 Greetings, mobile accomplishers. Welcome to The Verge Mobile Show. This is a special edition. It's a day late because Mobile World Congress is crazy, the big giant phone show in Barcelona. We are joined by our reporters in Barcelona, also hosts of The Verge Mobile Show, Dan and Vlad. Chris is here as well, and we even have the inestimable Evan Rogers, aka Kwisatz Hoderak. How are you doing guys? That's not a word. Kwisatz Hoderak. Hello. It's a good dune joke. I didn't let everybody say, hey, I'm so and so and so and so. I said everybody's name. But that's because it's a crazy wild show. We do things differently the second day. So how is Barcelona, guys? How is the show going for you? It's actually been pretty good. It's been a surprisingly happening show for things that are being announced here. There's been a lot of products announced. A lot of companies are doing a lot of things, which is kind of like a stark difference from last year where not a lot of companies did anything. So we've been quite busy here. Yeah, last year was really very business-y. It almost felt like MWC was kind of dying in terms of consumer interest. It was all behind the scenes deals and things that then panned out during the year, which is probably still going to happen, but it's going to happen maybe in the later part of the week. Whereas this week, we had Sony and Samsung come out with new flagship phones, something that didn't really happen last year. HTC also had an announcement and a big teaser toward its event a month from now. So it's a lot more exciting, I think. So okay, it seems like the biggest news of the show has to be Samsung, right? Even though Sony stuff I think looks pretty great, Samsung is the dominant Android player and they've got their new flagship phone, and it looks like a Band-Aid. Yeah, that gold color is not flattering. Setting aside that comparison, I think, I mean, honestly, it doesn't just look like a Band-Aid. It feels like one. Oh, really? Frankly, it's like you took the Galaxy S4 and you're like, we need to give people something new to buy, so we'll just do incremental changes, we'll do incremental upgrades. That might not be the most charitable assessment to give it because the camera promises to have been much improved. It now has face detect, as well as contrast detect autofocus, promises to have fast focus on any smartphone camera, 0.3 seconds. That could be a really big advantage over the long term, but honestly, for myself, I'm underwhelmed, they just made the screen a bit bigger, 5.1 inches. They gave it a new physical design, which is still very much Samsung-y insofar as it's glitzy and just unappealing. I mean, maybe my tastes are too macho, but the curves feel all wrong. Where the headphone jack is, it kind of seems like it's breaking the design or something. I don't know, and the colors, I mean, it just, Samsung said, and this is just so crazy to me, they did research and they said that the number one thing that people demand from their smartphone is, and I quote, a modern glam look. And I feel like they really matched that demand with what they've delivered. It sounds like a terrible idea and it looks like one. That's why assessment of it, to be honest. Yeah, I don't, like what does that mean, modern glam look? This does not say glam to me. This says iterative update on the GS4, which was itself an iterative update on the GS3, and that's not necessarily a bad thing, but I mean, just looking at this camera module on the back and this, whether it's stippled or whatever, it's just super. It's Nexus 7. Yeah. So the other thing that is super uninspiring to me is, I know they want to make it waterproof, and that's actually really great, we were all super impressed with the Galaxy S4 Active, but this thing, flap over the USB port, is kind of the worst. Yeah, don't they have the technology, I mean, we've been seeing it for years at trade shows, they have the technology to like dip phones in some coating that makes it waterproof without needing these stupid flaps, right? Yeah, they do. Go ahead, Dan. I was going to say there was actually a couple of companies here this year showing off even more ways that they can do that, the same idea, just like a different approach of dipping some other different chemical, and then they don't need to have the silly port connectors and things like that. You know, it's funny that there's a port connector or port cover on the USB port, but the headphone jack is fine, so obviously they figured out ways to waterproof those ports without requiring a flap, and we see Sony does the same thing with its waterproof Z1 and Z2, they have flap covers over the micro USB port, so it must be something to do with those connectors where it really has to be kept free of water for now. Yeah, the thing I was going to say is that there's also a distinction between being waterproof and water resistant, and the new Galaxy S5, it's only water resistant, it's IP67 rating, which if you care to go and read is slightly lower rating than the waterproof Xperia Z2 from Sony. And you know, I've already made the jokes, and I'm going to repeat it, but okay, I'm going to repeat it. Sony should market the Xperia Z2 by saying that whereas Samsung's new phone can just get wet, Sony's can take a whole dive, you know? Yeah, okay. Okay, you love that joke. I would like to point out that IP67, in fact they spelled it out on stage, IP stands for Ingress Protection, and when he said that I was thinking there was some sort of tie-in to Ingress, the game, and it took me like a good minute to realize that he was talking not about some sort of like, you know, I thought there was like some co-branding thing or co-marketing thing where, you know, the phone would come bundled with Ingress and there'd be some like natural