 hello welcome to the virgin mobile show this is episode 28 it's the week of december third two thousand twelve we're going to talk about things in the mobile world that happened this week so many things that happened and we're going to talk about them as i said this is really choppy so i'm just gonna say that my name is Dieter Bohn and we'll move on my name is Vlad Seva I'm Dan Seifert and I'm Chris Sigler and we're only ten minutes late today I feel pretty good about that I feel pretty good that this is the second week in a row that we're on a Tuesday so congrats to us and roughly the same time that we're supposed to be on we would have been on time today but we found some toys in google hangouts that distracted us in other words we were playing fart sounds for two minutes it was a good time we liked them they were fun so yeah so i don't know i think it was a relatively quiet week in news which means that what we're actually going to do is probably rant and complain about lots and lots of other things the chat room has already gone back to what we talked about last week which is that we need the kin nexus to be released which makes me really happy so i think the first thing i want to complain about is windows phone 7.8 it's coming out in early 2013 now microsoft has finally said and i mean there's some security enhancements to exchange but the big new feature is the new smaller live tiles and maybe i'm crazy but this shouldn't be that hard to push out i personally think that it has more to do with uh... with microsoft's desire to give the windows phone 8 devices enough of a head start on shelves because if you if you uh... if you get 7.8 out there quickly i think that you disincentivize some owners from upgrading to windows phone 8 in a timely fashion so that that might have something to do with it well i don't know i mean let's be fair microsoft people need a christmas holiday break as well it's december who does anything useful in december i was thinking about this at the beginning of the month this is going to be the month where nobody makes big news intentionally like if you're 7.8 is not big news don't oversell it vlad 7.8 is the smallest news imaginable well fair enough but in the context of the windows phone ecosystem there's windows phone 7.8 and there's windows phone 8 and there's all the rageaholics who bought the libya 900 thinking the smartphone bt test was over and then that's the most ironic thing that has happened this entire year nokia and AT&T saying smartphone beta beta test is over and then the Lumia 900 being the absolute beta test run for the Lumia 920 launch that's exactly the way that i see it so i mean i'm totally on board with dita this sort of thing windows phone 7.8 it's almost a question of why is it out already you're only given a small modification rate you should just get it out let people have it and that's the other thing you should have the confidence or you should have faith in the innovations of windows phone 8 to distinguish it from 7.8 it shouldn't be just a visual tweak people shouldn't be able to see 7.8 and 8 look alike and they're like woah it's all the same thing you should have some underlying strengths there as well yeah i mean i just we were so happy with Microsoft and how they managed to get updates out the door previous to this they did really well with 7.5 all things considered especially compared to what they've done in the past especially compared to android and i know that this is like this is not the platform of the future but you have these early adopters they're already angry about the fact that they're not getting a windows phone 8 upgrade you give them this bone and now you're making them wait for it just do what you need to do to get it out as soon as possible and it is a little bit oh wait there's new theme colors that might be the problem they couldn't figure out the the css codes for the new theme colors they've been debating between fff8 and fff7 and they just haven't decided which to be fair is pretty hard to beat yeah no it's a tough question yeah no it's a tough call look i mean for one thing keep in mind i think tom warren our very own tom warren microsoft pundit extraordinaire pointed out that 7.8 is microsoft's play in the entry level market for the foreseeable future so this isn't a throwaway it's tempting to think of this version as a throwaway platform but in some ways it's not uh... because until the hardware required to run windows phone eight gets pushed down market enough to to go to china and all these other places they're going to need to keep seven point eight and that that line that technology path alive but as i say december is not a good used month that's all that look all i know that i know i know exactly one thing about europe and that's that uh... europe has like six months of holidays here so i think that's where this mentality of yours is coming from what let me what what is that since you go forward to you probably going to over eat dramatically then you probably going to feel guilty about it uh... you going to over exercise dramatically or one day then there's going to be sales that is going to regretful overspending during the sales and in january everything will be just you know on another clearance sale you'll be you know he pounds heavier and every known use of to be excited like the only thing we had to be excited about this month is gmail two point oh four i was and we are already ripping i think it's right well okay i have a great way to be able to talk about all right before we move on i just want to point out that i have a uh... a windows phone eight acts here and this time which i'm pretty excited about doesn't make the power button anybody uh... yet it feels a lot bluer the fact that i've got a part from that now all right by gmail two point over i was uh... on the iphone and i had it's available and it should be downloadable now earlier today you had to look at the directly to install it from the app stores of using the update but it's out uh... and i am happy enough with it that i have turned off uh... notifications i haven't turned off email but turned off all notifications badges for the built-in email client and i'm just using this uh... forty-one right so i i did the assembly guy that i've had to turn off the built-in client for ages and i've been using sparrow uh... but today when i upgraded to the new at gmail at my turn office sparrows uh... notifications and i turned on the gmail and so we'll see how well that works so here's the thing about the the gmail app on both android and i was and on the desktop actually uh... a web view i use mail plane the thing that keeps me hooked up you know i used to go as the archiving and that i thought it was the labels but i realize that the thing i care about the most is uh... threading and more to the point when you're looking at a giant threat of emails with fifty people were flying with third you know favorite cat chips or whatever the threat happens to be uh... it all appears on a single elements and you could scroll through the whole element and you don't have to like scroll or tap or like scrolling like initiate something to switch to the next email you've got that entire email thread chain on a single view they all get marked red and you can just scroll through them really quickly and that's why i never could get into sparrow because it was too much of a hassle to move from one email to the next within a chain uh... and so despite the fact that there's some problems of with this gmail at still some which are google's fault and uh... so which are just limitations for what they can managed to do on i was it scratches my gmail it should just enough and now i will turn it over to chris who wants to complain about this at that page so here's my take a first-rate is an improvement i will i'm gonna try to be as well as i did by about this effect uh... it's an appropriate thing noted improvement over uh... the complete that complete dumpster fire that google uh... but that's that's really not much and and so so you know uh... if you think about how long google has spent uh... doing seemingly nothing to this application back to the box there are the only bible competitor to the native client of the few months ago uh... and this is what they've come up with this is will disappoint me uh... there are a few things that are already bothering me one is that you don't have a granular control over notifications are there either honor off essentially and on my android devices i always keep notifications limited to priority in box uh... because you know with with enough training we have to take a lot a lot of training at all you can get priority in back to the point where ninety nine percent of the time it's doing the right thing with your email and and to be fair i managed to do that pretty well on i was a i'd turned on the in the vip stuff and i can mark a few people's the a p and it wasn't perfect but it was pretty good at just getting the alerts for stuff that i want uh... and i think you do by i don't use priority in box like i don't just look at that in or anything else i look at all of my email at all of my email but just for getting out just for getting notifications party in boxes super convenient yes so that's that's one thing and then uh... and then also it bothers me that uh... that this is an idea you know i don't think there's anything you can do about this is that was full but but this app appears to be just a web view much like the act before it uh... and uh... you know that's that's google's fault that you have done by please entirely my goal i mean sparrow is a third-party email at the default native app that's not what you know are you sure that everything here is uh... completely webview because i mean things are are quick enough that i sort of wonder if it's a a mix of web and native co-op only going to the court navigation go into settings and tell me that's not an html page yeah but go but the thing that brings up the settings like that the panel sliding around everything it's a bunch of webviews in sort of a native shell it's a wrapper right yeah what i was going to suggest is that even if it is uh... based on the webview is starting to move away from that and it's starting to feel more like a native app even if uh... it's still rough around the edges but i i do feel like this entire discussion so far has omitted the biggest and most important change which is that the color of the icon has changed it's it's an outrage it is an abomination what i color code my home screen all out of whack now i mean the visit is like muscle memory that you've got built up for a particular occasion your home screen that's going to disappear because it's no longer i mean they've gone from a dark background to a white one it is pretty odd i mean yeah it's got like a icon there a thing on the bottom like it's sitting on something or it's raised up you know in a weird way and then chrome is still got a a dark background around its icon so now if there is any background around chrome well yeah i know that we talked about there's a the black whatever okay that that's right my face right right there but it may have been to be a bit less facetious this two points that i think we need to raise it the first is that i i see essentially once again do is kind of bring something out that doesn't feel like it's fully matured fully polished you see the ideas you see new design and the design language and uh... you know we use into hangouts at the moment the same loading animation that you see in to hangouts uh... this multi-colored circle which seems to be flipping around not a lot of that yet that's replicated exactly in the in the gmail for a lesson so google is working towards this consistency in this uniformity of knowing that you use in the group of just fine everybody on our team is remarked that the speed isn't great and is lag uh... some people's put in more lag than there is in the gmail one point whatever versions uh... what i what i was just saying is avenues in the previous version of gmail exclusively as both you guys could sparrow in the native uh... i was made up i mean it has been a great experience but i wouldn't goes of ours uh... called dumpster fire chris described and then it was survivable but as one thing so the dumpster fire technically i mean unless that dumpsters full of kerosene you product got a pretty good chance of of getting out of dumpster fire alive for not if you're in the dumpster the what's in the dumpster i mean you know i mean at the deuter is right and you it takes a lot to kill a human being uh... you wouldn't like them so far but maybe not if you have to use it for like yesterday that's uh... i gotta be honest i'm using it on my iphone five and i don't see the legs of the people are talking about so i think the animations are pretty cool the animations are are in my opinion slicker than they are on the android app uh... and you know schoolings really fast and all that other stuff uh... what does this thing that this liquor but they're not quicker who and and and yet if i read that that means is true uh... and everything is the the and read at the big advantage that it has is the fact that you can just wipe it actually between email threats yes so that again gets to the point about being really quick yet know that's definitely uh... omitted from for whatever reason from this version of the i was up which i can understand one thing that we haven't mentioned yet is it actually does support multiple inboxes now which is uh... a few or multiple uh... accounts issues a which is an early patient forty five taps to get from one account seriously one me sterile three three taps but close to a permanent what what is this country just one more final points raise which again is about the visual style to you at uh... which brian bishop from our team noted everything is kind of being enlarged like uh... you you know it's a other task that now if you have a specific out of the or person does have a speaker of the contacts they get a big letter so but i get an even from down again a big d uh... and all these visual elements have been in large in the text kind of insurance and down and you see less of each email uh... which people say looks pretty great on the i've had a patient makes the effort five seem little small like it needs a big screen which i think might be slain session on google spot just intro apple just be like our episode pic you need a bigger screen the iPhone sorry i'm just adding a picture to uh... to my right now realize it wasn't there it's not acceptable these of those i would just like to say uh... that uh... the dealer is destroying me and letterpress right now haha what i have to say anything well because i was a letterpress fanboys so he wanted to make sure that right i i only learned in the show but i only use devices and platforms that have letterpress on them uh... which means i i can actually use this windows phone x that i just showed you guys oh my god uh... yeah i know i i just thought i get in a few rounds of letterpress while i was waiting for you guys to finish what you're whatever it was that you're talking about okay this was so so terrible because not only did Chris completely derail the conversation but he also looked to his left and beats audio branding on his headphones the thing that i'm already annoyed and irritated about was just visible for like a solid five seconds the beats free and so it was a certain to go out and so i have to do that for the yeah but yes so i can hear anything we're saying right now no units get your smack talking now i can respect chris again but uh... we allow that without and other derailment of the whole conversation i a look i'm i'm relatively happy with uh... with the thing at uh... it makes it easier for me to be using an iphone uh... and tonight i've been bouncing between android iphone like literally like twice a day the past few days it's getting kind of embarrassing i do you feel that you know one of the biggest complaints about uh... heavy gmail users on the iphone why these android is because the gmail experience it isn't enough for you to just kind of forget about it right now yeah maybe i mean there's a bunch of apps on i was that i didn't think i'd care that much about what i do actually love a lot that are available on android uh... but there's a bunch of stuff on android that like it's hard for me to give up and it's like really little things like the unlock i've got a lot gesture and so taking a code saves me you know a quarter of a second every time i'm off my phone which given the returns and i thought every day that's up too uh... a million years uh... i couldn't be happy i was a little bit of a fun fact what's up the youtube app for i was just an update of the i've offices are yet does it let you are airplay street is there for really because that that's they took that out before right they did something to take that away and so i have called jasmine yes that's that's big deal check out the version of commerce and the summits on it a little bit she has got a set does it work on the i've had that uh... you optimize for i've had my phone five okay could just break this news before it was posted on the verge we did wow a sneak preview for those that are listed in the virgin will show or watch virtual show whether it was like but but but but but but but but but but but but but but but but but but but but uh... as it is so far and might it on is i've been i finally got my nexus four in last week after much of a delay and i've been like try living with my