great.
 And when we got to see it and we got some hands-on time with
 it, they're really loud.
 They project very well.
 They put the sound right in front of you.
 You don't have to do the silly cupping your hand behind it
 to reflect the sound back to you.
 So it does work pretty well.
 I guess it gives you the boom.
 And it's beat audio, too, if you care about that, I guess.
 So it's an all-metal construction.
 Of course, the display is glass.
 And there's some plastic ring around the edge.
 They carve out the metal the same way you've seen metal
 devices carved out, like the iPhone and the
 MacBook or whatever.
 But then in that process, they embed the plastic into it.
 And then there's bands so that it does proper antenna stuff
 so you don't have to touch your phone.
 Actually, the side material, we couldn't establish it when
 we had the pre-briefing with HTC.
 It's plastic.
 Even they weren't sure.
 Are you sure it's plastic?
 Because one of them suggested it might be ceramic.
 No.
 I mean, they may have lied to me, but it's plastic.
 OK.
 But it's a very thin rail of plastic.
 It looks fine.
 It looks good.
 It comes in white and black.
 As long as it stays clean.
 The only concern that I had when I was handling the
 device is because it's white.
 And the One X was a white device for its flagship
 version.
 And that notoriously got dirty quickly.
 So it would be pretty horrible if the white plastic on this
 got dirty, because it's not a glossy plastic.
 You know what's really nice and great from the One X?
 The camera doesn't protrude anymore.
 Now it's fully integrated into the back shell.
 Yeah.
 And it just looks like a mushroom device now.
 I'm not saying it's fat.
 I don't know exactly what the thickness is off the top of my
 head, but it's not bad.
 9.7 millimeters.
 Yeah.
 I have a DNA here.
 And it's virtually the same profile as the DNA.
 Well, the protruding camera on the One X was functional,
 right, because you had the speaker on the back.
 So I think that they needed to raise the
 phone off the surface.
 And with this one, they don't.
 So it's a win-win.
 Yeah.
 And we'll get into the camera, but I'm saving the
 best stuff for last.
 It's got a 1.7 gigahertz Snapdragon 600 processor,
 which I imagine just flies on the benchmarks.
 I'm sure it does.
 Yeah.
 2 gigs of RAM, 2300 milliamp battery, 32 and 64
 gigabyte variants.
 And so when you look at the standard specs of a phone, HTC
 is doing what HTC has always done, which is just, we're
 going to have a hugely well-specced phone.
 We're going to play the speeds and feeds game.
 We're going to blow that out as much as we can.
 And we'll see what happens.
 This is the other thing with the Galaxy S4 in a month.
 But for now, is there another phone that has better specs
 in the stuff we've talked about so far?
 HTC has always played the speeds and feeds game.
 But in actual real world use, it has not always had the
 fastest phones.
 Once we actually use the device for more than 20
 minutes, we can really say how fast it was.
 I can say that in the time that I did use it, everything
 was very snappy and very responsive and quick and fast
 and things like that.
 I didn't notice any lag like I've noticed with
 older HTC devices.
 So hopefully the new processor, along with the new
 software that we'll talk about in a moment, and all the
 gobs of RAM and stuff like that.
 So there's basically two more spec things to run through
 and then the software.
 The first spec thing, which I'm going to mention now, is
 that integrated into the power button, which is on the top,
 is an infrared blaster.
 IR blaster.
 So they're shipping it with this thing they're calling.
 Is it called HTC TV?
 Is that what it's called?
 HTC CinesTV.
 Whatever.
 And it's basically like a rebranded version of the Peel
 app, but instead of having to connect over Wi-Fi or Bluetooth
 to some janky IR blaster to control your media, you can
 use it right in the app.
 You can pick your channels directly.
 But its integration with DVRs is sad.
 And it's a pretty basic piece of remote software.
 Now the fundamental problem with this application and the
 concept of it, I appreciate that HTC is doing this,
 although it's really, really hilarious to think that
 phones in the 1990s had IR blasters and now we've come
 full circle.
 But they're solving the wrong problem, if you're looking at
 the industry as a whole.
 The correct problem to solve is the requirement that
 devices in your AV rack require IR control in the
 first place.
 Everything should be on a standard.
 Everything is connected to your network at this point.
 Your receiver, your game console, your TV, everything
 is on your network.
 Everything should be controlled over Wi-Fi.
 And that is where we should be going.
 It just sucks that HTC had to do this.
 Well, it gets into the fun of the whole issue.
 HTC can't build a whole TV ecosystem.
 They're not Apple.
 They're not even Samsung.
 And so they've got to work with the stuff that's available
 to them, and what's available to them is infrared.
 Yeah, and working with cable providers.
 Like the average consumer that doesn't have a super geeky AV
 rig in their house has a Motorola or Scientific
 American cable box from their cable provider.
 And that thing was designed in like 1999, and it uses IR.
 Yeah, it's not their fault. It's just symptomatic of a AV
 industry issue that is frustrating.
 Hang on, I just have a couple of points to
 counter that, actually.
 The first one is, having had some issues setting up my Wi-Fi
 situation over here in my new place, I can tell you that
 just cramming everything on Wi-Fi isn't the very best idea
 in the world, just because 2.4 gigahertz bandage is going to
 be way saturated when you think about the fact that if
 you're in an apartment building, everybody has a Wi-Fi
 network, and then everybody's TV has to hook up.
 Everybody's phone, everybody's tablet, everybody's laptop,
 their kid's laptop, et cetera, et cetera.
 So that's one thing.
 The other thing is exactly what Dieter was raising just a
 bit earlier.
 These things already exist.
 Your cable box is already there.
 Your TV is already there.
 Maybe you have a VCR that you can't let go of.
 Your DVD player.
 All these things are already in place.
 And I figure, particularly here in the UK, HT has already
 signed up Virgin, Sky, most of the content providers.
 So they have all the program guides integrated into the
 app, which is already on the phone.
 And then you have the IR blaster just at the top of the
 phone, you have the app, which is going to control your TV.
 To me, it's kind of like there's no downside to this.
 So it's a net positive.
 Even if you never use it, it's a net positive
 to have it there.
 The only downside, which I completely agree with Dieter
 on, is the power button should have been mounted on the side.
 This phone is too big for the top mount and power button.
 It should have been on the side.
 They should have just had a little opening for the IR
 blaster.
 That's all I want.
 Yeah.
 The same problem was with the DNA.
 I complained about it in my review.
 You had to do this ridiculous claw type of grip in order to
 reach the top mount and power button.
 Right.
 All right.
 So the big thing is the camera.
 The ultra pixel camera, which shoots the Zoe's, which is
 short for Zoetrope.
 And so we can come at this from a software and solutions
 perspective, which is the direction HTC is hoping that
 everybody will see it at.
 Or we can come at it from a spec perspective, which I
 don't think HTC is afraid of the spec side.
 But there is something sort of scary to the average consumer
 from there.
 And I guess let's just get into it.
 So I think Vlad will agree with me here that as far as
 the spec goes, I'm perfectly content with the spec.
 Well, let's say what the spec is.