protection for like the player if they were using a GS5, but then I later realized that it had absolutely nothing to do with that. Chris, you're the only person in the world that made that connection. No, but all they needed to say was IP67 because that's like an acronym we've heard before, but no, he's like Ingress Protection 67 on stage. Listen, they're bringing this information to the masses. Like they want people to know it's not just acronyms, it's real Ingress Protection. Yeah. So what was the vibe at their unpacked event? Because typically unpacked events are totally batshit insane, and this one was like, you know, the standard like Samsung gets up and lists off a bunch of features. Well except for the 15 minutes of random orchestra. I mean the orchestra was kind of like when people were walking in and filing to their seats the orchestra was playing and I think they were having some technical difficulties that pushed the actual event back a few minutes so they had the orchestra play on. And as far as a Samsung event, this was the straightest Samsung event I've ever attended. They just played it right down the middle as far as like showing their products, showing what their ideas behind these products were, what they do, what they're capable of and their mission with them or whatever. And they had people who represented the products talk on stage as opposed to having a Broadway show and an actor try to represent these things. So as press going to this event where you go and you want to be there to learn about the new products, this is kind of something that we've been asking Samsung to do for a while. You know, there was no misogyny, there was no dance. Wow, I totally failed. So one of the things I failed to mention at the top of the show is that these guys are actually at the press area in Barcelona at the conference center and so connectivity is as it tends to be at the mobile show, at the mobile conference, really bad. I think they're just messing with us. Yeah, I mean, we're messable. So the other thing about the GS5, I mean I know we're talking a lot about this but it's like the most important Android phone. We were, like there had been all these rumors about they're going to tone down the design and it just like, they didn't slather on a ton of features other than the health stuff which we should get to. But they did like basically keep the same Samsung experience. It's not wildly pained. It's totally the same. It's totally the same. Yeah, not just the same software but the same ID which we already talked about before, like with the exception of the back. But like if you look at the phone from the front versus the GS4 and like, if you look at them separately, not literally side by side, but if you saw a picture of GS4 then a picture of GS5 from the front, I think you'd be hard pressed to tell the difference. And it's like, it just feels like Samsung is in cruise control right now which I mean, this is the classic like complacent, like company that's like basically printing money and becoming complacent, you know. And this story has played out time and time and time again over the past 15 years in the mobile industry and Samsung kind of needs to like step up its game. If the GS6 comes out and it doesn't look significantly different, I'm going to be very, very upset. The thing I would say is that Apple has kind of set expectations with respect to that in so far as you can have one design and then you can pretty much reissue it the next year but you're only allowed two years. You can't do it a third time. Yeah, that's the thing is Samsung has – or sorry, Samsung. Apple has done more to update its iPhone design. It iterates more often than Samsung at this point which seems counterintuitive and crazy but that's totally what's happening. Right and the thing is Apple plays it a bit more strange by saying this is not the iPhone 6, it's the iPhone 5S. So it's pretty much like the old one, you just modified it a bit, we're not going to call it a 6. I think that's a bit more faithful, a bit more truthful to the consumer. But I mean, come on, you know how it is. Every year you have to reissue a new flagship phone whether you're ready to or not, whether the silicon is ready. One thing I would say, there's a Snapdragon 805 chip which is looking amazingly powerful as you've got to see it today. They're moving some equipment around next to me. But yeah, the Snapdragon 805 is a great chip but that's coming this summer whereas Samsung really needs to issue its new processor and its new device now so it can get the sales going. So the company is kind of forced into this corner essentially. I mean it's just the market dynamics. It's them, it's the carriers, everybody wants something new, people want something new. So then we kind of get these overly incremental upgrades. One thing I would say about that press event by the way, Dan says he's happy with it, I am not. I'm kind of disappointed that there wasn't a nice Michael Bay interview to tell us about the phone. Tell us about a 5 inch, 5.1 inch display Michael. So what you're saying is that you wanted a celebrity to just peace out. That's what you wanted. Pretty much. Okay. Okay, oh the heart rate monitor. You guys tried that, how does that thing work? It works as advertised believe it or not. It's able to grab your heart rate in like 5 to 10 seconds. I think it's kind of a clunky design because you have to hold your phone and wait for it. We're obviously going to talk about their wearables that they announced and I think that the implementation of the heart rate monitor in those is a much better system but if you don't want to buy a wearable, now your phone can read your heart rate if that's something you want to do. So is 5 seconds fast enough for a heart rate monitor or a heart rate