nexus four and like occasionally going back to my iphone parts of time today i think for me the biggest differences there's a lot of things with the internet platform that i like and the main or something like better than i was but when it comes to the apps uh... the third-party abs just a really frustrating me uh... for starters like i was complaining about earlier on twitter today that like there's no good camera for or photo apps for android that i can find none of them seem to compare to the third-party options are below i was and you know what it would do you want photo editing photo sharing was no no like uh... photo taking like like i use camera plus a lot of the iphone because it is the control over uh... exposure settings and stuff like that some camera nerd uh... and the ones i've tried for uh... and readjust don't work as well and are frustrating to use stuff like that so i mean that is one example uh... but there's others where just the third-party after just so much better and so much easier to use in that better design on i was a it makes me sad because i really like the android platform and using the internet but i'm just gonna mention because it surprised me picks up on android is really nice photo editor uh... isn't editor though or is that like uh... a shooter now it's it's not she's is definitely an essay in a place where you can see how do you confuse an editor with the first person shooter maybe that's my problem as a whole uh... the idea that it was a bunch of tweaks and filters it has a really nice color isolation uh... setting where you know you select color like red and it desaturates all the other colors and i think that surprised me actually is that i found pics on android uh... using android phones i can't find it in the ios app store so this is like the odds exception where andrew is an apt that i was does and showed his was a bit of an animal yet there's an animal to it well there has actually one of the things we talk about this week there's a feature on android for face the messenger that's uh... not available on i was uh... they've had on certain android but not all android phones which is actually coming on the s m s integration and now in a few countries and they're gonna watch it worldwide as quickly as they can uh... they've got a thing where you don't need a face book account to sign up for face book messenger which is to me really interesting you think that with the billion users that they would that that would be enough but uh... they wanna make sure that you can still use face book messenger to talk to everybody not just your face book friends they they they're trying to re contextualize it as just a general messaging app instead of of face book message yeah i think it's a it's a very very like definitive sign that that face book isn't playing when it comes to mess i've always thought of uh... face book messengers being a uh... aside show like you know just a feature of face book uh... and and this just goes to show you that they're out there to kill us ms there up there to take on the what's apps in the case of the world uh... and that is a bad and i messages the world and this is a abet at all this team very actively wait right now and somebody is going to win it and ultimately long-term is not going to be s of s well so ultimately long-term very interesting thing to see player yet the winner might not have be crowned in the u s either uh... so i mean let's look at that uh... i message we've got blackberry messenger which is still big in certain countries notably the countries where face bookers first launching this feature we got what's up with its uh... you know i think it's a ten billion messages a day but they won't say users who got kicked with thirty million users we've got thirty million users we've got thirty million users we've got taco talk and chat on the wall channel whatever uh... nimba's uh... ten whatever ten cents messaging uh... happens i forget half of these messaging clients are like talking about users in the tens if not the hundreds of millions so like there is no shortage of contenders in the states and face book wants to i mean you know i'd the post that i wrote this morning face book wants to make every phone a face book phone and if that it doesn't have a chance to win a messaging that that's problem and i mean for me it's it's sort of like why can't face book just let this one go why does face book feel like it needs to win here that's the really interesting question uh... and that's you know the features phones man we're talking about this is this is a podcast about the future that's the man that's the yeah i mean i don't know that we need to be asking that question instant messaging is something that doesn't have a dominant player at the moment and is open to somebody to grasp it and to own it uh... and it's just another just another branch to any one of these big companies whether it be google trying to teach at face book which so messenger and apple with our message uh... is just another way to pull users in and you know people use is then you start data mining them you start selling data uh... you start advertising to them etc etc and that's how you make money that's how everybody makes money so it makes sense why everybody would want a slice of the i a m pie and i was just thinking recently i need to standardize on some sort of instant messaging platform because i've got a bunch of contacts with people just fragmented all over the place someone's type uh... i'm getting and messages from like two people uh... you know this teacher but then you have a useful accounts for google and yeah uh... so i got a new account of a yahoo account that the question here is what is how will you standardize on that if if everyone is sending you messages from various accounts is it you can't really standardized on something if everyone that you're talking to is using different things right i will tell you how but i will tell you how on the verge uh... hopefully later this week nice uh... but but i mean that doesn't want that this point you you can send that unless you get absolutely big with the on one service and i could be faced with message and this is what things we're trying to do by removing what is essentially a very very low barrier to entry because as these said ability for we have faced with accounts most people who have access to the web have a face with a counter ready but they look is nudging that side just asking for your name and phone number which again is a play for these developing markets where people probably use i a m and texts and messaging a lot more than ourselves we do we treated each other against we do that more and to do is the good analogy here because twitter only really matters as much as it does because it's so you because it was not a body's office you know i mean that originally maybe it had technological advantages in the so simple and and even though it's with what we've run out in reason everybody's insurances because everybody isn't that it's a self-reinforced twitter doesn't want to be a messaging platform they've they've relegated direct messages to absolutely absolutely you know a submenu submenu in their app right which takes and i i can't i can agree that everybody's on twitter i think a lot of people that are in our circle or twitter uh... not like not trusting well for instance if i wanted to send my wife a message i can't do it on twitter she doesn't use twitter yeah i mean i think i had a say that everybody that matters yes uh... but also making isn't that to do is that much of a direct person to person communication platform like i'm really actually use twitter as a way to be having a conversation one at one of the person to other people it's easy to communicate with everybody else but my point is we've standardized on twitter as this information uh... distribution thing just because i don't know what is using in the same way this is that that uh... to my own heart but that i called i call the twitter is back in january and it's come true i called them a broadcasting social network and that's what it is it's a broadcasting network that everybody happens to be able to broadcast on the end there's a little bit of social in there uh... and there's a little bit archiving but not much and that they're promising to fix that but it's you know it's not uh... publishing platform it's a broadcasting platform yeah i'm i'm going to be i'm happy with that definition i think it fits as long as we're talking about messaging we would be remiss if we didn't uh... for the virgin mobile show briefly uh... wish text messaging sms short message service a happy twentieth birthday uh... die already wow i think that chris can we get a sound effect for the birthday want want want uh... i think it's it's too many steps here right now i got this i don't feel like that's not appropriate dot it's just goes west so so like i i i think that so can i i i just want to boil this down for you guys there there are only there are only three i was like there are three problems uh... my my greatest function uh... there are three problems with s m s the prevent it from researching uh... to become the dominant uh... instant messaging slash mobile messaging platform for the foreseeable future uh... one is uh... that the hundred forty character limit is obviously a huge issue to is presence information which i think is he to any good uh... platform in presence information isn't just like away status it's also things like you know see when people are typing better say you know optional reader seats uh... and then three the fact that at present you need a phone number or phone number is your only form of identification uh... when in fact there there can and should be much easier ways to identify yourself to to send and receive s m s is and that's something that that basically all other platforms to figure out i message is kind of trying to be a little i would argue will to start about it uh... with the way to integrates uh... email addresses and i i'm in a weird situation right now where like people with i phones can't text me because yes to a non-existent phone uh... same same for me yet so uh... but but regardless uh... the these are all problems and i don't blame s m s for having these problems because the twenty-year-old platform uh... but but you know uh... there's some after there's there's there there is a uh... a groundswell of of support among certain carriers for supporting and unfortunately the name escapes me there's an acronym for it there some uh... at s m s framework at that is uh... built into uh... i m s which is part and parcel with l t e and uh... and some carriers are really not a metro pcs is has deployed it uh... and it has presence information it can do a few other slick things so that's really their last and best hope for keeping messaging within control of the carriers if that fails that is going to become a dumb fight thing for them where they're just transporting that the data on behalf of all these other services that are out there yes i want that future com yet item i have a lot of thoughts and feelings about this which uh... would probably be boring because they're not fully thought through but they're close and i'll talk about them later uh... do i talk about some good as a mess this uh... police have called on congress to require uh... s m s law expert full two years it's bad it's a good thing about yet it's not a kind of crazy i was under the impression that that carriers held onto s m s messages for a lot longer than the family they do uh... for some reason i had my head that they all care you know hold onto for six months or a hundred eighty days but uh... apparently they only hold on to him for about a week and please don't like that because it makes it hard to use them in a court trial as opposed to jenner trial i i i strongly believe okay so this is actually another another uh... problem with that's about discuss is that uh... it isn't encrypted like a any any messaging platform that you use should be encrypted and to act and i message allegedly is in fact we were talking about this earlier today at the team the fact that i message apple claims that i message is encrypted but they've never shared any details on how it's encrypted or what that means that they also they also claim that these times an open standard uh... job but that's the truth that's not very very good point so so yeah i have but but but that is a an obvious weakness of s m s and it is very disturbing to me to think that i would have things that i have what it what it okay glad to hear your counter-argument the counter-argument is that the only thing you're really angling forward is encryption thing is just the illusion of some sort of security some semblance of privacy and i was going to go to my no no what i want well here's what i want i wanted to that if somebody wants to crack my my my stuff i was going to use a different word there wants to crack my stuff they need to throw a supercomputer at it for a week then they can have it if they if they want to put that amount of effort seeing what i bought on amazon and by all means well i think i think what it means is that chris really just wants to be able to said uh... his credit card information over text message to whoever he wants about worrying about it getting well obviously of course i mean my problem with uh... a lot of with this did actually a teeny tiny muscule e this fueling amount conflicted about these uh... these text message records because this is gonna sound lame but we this is how we talk to each other now this is how we send letters to each other now there should be a permanent archive uh... that i have the option to like save for posterity so future generations can read my messages because you know i'm genius and people are gonna wanna know what i was saying to people and i want to give them the opportunity i mean when we do we look at you know famous writers and scientists through the agents we like have that letters that they wrote to their wives and their best friends and like somebody thought to save that stuff and we're not thinking about saving any of the stuff and i know it's you know very short messages and is a very ephemeral whatever whatever whatever there's going to be this weird at black hole of context information about our generation that was never there for previous generation i can assure you i don't know if if i agree with that because uh... those are the letters that you they were writing to their wife isn't and their family members that i mean we're just emailing now and those are all our time to see if you are there probably wanted to if you wanted to be if you're you know you we we can put it on a you put it on a dvd drive that'll be around the last about ten years before degrees and nothing you try to be around a thousand years i'm serious like this is where all this brand hangout i'm not done this is why i wrote this rant about paper but you know all those months ago there's no there there's only a very small number of companies that are thinking about storing and maintaining data over millennia uh... people who's called millennium person anyway uh... and and so when we when we talk about phone companies keeping records of us and i see us it's a privacy issue that most important thing and that needs to be fixed but we were talking about messaging general there should be easy ways to export the data and there should be easy ways to archive the data and it shouldn't and this is the next thing you know when you use face book to message somebody or use gmail to email somebody that's using being used for advertising in the short term but there's also a whole social graph that you don't i mean what is face book doing with the fact that it knows that i'm talking to you know certain people on messenger are they using it to better target me for ads? i don't know should that be a core function of messaging in this day and age? well facebook has tried to do uh... exactly what you said dita which is you know build a timeline built around the person so assuming some future geniuses or genii or whatever show up and use facebook extensively and religiously and the way that facebook wants to be used uh... we could have a really detailed breakdown of exactly what they've done but here's the trouble uh... and i think you're raising... there's no export button i guess so uh... but i think you're raising a really good point but i also think there's another angle to it which is that when we get that timeline of the future uh... what thomas edison whatever whoever what we're gonna get we're not just gonna get those really awesome communiques with his contemporaries where he discusses business strategies and how to capsulize and such and such innovation we're also going to get his freaking music playlists for every single day he's scrolling activity we'll see every youtube video that he liked we'll know about the cat in japan that makes him laugh every night at one a m in the morning and and this is the trouble back in those days when people wrote those letters that we treasure now and which we find revealing about their personalities those are the only things that they've really produced in terms of content now we produce so much freaking content that if you could you just don't have any filter to like bring out the important stuff and and and that's the difficulty like people just either overproduced or the under produced like some people just take pictures of everything around the interview life and just because meaningless and other people don't take