 It's technically a four megapixel camera, which is
 obviously a lot lower resolution than what you see
 on most smartphones on the market today.
 But there's this misconception, and it's been
 talked about in cameras for many years now, called the
 megapixel myth, which just means that more megapixels
 equals a better picture.
 And that's not really the case.
 In reality, there's many more other factors that go into
 making a quality image.
 And one of them is the actual physical size of the pixels on
 an image sensor.
 So what HTC has done here is said, we're going to use a
 sensor that has fewer pixels, but each pixel is larger.
 And therefore, since it's larger, it's more sensitive to
 light, and it's able to better capture light for better
 color, better low light, better dynamic range, all of
 those things that contribute to a better quality image.
 And essentially, if you are familiar with digital
 photography, this is why full frame cameras take so much
 better pictures than your pocket-sized point-and-shoot
 cameras, because their sensor is so much larger, and it has
 larger pixels on it.
 So HTC is trying to apply this to the smartphone.
 And if everything they say is true about it, then it should
 lead to much more improved image quality, which I'm
 perfectly fine with.
 Four megapixels of resolution, if you are printing a photo
 off of that, you can easily do an 8 by 10 without a problem.
 You could even go bigger if you're not pixel
 peeping, as they would say.
 So I'm not too worried about it.
 But to your point, Dieter, customers have been sold on
 megapixels for many years now.
 And seeing it on the shelf next to something that says 8
 or 12 or 13 or whatever it might be is certainly
 something that will confuse a large number of people.
 To be clear, if you're printing digital photos in
 your 2013, you need to reevaluate your life.
 There are better ways to look at photos now than there were
 even five years ago.
 I don't know, man.
 Jack White disagrees with you.
 Well, I don't listen to Jack White's music.
 Jack White's album from 2012 is awesome.
 Just going to say that.
 You should listen to it.
 OK, but before we move on to the software side, which I'm
 sure Dieter is going to break down for us, I do want to give
 AC Mass a credit for doing what they've done here.
 Because we say this on podcasts up and down the
 internet, that companies should be bold, make bold
 decisions, and stand out, and do unique things.
 This is unique.
 Nobody has ever done this among smartphone or even
 feature phone manufacturers.
 As soon as they were able to put the word megapixel on
 their cameras, it's always been, let's get the bigger
 number, let's get the bigger number.
 It was one, 2.1, three megapixels, five megapixels,
 yada, yada, yada.
 41 megapixels.
 So actually, I want to talk about the peer review, because
 everyone immediately is going to compare this to Nokia's
 peer review technology for a number of reasons.
 And because the average picture that you take with the
 808 PureView is only five or eight megapixels.
 So that's lower resolution.
 But in reality, the way that particular sensor works is it
 captures 40 megapixels, or 41, or whatever, and then down
 samples it down to the lower resolution.
 No, it captures 38.
 Yeah, it captures 38.
 And then it down samples down to that five or eight
 megapixel final image, which is a different approach than
 what HTC is using.
 Right, but the general effect is pretty much the same.
 Because essentially, you have this 38 megapixels in a Nokia
 peer view, which fit into a given space.
 And then you have a smaller number of pixels, 4 million
 pixels in HTC's sensor, which again, fit into a given space.
 And I think they're the same sensor sizes.
 But the general point is that you have larger than average
 sensor sizes.
 And you're taking all the information, all the light
 information, as Steve Jobs used to say, it's all about the
 photons, man.
 And Nokia's doing arithmetic and algorithmic work and all
 of this calculation, whereas HTC's kind of brute forcing it
 and saying, we're just going to make big pixels, absorb as
 much light as we can.
 But the ultimate effect is the same.
 Both of them deliver better low light performance than most
 other cameras.
 And the thing that I would say is I'd rather have a really
 high quality four or five megapixel photo, and then take
 my chances printing it, than have a 12 megapixel photo from
 some of the, let's say, Sony sensors, which are kind of
 rubbish from like 2011, 2012, which are like 12,
 30 megapixels.
 I'd rather not have that.
 I'd rather have a smaller one that just gives me higher
 quality, and then deal with the size utilization.
 So if he had a, I'm talking.
 There's one other spec.
 I'm talking.
 Oh my god.
 There's one other spec.
 I'm not done.
 No, I'm going to get there.
 I'm going to kill you guys.
 You're the best.
 I love you so much.
 The other thing you're going to say is that it's optically
 stabilized.
 It's two-axis optical stabilization, which also helps
 with low light.
 So HTC had a meeting with a whole bunch of tech journalists
 to talk about this.
 I was there.
 And they showed a chart where one axis was the overall area
 of the whole sensor, and the other axis was pixel size.
 And you look at most smartphone cameras, and when
 you start getting up into the 8, 10, 12 megapixels,
 especially those higher megapixels, 13, you get these
 really tiny pixel sizes on the sensor that they argue is
 getting down to the point where the actual wavelength of
 light makes it so that it can't capture an image, whereas
 this sensor, the pixel size is up in the
 point-and-shoot range.
 And it also gives them other benefits.
 So having just a four megapixel image instead of an
 eight megapixel image, there's a couple things.
 One, there's less processing that has to happen.
 One, because it's smaller.
 But two, because there's just less noise and less interpolation
 that they have to do from a whole bunch of sensors catching
 the same light and trying to figure out where
 the pixels are.
 And so the smaller size and the less processing means that
 they can take, I don't think they're using the same image
 chip, but they can take their image processing chip and do
 more interesting things with the images, both in terms of
 getting low light shot and processing it, but also this
 new feature that they're introducing, which they're
 calling Zoe.
 I could talk about Zoe, too, if you want.
 I'm interrupting Joe.
 YOSSI ELKRIEFENI.
 There was this perfect moment where all three of you were
 going to say something.
 Because Chris seems to be generally more quiet on
 podcasts lately, I want to hear what he has to say.
 CHRIS BROADFOOT.
 Nothing.
 The moment is lost.
 But please, tell us about Zoe.
 What is Zoe, Dieter?
 DETERI MACHOVERA So basically, like a lot of cameras,
 you can do burst shots.
 So you hit the camera shutter button, and it actually
 captures a little bit before you hit it and a little bit
 after you hit it.
 But what HTC is doing is it's dual path encoding.
 So when you do a Zoe picture, it's actually encoding the
 light twice.
 One is a short little movie.
 It's about four seconds long, and I think it's technically
 like three point something, and then it's a couple tenths
 of a second before you hit it and a couple tenths of seconds
 after it's done.
 Somewhere in that range.
 And then at the same time, it's recording a burst shot
 of the actual images.
 And the net effect is you get a short little four second
 clip, and you can take any moment out of that clip and
 pull an image out of it as a still that is like full
 fidelity, not blurry, not crappy looking.
 It's an actual still image.
 It's not something that it's pulled out of there.
 And so the net effect is instead of taking a picture,
 if you've got some kind of action, some kind of thing
 going on, you can take a Zoe and just record the little
 four second thing and then pull what you want out of that as
 appropriate.
 And then the other thing they're doing is, and this
 I'm less clear about, but they take the event galleries that
 automatically get created, and then you can automatically
 make these little one, two minute movies that are short,
 little, automatically cut and transitioned things into your
 still photos and your video.