reading? Like when would you be using this heart rate monitor? I would say probably in between sets if you're working out. That would be my guess. Even if you're getting freaked out that you're about to have a heart attack. That's true. Yeah, but it's not an EKG, it's just a heart rate monitor. So yeah, you can take isolated readings of your heart rate. Did they say anything about specifically what kind of athletics or activities you would use this in regard to S-Health? I don't know, I mean they had a bunch of things. No, they didn't really go into that. Oh Dan, Dan. Sorry, I think we're also kind of overlapping with the lag here. What I was going to say is they had things in the background basically. They had icons showing people running and cycling and all those things. And as Dan says, I really think it's something that you can, for example, measure your resting heart rate and then go and do a particular exercise and then come back, measure your heart rate again and then judge how intensive that is and whether it's a good idea. Maybe you can provide that information to your doctor and I don't know, your trainer, whatever people do. It's an extra piece of information and tracking, but to Dan's point, I really think that these heart rate monitors make a ton more sense in the new world to get to that fit and do on the phone itself. Right. So actually let's talk about these. So let's talk about the boring ones first and then move into the awesome ones. So there's the Gear Fit and the Gear Neo, right? And the Gear 2 and the Gear Neo seem like basic iterations. So what's the difference between these two? Well the difference between the Gear 2 and the Gear Neo is that the latter doesn't have the camera. Which is awesome because the camera is a silly feature. The Neo also looks cheaper. It doesn't have the metal finish on the top like the Gear 2 does. I do want to argue in favor of the camera because that was basically the sole thing that I actually liked about the original Galaxy Gear. It's a quirky little thing that you can just take the quickest of snapshots with and it really doesn't get in the way. You don't have to pour anything out and unlike Google Glass, you don't have to have something stuck on top of your head. But yeah, I mean I look at the Gear 2 both devices and I just frunk. And like the Galaxy Gear wasn't a terribly good idea. This is not either. They fixed the software like with minimal effort. They basically just added the ability, they added a home button so that you wouldn't have to like remember one of the stuff. Which to me just basically tells you that this is just frunk. It's bad. The display, I have a very important question. Is the display always on on the Gear 2? No. If it were, it would have no battery left. My god. And these are running Tizen, right? That's correct. So yeah, the biggest change is… So do you see any notable difference with these things running Tizen? Do they seem faster? Do the software seem exactly the same? The software experience is exactly the same. They do feel snappier and more responsive but that also could be because Samsung probably upgraded the internal hardware. The big difference here is that Samsung claims you can get two to three days of battery life with this as opposed to the one day that you got with the Galaxy Gear. Whether that's attributed to more efficient chips or Tizen being more efficient, we don't really know. But you know, it is definitely a welcome improvement. I mean you do not need… Let's put it this way. If your smartwatch requires a dual core 1 GHz processor, you're doing something fundamentally wrong in the design of your smartwatch. No smartwatch should have functionality that requires that kind of horsepower. It's just like… It's so Samsung. This entire product is so Samsung. I'm glad they refined this and took out some of the major pain points from the original Gear. I thought that they were almost apologetic on stage about the original Gear when they were announcing the Gear 2. But that being said… Oh yeah, they absolutely should be. Yeah, but that being said, this is not… I mean I think we can all agree this is not the Gear to get excited about, right? Absolutely. And also Chris, just to mention on the positive side of the equation with the Gear 2, they now have interchangeable straps which again is a step forward for Samsung. But the earlier point, and it's a very important one that DISA makes, they put a home button on it. That just tells you everything you need to know. You're taking an interface that requires a home button, an interface that is usually fit on 4 to 5 inch devices and you're shrinking it down to the wrist. And it's just wrong. You need something that is specific to its physical dimensions. You need something that if it needs a button, it shouldn't be a home button at the bottom of it. Well, that's the same complaint as the Sony smartwatch 2, right? Absolutely. That it has basically the standard Android buttons below the display on the front which is insane. And the thing is you operate these things with either your forefinger or your thumb and they don't ring. So the Android buttons stay the same size in order for your thumb to be able to touch them properly, but then they occupy so much more space on something that fits on your wrist, something that is essentially supposed to be a watch. Right. Let's talk about the gear that's awesome, which is GearFit and it looks like pretty freaking good. Like it's maybe a little bit bigger than I might want a fitness band to be, but if they would just put the functionality of a smartwatch, just put notifications on this thing and have it be a health monitor, I would buy the hell out of it. Well I'd also want them to have it work with non-Samsung devices, but this thing looks great. I was