enough pictures and find that years passed by and i have any connection to the memories that they built up over that time and that's you know sad uh... it says no the decision the privacy for though i just generally assumed that somebody somewhere has access to my stuff excuses uh... so as that is our operate it's a it's a paranoid joshua copstein inspired kind of way to be you you shouldn't accept that you should be issued demand under twenty-eight that encryption anything the year sending and receiving are you uh... you're somebody's using it for me as somebody can look at it i mean i remember i remember back in the day i used to get your emails that people would put their their pgp key in their and their email signature like every single you know thanks if you want to you could turn on the cvn haven't encrypted conversation chris uh... i want to know if your moves in in letterpress are encrypted uh... they are actually and i would have been dreaming of of playing letterpress unencrypted yeah the words that he plays i don't think they're in the english language so they must be encrypted it's just but so so like i i think first of all the i think that you're significantly over romanticizing uh... this this content that were generating i mean like you know with the exception of a few luminaries there actually you know millions and millions and billions of people that we know nothing about over history uh... yeah and and that's because you know none of their communication has been preserved and nothing that they did is really been preserved and i think that you know to flat point i think the exact same thing is happening now except the opposite where we just have this constant stream of noise that nobody's going to bother take the time to do anything with uh... and that the bigger issue that that i really fear uh... for our uh... are future generations about somebody just uh... friend in the end uh... game uh... you can't be chris alert but the uh... the the bigger concern the bigger concern i have is the fact that nobody is going to have any good user names for any service and and and i'll be damned i'll be damned if anyone is going to to be allowed to have my user names after i got by the way whoever on xbox has the username back lawn i will give you money to give us a it drives me to account i've managed to pick a word that nobody uses and so i can usually get it on most services but on xbox there's is one person that like put those strings of letters and numbers not numbers letters and vowels together very unhappy about it uh... it's it's the energy i mean perfectly fine because there are that many flat samples anywhere in the globe anyway so i can just roll in to be like that's my name gives me not on gmail and i was raised to cut the hell out of me is like who the hell needs that several apart from me i'm sure is going to be kind of like glad and to its which is one of those abandoned the counts and because you just go with blackjack uh... this morning's but chris is getting more friends on game center apparently hey uh... all you have uh... they uh... black i just had a quick google search and turns out that there is a flat and there's a lot of who is an olympic lifter yet and they are you saying that he has bigger muscles and black does at the very good point i didn't think about that that i can't believe that possible yet he hasn't won any medals though i'm looking to the country but he's bulgarian uh... middle heavyweight class the deer i i'd like to say on xbox it's me is a year you met that well and we need to have a look at that but i don't like i was saying before the podcast the only version of this podcast is going to sound quite a lot of those people's games that are not sound effects and applause i mean it's gonna be grand yet but the thing is we've got a couple of uh... troll face issues if people are going to see and as soon as they go out somebody giggles and it's like these guys must be high if you just listen to this and people like t i got accused of of being it legitimately high was it last week uh... both in the chat and on twitter and so i had to say those actually only high on life and it's because you know i'm standing in my like the bounce around when i'm trying to have fun uh... i try to have fun with you guys could like you we should be engaging in interesting and it's hard like right now this is an aging interesting so let's move on from london it's like a whole different world would you describe him as a brother from another mother but sister from another mister the that it's been weird no no no uh... with the friends and colleagues and we'll leave it at that but i would never got a hold of the gas camp for us uh... he didn't really carry the and it's it's a frustrating thing radius because uh... is well designed it works for you nice and quickly and if it were actually a phone with a massive camera back of it it could have some potential but i was just a camera com function as a folk so all of that good stuff andrew four point one and the great processor it's nappies responsive four point eight inch screen it's an LCD it's a really gorgeous one some twenty p uh... as far as i was concerned and Aaron is a massive sample Samsung fan i want a boy which is a massive Samsung fan tracks massive uh... tracks Samsung products religiously as far as he's concerned is the first display that Samsung has put on any of these devices so that's high praise the trouble is is still just a really really fancy camera and as a camera it stinks is actually worse than most point shoots in sprites range which will it it stinks on a couple of levels right it kinda stinks on handling and it kinda stinks on image quality right yeah well the thing is we polish you cameras they've kind of eliminated the physical controls anyway like you know going to go and find two hundred other point shoot cameras with knobs and dials and really handy physical buttons and controls they just kind of disappeared and they'd be replaced by touch screens anyway and they have easy control schemes anyway so i don't think the standard there is really high in the first place but Samsung doesn't approve of that you're absolutely right but image quality is the thing that really needed to be good to make this device make sense and that's where it falls down so again December guys what was gonna say well what drives me crazy is i mean if you're gonna have a device that we've seen point shoots at a reasonable price point uh... that are good and we've seen android devices at a reasonable price point that are good but yet you put them together and like they they chose not that you they can't they couldn't hit a reasonable price point here if you're gonna have to me what's the same retail for five hundred u.s. it's like five hundred yeah if you're gonna sell a five hundred dollar device it's it's got a have fewer compromises it really does. Here's the thing that i would say uh... the Nikon Coolpix S800C i believe it is uh... it was the first attempt you know it was the first android powered point and shoot camera and that had so much more issues so many more issues uh... it was slow, it's display wasn't awesome it didn't have the same processor it was just way way behind if we actually keep this going and if another company steps up and makes the same leap that we've seen from the Nikon attempt to the Samsung attempt to the next android powered camera then we could be looking at a really good device at that stage but it's still just kind of exactly as Dita says, you take a reasonable price camera you take a reasonable price phone you throw away the phone part which is the thing that kind of stinks and then you put them together but also you put together the price for both it's like then you have a problem because nothing comes free you pay for the extra phone like functionality, you pay for the extra android like functionality, you pay or from the android perspective you pay for the extra camera functionality but neither one is good enough to justify it and that's basically where we are like there's a lot of good things in it but as a sum of all the parts together it's actually less and so we wait for the next one right, I'm curious as to Samsung's approach more feels like they went from the ground, started with a smartphone and then added a camera to it and I'm curious as to if the opposite approach might produce better results if you had say a Canon that was already an established good camera and then... Yeah, the S100 the Canon S100 is so obvious yeah, it's a great camera, excellent camera, all of us on staff really love that camera so if you just inserted you know the android operating system and cellular radio on it and see where it went from there and I think that's what Nikon was trying to do with the S800c as you mentioned except that ran Android 2.3, it had an underpowered processor and a number of other problems with it I think connected cameras are definitely where cameras are going in the future there's definitely going to be a point where you can't buy a camera that isn't connected just like you can't really it's really hard to buy a TV that's not 3D these days now if I'm connected do you mean Wi-Fi or cellular or both? I think eventually it's going to be both but I mean it'll start with Wi-Fi, Wi-Fi has actually been around for a long time Nikon had Wi-Fi cameras back in like 2003 or 2004 yeah, 2001 or 2001, there you go so Wi-Fi has been around a long time and it didn't really catch on to every single camera model but you are seeing more cameras with Wi-Fi now and then now we have these actual cellular connected cameras that are running smartphone operating systems and I think that's definitely where they're going in the future it's just unfortunate that the Galaxy camera is not quite the answer to that question yet yeah I mean my problem with these cameras is it's a very particular problem to me is that I need the wireless either to the cloud or directly to my laptop if at all possible to be as reliable and fast as humanly possible so that I could use it to live log and I know that there's like you know a hundred people on the face of the earth that care about this but I'm sorry Chris is going around going around on the left right now and I knew it would work, yes. Moving to Google Hangouts is the best thing ever. So now you know, if you're watching this live, now you know why Chris has been so quiet for the past ten minutes as he acted with this face overlay wow I was just going to say I would like to see the wireless reliability be better and I'm going to move on and let's talk about the other thing that is a notable review, brief review from this week and that is the tramp stamped Galaxy Note 2 on Verizon. Just before we do that, I wanted to just wrap up the Galaxy camera and give Dan a chance to recover because the man is in tears. That was more than I could handle, I'll admit that. So I just wanted to rephrase myself from earlier to say correctly which is that the Galaxy camera in totality is less than some of its parts. Galaxy camera in totality is less than some of its parts. I said it in a really grammatically busted way earlier on. That aside, also I was just thinking about the grip of how you handle a camera which is all touchscreen on the back and the fact of the matter is where your thumb wants to rest is exactly on the top right corner of the touchscreen. Yeah, you have to do this move. Particularly if you have a camera shaped hand grip as opposed to a phone which has different ergonomics. So it has issues and the whole idea, the whole concept of Android powered cameras still has issues that need to be ironed out. But also to Deezus' point about Wi-Fi connectivity, I think we've all dreamt of this awesome, awesome concept of being able to just shoot with our cameras and having the pictures pop immediately onto our devices. But it's not just reliability which is, yes, the number one thing, but it's also speed. So if you take a picture and it takes you ten seconds, it's reliable but it takes you ten seconds for the pictures to pop up on your computer then you start thinking about cables and other stuff. That's the whole Wi-Fi card promise. If you're not familiar with what an Wi-Fi card is, it's an SD card with a Wi-Fi chip built into it that you can put into virtually any camera. Now what it is is pain and sorrow and heartbreak and disappointment crammed together into a tiny little plastic wedge. That's what the Wi-Fi card is. I've gone through probably half a dozen of these things. This time it's going to be good. It promises to cut the cables so that you can shoot your pictures and they instantly are transferred over to your computer. But the problem, as Vlad mentioned, is it's very bottlenecked and very slow. And as Dieter would more than likely say next, is that it's very unreliable and you lose connections and drop connections all the time. I know Toshiba had something called the Flash Air card which functioned pretty much the same way. It creates a server that you can access on any device because it's web-based. And the pictures always seem to pop up reliably. I saw that on IFA. The trouble is, I didn't see it this year's IFA, I saw it last year's IFA. And then it got delayed and it was supposed to launch sometime early in this year. And I've heard pretty much zilch about it since then. So, you know, we're still stuck. One thing that I would point out about the Galaxy camera, like I really want to love the concept, but I think that Samsung made a major branding misstep. And I thought this ever since they announced it, I think they made a major branding misstep by calling it the Galaxy camera. Because that implies, the name implies that it is, it's like a smartphone with the camera grafted on, which it kind of is. It's a smartphone with the camera grafted on minus the calling part. And that's not what they should have made. They should have done something more along the lines of what Nikon did, which is graft Android onto a genuine point and shoot. Which is the point I made about five minutes ago. Chris was busy five minutes ago. He was making sure that he could show us the visual trickery. The name of the company Nikon comes from the name of Japan in Japanese, which is Nippon. It is not Nikon. It's Nikon. It's not, I don't know, like who told you this? And like if it does come from Nippon, why don't they just call the company Nippon? Like why is there a case? You're making this up. I think there are a few reasons why they would call it Nippon. But, yeah, that's exactly the point I had earlier. Is that, you know, if they had started from a good camera base and added the smartphone on top of that, I think it would have been a better result starting with a smartphone base and adding camera parts. You know, I also don't feel like anybody has really gone right, which is enough. Because, frankly, the other thing is the sensor in the Galaxy camera is a joke. It's actually smaller than the one in the 808 POV. The Nokia 808 POV. So it's like a tiny, tiny little sensor. It's standard fare for like a hundred dollar point and shoot camera is going to have a sensor of that sort in it. Right, but there's a thing. The market for those things is disappearing. And those people are going to buy a $500 camera. So really Samsung is trying to innovate its way into a space that is being vacated. Just because nobody wants to buy anything in there. What I want to see is something like Sony's next series cameras, you know, full APS-C size sensors, TAC Android, TAC Dropbox integration, TAC all those things on top. And then, okay, fine, the price is going to be kind of crazy. But people might be able to justify that more readily. And the notion of data share, or you know, data plan sharing, I think makes that a little more palatable. I'm still not comfortable with the way those plans work currently. Like I'm really upset that I'm paying an extra ten dollars a month just so that my tablet can use the same data bucket as my phone. But it's a step in the right direction. And now let's talk about Verizon's tattooing of the Galaxy Note 2. Yeah, so I was using this thing over the weekend and Vlad, you know, I will lean heavily on your thoughts about this since you did our original review. But this is actually the first time, I'm a little embarrassed to admit this, this is the first time that I've ever carried around a Note, a Galaxy Note of any kind, as like my daily driver for any period of time. And that happened last weekend. And I really, really disliked it a lot more than I thought I would. I thought that I would like, I thought that I would pretty quickly adapt to the size and the weight and just move on with my life. But the problem, I was telling David about this, David Pierce, the problem that I kept having is that the Galaxy Note 2 is big enough so that you can't handle it like a phone, you kind of have to handle it like a tablet. And what I mean by that is that if you just try and pretend like it's a phone, you know, a regular phone, then you are going to drop it. Because unless you have truly enormous hands, you have just enough trouble getting a grip on it, especially since the Note 2 is such glossy plastic all over, that it's going to end up falling out of your hands. And I'm convinced that if I use this phone for another week or two, it would have hit the floor. David was telling me that he dropped one of his review units. So, I don't know if that was public information or not. But yeah, that was the biggest problem I had. As a phone, and Vlad, I think you relayed this in your review very well, if