 With vintage filters.
 With vintage filters.
 Yeah.
 I think they've got six different tracks that
 automatically put the filters on it.
 So hopefully they'll be expanding that soon.
 But I'm interested to try this new way of taking pictures.
 So the thing that confuses me about Zoes is that there's
 other phones on the market that do this.
 You've got the Blackray Z10 that will shoot a string of
 images in a row, almost like recording a video, and then
 you can pull the good one out of that.
 And I know there's other phones that do that and other
 software that does it.
 But what HTC is trying to sell this as are short video clips.
 These Zoes, essentially.
 If you're not pulling a still out of it,
 you're making a Zoe.
 And it's this new short video clip.
 It's not a cinemagraph.
 It's not a vine.
 It's not these other things that we have been blowing up
 for the past year.
 It's half a vine, let's be honest.
 It's half a vine.
 And then, so it's this proprietary format.
 And then to share it, I've got to.
 Well, I mean, it's not proprietary.
 It gets saved as a standard MLV file, I think.
 OK.
 Well, that's fair.
 So when I want to share it, though, I upload it to HTC
 servers, is that correct?
 Well, you can upload it to YouTube.
 You can upload it to Facebook.
 Or you can make this automatically little
 generated vignette.
 And you can upload that.
 Or you can upload that little vignette along with up to, I
 think, it's 10 of the associated assets from the
 gallery, so like the vignette plus 10 photos so that you
 make a cute little gallery.
 You can upload that to HTC servers.
 But HTC apparently doesn't want to be in the business of
 storing your junk forever.
 And so when you upload it, it only stays there for 180 days,
 which it's just like I would never, like if I'm going to
 share something to my mom that is a cute little video clip
 and some pictures, the idea that I would put it up there
 and it's not going to be there in 180 days, not going to
 happen, not going to do it.
 I love how Deedus' webcam kind of shakes the more outraged
 he is and the more disappointed he is about
 things.
 So obviously this is an Android-based device.
 And we don't have things like Vine, which is blowing up.
 But when Vine eventually does come to Android, why would I
 use a Zoe instead of just shooting a Vine?
 Well, because you can get the shot of your child's first
 step, and if you happen to miss the shutter button, you'll
 have the little thing.
 HTC's argument, and take it for what it is, is that most
 people when they shoot boobies on their phones kind of suck
 at it.
 Most movies on phones are really boring.
 But when you're limited to this little four-second clip,
 you'll catch something interesting.
 And they argue that they can put these things together and
 make something overall that's compelling, even if it's from
 a relatively boring day hanging out.
 That's their argument.
 I mean, if you think about Vines and the fact that most
 people's Vines actually consist of multiple little
 clips, so they hold the button down, they take a three-second
 thing and then add a three-second thing and then
 combine them and try and do something crazy with that.
 I think HTC's going after the same thing.
 I need to correct Dieter and say it's a three-second clip
 that you get from the HTC One camera, not a four-second one.
 It's like 3 and 1 half.
 It's like 3.7.
 Yeah, I think it goes 0.6 seconds before you hit the
 shutter and then three seconds after.
 So it's 0.6.
 No, but I think before you hit the shutter, well, that's the
 thing.
 Before you hit the shutter, you get five frames just being
 shot, and then 15 frames after you hit the shutter.
 But that's one thing.
 That's the full-res photos.
 That's one recording.
 The other recording is the actual 1080p video, which is
 happening, and that's three seconds.
 It's three seconds.
 You get 0.6 before and 0.3 after.
 So it's 3.9 seconds in total.
 So I'm going to say I'm OK at calling it four seconds.
 Then I've been misinformed, and I apologize for spreading
 unabashed information.
 Yes, I'm underselling HTC's product.
 But yeah, I think HTC's going after the exact same premise
 as Vine, which is, again, what Deezer was saying, is just
 short little bursts, which when you put them together
 makes, to me, it's kind of like a video collage or like a
 stop-motion animation with more animation in it, I guess.
 It's something like that.
 I mean, really, I like this software addition for the
 playfulness and the toy factor of it, really.
 So you get the phone, you have all the multimedia
 capabilities to play back movies and music and all of
 that stuff.
 But that stuff, you've been able to do for years now with
 your phone.
 So that isn't brand new.
 This software suite, this camera suite, gives you a new
 way, I mean, it's such a tight marketing cliche, but to be
 creative, right?
 It actually lets you do stuff that's creative.
 And that's the thing.
 A lot of creative people do say that the fun of creativity
 is in the limitations.
 So yeah, just being able to shoot video gets boring
 because it's just so expensive.
 And there's too many options, and you don't
 really know what to do.
 But if you're told, OK, you can shoot free clips of 3.9
 seconds and then stitch them together into this epic 11
 second, 12 second masterpiece, what's the best that you can
 do?
 You have limitations.
 You have kind of a set framework, and then you can
 work within that and play within that.
 But having said that, I do still get this feeling.
 And I am one of the biggest fans of the design of this
 phone as well.
 I really like the whole zero gap, as HTC calls it, physical
 design, optical bonding of the display, et cetera, et cetera.
 As usual, people think I have a fetish for this, but if this
 was a 4.3 inch phone, I'd probably be
 married to it by now.
 But the trouble is, OK, you have a great design.
 You have this great new camera suite.
 You have the biggest speakers ever fit inside
 a phone, apparently.
 It's still just another Android multimedia phone.
 We've had these already.
 We've had quad-core phones.
 We've had 1080p phones.
 I just don't feel excited.
 I don't feel like I'm really getting that much new.
 Well, I think that's smartphone fatigue, not an
 issue with this phone in particular.
 Because I don't know what HTC could have done today, apart
 from show me a Nexus device that would have brought me the
 same level of joy that the original iPhone
 or the Nexus One did.
 Well, it's interesting that you mentioned smartphone
 fatigue, because I know you've talked about this before,
 Chris, but one thing that we noticed during HTC's
 presentation today is that all of the specs that we've been
 talking about were not mentioned during the
 presentation.
 We didn't hear 4.7 inch 1080p display with this.
 That's a good point, yeah.
 We didn't hear Snapdragon 600 quad-core processor with 1.7
 gigahertz clock speed and 2 gigabytes of RAM.
 I don't recall hearing a single spec period.
 The only spec they really talked about was saying that
 it's all aluminum.
 And then they just talked about the actual features of
 what you can do with the device.
 So it will be interesting to see how that plays out this
 year with other events.
 But certainly in the past, we've seen Samsung shy away
 from talking about specs.
 Obviously, Apple has never really focused on specs with
 any of these things.
 Wait, wait, wait.
 Is Samsung shying away talking about specs?
 Well, features and specs are two different things.
 The Galaxy S3 event was all about smart stay and stuff
 like that.
 They put far more emphasis on that than they did on the
 actual line items, specs of the features.
 Oh, no, no, no.
 You guys have very selective memory.
 Make the phone do what it does.
 You guys have very selective memory.
 Because I remember seeing, I was there with the Samsung
 Galaxy S3.
 I remember seeing people say, doesn't that noise make you
 want to go to the bathroom?