going to say, Dieter, it actually does do notifications. You can get your calls and your messages and your emails on there, but it only works with Samsung devices. And like you said, I would buy one of these, but I don't really want to buy a Galaxy S5 or whatever. Yeah. Wasn't one of their initial slides, didn't that include openness and cooperation with an industry? Weren't those the words that they used? Yeah, they said that the Gear was an open platform or something like that and it's kind of silly when it only works with Samsung devices. So it's an open platform for people to bring their apps to, but you can't take it to other platforms. Apparently that's what they mean. Not only does it only work with Samsung devices, by the way I apologize, the light in this room timed out and there's nothing I can do about it. Not only does it only work with Samsung devices, but only specific Samsung devices because we saw over the course of the original Galaxy Gear's very short lifespan, they slowly rolled out compatibility to additional Samsung phone models. It wasn't like on day one it would work with any Samsung you own. It originally only worked on the Gear, I mean the Note 3 I think, and then they rolled it out to the S4 and the GS3. So it looks sweet though. It looks really cool. Well, not only does it look sweet. I mean Vlad wrote a really great report about it and like the thing that we were talking about before and I'm going to steal his thunder and then I'll let him yell at me for it, is this is Samsung when it's at its best. Yes, it's iterative. Yes, they're using technology they've got off the shelf. Yes, they're stealing ideas from other companies, but every now and then they do all those things but they are able to turn something around really fast that's remarkably compelling. And sometimes Samsung Samsung's it up and we get the Gear and sometimes Samsung Samsung's it up and they do something that's like whoa hey, this is really nice. Yes, it's been a long time since we've actually had that latter experience. But what you said Samsung took Samsung's technology off the shelf, they took that technology off the Samsung shelf. We mock Samsung energy to the high heavens about those curved displays on smartphones and we're still right, we don't think we're wrong because they don't make that much sense in a smartphone. But putting that curved display on something that is supposed to wrap around your wrist and actually requires a curve makes perfect sense. And the thing that I would say with the Gear Fit is that it's just instantly recognizable. To me it's the exact opposite of the GS5. I'm seeing people with the GS4 all around the MWC show floor and I'm thinking do these guys have a GS5 already? You just can't tell the difference. Whereas with the Gear Fit because it's super artistic Hit us with the details. There's the Z2, which is the new flagship, and then the Z2 tablet, which is like, look at us, we made a thin tablet. Yeah, the Z2 is really nice. Oh, come on. Yeah, the Z2 seems appealing. You have to give the Z2 tablet a bit more credit, yes. As big a selling point as it's selling is, but I mean, in terms of technological feats and engineering feats, I think Sony is really stepping back into its own habits of just being way out ahead of everybody else. The feeling I get with other phone manufacturers is that they're meeting engineering limits before, or lower engineering limits than Sony is. Sony can push things so much harder and to such greater extremes than everybody else. I mean, the Z2 tablet, you have to hold it in your hands. It's extremely, extremely thin, and it keeps the same 6,000 mAh battery as tablet Z, that it succeeds. It's waterproof. And it has this new display, which really is the big highlight for Sony this year of the Z2 tablet. They have these light-colored LED displays. And I've been complaining about Sony displays in this flagship phone for years now. And they finally fixed it. And they fixed it in such great fashion. I mean, this is basically what this is. Hey, Vlad. They really are as good. Vlad, I just have a question for you. And you and I talked about this a little bit on Verge Live on Monday. But why is it, do you think, that Sony has not been able to make inroads and become a Samsung-level competitor on Android yet? Because by all appearances, they are making phones that are as good as any phones in the industry right now. Yeah, that is very much the case. But I would say right now, they just fixed their display. The phone that has their awesome, amazing display isn't on sale yet. It just got announced. So we basically need to give them some time. I've been saying this for all that time. The display is probably the most fundamental spec that you can have with your device. It's your input. Your output device is the first and last thing you see and you use. So if that stinks, if the person doesn't enjoy it, they don't enjoy the entire user experience. So I feel like I've built up a prejudice against Sony's Android screens just because their display isn't bad. So Vlad, talk to me about the specifics of this device a little bit. I know on the Tablet Z, they kind of used a material that was similar to the Xperia Z, and it was like a polycarbonate kind of material. What is the outside perimeter material on the Z2 Tablet? Is it aluminum like the Z1 and the Z2? That's correct. The smartphone has an aluminum frame around the outside and has glass in the front and in the back. And the tablet, it has a soft touch back, which is just, I can't really prove on that. I can't think of a way to improve it. It feels so good. It's probably a good reason to use an Android tablet. The Z2 tablet would be the one. So on the Z2, on the iPhone. Hang on. You've got to come up with a reason to use an Android tablet, especially