you are in the market for a 5.5 inch phone, it's a fine device. I just don't think, I was surprised at how unable I was to adapt to that size. Yeah, this is the thing that I've been stressing all the time. With the original Galaxy Note, with the second Galaxy Note 2, it just isn't a phone. So many people will make the argument, it fits in my pocket. Well, fine, let it fit in your pocket. But it isn't a phone. You can't operate it like a phone. You can't treat it like a phone. And exactly as you say, Chris, the instinct is to treat it and to work with it as a tablet. I still think that as a device, it has a ton of good things going for it. But I just wanted to take this opportunity to also raise another point, which is, I've been using the iPhone 5 for a bit, for a week or two now, and switching between it and the One X. The Windows phone 8X, which I was really enthusiastic about, I still really like. I just don't have one because HTC took it away. And they've given Chris free or whatever. Fine, that's fine, I'll live with that. But anyway, I've been switching between the iPhone 5 and the One X. And the One X is a 4.7 inch device. Significantly smaller than the Galaxy Note 2. And every time I make an immediate switch between the two, between the iPhone and the One X, the latter just feels like the former, but oversized. Like, you still have icons, but there's just this massive space between them for no good reason. And they're large for no good reason. And the keyboard is, you know, one and a half, two times the size for no good reason. Everything just feels like it's bigger without there being any benefit to it. And it just kind of reminds me and reiterates the fact that there isn't ergonomics to be spot. And these 4.5 inch and above phones aren't hitting it. And anything that is 5 inches and above just isn't a phone. That's just it. Yeah, I mean, it's a fine... Just get a 7 inch tablet. Yeah. Unless you're really in love with the S Note and the Snowton and the S Pen. The Snowton. Yeah, I mean, I will say that I was really kind of blown away by the battery life on it. The thing that really stuck out in my mind was that I didn't connect it to the Wi-Fi in my house. And I have pretty crappy reception here, but I was able to connect to Verizon's LTE network. And I charged it 200% and set it down just in my living room when I went to bed. And I woke up the next morning and just left it sit there for probably another two hours. Then looked at it and it was still indicating 100% despite being on LTE all night. Even though it wasn't really doing anything. And I plugged it in. That is so blatantly an American version of that phone. What do you mean? The battery can't be at 100% but it's so like, ballsy and you know, I want 100% dude. Just give me whatever you're going to give me. It's like, I want a American phone. I got a 100% for you. Well it does have that tacky tattoo on the front button. Chris, do you have it? On his belly button. Yeah, I have it right here. Show us that awesome. I don't know if you can see that. Yeah, I can just make it out. Yeah, it's got the Tramp stamp on the home button. And turn it around because I know the back is also very branded. It says Verizon, 4G, Galaxy Note 2. All on the back. And I think Verizon and Samsung were both like, whoa, we have this giant canvas. So they have three logos on the back and then both Samsung and Verizon are on the front. So there's a total of five logos on this phone. I'm convinced that we're getting close to the point where carriers are going to start selling like ad spots on phones. So it'll just be like a random Best Buy or Target logo. I was just thinking about that. If they actually had a flat edge on the sides, we would get phones that are like Nascar cars. Yes, absolutely. Epic 4G Touch, sponsored by McDonald's. McNuggets. I can see this sort of like dystopian future where the level of your subsidy depends on how many sponsorship stickers you're willing to put on your phone. I can totally believe that. So last week Chris was talking about how subsidies and whatnot, the Nexus 4 and everything, need to go away. Now we're getting to the point where they're going to go away via sponsorships. Maybe these little etching machines in every carrier store and then you hand your phone to them and they'll tattoo on all the logos and it's cheaper. Which would indeed be dystopian. I would put a Starbucks logo on mine. I'm so disappointed. Between this and Bates... Actually, can we talk about the Starbucks app update? I think that's... There's two major Starbucks updates that happened yesterday. One, the iOS app was finally updated for the iPhone 5's display, which I've been complaining about since, I don't know, when was the iPhone 5 coming out? September. So that was finally rectified. And then last night, Starbucks finally updated its Android app for Android 4.2. So now I can finally install it on the Nexus 4. Now what makes that update really funny is that, and I see Dieter's forever alone now. So what's funny about this update is that... Oh god, you guys are killing me. What's funny about this update... By pure coincidence, I was yawning. What's funny about this update is that up until the point that it was released, if you contacted Starbucks and complained that the app was crashing, they were like, oh, there's something screwed up with your phone. You should contact Google, you should contact LG, you should contact Samsung, you should contact AT&T. And then all of a sudden the update comes out and they're just... suddenly works on 4.2. So now I no longer have to go into Starbucks like a buster with my Nexus 4 in one hand and an iPhone 5 in the other hand, connect to their Wi-Fi to pay for my coffee drink. You know what I do when I go into Starbucks? I swipe my credit card. That's what I do. Or I give them cash. No rewards, man. Throwing away all those rewards. Yeah, you're living in the 20th century. You're living in the 20th century, Dieter. I just want to make a serious point here. 1995 called it... 1995 called it once its payment method back. I just want to make a serious point here, which is that I think when we are spending our money and when we're making all of these consumer choices, we should aim to help the specialists. And by that I mean it's things like... Here in the UK there's this really terrible, in my opinion, trend where supermarkets are just broadening out and spreading their tentacles into things that supermarkets don't usually sell. So they started off by selling clothing alongside groceries. Now you can pretty much buy anything. What supermarkets are you going to? Well to be fair... I said supermarkets. Oh, I see. But the thing is, so they started off with those things and now you can buy lawnmowers if it's a big enough supermarket. But then they started selling insurance. Now Tesco, Mobile have... What was the... MV&A? That was the... MV&O. Right, yes, MV&O. On O2's network. And they're selling insurance, they're selling mobile contracts. Sainsbury's are doing the same thing. And ultimately, you know, they're trying to pitch you the idea that if you stay loyal to one of those companies, you're going to get a synergy from all those products and you know, a sense of money, whatever. But the only thing that's really happening is that they're squeezing out, again, the specialists, the guys who only do insurance and the guys who only do banking and the guys who only do whatever. And we're just going to end up with these massive, massive corporations that have way too much control over pricing. Which is the thing that worries and scares me. So, I mean, Starbucks does coffee. So I guess Starbucks is okay. If what you're... I mean, these giant super corporations controlling our lives and overtaking the state is the dominant form of control in society. I mean, we're almost there and I think that's great because it'll bring forward, you know, shadow run, right? I mean, if we've got, you know, these giant corporations in charge, and that's one step closer to me being able to cast magic spells in a cyberpunk future. I don't know how to... No shout out to fans here. Nobody knows what I'm talking about. I don't know how you're going to get there with paying with cash for everything, Dieter. Also, just a quick extra point here about the UK. On the point of subsidies, actually, because the Times, the local well-respected newspaper, which is actually owned by News International, which in turn is owned by News Corp, again, making a point about massive corporations, they've started subsidizing the Nexus 7. And they're subsidizing it very much in the carrier model, which is to say you pay the upfront fee, which is now 50 pounds instead of 199 for the 32GB Nexus 7, and then you sign up for the 80 month subscription model. So it's basically you get a subscription with them and that subsidizes your hardware. So they're acting like one of the carriers and they're trying to push their digital subscription. Which to me is interesting because... We've had commenters point out that German and Czech publications have done relatively similar schemes, so this isn't the very first paper to do this. But it's interesting to me because now you have something material that goes along with digital subscription to a newspaper. And one of the barriers for a lot of people to pay for digital subscription or to accept any paywall is that you're not getting anything physical, anything tangible when you're paying your money and handing your money over. So maybe this would be stimulus for people, what do you guys think? How much is the subscription, do you know? In total it adds up to 360 pounds for the 40 months plus the tablet, including the tablet's price. Yeah, I mean if the paper is... I mean I pay, what is it, 22 bucks a month or something just for the digital Wall Street Journal, so that seems like a pretty reasonable deal. Yeah, it's 70 pounds a month here in the UK, which is I mean frankly it's steep, it's more than the Wall Street Journal. I mean I would say the Times isn't the best newspaper around anyway. But maybe the pricing is more reasonable, right? Maybe if it's like 10 pounds a month or something. Yeah, for sure. I'm just wondering whether the hardware aspect would warm you guys to the idea more, like okay, I can get a subscription, I'm kind of iffy on it, but hey, look, I can get a tablet for dirt cheap that swings me over the edge. I can actually see that happening for me if I wanted the publication. Well, if you're already sold on the publication then I mean that's not a hard sell. That's the point, I'm sold on the publication but not on its price. And then you just kind of sweet as a deal with Soho, and I'm like, okay fine, I'll pay the price. I mean, the only thing I guess is like, I'm always nervous about I mean I'm nervous about subsidies in general, and it's, in principle it's fine as long as you know exactly what you're getting into at the outset. And I mean, what you're describing to me, Vlad, it feels like, we were talking about the 90s, it feels like Columbia House a little bit. Oh god. You know, you sign up for the one CD a month, and then you know if you forget to cancel they just keep on sending them, and you get those 13 CDs to start, it's amazing. Their CDs are like $27 a piece. Right, so like it's fine to sign up for a subsidy either from a carrier or from a random newspaper or from a grocery store, Starbucks or whoever, as long as you know you are thinking through who it is that you're committing your money to. And I think that the whole point of these things is that it sort of short circuits that. Doing it with publication makes a bit more sense, but I'm nervous to say that I think that's a great solution for everybody. Hey guys, I just want to point out that Columbia House, it turns out, still exists. What? Oh my god, I'm signing up right now. Yeah, no, their slogan is the worst slogan ever. You just pay for the DVDs you want without the streaming you don't. Oh! And the streaming is like this evil that needs to be banished. This is amazing. So they do DVDs now? Yeah. Do they do CDs at all? I think just DVDs. I'd just like to point out that Columbia House is something I've never heard of before. I know exactly what you guys are describing, just never heard of the brand. Well there was a few of these in the 90s, I think Columbia House was the biggest one, but there was also BMG, which was also a record label for some reason. But BMG, which had the same exact concept, and then there were some others that I just can't remember right now. They were all the same thing, where they're like, get 13 CDs for a penny, sign up for this contract, and we're going to send you CDs every month, and if you don't want it, you just tell us we don't want it, but then if you forget, we're going to charge you anyways. Yeah, and it preyed on me. It preyed on teenagers who were like, oh yeah, sweet, and then forget to, you know, every time, you wouldn't think to cancel it until the next CD came, and you'd be like, why are they sending me Burl Ives Christmas music? This has to stop. Doesn't Regus Digest work on pretty much the same business model? I don't know. Brendan, our producer, says that Columbia House is what motivated him to switch from cassettes to CDs. Wow. That's food for thought. I hadn't thought of it that way. Maybe Columbia House had a major impact on the transition to CD. Yeah, you know, we're really lucky that Columbia House didn't get into streaming in a big way, because it would be forever tainted with people's history and memory of being screwed over by them, and streaming would have never gotten off the ground. So thank you, Columbia House, for staying in the past, and sending out DVDs over the mail. And letting YouTube and cat videos popularize streaming to the entire globe. And what would be amazing is if Columbia House offered to send you a rotating assortment of cat videos on DVD, for people who were really internet-averse, but still wanted to get in on the cat videos. What we need is for Columbia House to get into the business of selling tablets and phones, right? Because we're switching phones, we're complaining that we don't have the perfect phone, so they just send us a batch of six phones right away for a penny, and then they just keep us sending another one. And then they send you that $49 on-contract Android phone, and you're just like, ahhh, I get this one. Dude, what if they partnered up or just bought KnowYourMeme.com? Why did I get this? I forgot to cancel. What if they partnered up with KnowYourMeme.com and started selling grandparents a meme a week, or whatever? Keep up with the young ones! Yeah. That would be amazing. For $9.99 every month. They could send you a different troll face every month as a poster. And you could wear it. When you're trolling someone in real life, you could just be like... Brilliant. I'm in. I'm in. I'm signing up. I'm calling this podcast if Lad gives me permission. Oh wait, there's a couple of... I want to point out we've updated our How to Buy a Smartphone article, so you should go check that out, or more to the point, send your friends and family there if they ask you which phone they should get, and be like, well actually you should find out what kind you want in the first place. And then, the excellent how-to from Evan Rogers for US users about how to travel internationally and still maintain a connection and not have your entire bank account get wiped out from roaming charges. I haven't had a chance to use my Vlad face yet. No. Deezer just walked away. Sorry Deeder. He's all flipping some tables. Sorry. That means a caption to be honest. That, ladies and gentlemen, is the Verge Vobel show. We want to thank you so much for watching. If you want to follow us, you can and should. We are on Twitter. I am back on Chris' e-power. Vlad is Vlad Saba. Dan is DC Seifert with an EI. We're all at Verge. You can leave a comment on this post now, or when it goes up, or whenever. And next week, we'll be here. Maybe on Tuesday. You never know. Bye guys.
 hello
 welcome to the virgin mobile show this is episode 28
 it's the week of december third two thousand twelve we're going to talk
 about
 things in the mobile world that happened this week
 so many things that happened and we're going to talk about them as i said
 this is really choppy so i'm just gonna say that my name is Dieter Bohn and we'll move on
 my name is Vlad Seva
 I'm Dan Seifert
 and I'm Chris Sigler
 and we're only ten minutes late today I feel pretty good about that
 I feel pretty good that this is the second week in a row that we're on a Tuesday
 so congrats to us
 and roughly the same
 time that we're supposed to be on
 we would have been on time today but we found some
 toys in google hangouts that
 distracted us
 in other words we were playing fart sounds for two minutes
 it was a good time
 we liked them they were fun
 so yeah so i don't know i think it was a relatively
 quiet week in news which means
 that what we're actually going to do is probably rant and complain about lots and lots of
 other things
 the chat room has already gone back to what we talked about last week which is that we
 need the kin nexus to be released
 which makes me
 really happy
 so i think the first thing i want to complain about is windows phone 7.8
 it's coming out in
 early 2013 now microsoft has finally said
 and
 i mean
 there's some security enhancements to exchange but the big new feature is the new smaller
 live tiles and
 maybe i'm crazy but
 this shouldn't be that hard to push out
 i personally think that it has more to do
 with uh...