 That's what I remember from Samsung's Galaxy S3 event.
 OK.
 No, no, seriously.
 Samsung had probably the biggest screen in
 London inside a dome.
 It was like 60 feet?
 No, it's larger.
 It was just a massive, massive screen.
 And they put up every spec and feature of the Galaxy S3 up
 on that.
 It was just a straight bullet point list.
 It was like GLONASS, GPS, Bluetooth 4.0, yada, yada,
 yada, which also reminds me, the HT1 is one of the first
 phones with 802.11ac.
 So hot news for router fanboys.
 Your 802.11ac connectivity is ready to be used now.
 So I want to make a point that I think we should come back to
 and revisit.
 But it's really important to note that we're talking about
 HTC, and we inevitably ended up talking about Samsung.
 And that's happening to them again, because there's going
 to be a new Samsung Galaxy S phone, flagship phone,
 probably next month, announced next month.
 But before I get into that whole discussion of are they
 actually going to be able to sell any of these damn phones,
 we need to talk about the software.
 We need to talk about the new sense, Sense 5.
 Although I think nuisance is just calling it nuisance.
 Which, not sense.
 Don't say that too fast.
 Oh, god.
 Sorry.
 I just can't believe that nobody in their marketing team
 was like, what if we say this fast?
 Or what does it sound like?
 Oh, it sounds like nuisance.
 Which is something that we've called sense in not so many
 certain terms for years.
 So I'm sorry, HTC, but nuisance is not a good name.
 So the nuisance is just like the old sense.
 I asked specifically if they had taken out any features.
 And the only feature I think they actually took out was the
 thing where you could set the phone down on its face to
 silence the ringer.
 Or you could lift it up to go into speakerphone.
 Well, and plus the speakers are on the front now, so it
 doesn't make sense to do that functionality.
 But all the integration with social networks, most of the
 widgets, not all of them.
 They killed a couple.
 That's all there.
 And look and feel is a bit better.
 They got rid of the annoying tabs at the bottom.
 They switched to the hollow pivots.
 They toned down the gradients a tiny little bit, but not all
 the way.
 And they redesigned all the icons.
 HTC tells us they touched every single corner.
 We'll see.
 Again.
 Yeah.
 The icons are 2D now, right, instead of 3D?
 Yeah, they've lost their cartooniness and their
 shakiness.
 On that topic, I just want to say really quickly, the new
 icon look is apparently very much in the style of Scott
 Croyle, who is the lead designer for HTC.
 I don't know what that tells us, other than he was allowed
 to change the icons and not anything of actual import.
 Scott Croyle has absolutely fantastic taste in footwear,
 may I say.
 I've actually had a conversation with Mr. Croyle
 about his shoes in the past.
 Turquoise today, Chris.
 Turquoise.
 Yeah, he wore turquoise shoes to the MWC announced for the
 1X last year, too.
 I don't know if that's a running theme for him or what.
 I don't think they were literally the same pair of
 shoes, but they were close.
 Yeah, that was shameful.
 Wearing the same pair of shoes twice, that would be shameful.
 I want to point out Scott's got real slowdown about these
 turquoise shoes, because Chris is wearing them, too.
 So I've been avoiding saying the most and totally ignoring
 the shoe conversation, by the way.
 I've been avoiding talking about the most important
 feature on the new Sense, which is BlinkFeed.
 They have replaced your home screen.
 They've gotten rid of the flip clock, replaced with a more
 generic clock.
 And they've basically put Flipboard on your home screen.
 And I don't know if the people that aren't talking are
 visible, but Vlad's yawn is pretty amazing.
 I'm just getting comfortable so I can have a nap while you
 talk about this nonsense.
 So the idea is you hit your home button, and you have a
 feed of snackable content.
 Your news feeds and your Facebook and some Twitter
 stuff, and it looks like Flipboard.
 It's relatively pretty.
 It's relatively fast.
 It doesn't work offline, which is kind of stupid.
 But it's not a tool.
 You can't use it as a Google Reader replacement or a
 Twitter client replacement.
 It's just a thing that HTC put on your home screen so that
 when you're standing in line at the grocery store, you've
 got something to do for a couple of minutes.
 And I really want to know what you guys think of it, because
 I'm literally holding two thoughts in my
 head at the same time.
 And 75% of me says, oh my god, I do not want Flipboard on my
 home screen.
 And 25% of me says, oh, Flipboard on my home screen.
 That would actually be kind of neat.
 Here's my thought on it.
 And if you're the type of person that's going to open
 your phone up while you're standing online at the grocery
 store to read something, chances are you're already
 getting information from Twitter.
 You're already getting information from Facebook.
 You're probably doing some sort of RSS or Google Reader
 type of thing.
 And this is kind of pulling in all that same stuff.
 So if you have a Twitter app that you like to use and you
 check it, you look at it, and then are you going to see the
 same stuff on your Blink feed, I guess, mixed in with all
 your other stuff?
 So it's like you're reading the same stuff twice.
 Or if you have a Google Reader account set up and you're
 looking at your Google Reader articles, you're going to see
 the same type of articles again in your Blink feed without a
 way of marking them red.
 So if you see it on Blink feed and then you go back to your
 Google Reader, it's not marked as red.
 So you're seeing it again.
 So I mean, it's just.
 Well, you're not the target market for it then.
 No, I'm not.
 But I'm trying to put myself in the mind of someone who's
 going to use this.
 Well, it's a replacement.
 You just have to kind of let go.
 It's not meant to be a full tool.
 It's like a thing to do.
 It's like flipping on the TV.
 You're not sitting down to watch your binge of West Wing
 on Netflix and making sure you're going through every
 single episode.
 You're flipping on the TV, seeing what's on.
 You get bored.
 You turn it off.
 That's what it's meant to be.
 This is HTC's way of saying that our way of doing things
 is better than the users' way of doing things.
 Because if they wanted to respect the user, they would
 have made BlinkFeed a widget that you can put on any home
 screen panel you want.
 But instead, it is now the home screen, which I find, in
 terms of an Android device, I find that offensive.
 We've seen widgets like this fail spectacularly.
 Right.
 Blur.
 Right.
 And now they're like.
 They're going to make it a home screen widget and have it
 be successful.
 They need to make it look.
 They need to have it control the whole screen.
 It needs to be that flipboard experience where it's edge to
 edge, not in a stupid little border.
 So I kind of get what they're trying to do.
 And you can click a check box to make it the classic Android
 home screen, your default home screen, when you hit the
 Home button.
 Oh god, we haven't talked about the buttons.
 We'll get back to that.
 But the report that I wrote was basically HTC is taking
 two giant risks.
 One is the camera.
 I think we're pretty positive about that.
 We're at least happy they're taking that risk.
 And two is this differentiation link feed.
 And it seems like a fiasco to me that I want no part of.
 But there's a tiny part of me that says maybe.
 Well, listen.
 Here.
 I just want to point out where this thing
 just goes wrong for me.
 And I'm reminded of Timescape, Sony Ericsson's Android phones.
 Blurscape.
 I love how we're just bringing up old, really bad Android
 customization skins.