at this size. These bezels are pretty big. I'm using a Nexus 7 as my primary tablet right now. And I've got to say, Android tablets, you look great. I don't know. I think Sony's actually doing a super interesting thing with their Tablet Zone right now, because the Tablet Z last year's model is actually super affordable. Compared to the iPad, you can get a Snapdragon. I think it's the 800 and the Z. Sony's making a great tablet here. This Z2 tablet looks great. It looks really good. They're selling a 16 gigabyte model. The hardware doesn't matter, because there's no support from the ecosystem for Android at this size. That's the problem. That's the only ecosystem that Sony has available to them. Yeah. Well, I mean, yeah. But it's like, sorry for your luck, guys. You're making great stuff that nobody should buy right now. Is this true, sadly? That is true. So what's way more interesting to me is the Z2 phone. I think the Z2 phone looks awesome. I agree. Yeah, tell me about it. Well, what's there to tell? Aside from the display, it really is more or less the Z1. It keeps the exact same footprint, but grows to 5.2 inches, which means that much of an upgrade. It has a Snapdragon 80201, which is a very incremental upgrade on the 800. It's basically the same chip, which is no bad thing because it's a very good chip. Camera is basically left the same. And that has 4K video recording. But again, it's one of those upgrades where it's like, I don't have anything that plays back 4K. Not even the phone plays back 4K. So I don't really care about the damn video being at that resolution. And it really is all about that display because it is very nice. It's great color fidelity, beautiful viewing angles. I mean, they claim it has the widest color count of any mobile device, which is something that you probably need to measure. I just think it's one of the better ones in the market right now, which is as much as someone needs to do. I mean, it's still got the glass back. That's fine. I mean, not hearing that the camera's been improved much is a little bit disappointing to me. But I got to say, looking at this, comparing it to the Nexus 7 that I'm using now, and even the HTC One, which is generally regarded as one of the better designed or best designed Android phones, this seems really nice. And as long as they haven't screwed the software up too much, and it sounds like they've continued their trend of doing what they're doing with software with the Z1, which is not being totally overbearing with it, this is an interesting phone to me. This is the kind of phone that, if this doesn't have any success, then I feel like there's something fundamentally wrong with the Android ecosystem, that Sony can make a phone this good and nobody cares. Yeah, but the same could be said about the HTC One. Yeah, but I mean, you can always talk up HTC to just having any marketing money and just being that. Sony does not spend some marketing money in the US. Right, well that's the other thing. I mean, hopefully they can get some success with this in some other markets. I think it's great. I will say that Sony is one of the few mobile phone makers whose mobile phone division is making a profit. But yeah, they do have trouble breaking into the US. They bring their devices to the US far later than anywhere else in the world. And they're only on one carrier so far. So it's really hard for them to really make a dent in the US market with these devices, even if they are really excellent and attractive devices. And also, let's not overestimate the difficulties that HTC has had. The company just announced this week that the HTC One and the One family have been its most successful phones in terms of sales, most successful smartphones. So they have been doing OK in terms of sales. It's just they haven't had a portfolio around the One. They've had one flagship phone. And when people can't afford to buy the flagship phone, HTC just hasn't really had the compelling lower price point device to point them to. Then they end up in some garbage from Samsung. Well, what about the One Mini? It's not a One Mini. That's exactly the problem. It's a One minus a couple of its most fundamental advantages. If they called it the One minus, that would be like a really good thing for the product. Frankly, they shouldn't have done it. They should have done a better phone. Yeah. No, I totally agree. The other insane thing that happened at Mobile World Congress is Nokia has announced Android phones. So that's the Nokia X, the XL, and the X Plus. So I mean, how are they? Are they fast? Are they any good? Is it terrible? Is it awesome? Tell me about these phones. So I got to play with all three of them. And I guess the X and the X Plus are pretty much the same thing. The X Plus just has a dual SIM. And I keep coming back to the point where Nokia has a Windows phone already at this price point that offers a better user experience than the Nokia X. The X is running a forged version of Android that's based on Android 4.1. So it's like two years old. It's really dated software. And the performance is very apparent that this is the older version of Android when you're jumping into third party apps and you're trying to bounce around between your apps and things like that. There's a lot of lag. It's pretty sluggish. It's just not a really pleasant user experience. People with a very good experience they are mimicking the home screen interface of their Lumia phones. But they kind of missed, like it looks like the home screen of the Lumia phone. But it loses all of the animations and all the other beauty parts of Windows phone. So it's just like very surface level similarities. And the main navigation is pretty fast as far as swiping up and down the home screen. But once you're in apps, things