 with microsoft's
 desire to give the windows phone 8 devices enough of a head start on shelves because
 if you
 if you uh... if you get 7.8 out there quickly i think that you disincentivize
 some
 owners from upgrading to windows phone 8
 in a timely fashion
 so that that might have something to do with it
 well i don't know i mean let's be fair
 microsoft people need a
 christmas holiday break as well
 it's december
 who does anything useful in december
 i was thinking about this at the beginning of the month
 this is going to be the month where nobody makes big news
 intentionally
 like if you're
 7.8 is not big news don't oversell it vlad 7.8 is the smallest news imaginable
 well fair enough but in the context of the windows phone ecosystem there's windows phone 7.8
 and there's windows phone 8
 and there's all the rageaholics
 who bought the libya 900 thinking the smartphone bt test was over
 and then
 that's the most ironic thing that has happened this entire year
 nokia and AT&T saying smartphone beta beta test is over and then the Lumia 900 being
 the absolute beta
 test run for the Lumia 920 launch
 that's exactly the way that i see it
 so i mean i'm totally on board with dita this sort of thing windows phone 7.8
 it's almost a question of
 why is it out already
 you're only given a small modification rate
 you should just
 get it out let people have it and that's the other thing
 you should have the confidence
 or you should have faith in the innovations of windows phone 8
 to distinguish it from 7.8 it shouldn't be just a visual tweak
 people shouldn't be able to see 7.8 and 8 look alike and they're like woah it's all the same thing
 you should have some underlying strengths there as well
 yeah i mean i just
 we were so happy with Microsoft and how they managed to get
 updates out the door previous to this
 they did really well with 7.5 all things considered especially compared to
 what they've done in the past especially compared to android and
 i know that this is like
 this is not the platform of the future but
 you have these early adopters they're already angry about the fact that they're not getting a windows phone 8 upgrade
 you give them this bone and now you're making them wait for it
 just
 do what you need to do to get it out as soon as possible and it is a little bit
 oh wait there's new theme colors that might be the problem they couldn't figure out the
 the css codes for the new theme colors
 they've been debating between fff8 and fff7 and they just haven't decided
 which to be fair is pretty hard to beat
 yeah no it's a tough question
 yeah no it's a tough call
 look i mean for one thing keep in mind i think tom warren our very own tom warren
 microsoft
 pundit extraordinaire
 pointed out that 7.8 is
 microsoft's play in the entry level market for the foreseeable future so
 this isn't
 a throwaway it's tempting to think of this version as a throwaway platform but
 in some ways it's not
 uh... because until
 the hardware required to run windows phone eight gets pushed down market enough to
 to go to china and all these other places
 they're going to need to keep seven point eight and that
 that line
 that technology path alive
 but as i say december is not a good
 used month
 that's all that
 look all i know that i know i know exactly one thing about europe
 and that's that
 uh... europe has like six months of holidays here
 so
 i think that's where this mentality of yours is coming from what
 let me what what is that since you go forward to you probably going to over
 eat dramatically then you probably going to feel guilty about it
 uh... you going to over exercise dramatically or one day then there's
 going to be sales that is going to regretful overspending during the sales
 and in january everything will be just you know on another clearance sale you'll
 be you know he pounds heavier
 and every known use of to be excited
 like the only thing we had to be excited about this month is gmail two point oh
 four i was
 and we are already ripping i think it's right
 well okay i have a great way to be able to talk about all right
 before we move on i just want to point out that i have a uh... a windows phone
 eight acts here and this time which i'm pretty excited about
 doesn't make the power button anybody
 uh... yet it feels a lot bluer
 the fact that i've got a part from that now
 all right by gmail two point over i was uh... on the iphone and i had it's
 available and it should be downloadable now earlier today you had to look at the
 directly to install it from the app stores of using the update
 but it's out
 uh... and
 i am happy enough with it that i have turned off
 uh... notifications i haven't turned off email but turned off all notifications
 badges for the built-in email client and i'm just using this
 uh... forty-one right so i i did the assembly guy that i've had to turn off
 the built-in client for ages and i've been using sparrow
 uh... but today when i upgraded to the new at gmail at my turn office sparrows
 uh... notifications and i
 turned on
 the gmail and so we'll see how well that works
 so here's the thing about the
 the gmail app on both android
 and
 i was and on the desktop actually uh... a web view i use mail plane
 the thing that keeps me hooked up
 you know i used to go as the archiving
 and that i thought it was the labels but i realize that the thing i care about
 the most
 is uh... threading
 and more to the point when you're looking at a giant threat of emails with
 fifty people were flying with third you know
 favorite cat chips or whatever the threat happens to be
 uh... it all appears on a single
 elements and you could scroll through the whole element and you don't have to
 like scroll
 or tap or like scrolling like initiate something to switch to the next email
 you've got that entire email thread chain on a single view
 they all get marked red and you can just scroll through them really quickly
 and that's why i never could get into sparrow because it was too much of a
 hassle to move from one email to the next within a chain
 uh... and so
 despite the fact that there's some
 problems of with this gmail at still some which are google's fault and uh...
 so which are just limitations for what they can
 managed to do on i was
 it scratches my gmail it should just enough
 and now i will turn it over to chris who wants to complain about this at that
 page
 so here's my take a first-rate is an improvement
 i will i'm gonna try to be as well as i did by about this effect
 uh... it's an appropriate thing noted improvement
 over uh... the
 complete that complete dumpster fire that google
 uh...
 but that's that's really not much and and so so you know uh... if you think
 about how long
 google has spent
 uh... doing seemingly nothing to this application
 back to the box there are the only bible competitor to the native client of the
 few months ago
 uh... and this is what they've come up with this is
 will disappoint me
 uh... there are a few things that are already bothering me
 one is that
 you don't have a granular control over
 notifications are there either
 honor off essentially and on my android devices i always
 keep notifications limited to priority in box
 uh... because you know with with enough training
 we have to take a lot a lot of training at all you can get priority in back to
 the point where
 ninety nine percent of the time it's doing the right thing with your email
 and and to be fair i managed to do that pretty well on i was a i'd turned on the
 in the vip stuff and i can mark a few people's the a p and it wasn't
 perfect but it was pretty good at just getting the alerts for stuff that i want
 uh... and i think you do by i don't use priority in box like i don't just look
 at that in or anything else i look at all of my email at all of my email
 but just for getting out just for getting notifications party in boxes
 super convenient
 yes so that's
 that's one thing and then uh... and then also
 it bothers me that uh... that this is an idea you know i don't think there's
 anything you can do about this is that was full but
 but this app appears to be
 just a web view much like the act
 before it
 uh... and uh... you know that's that's
 google's fault that you have done by please entirely my goal i mean
 sparrow is a third-party email at the default native app that's not what you
 know are you sure that everything here is uh... completely webview because i
 mean things are are quick enough that i sort of wonder if it's a a mix of
 web and native co-op only going to
 the court navigation
 go into settings and tell me that's not an html page
 yeah but go but the thing that brings up the settings like that the panel
 sliding around everything it's a bunch of webviews in sort of a native shell
 it's a wrapper right
 yeah what i was going to suggest is that even if it is uh...
 based on the webview is starting to move away from that and
 it's starting to feel more like a native app even if
 uh...
 it's still rough around the edges but i i do feel like this entire discussion so far
 has omitted
 the biggest and most important change
 which is that the color of the icon has changed
 it's it's an outrage it is an abomination what i color code my home
 screen
 all out of whack now
 i mean the visit is like muscle memory that you've got built up for a
 particular occasion your home screen that's going to
 disappear because it's no longer
 i mean they've gone from a dark background to a white one it is pretty odd i mean
 yeah it's got like a icon there a thing on the bottom like it's sitting on
 something or it's raised up
 you know in a weird way
 and then chrome is still got a a dark background around its icon so
 now if there is any background around chrome
 well yeah i know that we talked about there's a the black
 whatever okay
 that that's right my face
 right right there
 but it may have been
 to be a bit less facetious this two points that i think we need to raise it
 the first is that
 i i see essentially
 once again do is kind of bring something out that doesn't feel like it's fully
 matured fully polished
 you see the ideas you see
 new design and the design language and
 uh... you know we use into hangouts at the moment the same loading animation
 that you see in to hangouts
 uh... this multi-colored circle which seems to be flipping around
 not a lot of that
 yet that's
 replicated exactly in the in the gmail
 for a lesson so google is working towards this consistency in this
 uniformity of knowing that you use in the group of just fine
 everybody on our team is remarked that the speed
 isn't great
 and is lag
 uh... some people's put in more lag than there is in the gmail one point
 whatever versions
 uh... what i what i was just saying is avenues in the previous version of gmail
 exclusively as both you guys could sparrow in the native uh...
 i was made up
 i mean
 it has been a great experience but i wouldn't
 goes of ours uh...
 called dumpster fire
 chris described and then
 it was survivable
 but as one thing so the dumpster fire technically i mean
 unless that dumpsters full of kerosene you product got a pretty good chance of
 of getting out of dumpster fire alive for not if you're in the dumpster
 the what's in the dumpster i mean you know i mean at the deuter is right and
 you
 it takes a lot to kill a human being
 uh...
 you wouldn't like them so far but maybe not if you have to use it for like
 yesterday
 that's uh... i gotta be honest i'm using it on my iphone five and i don't see the
 legs of the people are talking about so
 i think the animations are pretty cool the animations are are
 in my opinion slicker than they are on
 the android app
 uh... and you know schoolings really fast and all that other stuff uh... what
 does this thing that this liquor but they're not quicker
 who and and and
 yet if i read that that means is true
 uh... and everything is the the and read at the big advantage that it has is the
 fact that you can just wipe it actually
 between email threats yes so that
 again gets to the point about being really quick
 yet know that's definitely uh... omitted from for whatever reason from this
 version of the i was up which i can understand
 one thing that we haven't mentioned yet is it actually does support multiple
 inboxes now which is uh...
 a few or multiple
 uh... accounts issues a which is an early patient forty five taps to get
 from one account
 seriously one
 me
 sterile three three taps but
 close to a permanent what what is this country just one more final points raise
 which again is about the visual style to you at
 uh... which brian bishop from our team noted everything is kind of being
 enlarged like
 uh... you you know it's a other task that now if you have a specific out of
 the or person does have a speaker of the contacts
 they get a big letter so
 but i get an even from down again a big d
 uh... and all these visual elements have been in large in the text kind of
 insurance and down and you see less of each email
 uh... which people say looks pretty great on the i've had a patient
 makes the effort five
 seem little small like it needs a big screen which i think might be
 slain session on google spot just intro apple
 just be like
 our episode pic
 you need a bigger screen the iPhone
 sorry i'm just adding a picture to uh... to my
 right now
 realize it wasn't there it's not acceptable
 these of those i would just like to say
 uh... that uh... the dealer is destroying me and letterpress right now
 haha
 what i have to say anything
 well because i was a letterpress fanboys so he wanted to make sure that
 right i i only learned in the show but i only use devices and platforms that
 have letterpress on them
 uh...
 which means i i can actually use this windows phone x that i just showed you
 guys oh my god
 uh...
 yeah i know i i just thought i get in a few rounds of letterpress while i was
 waiting for you guys to finish what you're whatever it was that you're talking
 about
 okay this was so so terrible because not only did Chris completely derail the
 conversation
 but he also looked to his left
 and beats audio branding on his headphones the thing that i'm already annoyed and
 irritated about was just visible for like a solid five seconds
 the beats free and so it was a certain to go out and so i have to do that for
 the
 yeah
 but
 yes
 so i can hear anything we're saying right now
 no units get your smack talking
 now i can respect chris again
 but
 uh...
 we allow that without
 and other derailment of
 the whole conversation i a
 look i'm i'm relatively happy with uh... with the thing at uh...
 it makes it easier for me to be using an iphone
 uh...
 and
 tonight i've been bouncing between android iphone like literally like twice
 a day
 the past few days
 it's getting kind of embarrassing
 i do you feel that you know one of the biggest complaints about
 uh... heavy gmail users on the iphone why these android is because the gmail
 experience it isn't enough for you to just kind of forget about it right now
 yeah maybe i mean
 there's a bunch of apps on i was that i
 didn't think i'd care that much about what i do actually love a lot that are
 available on android
 uh... but there's a bunch of stuff on android that like it's hard for me to
 give up and it's like really little things like the unlock i've got a lot
 gesture and so taking a code
 saves me you know
 a quarter of a second every time i'm off my phone
 which given the returns and i thought every day that's up
 too
 uh... a million years
 uh...
 i couldn't be happy i was a little bit of a fun fact
 what's up
 the youtube app for i was just an update of the i've offices are yet does
 it let you are airplay
 street is there for
 really because that that's they took that out before right
 they did something to take that away
 and so i have called jasmine
 yes
 that's that's big deal
 check out the version of commerce and the summits on it a little bit
 she has got a set
 does it work on the i've had that
 uh... you
 optimize for i've had my phone five
 okay could just break this news before it was posted on the verge we did
 wow
 a sneak preview for those that are listed in the virgin will show or watch
 virtual show whether it was like
 but but but but but but but but but but but but but but but but but but but but
 uh... as it is so far
 and might it on is i've been i finally got my nexus four in last week after
 much of a delay and i've been like try living with my nexus four and like
 occasionally going back to my iphone parts of time today
 i think for me the biggest differences there's a lot of things with the
 internet platform that i like
 and the main or something like better than i was
 but when it comes to the apps
 uh... the third-party abs just a really frustrating me uh...
 for starters like i was complaining about earlier on twitter today that
 like there's no good
 camera for or photo apps for android that i can find none of them seem to
 compare to the third-party options are below i was and you know what it would
 do you want photo editing photo sharing was no no like uh... photo taking like
 like i use camera plus a lot of the iphone because it is the control over
 uh... exposure settings and stuff like that some
 camera nerd
 uh... and
 the ones i've tried for uh... and readjust don't work as well and are
 frustrating to use stuff like that so i mean that is one example
 uh... but there's
 others where just the third-party after just so much better and so much easier
 to use in that better design on i was a it makes me sad because i really like
 the android platform
 and using the internet
 but i'm just gonna mention because it surprised me picks up on android
 is really nice photo editor
 uh...
 isn't editor though or is that like uh... a shooter
 now it's it's not she's is definitely an essay in a place where you can see how
 do you confuse an editor with the first person shooter
 maybe that's my problem as a whole
 uh... the idea that it was a bunch of tweaks and filters it has a really nice
 color isolation
 uh... setting where you know you select color like red and it
 desaturates all the other colors
 and i think that surprised me actually is that
 i found pics on android
 uh... using android phones i can't find it in the ios app store
 so this is like
 the odds
 exception where andrew is an apt that
 i was does
 and showed his
 was a bit of an animal yet there's an animal to it
 well there has actually one of the things we talk about this week there's a
 feature on android for face the messenger that's uh... not available on
 i was uh...
 they've had on certain android but not all android phones which is actually
 coming on the s m s integration
 and now in a few countries and they're gonna watch it worldwide as quickly as
 they can
 uh... they've got a thing where you don't need a face book account to sign
 up for face book messenger
 which is
 to me really interesting you think that with the billion users that they would
 that that would be enough
 but uh... they wanna make sure that you can still use face book messenger to
 talk to everybody not just your face book friends they they they're trying to
 re contextualize it as just
 a general messaging app instead of of face book message
 yeah i think it's a it's a very very like definitive sign that that face book
 isn't playing when it comes to mess i've always thought of uh... face book
 messengers being a uh...