 The trouble is, I have yet to see any one application,
 never mind a phone manufacturer whose strength
 and specialties hardware, any one application aggregate all
 of these things successfully.
 Everybody has this ambition.
 It might be one of the most commonly attempted and
 absolutely one of the most commonly failed things in
 mobile software, aggregating news, social feeds, and maybe
 like emails and alerts and things like that.
 I mean, it's like something that Windows Phone is
 essentially built around with the People Hub.
 And we all know how well that works to replace your Twitter
 app.
 But everybody's trying.
 Because with iOS, Siri's trying to do similar things
 where it alerts you to things.
 Google now is trying to do similar things where it
 gathers in information it thinks you're going to want
 and needs, things like that.
 Aggregating information in an intelligent way and in a way
 that you find helpful and useful, more so than, as Dan
 was saying, just jumping into Twitter or just jumping into
 a discrete application in question, like your email
 client, for example, is really, really tough.
 And HTC is not.
 I want to express the, there's a couple of things I want to
 express that's different about BlinkFeed than
 what we've seen before.
 And it's funny that you mentioned Google now.
 Because Google now is very different from BlinkFeed in
 that BlinkFeed is just purely for entertainment's sake.
 Whereas Google now is going to give you directions, it's
 going to give you weather, it's going to give you local
 things nearby that you can check out, and your calendar,
 and all that other stuff.
 BlinkFeed doesn't do any of that.
 And I've heard a lot of people compare BlinkFeed to
 Microsoft's LiveTiles because it looks very similar.
 But in reality, it's not.
 It's not giving you email notifications.
 It's not giving you messaging notifications.
 It's not giving you missed call notifications.
 It's just giving you entertainment.
 And it's a big thing.
 Priorities were the thing for me.
 So OK, you're my BlinkFeed.
 And I'm supposed to trust you.
 Because as you say, if you're going to replace at least part
 of the Twitter app, or the email app's functionality, or
 your newsreader's functionality, you want to
 trust whatever you're replacing it with that is better.
 So I'm supposed to trust you.
 But at the same time, you have no hierarchy for the
 information that I want to see.
 So I asked about things like, what if I have calendar
 alerts coming up?
 Are those going to float to the top of the BlinkFeed?
 What if I have important emails coming up?
 Are those going to come to the top?
 And this is the thing.
 We have alerts.
 We have all this incoming data and information that Android
 just provides to HTC.
 Why isn't that integrated into the BlinkFeed?
 I'll find it so much more useful to unlock my phone and
 to say, oh, here's the news.
 But then, wait, I actually do have some alerts and some
 meetings coming up, which I need to address first.
 Those things aren't surfacing.
 They aren't coming up.
 And that limits the usefulness of it, whereas it's trying to
 be kind of universal to you.
 Here's how I see it.
 HTC is screwed.
 They're 10th place in the global smartphone market.
 Mobile phone market.
 Excuse me, they can't spend as much money in
 marketing as Samsung can.
 They're not Apple.
 And on the software side, they had two choices.
 They could go the standard stock Android route, which
 they seem terrified of doing.
 It wasn't a choice.
 This is the thing.
 I'm not a tear man.
 But they couldn't go the standard stock Android route
 because they're afraid of Motorola, because Motorola is
 going to do that.
 And then they won't be differentiated from Motorola.
 So they had to try and push forward with Sense.
 And they believe that Sense is great.
 OK, whatever.
 So in order to make Sense a real differentiator that
 people care about, they have to provide a tool that people
 actually need that they can't otherwise get.
 And the tool of giving me crap to read when I'm waiting in
 line, that problem has been solved very
 well by a ton of apps.
 So the only real thing they're fixing is for the few people
 that don't know how to find Flipboard, and the few people
 who don't want to have to hit the Home button and then hit
 the Flipboard button icon.
 Those are really small problems.
 And so that's the thing.
 If you're going to differentiate, differentiate in
 a way that actually matters, it solves a real problem, not
 a fake problem.
 And I'm vehemently agreeing with you, Vlad, that this is a
 version one of a thing.
 And they're promising that they're going to make it
 better, and they're going to add algorithms, and blah,
 blah, blah.
 And they're also promising that they can do it off of the
 standard ROM update cycle.
 They can update it directly.
 But until they do, this is a feature that I'm only a tiny
 part interested in.
 That's the thing.
 That's a great point, actually, that you're raising.
 This is a version one.
 This is the horrible thing and the horrible situation we face
 ourselves as smartphone buyers.
 When I get a version one of something, I know for a fact
 that I'm not going to get version two in a month's time,
 version three in three months' time.
 I'm not going to get the iteration speed of something
 like Firefox, which has reached between seven versions
 over the past 10 weeks or whatever.
 You get version one of something on your phone, you're
 stuck, basically.
 It's like, version two is going to come next year.
 And by next year, I have to buy the other new phone.
 Yeah.
 So we would judge this so much less severely if we could
 trust HTC to just iterate like crazy on this and innovate on
 top of it.
 Here's the thing.
 All those things that you were asking for, Vlad, of your
 calendar notifications and things like that, Google
 provides in Google Now.
 And Google has been updating Google Now outside of ROM
 cycles, I mean, the Google Search app.
 Well, no, BlinkFeed can be updated outside of ROM cycles.
 It's just do we trust HTC to actually do it?
 Exactly.
 Google's already doing it and has done it.
 And it's extended Google's Now functionality.
 HTC could have just integrated it.
 Or if they were daring enough to actually launch a phone
 supporting Android 4.2, let you put the stupid Google Now
 widget on your home screen.
 But it's not doing that.
 And now we have to rely on HTC, who designs hardware more
 than software, to update the software.
 I just want to also add the extra notes about sense.
 Like Dita was saying, I did an interview with Peter Chow
 today, and we spoke about that.
 First of all, I've basically lost hope.
 If you're hoping for an HTC-made 4.3-inch device
 with stock Android, please just stop hoping.
 Just kill yourself.
 Learn about Albert Camus, a French philosopher, French
 Algerian philosopher, and absurdism.
 And learn to live without hope.
 That is the best advice I can offer you.
 We've got to talk about these buttons.
 Very quickly, but essentially, to Peter Chow, sense is really
 important to the company, because the company needs to
 differentiate itself.
 And he says, and I don't agree, but he says you can't
 build things like BlinkFeed without sense.
 I don't see why you can't.
 And you can't build things like the camera
 experience without sense.
 I don't see how sense facilitates the camera app.
 I think those innovations can be done in a standalone
 fashion and put on top of stock Android.
 Or just take Android and customize it less.
 But the company's just resolute and determined to be
 different for different sake.
 And I think that is one of the things.
 We need to be clear that sense applies to all of their
 software customizations, all bundled up.
 So it's more than just a skin.
 So when he says you can't do the camera without sense,
 the semantic or the pedantic reason is that that's part of
 their overall branding for all of their customizations.
 But yeah, I would like to see something.
 What I would like to see is HTC have the confidence in its
 own software and offer a stock ROM download on its developer
 site, and I will void my warranty to go get it.
 And I'm sure that it costs a bunch of
 money to develop that.