get pretty dicey. And then it's hard to say that this is going to be Nokia's savior. They're really using this as like a Trojan horse to get people onto Microsoft's cloud services. But I'm not sure I fully buy that approach. I think it'll get people used to using Android apps instead of using Microsoft services. I think the biggest thing here is, at least the vibe that we get, is that essentially it's a Windows phone with a shortcut into running Android apps. That's what's happening here. It isn't really an Android phone because it doesn't have any of the Android applications. It tries to replace them with Nokia Microsoft alternatives. And it's like, we have Windows phone. We can't get traction with it. We also can't get it cheap enough. So we're going to run the cheaper platform that has a much wider app ecosystem. I disagree. I don't buy that they can't get it cheap enough. And unlocked Lumia 520 is $69 in the US. Yes, that's the thing. This is going to be launching for 89 euro. That's considerably more expensive than a 520 is right now. And this thing looks like Windows phone, but it does not perform like Windows phone. It's not a Windows phone experience. So it's very surface level. Nokia said numerous times that they plan to keep pushing this price lower, but they're already lower with Lumia. I don't get it. Am I the only one who thinks this looks like an unholy monster? Like this has none of the advantages of Windows phone and all the disadvantages and ugliness of a basically web-aware rectangle UI. Yeah, that's the first. This is the worst of both worlds. There's just a lot of confusing things with the UI. When you install a new app, there's no app tray or app list. It just gets thrown down at the bottom of your home screen. And so you can put it in folders and stuff like that, but there's really no great organization there. It's got this second home screen called Fastlane, which Nokia is kind of like combining your most recent apps and notifications into one feed, which they say is very popular on their Asha phones, but I'm not sure it really translates that well on Android. And then Nokia is always known for putting great cameras in their devices, and these particular ones have fixed focus three megapixel cameras that are terrible. So it's like there's no advantage to it. The only advantage that a user has when they buy this is the fact that it has a Nokia name. You're not getting Nokia's great design. You're not getting Nokia's great camera technology. You're not getting Nokia's great software. You're getting scraps. This doesn't even seem like a good, this is like the saddest vendor lock-in ever. Like for Google, it makes sense that they are pushing devices that really bring people into their service ecosystem because their lock-in is so great. But this is like, oh, well, introduce people to Microsoft services, but you'll still be running Android apps. But Microsoft doesn't make a huge amount of money from these services. I don't think Google had anything to do with this, or any participation, or anybody called Google and asked would you buy it if we did a really garbage Nokia with Microsoft services running on top of Android. But I think the biggest issue here is also from Microsoft's perspective, it's just kind of a head scratcher. I see why Microsoft's acquired Nokia. There's a lot of good reasons to think if Nokia was going to pursue this plan anyway, Microsoft wouldn't have liked to have its main Windows Phone manufacturer split its focus between Windows Phone and Android. That would not have been a good idea. But once Microsoft agreed to acquire Nokia, and I know that deal hasn't closed yet, it really should have put a stop to this. Because what does it say to Windows Phone developers? Like do we carry on making Windows Phone apps, or do we switch to Android knowing that Microsoft is going to support Android apps now? It's a really confusing situation for them, isn't it? Yeah, no, it's totally confusing. And I mean, honestly to me, it just seems like what Nokia has decided is they don't believe that they're going to get the apps that they think that people want at the low end any time soon. And so they just said, look, we're going to do Android on the low end because we want people to be able to sideload those apps on there. Like the UI is whatever. It's not great. I can't decide if I think it's patronizing. There's the simplification of just having a single home screen, but then there's the fast lane, which seems a little complicated. Whatever. It's like, fine. It's not that interesting to me. What's interesting to me is that Nokia, somebody inside Nokia, felt that in order to do what they were trying, in order to achieve what they're trying to achieve in the emerging markets that they're trying to tackle, that Windows Phone wasn't going to get there. And if we're right that it's not really about price, it's not really about driving down the price of Windows Phone, driving Windows Phone down to work on lower and lower hardware because the 520 seems to prove that they're relatively close and they could get closer. If it's not about the hardware and it's not about price, it's got to be about software. It's got to be that inside Nokia, they had a fundamental belief that they weren't going to get what they needed to get in terms of app support in order to drive it in emerging markets. It's got to be the only answer that makes sense to them. I've said this before, but it really feels like to me that Nokia had a group within that was working on this for a long time. And it was very apparent that they were working on it for a long time. It's based on Android 4.1, which is a two-year-old version of the operating system. And they were just like, this Microsoft deal is closing soon. We are pushing this to market. We've