 aside show like you know just a feature of face book uh... and and this just
 goes to show you that they're out there to kill us ms
 there up there to take on the what's apps in the case of the world
 uh... and that is a bad and i messages the world and this is a abet
 at all this team very actively wait right now and somebody is going to win
 it and ultimately long-term is not going to be s of s
 well so ultimately long-term very interesting thing to see player yet the
 winner might not have be crowned in the u s either
 uh... so i mean let's look at that uh... i message we've got blackberry
 messenger which is still big in certain countries notably the countries where
 face bookers first launching this feature
 we got what's up with its uh... you know i think it's a
 ten billion messages a day but they won't say users who got kicked with thirty
 million users we've got
 thirty million users we've got
 thirty million users we've got
 taco talk
 and chat on the wall
 channel whatever
 uh... nimba's
 uh... ten whatever ten cents messaging uh... happens i forget
 half of these messaging clients are like talking about users in the tens if not
 the hundreds of millions
 so like
 there is no shortage of contenders in the states
 and
 face book wants to i mean you know i'd
 the post that i wrote this morning face book wants to make every phone a face
 book phone and if that it doesn't have a chance to win a messaging that that's
 problem
 and i mean for me it's it's sort of like
 why can't face book just let this one go why does face book feel like it needs to
 win here that's the really interesting question
 uh... and that's you know
 the features phones man
 we're talking about this is this is a podcast about the future
 that's the man that's the
 yeah i mean
 i don't know that we need to be asking that question
 instant messaging is something that
 doesn't have a dominant player at the moment
 and
 is open to somebody to grasp it and to own it
 uh... and it's just another
 just another branch to any one of these big companies whether it be google
 trying to teach at face book which so
 messenger and apple with our message
 uh... is just another way to pull users in and
 you know people use is then you start data mining them you start selling data
 uh... you start advertising to them etc etc
 and that's how you make money that's how everybody makes money so it makes sense why
 everybody would want a slice of the i a m pie and i was just thinking recently
 i need to standardize on some sort of instant messaging platform because i've
 got
 a bunch of contacts with people just fragmented all over the place someone's
 type
 uh... i'm getting and messages from like two people
 uh...
 you know this teacher but then you have a useful accounts for google and yeah
 uh... so i got a new account of a yahoo account that the question here is what
 is how will you standardize on that if if everyone is sending you messages from
 various accounts is it
 you can't really standardized on something if everyone that you're
 talking to is using different things right i will tell you how but i will
 tell you how on the verge uh... hopefully later this week
 nice
 uh... but
 but i mean that doesn't want that this point you you can send that
 unless you get absolutely big with the on one service and i could be faced with
 message
 and this is what things we're trying to do
 by removing what is
 essentially a very very low
 barrier to entry because as these said ability for we have faced with accounts
 most people who have access to the web have a face with a counter ready
 but they look is
 nudging that side just asking for your name and phone number
 which again is a play for these developing markets where people probably
 use i a m
 and texts and messaging a lot more than ourselves
 we do we treated each other against we do that more
 and to do is the good analogy here because
 twitter
 only really
 matters as much as it does because it's so you because it was not a body's
 office
 you know i mean that
 originally maybe it had
 technological advantages
 in the so simple and
 and even though it's with what we've run out
 in reason
 everybody's insurances because
 everybody isn't that
 it's a self-reinforced twitter doesn't want to be a messaging platform they've
 they've relegated direct messages to absolutely absolutely you know a
 submenu submenu in their app right
 which takes
 and i i can't i can agree that everybody's on twitter i think a lot of
 people that are
 in our circle or twitter uh... not like not trusting
 well for instance if i wanted to send my wife a message i can't do it on twitter
 she doesn't use twitter
 yeah i mean i think i had a say that everybody that matters
 yes
 uh... but also making isn't that to do is that much of a direct
 person to person communication platform like i'm really actually use twitter as
 a way to be having a conversation
 one at one of the person to other people
 it's easy to communicate with everybody else
 but my point is
 we've standardized on twitter as this
 information
 uh... distribution thing
 just because i don't know what is using in the same way
 this is that that uh... to my own heart but that i called i call the twitter is
 back in january and it's come true i called them a broadcasting
 social network
 and that's what it is it's a broadcasting network that everybody happens to be able
 to broadcast on the end
 there's a little bit of social in there
 uh... and there's a little bit archiving but not much and that they're promising
 to fix that
 but it's you know it's not uh... publishing platform it's a broadcasting
 platform
 yeah i'm i'm going to be
 i'm happy with that definition i think it fits
 as long as we're talking about messaging we would be remiss if we didn't
 uh... for the virgin mobile show briefly uh... wish text messaging sms short
 message service
 a happy twentieth birthday
 uh... die already
 wow
 i think that
 chris can we get a sound effect for the birthday
 want want want uh... i think it's
 it's too many steps here
 right now i got this
 i don't feel like that's not appropriate
 dot
 it's just
 goes west
 so so like i i i think that
 so can i i i just want to boil this down for you guys there there are only there
 are only three
 i was like there are three problems uh...
 my my greatest function
 uh... there are three problems with s m s the prevent it from
 researching
 uh... to become the dominant uh... instant messaging slash mobile messaging
 platform for the foreseeable future
 uh... one is
 uh...
 that the hundred forty character limit
 is obviously
 a huge issue
 to is presence information which i think is
 he to any good
 uh... platform in presence information isn't just like
 away status it's also things like
 you know see when people are typing better say you know optional reader
 seats
 uh...
 and then three the fact that
 at present you need a phone number or phone number is your only form of
 identification
 uh... when in fact there
 there can and should be much easier ways
 to identify yourself to to send and receive
 s m s is and that's something that that
 basically all other platforms to figure out i message
 is kind of trying to be a little i would argue will to start about it
 uh... with the way to integrates uh... email addresses and i i'm in a weird
 situation right now where
 like people with i phones can't text me because yes to a non-existent
 phone uh... same same for me
 yet so uh... but but regardless uh... the these are all problems and i don't
 blame s m s for having these problems because the twenty-year-old platform
 uh... but but you know uh... there's some
 after there's there's
 there there is a
 uh...
 a groundswell of of support among certain carriers
 for supporting and unfortunately the name escapes me there's an acronym for
 it there some
 uh... at s m s framework at that is
 uh... built into
 uh...
 i m s
 which is part and parcel with l t e
 and uh... and some carriers are really not a metro pcs is has deployed it
 uh... and it has presence information it can do a few other slick things
 so that's really their last and best
 hope for keeping messaging within control of the carriers if that fails
 that is going to become a dumb fight
 thing for them where they're just transporting that the data
 on behalf of all these other services that are out there
 yes i want that future com
 yet item
 i have a lot of thoughts and feelings about this which uh... would probably be
 boring because they're not fully
 thought through but they're close and i'll talk about them later uh...
 do i talk about some good as a mess this uh...
 police have called on congress to require
 uh... s m s law expert full two years
 it's bad
 it's a good thing about
 yet it's not a kind of crazy i was under the impression that that carriers held
 onto s m s messages for a lot longer than the family they do
 uh... for some reason i had my head that they all care you know
 hold onto for six months or a hundred eighty days but
 uh... apparently they only hold on to him for about a week and please don't
 like that because it makes it hard to use them in a court trial
 as opposed to jenner trial
 i i i strongly believe okay so this is actually another another uh... problem
 with that's about discuss is that uh... it isn't
 encrypted like a any any messaging platform that you use should be
 encrypted
 and to act
 and i message allegedly is in fact we were talking about this
 earlier today at the team the fact that
 i message apple claims that i message is encrypted
 but they've never shared any details on how it's encrypted
 or what that means that they also they also claim that these times an open
 standard
 uh... job
 but that's the truth that's not very very good point
 so so yeah i have but but but that is a an obvious weakness of s m s and it is
 very disturbing to me
 to think that i would have
 things that i have
 what it what it okay glad to hear your counter-argument
 the counter-argument is that
 the only thing you're really
 angling forward is encryption thing is just the illusion of some sort of
 security some semblance of
 privacy and i was going to go to my no no what i want
 well here's what i want i wanted to that if somebody wants to crack
 my
 my my stuff
 i was going to use a different word there
 wants to crack my stuff they need to throw a supercomputer at it for a week
 then they can have it if they if they want to put that amount of effort
 seeing what i bought on amazon
 and by all means well i think i think what it means is that chris really just
 wants to be able to
 said uh... his credit card information over text message to whoever he wants
 about worrying about it getting well obviously of course i mean my problem
 with uh... a lot of with this did actually
 a teeny tiny
 muscule e
 this fueling
 amount conflicted about these uh... these text message records because
 this is gonna sound lame but we this is how we talk to each other now this is
 how we send letters to each other now there should be a permanent archive
 uh... that i have the option to like save for posterity so future generations
 can read my messages
 because you know i'm genius and people are gonna wanna know what i was saying
 to people and i want to give them the opportunity i mean
 when we do we look at you know famous writers and scientists through the
 agents we like have that letters that they wrote to their wives and their best
 friends and
 like somebody thought to save that stuff and we're not thinking about saving
 any of the stuff and i know it's you know very short messages and is a very
 ephemeral whatever whatever whatever
 there's going to be this weird at black hole
 of context information about our generation
 that was never there for previous generation i can assure you i don't know
 if if i agree with that
 because uh...
 those are the letters that you they were writing to their wife
 isn't and their family members
 that i mean we're just emailing now and those are all our time to see if you are
 there
 probably wanted to if you wanted to be if you're you know you we we can put it
 on a you put it on a dvd drive that'll be around the last about ten years before
 degrees and nothing
 you try to be around a thousand years i'm serious like this is where all this
 brand hangout i'm not done
 this is why i wrote this rant about paper but you know all those months ago
 there's no
 there there's
 only a very small number of companies that are thinking about storing and
 maintaining data over millennia
 uh... people who's called millennium person
 anyway
 uh... and
 and so when we when we talk about phone companies keeping records of us and i
 see us it's a privacy issue that most important thing
 and that needs to be fixed but we were talking about messaging
 general
 there should be easy ways to export the data
 and there should be easy ways to archive the data and it shouldn't
 and this is the next thing
 you know when you use face book to message somebody or use gmail to email
 somebody
 that's using being used for advertising in the short term but there's also a
 whole social graph that you don't i mean what is face book
 doing with the fact that it knows that i'm talking to
 you know certain people
 on messenger
 are they using it to better target me for ads? i don't know should
 that be a core function of messaging in this day and age? well facebook has tried
 to do
 uh... exactly what you said dita which is you know build a timeline built
 around the person
 so
 assuming some future geniuses or genii
 or whatever show up and use facebook extensively and religiously and the way
 that facebook wants to be used
 uh... we could have a really detailed breakdown of exactly what they've done
 but here's the trouble uh... and i think you're raising... there's no export button
 i guess so
 uh... but i think you're raising a really good point but i also think there's
 another angle to it which is that
 when we get that timeline of the future
 uh... what thomas edison whatever whoever
 what we're gonna get we're not just gonna get those really awesome
 communiques with his contemporaries where he discusses business strategies and
 how to capsulize and such and such innovation
 we're also going to get his freaking music playlists for every single day
 he's scrolling activity we'll see every youtube video that he liked
 we'll know about the cat in japan that makes him laugh every night at one a m
 in the morning
 and and this is the trouble
 back in those days when people wrote those letters that we treasure now and
 which we find
 revealing about their personalities
 those are the only things that they've really produced
 in terms of content now we produce so much freaking content that if you could
 you just don't have any filter to like
 bring out the important stuff
 and and and that's the difficulty like
 people just
 either overproduced or the under produced like some people just
 take pictures of everything around the interview life and just because
 meaningless
 and other people don't take enough pictures and find that
 years passed by and i have any
 connection to the memories that they built up over that time
 and that's you know
 sad
 uh...
 it says no the decision
 the privacy for though
 i just generally
 assumed that somebody somewhere has access to my
 stuff
 excuses
 uh... so
 as that is our operate it's a it's a paranoid joshua copstein inspired kind
 of way to be
 you you shouldn't accept that you should be issued demand under twenty-eight that
 encryption
 anything
 the year sending and receiving
 are you uh... you're somebody's using it for me as somebody can look at it
 i mean i remember i remember back in the day i used to get your emails that
 people would put their their pgp key in their and their email signature like
 every single you know thanks if you want to you could
 turn on the cvn haven't encrypted conversation chris uh...
 i want to know if your moves in in letterpress are encrypted
 uh... they are actually
 and i would have been dreaming of of playing letterpress unencrypted
 yeah the words that he plays i don't think they're in the english language so
 they must be encrypted it's just but so so like i i think first of all the i
 think that you're significantly over romanticizing
 uh...
 this this content that were
 generating i mean like
 you know with the exception of a few
 luminaries there actually you know millions and millions and billions of
 people that we know nothing about over history uh... yeah
 and and that's because you know none of their communication has been
 preserved and nothing that they did is really been preserved
 and i think that you know to flat point i think the exact same thing is
 happening now except the opposite where we just have this constant stream of
 noise that nobody's going to bother take the time to do anything with
 uh... and that the bigger issue that that i really fear
 uh... for our
 uh... are
 future generations about somebody just uh...
 friend in the end uh...
 game
 uh... you can't be chris alert but the uh...
 the the bigger concern the bigger concern i have is the fact that nobody is
 going to have any good user names for any service
 and and and i'll be damned i'll be damned if anyone is going to to be
 allowed to have my user names after i got
 by the way whoever on xbox
 has the username back lawn
 i will give you money to give us a it drives me to account i've managed to
 pick a word
 that nobody uses and so i can usually get it on most services but on xbox
 there's is one person
 that like put those strings of letters and numbers not numbers letters and
 vowels together
 very unhappy about it
 uh... it's it's the energy
 i mean perfectly fine because there are that many flat samples anywhere in the
 globe anyway
 so i can just roll in to be like that's my name gives me
 not on gmail
 and i was raised to cut the hell out of me is like
 who the hell needs that several
 apart from me
 i'm sure is going to be kind of like glad and to its which is one of those
 abandoned the counts
 and
 because you just go with blackjack
 uh...