 But if you think that sense is the bee's knees, give me the
 choice not to use it and see what I do.
 And that's the thing that I think the people that are
 really into HTC's devices and are really excited about this
 particular one, et cetera, are the enthusiasts.
 They're the people that are most likely going to take that
 device and customize the crap out of it.
 So that's just like throwing them a bone, and it gives them
 that halo status among the geeks that they can be like,
 I love my HTC, and go tell everyone else to buy it.
 And it's never going to happen.
 Yeah, they need to move beyond that crowd, though, if they're
 going to be successful.
 I mean, just like the flip-flop.
 It's a halo thing, though.
 It's like when you think of a car manufacturer has a halo
 sports car that very few people buy, but the people
 that do buy it are influential.
 And that car that they only sell a handful of units of
 influences the entire line down.
 But so BlinkFeed isn't about those power users at all.
 HTC knows they're not going to get them to
 care about BlinkFeed.
 They're going to install a ROM, or they're going to click
 the checkbox to get the default home screen.
 What it's about is the store shelf experience.
 They need to have people walk into a carrier store and play
 around with it and go like, this is cool.
 That's what the old flip clock did back in the day.
 It was about the store shelf experience.
 That's what BlinkFeed is now.
 If I'm Peter Chow, I could give a good god damn if people
 use BlinkFeed a month after they buy it.
 If it gets them to buy it, that's good enough.
 So let's talk about these buttons.
 Yeah.
 That's good.
 Somehow we missed this in discussing hardware, but it
 kind of relates to software anyways, because I used it.
 So HTC last year used three capacitive buttons on this
 device, you have a back, a home, and a recent apps or
 multitasking key, depending on how you want to call that.
 But this year, it's only got two buttons.
 And the one that's been axed is that multitasking key.
 And HTC claims that the average user doesn't care and
 doesn't use it and doesn't want to use it and
 isn't aware of it.
 And so they've buried the function under a double tap of
 the home key, which is located on the right side of the phone
 just above that bottom speaker.
 And the back button is on the opposite
 side on the left side.
 So they've buried multitasking under a double tap, and they've
 buried Google Now under a long press of the button.
 And then the menu button appears at the bottom of the
 screen by default, but you can turn that off and make a long
 press of the back button toggle the menu.
 Yeah.
 So you can open up all these long press options, which are
 like the way to bury features.
 This is why, if you want users to not care about
 multitasking, this is how you do it.
 You just hide it from them.
 So here's the thing.
 HTC's not wrong that most users don't care about the
 multitasking button.
 Probably not.
 But at the same time, if it's there, they're going to hit it
 and they're going to see it and they're going to see what
 they can do with it.
 And if they bury it under a double tap of something which
 you know, how many people are really going to figure out that
 a double tap of the button launches this, then they're
 never going to use that feature ever.
 And this is perfect evidence for my point about HTC wanting
 to be different for its own sake.
 The multitasking overview, the visual multitasking, is
 different again from last year.
 Yeah.
 It's better.
 So last year, it was some sort of three dimensional card
 system where you slide left and right.
 With the worst inertial scrolling ever.
 Right.
 Now it's nine thumbnails and you can swipe up to dismiss
 them, yada, yada, yada.
 It looks like the Nokia N9 is multitasking.
 Right.
 But it's just nine and there's no option to just shut down
 all of them at the same time.
 Which is again, it's in the freaking stock Android.
 You take good software and you destroy it.
 You take things away.
 You slather on nonsense on top of it.
 You know, honestly.
 On the stock Android, there's no dismissal, number one.
 Number two, I can only see 3 and 1 half apps on the
 multitasking button.
 There's no dismissal on stock Android?
 No.
 No.
 Not for all of the apps.
 You can do it one by one, obviously.
 OK.
 Well then everybody else has been doing that, I guess.
 That's a good skin customization.
 All right.
 I take that back.
 I take that back.
 OK.
 But still, to me, it's like I'm seeing all these changes.
 I'm seeing all this work.
 People have gone into the office, spent time doing this.
 And I just feel like this is not where you need to change
 about your phone from last year.
 This is not the reason you haven't been selling phones.
 Samsung has been selling phones.
 And that's where we find ourselves.
 Well, it's interesting.
 I'm railing on this two button layout pretty hard.
 I really want to use it in an actual workflow and see if I
 can live with it.
 Because the fact of the matter is I use an iPhone often.
 And that only has one stick and button.
 And I have to double tap that to open up my multitasking
 tray or whatever as well.
 So I could be making a big deal of nothing.
 But I do like that multitasking button on the
 old phones.
 And you know where else you need to double tap the home
 button is the GS3.
 This thing is getting released on like 180
 carriers worldwide.
 185.
 185.
 In the US it's getting released on AT&T, T-Mobile,
 and Sprint, but not Verizon.
 Sorry, Verizon.
 Sorry, HTC.
 Yeah, I was going to say, sorry, Verizon has nothing to
 do with it.
 This was Verizon's decision, actually.
 I was saying, sorry, Verizon users that want this phone.
 The real story is sorry, HTC, that it's being
 left out of Big Red.
 Yeah.
 So I mean, yeah.
 It's just terrible.
 They can't catch a break, right?
 They have no leverage with Verizon.
 And it's just, if they can sell a bunch of these phones
 on other carriers and build the brand the way that they
 didn't in 2012, maybe they can start to get Verizon to be
 like, yeah, sure, we'll carry it.
 What the heck?
 Give us a Droid 2, but give us this.
 But until then, I don't know.
 It's basically kneecapping them from the start at launch.
 It should be coming out in March, and the dates are kind
 of fuzzy, I think.
 But the other thing that's kneecapping them from the
 start is, just like last year, there's going to be a
 bunch of people that are going to be looking at this and
 waiting to make their purchase decision until they see what
 Samsung has on deck.
 And Chris is cute.
 Yes.
 Well, just to wrap the discussion with Verizon, let's
 not forget the fact that the Droid DNA just came out a few
 weeks ago.
 So HTC is still on a cycle with them.
 It's not like they're getting shut out of Verizon.
 And I think that Verizon is just continuing to exercise
 its extraordinary purchasing power on OEMs that can't
 afford to standardize across the range, HTC included.
 So I don't know.
 The Droid DNA is a good phone, right?
 Dan, I think that you may be the only one among us who've
 used both.
 Do you have an opinion on which one you'd
 rather take home?
 The one versus the DNA?
 I would rather have the one, just because
 it's slightly smaller.
 The DNA is very frustratingly large.
 And the one, I do like the aluminum chassis.
 The DNA's got the soft touch plastic.
 But I like the aluminum body on the one.
 And the DNA has last year's camera technology.
 And the one has this year's camera technology, et cetera.
 So I think as far as a device goes, I would go with the one
 over the DNA.
 It's fair.
 Sounds prudent.
 But yeah, about this GS4 rumor.
 So Eldar Murtazin, or however you pronounce his last name,
 I'm sure I'm pronouncing it incorrectly.
 And I apologize, Eldar, if you happen to be
 watching our show.
 You're probably not.