been working on it for so long. We're not having this scrapped. And so there's that part of it. The other part, I think, is that, like you said, Peter, that it's a tacit admission that Windows Phone does not have the apps that people are looking for and that people buy phones because of the apps. You buy a smartphone because of the apps that it can use. And that's why Nokia initially explored this Android project for however long ago when they started developing on it. I think most people disagree with me on this. But I think there's a very real possibility that Microsoft will kin this. And it will disappear within 30 days of the closure of the acquisition. So I would say that I would believe you more if Nokia had announced one phone. But they announced three. And they announced a line of them. And they announced a Nokia Store that they need to maintain and all these other things that are pretty entrenched ideas, I guess, and entrenched services that they need to offer with these phones. But Ken was two devices and an entire cloud network devoted to them. I mean, that's fair. But there was also two devices sold on one carrier that literally nobody bought. Yeah. Right. Well, on the other hand, Nokia didn't exactly spend even five minutes on naming these devices. They just borrowed agency's naming scheme from like two years ago. Well, let's put it this way. I think that if you want a collector's item, you should strongly consider picking up a Nokia X. Because I can't see Microsoft continuing to put R&D dollars into developing Android devices. So even if these last, say, a full year on the marketplace, I don't think they're going to get successors. That would be my guess. But you know what else? This basically disproves Bill Gates. Because he said the world is getting better all the time. Whereas two or three years ago, the collector's device from Nokia was the N9, which to this day is one of the prettiest and nicest devices, even though it's kind of left. But these are no N9s. That's for sure. These are no N9s. That's my point, Dan. That's my point. The collector's device is getting worse. It's not getting better. So the other thing I really, really need to hear about, because you guys have held it and I have not, is Project Tango, which is Google's I can see the whole room and space thing out spatially. Right on the phone, better than a connector. Like a connector. I don't know. It seems insane. So tell me about this thing. So I remember talking to you guys a week ago or so when Google announced it. And I was pretty mad on the whole announcement. I was like, oh, so they're announcing another phone to give us augmented reality games. But then I got to see the thing in person. And it is pretty wild what it can do. It's got these multiple cameras and sensors on it that capture a far greater amount of data. It can measure distance. It can measure spatial awareness and things like that. And then it's got a custom processor inside that can crunch all of that data, feed it into an API, and spit it out to an app. So it can do things like you can hold up the phone, and then it can just literally start to build a 3D model of the room as you move the phone around the room in real time. And so you move the phone around, and you can see the object in front of you get built in a 3D model on the screen. And so this technology has actually been around for a long time. The founders of the company, Movidius, that developed this particular device compared it to what the Mars Rover does when it was on the surface of Mars mapping things out. But they've now shrunk it down into a thing that can fit in the palm of your hand and run on a smartphone battery. It's pretty wild. It's quite a trip to use. Did it work? Yeah, it worked. I mean, it worked. Like they built this thing. It's a developer's device that Google's going to give out to developers to build apps to actually make use of all this data. But they had a couple of demonstration apps to show the capabilities of it. So this one that is playing on the video right now is a distance heat map. So items that are further away are a darker blue. Items that are closer to you are orange. And as you move things, it adjusts as you move the phone around. So everything pretty much worked as they said it would. It was able to build a 3D model of the table in front of me right before my eyes and things like that. It was quite impressive. I came away far more impressed with it after seeing it in person than I was a week ago when I had just seen that Google announced it. So OK, I mean, obviously the hardware is super janky. But that's like because it's a developer device and they're only making 200 of them. Did they talk about whether or not this was going to turn into like, do they have plans to do production? Or is this just a crazy wild experiment? What the hell? So they were really cagey about that. I think they were really, we were talking to Movidius. We were not talking to Google's side of things. So I think Movidius was very concerned about spilling Google's plans and things like that. But the CEO did hint to me that this could be in consumer products in the very near future. But he wouldn't say how much it costs to build these developer devices or an exact time when it will be in a smartphone on a shelf in a store. Assuming you need to pay more for this thing, what app would make me be like, you know what? I want to spend an extra $50 to get the Super Tango Power from, like I think, what the killer app is. I mean, I think we need to wait and see what the killer app will be. That's why these developers are going to get it. Some sample applications are very obvious things, building a 3D model of a room or a set very quickly and easily. But they also say that they could put this in like a neck-worn