 this morning's
 but chris is getting more friends on game center apparently
 hey uh... all you have
 uh... they uh... black i just had a quick google search and turns out that
 there is a flat and there's a lot of who is an olympic lifter
 yet and they are you saying that he has bigger muscles and black does
 at the very good point i didn't think about that
 that i can't believe that possible
 yet he hasn't won any medals though i'm looking to the country but he's
 bulgarian
 uh...
 middle heavyweight class
 the deer i i'd like to say on xbox it's me
 is a year
 you met
 that
 well and we need to have a look at that but i don't like i was saying before the podcast
 the only version of this podcast is going to sound
 quite a lot of those people's games that are not sound effects and applause i
 mean it's gonna be grand
 yet but the thing is we've got a couple of uh...
 troll face issues if people are going to see
 and as soon as they go out somebody giggles
 and it's like
 these guys must be high if you just listen to this and people like t
 i got accused of of being it legitimately high was it last week
 uh... both in the chat and on twitter
 and so i had to say those actually only high on life and it's because
 you know i'm standing in my like the
 bounce around when i'm trying to have fun
 uh... i try to have fun with you guys
 could like you
 we should be engaging in interesting
 and it's hard like right now this is an aging interesting so let's move on from
 london it's like a whole different world
 would you describe him as a brother from another mother but
 sister from another mister
 the that it's been weird no no no
 uh...
 with the friends and colleagues and we'll leave it at that
 but i would never got a hold of the gas camp for us uh... he didn't really
 carry the
 and it's it's a frustrating thing radius because
 uh... is well designed
 it works for you nice and quickly and if it were actually a phone
 with a massive camera back of it
 it could have some potential
 but i was just a camera com function as a folk
 so all of that good stuff andrew four point one and the great processor it's
 nappies responsive
 four point eight inch screen it's an LCD it's a really gorgeous one some twenty p
 uh... as far as i was concerned and
 Aaron is a massive sample Samsung fan
 i want a boy
 which is a massive Samsung fan
 tracks massive uh... tracks Samsung products religiously
 as far as he's concerned
 is the first display that Samsung has put on any of these devices
 so that's high praise
 the trouble is
 is still just a really really fancy camera and as a camera
 it stinks is actually worse than
 most point shoots in sprites range
 which will it
 it stinks on a couple of levels right it kinda stinks on handling and it kinda
 stinks on image quality right
 yeah
 well the thing is we polish you cameras
 they've kind of eliminated the physical controls anyway
 like you know going to go and find two hundred other point shoot cameras with
 knobs and dials and really handy physical buttons and controls
 they just kind of
 disappeared and they'd be replaced by touch screens anyway and they have easy control
 schemes anyway so
 i don't think the standard there is really high in the first place
 but Samsung doesn't approve of that you're absolutely right
 but image quality is the thing that really needed to be good to make this device
 make sense and that's where it falls down
 so again December guys what was gonna say
 well what drives me crazy is
 i mean
 if you're gonna have a device that we've seen
 point shoots at a reasonable price point
 uh... that are good and we've seen android devices at a reasonable price
 point that are good
 but yet you put them together and like they they chose not that you they can't
 they couldn't hit a reasonable price point here
 if you're gonna have to me what's the same retail for five hundred u.s. it's
 like five hundred
 yeah if you're gonna sell a five hundred dollar device it's it's got a
 have fewer compromises
 it really does. Here's the thing that i would say uh...
 the Nikon Coolpix S800C i believe it is
 uh...
 it was the first attempt
 you know it was the first
 android powered
 point and shoot camera
 and that had so much more issues
 so many more issues
 uh...
 it was slow, it's display wasn't awesome
 it didn't have the same processor
 it was just way way behind
 if we actually keep this going and if another company steps up and makes the
 same leap that we've seen from
 the Nikon attempt to the Samsung attempt to the next android powered camera
 then we could be looking at a really good device
 at that stage
 but it's still
 just kind of
 exactly as Dita says, you take a reasonable price camera you take a
 reasonable price phone
 you throw away the phone part which is the thing that kind of stinks
 and then you put them together but also you put together the price for both
 it's like then you have a problem because nothing comes free
 you pay for the extra phone like functionality, you pay for the extra android like
 functionality, you pay
 or from the android perspective you pay for the extra camera functionality
 but neither one is good enough to justify it
 and that's basically where we are
 like there's a lot of
 good things in it
 but as a sum of all the parts together it's actually less
 and so we wait for the next one
 right, I'm curious as to Samsung's approach more feels like
 they went from the ground, started with a smartphone and then added a camera to it
 and I'm curious as to if the opposite approach might produce better
 results if you had
 say a Canon
 that was already an established good camera and then... Yeah, the S100
 the Canon S100 is so obvious
 yeah, it's a great camera, excellent camera, all of us on staff really love that
 camera
 so if you just inserted
 you know
 the android
 operating system and cellular radio on it
 and see where it went from there and I think that's what Nikon was trying to do with the S800c
 as you mentioned
 except that ran Android 2.3, it had an underpowered processor
 and a number of other problems with it
 I think
 connected cameras are definitely where cameras are going in the future
 there's definitely going to be a point where you can't buy a camera
 that isn't connected just like you can't really
 it's really hard to buy a TV that's not 3D these days
 now if I'm connected do you mean Wi-Fi or cellular or both?
 I think eventually it's going to be both
 but I mean it'll start with Wi-Fi, Wi-Fi has actually been around for a long time
 Nikon had Wi-Fi cameras back in like 2003 or 2004
 yeah, 2001
 or 2001, there you go
 so Wi-Fi has been around a long time and it didn't really
 catch on to every single camera model but you are seeing more cameras with Wi-Fi
 now and then
 now we have these actual
 cellular connected cameras that are running smartphone operating systems and I think
 that's definitely where they're going in the future
 it's just unfortunate that the Galaxy camera is not quite the answer to that
 question yet
 yeah I mean my problem with these cameras is it's a very particular problem
 to me is that I
 need the wireless either to the cloud or directly to my laptop if at all possible
 to be
 as reliable and fast as humanly possible so that I could use it to live
 log
 and I know that there's like
 you know a hundred people on the face of the earth that care about this
 but I'm sorry Chris is going around
 going around on the left right now and
 I knew it would work, yes. Moving to Google Hangouts is the best thing ever.
 So now you know, if you're watching this live, now you know why Chris has been so quiet for the past
 ten minutes as he acted
 with this face overlay
 wow
 I was just going to say I would like to see the wireless reliability be better
 and I'm going to move on and let's talk about the other thing that
 is a notable review, brief review from this week
 and that is the tramp stamped Galaxy Note 2 on Verizon.
 Just before we do that, I wanted to just wrap up the Galaxy camera
 and give Dan a chance to recover because the man is in
 tears. That was more than I could handle, I'll admit that.
 So I just wanted to rephrase myself from earlier to say correctly which is that
 the Galaxy camera
 in totality is less than some of its parts.
 Galaxy camera in totality is less than some of its parts. I said it in a really
 grammatically busted way earlier on.
 That aside, also I was just thinking about the grip of how you handle
 a camera
 which is all touchscreen on the back
 and the fact of the matter is where your thumb
 wants to rest
 is exactly on the top right corner of the touchscreen. Yeah, you have to do this move.
 Particularly if you have a camera shaped hand grip as opposed to a phone
 which has different ergonomics.
 So it has issues and the whole idea, the whole concept of Android powered cameras
 still has issues that need to be ironed out.
 But also to Deezus' point about Wi-Fi connectivity,
 I think we've all dreamt of this
 awesome, awesome concept of being able to just shoot with our cameras and having
 the pictures pop immediately
 onto
 our devices.
 But it's not just reliability which is, yes, the number one thing, but it's also speed.
 So if you take a picture and it takes you ten seconds, it's reliable but it takes you
 ten seconds for the pictures to pop up on your computer
 then you start thinking about cables and other stuff.
 That's the whole Wi-Fi card promise. If you're not familiar with what an
 Wi-Fi card is, it's an SD card
 with a Wi-Fi chip built into it that you can put into virtually any camera.
 Now what it is is pain and sorrow and heartbreak and
 disappointment
 crammed together into a tiny little plastic wedge. That's what the Wi-Fi card is.
 I've gone through
 probably half a dozen of these things.
 This time it's going to be good. It promises to cut the cables so that you can shoot
 your pictures and they instantly
 are transferred over to your computer.
 But the problem, as Vlad mentioned, is it's very bottlenecked and very slow.
 And as Dieter would more than likely say next, is that it's very unreliable
 and you lose connections and drop connections all the time.
 I know Toshiba had something called the Flash Air card which
 functioned pretty much the same way.
 It creates a server that you can access on any device because it's web-based.
 And the pictures always seem to pop up reliably. I saw that on IFA.
 The trouble is, I didn't see it this year's IFA, I saw it last year's IFA.
 And then it got delayed and it was supposed to launch sometime early in this year.
 And I've heard pretty much zilch about it since then.
 So, you know,
 we're still stuck.
 One thing that I would point out about the Galaxy camera, like I really want to
 love the concept, but I think that Samsung made a major
 branding misstep. And I thought this ever since they announced it, I think they
 made a major branding misstep by calling it the Galaxy camera.
 Because that implies, the name implies that it is,
 it's like a smartphone with the camera grafted on, which it kind of is.
 It's a smartphone with the camera grafted on minus the calling part.
 And that's not what they should have made. They should have done something more
 along the lines of what Nikon did, which is graft Android
 onto a genuine point and shoot.
 Which is the point I made about five minutes ago.
 Chris was busy five minutes ago. He was making sure that he could show us the visual
 trickery.
 The name of the company Nikon
 comes from the name of Japan in Japanese, which is Nippon.
 It is not Nikon.
 It's Nikon.
 It's not, I don't know,
 like who told you this?
 And like if it does come from Nippon, why don't they just call the company Nippon?
 Like why is there a case? You're making this up. I think there are a few reasons why they would call it Nippon.
 But,
 yeah, that's exactly the point I had earlier. Is that, you know, if they had started from a good
 camera base and added the smartphone on top of that, I think it would have been a better result
 starting with a
 smartphone base and adding camera parts.
 You know, I also don't feel like anybody has really gone
 right, which is enough.
 Because, frankly, the other thing is the sensor in the Galaxy camera is a joke.
 It's actually smaller than the one
 in the 808 POV.
 The Nokia 808 POV.
 So it's like a tiny, tiny little sensor.
 It's standard fare for like a hundred dollar point and shoot camera is going to have a sensor of that sort in it.
 Right, but there's a thing.
 The market for those things
 is disappearing.
 And those people are going to buy a $500 camera.
 So really Samsung is trying to innovate its way into a space that is being vacated.
 Just because nobody wants to buy anything in there.
 What I want to see is something like
 Sony's
 next series cameras, you know, full
 APS-C size sensors,
 TAC Android, TAC Dropbox integration,
 TAC all those things on top.
 And then, okay, fine, the price is going to be kind of crazy.
 But people might be able to justify that
 more readily. And the notion of data share,
 or you know,
 data plan sharing, I think makes that a little more palatable. I'm still not
 comfortable with the way those plans work currently.
 Like I'm really upset that I'm paying an extra ten dollars a month just so that my
 tablet can use the same data bucket as my phone.
 But it's a step in the right direction.
 And now let's talk about Verizon's tattooing of the Galaxy Note 2.
 Yeah, so I
 was using this thing over the weekend and Vlad, you know, I will lean heavily on
 your thoughts about this since you did our original review. But this is actually
 the first time, I'm a little embarrassed to admit this, this is the first time
 that I've ever carried around a Note,
 a Galaxy Note of any kind, as
 like my daily driver for any period of time.
 And that happened last weekend.
 And
 I really, really disliked it a lot more than I thought I would. I thought that I
 would like,
 I thought that I would pretty quickly adapt to
 the size and the weight and just move on with my life.
 But the problem, I was telling David about this, David Pierce,
 the problem that I kept having is that the Galaxy Note 2 is
 big enough
 so that you can't handle it like a phone, you kind of have to handle it like a tablet.
 And what I mean by that
 is that if you just try and pretend like it's a phone,
 you know, a regular phone, then you are going to drop it.
 Because unless you have truly enormous hands,
 you have just enough trouble getting a grip on it,
 especially since the Note 2 is such glossy plastic all over,
 that it's going to end up falling out of your hands. And I'm convinced that if I
 use this phone for another week or two, it would have hit the floor. David was telling me
 that he dropped one of his review units.
 So, I don't know if that was public information or not.
 But yeah, that was the biggest problem I had. As a phone,
 and Vlad, I think you relayed this in your review very well,
 if you are in the market for a 5.5 inch phone, it's a fine
 device. I just don't think, I was surprised at how
 unable I was to adapt to that size.
 Yeah, this is the thing that I've been stressing all the time.
 With the original Galaxy Note, with the second Galaxy Note 2,
 it just isn't a phone. So many people will make the argument,
 it fits in my pocket. Well, fine, let it fit in your pocket. But it isn't a phone.
 You can't operate it like a phone.
 You can't treat it like a phone. And exactly as you say, Chris,
 the instinct is to treat it and to work with it as a tablet.
 I still think that as a device,
 it has a ton of good things going for it.
 But I just wanted to take this opportunity to also raise another point,
 which is, I've been using the iPhone 5
 for a bit, for a week or two now, and
 switching between it and the One X. The Windows phone 8X, which I was really enthusiastic about,
 I still really like. I just don't have one because
 HTC took it away. And they've given Chris
 free or whatever. Fine, that's fine, I'll live with that.