 He has a long, long, long history of breaking news and
 also spreading incorrect rumors, to be very blunt,
 going back to the early Nokia Symbian days, back when it
 was still at 60.
 And so he tweeted yesterday morning, I think it was
 yesterday, that there would be a big event on March 14.
 Didn't specify Samsung, didn't specify GS4, just said
 there was going to be a big event on March 14, and that
 it was going to kill the HTC One, basically.
 And Sammobile, which is a site with a pretty good
 reputation for Samsung leaks, posted about that tweet and
 then followed up saying that they had confirmed that that
 would be for the GS4.
 We did a little research on our end, talked to some
 sources who have a very good track record, and they
 basically came back and said, yeah, that's definitely the
 date, March 14.
 It's going to be a US event.
 Which is interesting.
 Yes, it is.
 The last event was in London, so it's in the US
 this time around.
 And yeah, it may be a coincidence.
 It's hard to tell how much industrial espionage is
 actually going on here.
 But it does suck for HTC that this phone is being
 announced literally days before the ones start shipping
 around the world.
 The timing couldn't be worse for them.
 That is, of course, assuming that the date doesn't slip.
 But as of right now, 3-14 is looking like the date to watch.
 We don't know anything about it.
 That's the other thing to know.
 We know that it's going to be another very feature-heavy
 announcement, and Vlad and I were debating about this
 earlier, about just how feature-heavy the
 GS3 announcement was.
 I thought that they put a lot of emphasis on these weird
 gimmicky features.
 That's smart to say, always comes to mind.
 And our source says that with the GS4, it's going to be even
 more pronounced.
 It's going to be the biggest leap in feature set since
 launch of the Galaxy S series, and bigger than the Delta
 from the GS2 to the GS3.
 And then we also heard that the phone's industrial design
 would mirror that of the Note 8.0, which has been leaked
 recently, which is Samsung's new mid-sized tablet that
 we're actually expecting to see debut at Mobile World
 Congress next week.
 I think that's going to be Samsung's big
 announcement there.
 So the final ID for that product that we see next week
 should give us some hints as to what we can expect to see
 with the GS4 in terms of ID.
 But that's about all we know.
 I mean, I think that 1080p is obviously a
 very safe assumption.
 We've been seeing Samsung's 4.99 inch panels with 1080p
 resolution.
 But what's interesting is that you're saying
 that's all we know.
 And that's such a stark contrast to what we were
 talking last year at this time about Samsung.
 Like we're maybe just over three weeks away from this
 alleged launch date, and we haven't seen a
 single leaked image.
 We haven't seen a single leaked design or anything.
 Whether they've been replaced last year or not,
 there's been nothing.
 So it's pretty interesting to see how different
 that is this year.
 And I think that, to be honest, I think that Samsung
 is starting to get a little addicted to the PR aspects of
 product security and all that.
 Because you remember last year, leading up to the GS3,
 there were all those incorrect leaks.
 And then the phone was announced.
 And then Samsung actually came out with this big blog post
 basically congratulating itself on fooling everybody.
 And I think we're about to see this same cycle again.
 I think that we're hearing the Note 8 leaks have been
 incorrect in terms of what the device
 actually looks like.
 Right now, the leaks that we've seen basically make it
 look like a giant GS3 or a giant Note 2.
 So we're hearing that that's incorrect.
 We haven't heard squat about the GS4, like you say, Dan.
 So I think that Samsung is really putting their nose to
 the grindstone on security, and they're super proud of it.
 I guarantee you, after March 14, we're going to get another
 blog post from them saying how they did it.
 I just want to, on that topic, I do also want to point out
 that Samsung and HTC and all of these Asian manufacturers
 consider just the basic quantity of people that
 attend their launch event part of their self-assessment and
 part of their success of a launch event.
 They don't really give a rat's ass whether you're connected
 and whether your live blog actually exists and whether
 they're connected with actual consumers.
 They just want to see how many bodies they can fit inside a
 massive hole in a big city.
 But on that topic, nice bit of trivia from
 HTC's event today.
 Peter Chow, when he came in, he came in very early and just
 kind of snuck in because nobody noticed him for some
 reason, so it's kind of like a random Taiwanese dude just
 walks in, and I'm like, that was Peter Chow.
 Why didn't anybody freak out and try and take his photo?
 But then I think his wife still, Chae Wang, who's the
 chairwoman of HTC, I believe she is the chairwoman of HTC.
 Well, anyway, she's also the boss of VIA, which is another
 big Taiwanese company.
 She's a big deal in Taiwan.
 When she arrived, man, it was like she had an entourage of
 20 people with cameras and video cameras and DSLRs and
 things like that.
 And she was the focus of attention
 everywhere she went.
 It was really weird because Peter Chow was there, and
 people could see him floating in and out of the event.
 Nobody chased him.
 When she had anything to say, people with lights on their
 cameras and all sorts were just all around her.
 I don't really understand that.
 I don't really understand the dynamics and how she's a
 bigger celebrity than him over there in Taipei, but it was
 just kind of a curious thing for me.
 The only thing I have to say about that is I want everybody
 to appreciate just how awesome this photo that Vlad took of
 Peter Chow is.
 It's amazing.
 He looks like such a boss.
 He's just stupendous.
 Nice job.
 And he is indeed the boss.
 That's right.
 That's true.
 Yeah.
 I mean, he's kind of a laid back guy.
 Also, just another thing to point out because the comments
 on that interview suggest that it kind of sounds aggressive.
 We're angry at each other and pointing a finger when I'm
 asking questions, and he's kind of giving me a dirty look
 when he's answering.
 But because it's just transcribed in text, I think
 the tone of the actual interview wasn't really
 conveyed.
 Like, there was a bit of a language barrier because
 English isn't perfect.
 And where I pressed him on things, I did so gently.
 Yeah.
 And he smiles when he gets those questions.
 He's like, yeah, I know what you're doing.
 I'm going to give you an answer now.
 Yeah.
 I have nothing else to say about the HTC One or the
 Galaxy S4 or the wireless charging orb.
 You guys want to talk about the Ubuntu phone and that it's
 not coming till next year?
 Peter, you didn't answer the most important question of
 all, would you rather have the HTC One or the Galaxy S4?
 I'm going to wait and see.
 Yeah, what's your next?
 I'm going to wait and see.
 I'm going to tell you guys right now.
 Here's the thing that I would love to be proven wrong on.
 And it's like, I'm convinced, even though we haven't seen
 anything, we really know nothing about the Galaxy S4,
 I'm convinced it's going to be made out of plastic.
 And that will make me want the HTC More on a hardware level.
 I would love for Samsung to just prove me wrong and make
 me shove my foot in my mouth and release an aluminum device.
 But that happened last year.
 I just feel like we're going through an absolute
 recurrence.
 And maybe we should call this episode 37 instead of 35.
 We should move with the time.
 Deja vu.
 This is actually, we live in the Battlestar Galactica
 universe.
 Everything that has happened before and everything will
 happen again.
 And so we're just reliving 2012.
 Only the Cylons.
 Maybe this is the Matrix.
 Same situation.
 It's a similar story.
 It's an alternate universe, similar story.
 Minor details are different.
 This is what happened last year.
 And the year before, HTC was first with the Sensation before
 the Galaxy S2.
 HTC was first with the One X coming out before the Galaxy S3.
 And both of those devices had higher quality materials.
 The One X versus the Galaxy S3 is just no contest in terms of
 physical design.
 The One X is just so much nicer.
 It has a better display.
 HTC, in terms of hardware, just keeps winning.
 It keeps having the better device.
 And yet, Samsung keeps beating it with those dumb features.
 I mean, even this is a similar thing.
 It's not beating them with commercials, dude.
 It's beating it with the marketing push.
 I mean, if you turn on a TV and you see a commercial for a
 cell phone company, you're usually going to
 see Apple or Samsung.
 And Samsung's going to be, lately, thankfully, it's been
 talking about its features instead of just trying to make
 fun of Apple buyers.
 Whereas you don't see an HTC commercial.
 You might see it initially, like right when a phone is
 released, you might see a handful of HTC commercials.
 But they're not running for like six months at a time.
 I still see Galaxy S3 commercials on TV.
 And that phone was launched in, what, June or July?
 So this time around, HTC is going to take a bigger role in
 the marketing of its own phones instead of leaving it to the
 carriers.
 It's going to do it in specific cities because it
 doesn't have a ton of money.
 And I don't think they're going to be spending at the
 company money.
 But they are going to try and market this stuff directly to
 consumers themselves.
 And I mean, that's smart insofar as the carriers
 certainly didn't help them out with the 1X or the 1S at all.
 And I don't think they're going to be spending that money
 in any appreciable way.
 But does HTC have the resources to do what they need
 to do to actually compete with this phone from a marketing
 perspective, especially given the fact that they have this
 camera and this link feed UI that is going to initially put
 consumers off if they don't market it just so, just right?
 Go ahead, Chris.
 We thought that it had a couple more months of leeway.
 Yeah.
 I was going to say, the camera point is really good because
 that ultra pixel situation and the low light performance are
 so easy to demonstrate.
 And they're so easy to promote.
 You can trust carriers to just pimp them out in a very easy
 and approachable fashion, so long as the
 carrier's interested.
 But the thing to me, when you think about the scale of
 Samsung's achievement with its marketing might, the freaking
 phone, when you unlock it, has water ripples.
 And it makes these plunking noises.
 You pick it up, and it acts.
 It doesn't treat itself seriously.
 It acts like a freaking child's toy.
 And in spite of that, and in spite of junkyard things like
 smart stay and just nonsense features, it keeps succeeding.
 So I don't know what to say.
 It just makes me sad because I still continue to think that
 Android is the best smartphone software out there.
 And watching these people just futting around and screwing
 with it and not doing a good job, even Sony.
 I mean, Sony is generally restrained.
 But then the Xperia Z or Z should have been out by now.
 Because HTC might actually get the one out before the
 Xperia Z, and it already has a higher pixel density.
 And it absolutely has a better display.
 So what's the point in the Xperia Z?
 Who cares about the Xperia Z today?
 Nobody.
 I mean, at this point, as far as Android is concerned, I
 just kind of feel like I'm going to mute everything out
 and just wait until May when the K-branded pastry comes
 out and we get a new beautiful Android.
 And we get the X phone, the Motorola X phone.
 Yeah.
 OK.
 I'll tell you what.
 I'll step up to 4.5 inches for that device.
 I won't go all the way up to 4.7.
 But if it's 4.5, I will spend actual money on it.
 Wow.
 I'm going to hold you to that.
 What about you, Chris?
 What are you going to do?
 I think I'm going to hang on to the iPhone 5 and the Nexus 4
 at least until the GS4 announcement.
 And then we'll take it from there.
 But I mean, that's going to be easy for us all to do anyway,
 because the one won't be out by then, which is exactly HTC's
 problem.
 I don't want to talk about the Ubuntu phone.
 It's not shipping until 2014.
 We got a great report by Sean Hollister up on the site.
 You should read it.
 And the developer previews are coming very soon for Galaxy
 Nexus and the Nexus 4, so you can play around with it.
 Go ahead, Chris.
 Well, I do want to just mention one thing very briefly
 about the Ubuntu mobile effort in general,
 which has me concerned, which is that they appear to be
 moving in some ways in the same direction as Tizen, where
 they're going to end up ceding a lot, if not all control of
 the platform to the carriers that are
 launching these devices.
 And it's going to become more about branding these phones as
 carrier devices with very, very deep carrier, quote unquote,
 experiences, and less about what they're going to be doing
 about a consistent Ubuntu experience across phones and
 across carriers.
 And that's very scary.
 But we'll see.
 We have a long way to go until we know for sure how this is
 going to play out.
 On that ridiculously depressing note, I want to
 Oh, oh.
 Should we briefly mention what's going on next week?
 No.
 Yes, we should, actually.
 You're totally right.
 We totally should.
 So next week is obviously, or maybe not so obvious to you,
 but it's Mobile World Congress, starting on,
 essentially the event itself starts on Monday, but for us
 it starts on Sunday.
 All four of us will be there in Barcelona covering it, as
 well as some other people from the Verge.
 We've got a pretty good staff that will be there.
 And it should be interesting to see what happens.
 Obviously HTC did its thing already, so it will have a
 muted presence at MWC instead of the big presence it
 normally has.
 And as far as the show goes, I believe we're planning on
 doing a show.
 Is that correct, Dieter?
 Sure.
 Yeah.
 I don't know.
 I mean, here's the thing.
 We never know when we're going to get back from events.
 We never know when we're going to have time.
 And we especially never know exactly what our bandwidth is
 going to be.
 So if we can do a show, we will do a show.
 And we'll endeavor to give you a heads up on
 when that show happens.
 But follow Verge on Twitter for like, hey, we're
 broadcasting in five minutes because we feel like it,
 because that could totally happen.
 Pretty much.
 But at the same time, rest assured that our textual,
 photographic, and video output is not going to be diminished.
 Because we're bringing out professional video producers
 who put the rest of us amateurs to absolute shame
 every single time and somehow make us look presentable.
 Like for example, my wall isn't as yellow as it looks.
 But it is actually really yellow.
 So my webcam's white balance has been
 broken the entire show.
 So I look kind of orange and weird.
 And then the wall looks like it's painted with custard,
 according to somebody on Twitter.
 So we'll have a higher level of professionalism at MWC.
 And we'll make sure not to miss anything.
 Because that's a joke.
 Yeah, it should be fun.
 I'm looking forward to it.
 And on that slightly more upbeat note.
 Optimistic, upbeat note.
 Thank you very much for watching and or listening.
 If you want to follow us on Twitter, you can and should.
 I am backlawn.
 Vlad is Vlad Sabov.
 Dan is DC Seifert with an EI.
 Chris is Zpower.
 Again, we are all at Verge.
 You can email us.
 It's mobileshow at theverge.com.
 We will completely read every single email that you
 send to us and then forget to talk about it on the show.
 And we may or may not see you next week on the mobile show.
 But definitely watch for us covering MWC.
 And it's definitely going to be episode 35.
 That's right.
 Thanks, guys.
 Bye.