 But anyway, I've been switching between the iPhone 5 and the One X. And the One X is a 4.7 inch device.
 Significantly smaller than the Galaxy Note 2.
 And every time I make an immediate switch between the two, between the iPhone and the One X,
 the latter just feels like the former, but
 oversized. Like, you still have icons, but
 there's just this massive space between them for no good reason. And they're large for no good reason.
 And the keyboard is, you know, one and a half, two times the size
 for no good reason. Everything just feels like it's bigger
 without there being any benefit to it. And it just
 kind of reminds me and reiterates the fact that there isn't
 ergonomics to be spot. And these 4.5 inch and above phones
 aren't hitting it. And anything that is 5 inches and above just isn't a phone.
 That's just it.
 Yeah, I mean, it's a fine...
 Just get a 7 inch tablet. Yeah.
 Unless you're really in love with the
 S Note and the Snowton and the S Pen.
 The Snowton. Yeah, I mean, I will say
 that I was really kind of blown away by the battery life
 on it. The thing that really stuck out in my mind was that
 I didn't connect it to the Wi-Fi in my house. And I have pretty crappy reception here, but I was able to
 connect to Verizon's LTE network.
 And I charged it 200% and set it down
 just in my living room when I went to bed. And I woke up the next morning
 and just left it sit there for probably another two hours.
 Then looked at it and it was still indicating 100% despite being on LTE all night.
 Even though it wasn't really doing anything. And I plugged it in.
 That is so blatantly an American version of that phone. What do you mean?
 The battery can't be at 100% but it's so like,
 ballsy and you know, I want 100% dude. Just give me whatever you're going to give me.
 It's like, I want a American phone.
 I got a 100% for you. Well it does have that tacky tattoo on the front button.
 Chris, do you have it? On his belly button.
 Yeah, I have it right here.
 Show us that awesome. I don't know if you can see that.
 Yeah, I can just make it out.
 Yeah, it's got the Tramp stamp on the home button.
 And turn it around because I know the back is also very
 branded.
 It says Verizon, 4G, Galaxy Note 2.
 All on the back. And I think Verizon
 and Samsung were both like,
 whoa, we have this giant canvas.
 So they have three logos on the back and then
 both Samsung and Verizon are on the front. So there's a total of five logos
 on this phone.
 I'm convinced that we're getting close to the point where
 carriers are going to start selling like
 ad spots on phones. So it'll just be like a random Best Buy or Target logo.
 I was just thinking about that.
 If they actually had a flat edge on the sides,
 we would get phones that are like Nascar cars.
 Yes, absolutely.
 Epic 4G Touch, sponsored by McDonald's.
 McNuggets. I can see this sort of like
 dystopian future where
 the level of your subsidy depends on how many
 sponsorship stickers you're willing to put on your phone.
 I can totally believe that.
 So last week Chris was talking about how subsidies
 and whatnot, the Nexus 4 and everything, need to go away.
 Now we're getting to the point where they're going to go away
 via sponsorships.
 Maybe these little etching machines in every carrier store and then you hand your phone to them
 and they'll tattoo on all the logos and it's cheaper.
 Which would indeed be dystopian.
 I would put a Starbucks logo on mine.
 I'm so disappointed.
 Between this and Bates...
 Actually, can we talk about the Starbucks app update?
 I think that's...
 There's two major Starbucks updates that happened yesterday.
 One, the iOS app was finally updated for the iPhone 5's display, which I've been complaining about
 since, I don't know, when was the iPhone 5 coming out? September.
 So that was finally rectified.
 And then last night, Starbucks finally updated its
 Android app for Android 4.2. So now I can finally install it on the Nexus 4.
 Now what makes that update really funny
 is that, and I see Dieter's forever alone now.
 So what's funny about
 this update is that... Oh god, you guys are killing me.
 What's funny about this update... By pure coincidence, I was yawning.
 What's funny about this update is that up until the point that it was released,
 if you contacted Starbucks and complained that the app was crashing,
 they were like, oh, there's something screwed up with your phone. You should contact Google,
 you should contact LG, you should contact Samsung,
 you should contact AT&T. And then all of a sudden the update comes out and
 they're just... suddenly works on 4.2.
 So now I no longer have to go into Starbucks like a buster with my
 Nexus 4 in one hand and an iPhone 5 in the other hand,
 connect to their Wi-Fi to pay for my coffee drink.
 You know what I do when I go into Starbucks? I swipe my
 credit card. That's what I do. Or I give them cash.
 No rewards, man. Throwing away all those rewards.
 Yeah, you're living in the 20th century. You're living in the 20th century, Dieter.
 I just want to make a serious point here.
 1995 called it... 1995 called it once its payment method back.
 I just want to make a serious point here,
 which is that I think
 when we are spending our money and when we're making all of these
 consumer choices, we should aim
 to help the specialists. And by that I mean
 it's things like... Here in the UK there's this really
 terrible, in my opinion, trend where supermarkets are just broadening out and
 spreading
 their tentacles into things that supermarkets don't usually sell.
 So they started off by selling clothing alongside groceries.
 Now you can pretty much buy anything. What supermarkets are you going to?
 Well to be fair... I said supermarkets.
 Oh, I see. But the thing is,
 so they started off with those things and now you can buy lawnmowers if it's a big enough
 supermarket.
 But then they started selling insurance. Now Tesco, Mobile have...
 What was the...
 MV&A? That was the...
 MV&O.
 Right, yes, MV&O.
 On O2's network. And they're selling insurance, they're selling mobile contracts.
 Sainsbury's are doing the same thing. And ultimately, you know, they're trying to
 pitch you the idea that if you stay loyal to one
 of those companies, you're going to get a synergy from all those products and
 you know,
 a sense of money, whatever. But the only thing that's really happening is that they're
 squeezing out,
 again, the specialists, the guys who only do insurance and the guys who only do
 banking and the guys who only do whatever. And
 we're just going to end up with these massive, massive corporations
 that have way too much control over pricing. Which is the thing that worries and
 scares me.
 So, I mean, Starbucks
 does coffee. So I guess Starbucks is okay.
 If what you're... I mean, these giant super corporations controlling our lives and
 overtaking the state is the dominant form
 of control in society. I mean, we're almost there and I think that's great
 because it'll bring forward, you know,
 shadow run, right? I mean, if we've got, you know,
 these giant corporations in charge, and that's one step closer to me being
 able to cast magic spells in a cyberpunk future.
 I don't know how to...
 No shout out to fans here. Nobody knows what I'm talking about.
 I don't know how you're going to get there with paying with cash for everything, Dieter.
 Also, just a quick
 extra point here about the UK. On the point of subsidies, actually, because
 the Times, the local well-respected newspaper, which is actually owned by
 News International, which in turn is owned by News Corp,
 again, making a point about massive corporations,
 they've started subsidizing the Nexus 7.
 And they're subsidizing it very much in the carrier model, which is to say
 you pay the upfront fee, which is now 50 pounds instead of 199 for the 32GB
 Nexus 7, and then you sign up for the 80 month
 subscription model. So it's basically
 you get a subscription with them and that subsidizes your hardware. So they're acting like
 one of the carriers and they're trying to push their digital subscription.
 Which to me is interesting because...
 We've had commenters point out that German and Czech
 publications have done relatively similar schemes, so this isn't the very first
 paper to do this. But it's interesting to me because now you have
 something material that goes along with digital subscription to a newspaper.
 And one of the barriers for a lot of people to pay for digital subscription
 or to accept any paywall is that you're not getting anything
 physical, anything tangible when you're paying your money and handing your money over.
 So maybe this would be stimulus for people, what do you guys think?
 How much is the subscription, do you know?
 In total it adds up to 360 pounds
 for the 40 months plus the tablet, including the tablet's price.
 Yeah, I mean if the paper is... I mean I pay, what is it, 22 bucks a month or something
 just for the digital Wall Street Journal, so
 that seems like a pretty reasonable deal.
 Yeah, it's 70 pounds a month here in the UK, which is
 I mean frankly it's steep, it's more than the Wall Street Journal.
 I mean I would say the Times isn't the best newspaper around anyway.
 But maybe the pricing is more reasonable,
 right? Maybe if it's like 10 pounds a month or something.
 Yeah, for sure. I'm just wondering whether the
 hardware aspect would warm you guys to the idea more, like
 okay, I can get a subscription, I'm kind of iffy on it,
 but hey, look, I can get a tablet for dirt cheap
 that swings me over the edge. I can actually see that happening for me if I
 wanted the publication.
 Well, if you're already sold on the publication then
 I mean that's not a hard sell. That's the point, I'm sold on the publication but not on its price.
 And then you just kind of sweet as a deal with Soho, and I'm like, okay fine, I'll pay the price.
 I mean, the only thing I guess is like, I'm always nervous about
 I mean I'm nervous about subsidies in general, and
 it's, in principle it's fine as long as you know exactly what you're getting into at the
 outset.
 And I mean, what you're describing to me, Vlad,
 it feels like, we were talking about the 90s,
 it feels like Columbia House a little bit. Oh god.
 You know, you sign up for the one CD a month, and then you know if you forget to cancel
 they just keep on sending them, and you get those 13 CDs to start, it's amazing.
 Their CDs are like $27 a piece.
 Right, so like it's fine to sign up for
 a subsidy either from a carrier or from a
 random newspaper or from a grocery store, Starbucks or whoever,
 as long as you know you are thinking through
 who it is that you're committing your money to.
 And I think that the whole point of these things is that it sort of short circuits that.
 Doing it with publication makes a bit more sense, but
 I'm nervous to say that I think that's a great solution for everybody.
 Hey guys, I just want to point out that Columbia House, it turns out, still exists.
 What?
 Oh my god, I'm signing up right now. Yeah, no, their slogan is the worst slogan ever.
 You just pay for the DVDs you want without the streaming you don't.
 Oh!
 And the streaming is like this evil that needs to be banished.
 This is amazing. So they do DVDs now?
 Yeah. Do they do CDs at all? I think just DVDs.
 I'd just like to point out that Columbia House is something I've never heard of before.
 I know exactly what you guys are describing,
 just never heard of the brand. Well there was a few of these in the 90s, I think Columbia House was the biggest one,
 but there was also BMG, which was also a record label for some reason.
 But BMG, which had the same exact concept,
 and then there were some others that I just can't remember right now.
 They were all the same thing, where they're like,
 get 13 CDs for a penny, sign up for this contract,
 and we're going to send you CDs every month, and if you don't want it, you just tell us we don't want it,
 but then if you forget, we're going to charge you anyways.
 Yeah, and it preyed on me.
 It preyed on teenagers who were like, oh yeah, sweet, and then forget to, you know,
 every time, you wouldn't think to cancel it until the next CD came, and you'd be like,
 why are they sending me Burl Ives Christmas music? This has to stop.
 Doesn't Regus Digest work on pretty much the same business model?
 I don't know.
 Brendan, our producer, says that Columbia House is what motivated him to switch from cassettes to CDs.
 Wow.
 That's food for thought. I hadn't thought of it that way.
 Maybe Columbia House had a major impact on the transition to CD.
 Yeah, you know, we're really lucky that Columbia House didn't get into streaming in a big way,
 because it would be forever tainted with people's history and memory of being screwed over by them,
 and streaming would have never gotten off the ground.
 So thank you, Columbia House, for staying in the past,
 and sending out DVDs over the mail.
 And letting YouTube and cat videos popularize streaming to the entire globe.
 And what would be amazing is if Columbia House offered to send you a rotating assortment of cat videos on DVD,
 for people who were really internet-averse, but still wanted to get in on the cat videos.
 What we need is for Columbia House to get into the business of selling tablets and phones, right?
 Because we're switching phones, we're complaining that we don't have the perfect phone,
 so they just send us a batch of six phones right away for a penny,
 and then they just keep us sending another one.
 And then they send you that $49 on-contract Android phone, and you're just like,
 ahhh, I get this one.
 Dude, what if they partnered up or just bought KnowYourMeme.com?
 Why did I get this? I forgot to cancel.
 What if they partnered up with KnowYourMeme.com and started selling grandparents a meme a week, or whatever?
 Keep up with the young ones!
 Yeah. That would be amazing.
 For $9.99 every month.
 They could send you a different troll face every month as a poster.
 And you could wear it.
 When you're trolling someone in real life, you could just be like...
 Brilliant. I'm in. I'm in. I'm signing up.
 I'm calling this podcast if Lad gives me permission.
 Oh wait, there's a couple of... I want to point out we've updated our How to Buy a Smartphone article,
 so you should go check that out, or more to the point, send your friends and family there if they ask you
 which phone they should get, and be like, well actually you should find out what kind you want in the first place.
 And then, the excellent how-to from Evan Rogers for US users about how to travel internationally
 and still maintain a connection and not have your entire bank account get wiped out from roaming charges.
 I haven't had a chance to use my Vlad face yet.
 No.
 Deezer just walked away.
 Sorry Deeder.
 He's all flipping some tables.
 Sorry.
 That means a caption to be honest.
 That, ladies and gentlemen, is the Verge Vobel show.
 We want to thank you so much for watching.
 If you want to follow us, you can and should.
 We are on Twitter. I am back on Chris' e-power.
 Vlad is Vlad Saba.
 Dan is DC Seifert with an EI.
 We're all at Verge.
 You can leave a comment on this post now, or when it goes up, or whenever.
 And next week, we'll be here. Maybe on Tuesday. You never know.
 Bye guys.