wearable device and use it as something to assist the visually impaired, since it can detect how far away things are. If an obstacle is in someone's path, it can give them an alert or an audio clue. And then there's the visual effects industry that could use this to build 3D models for movies and things like that. I don't think it's an application that everybody would make use of. But there are definitely things where this could be a useful device. So Dan, let me ask you this. It kind of seems like the fact that this technology is bundled into a smartphone is actually not the most important part, just that they can get it down to the size. They have it in a smartphone for convenience's sake. It's a mobile computing platform, essentially. And if they're going to do that, why not just make it a phone? But were they also talking about having this in a slew of devices that weren't quite as computationally powerful as smartphones? I mean, that's a fair assessment. I mean, the key development that they wanted to stress was the fact that they have this processor that they developed that can take all of this data and analyze it and crunch it and manage it. And they've made this processor small enough and power efficient enough that it can run in a smartphone form factor. So they're using the smartphone as a vehicle to show it off. But there's no reason that it couldn't also be applied in other small-sized things, like a GoPro camera with this type of technology or something like that. Right. Not only could you have it in a GoPro, you could have it in something like Google Glass. And I'm sure Google is very interested in that for indoor mapping, like they said in their announcement video. But it seems like this is something that could possibly go into all sorts of different products. But it is interesting to see it in phone form factor. Yeah, I don't see why they couldn't apply it to a variety of different form factors. I just wonder if that was what they were most vocal about at MVC. They were really kind of cagey as to what future plans would be, to be honest with you. It's not really, they didn't make it seem like it was limited to just smartphones. What else is going on out there, guys? What else did you see? I don't know what else we saw that we could talk about. We saw a lot of things. It's not Firefox. We should talk about the new Firefox OS. So they updated Firefox. They showed us version 1.3, which is the latest version. It's on a couple of devices that will be hitting market in a month or whatever. And it's a faster, much more refined interface than the Firefox we saw a year ago. It really felt like this was the latest version. It really felt like this was Firefox growing up quite a bit in the past year. It's still definitely very low end. And definitely, a device like the Moto G with Android 4.4 runs circles around it. But it's a lot better than it used to be. And you can have devices with higher resolution displays and faster processors and things like that that make it an actually usable smartphone. I remember last year when we first saw the first Firefox phones, you would open up the dialer, and then you'd wait, and then you'd push a button, and then you'd wait for it to receive the button command. And then it was like when basic things like the dialer were virtually unusable, it was like a non-starter. But they've addressed those. The performance for those basic core features is a lot better. But it's hard to see this really competing well against the cheap Android phones that are really flooding the market. But the cheap Android phones, let's be super clear. Are not good. I guess they're better. The Moto G is an excellent phone. The Moto G is the counter to your argument there. But the Moto G unsubsidized is what? $100 and what? $180. $199. Yeah, and I mean, Firefox is going to move a lot lower than that. Yeah, but there's no reason that the Moto G is just like the first of a really good low end phone. I have a feeling that Motorola has said that it plans to go even cheaper and still maintain the quality. So I don't think Firefox has a long time to hold that slot without being really challenged. Yeah. And I also feel like to Dan's point, Android phones are likely to trickle down to lower price points quicker than Firefox OS is going to be able to really build out any sort of app ecosystem and really get itself to the sort of responsiveness that can hope to match devices like the Moto G. Just this week, it was revealed from Motorola that the Moto G apparently is one of his best selling phones and that the company is making a profit, whatever you say. So it's not a lost lead. I know Motorola itself has been losing money, but the Moto G hasn't. Right. Yeah, I mean, Mozilla's ultimate goal here is a $30 phone, which is pretty remarkable when you consider that Nokia on stage this week, like their first announcement before they got into Nokia X was the 220, which is a 29 euro phone that has a keypad, a tiny color display, and like its headline features that it can get on the internet. So the fact that Firefox wants to actually produce a true touchscreen smartphone for $30 is pretty remarkable. And that's not to say that you're going to get a headline experience on that device. I would say you have to put a heavy quotation marks around smartphone. Very heavy. I mean, they're so heavy, they might even crush it. Like what is, aside from price, what is Mozilla's competitive advantage in the market right now? There isn't one. Well, no, I'll tell you what it is. It's the fact that they cater to the needs of carriers. So you're seeing where you're seeing a lot of wins for Mozilla, and I think where you're going to continue to see the most wins, is in carriers that operate in emerging markets, and maybe European countries where ARPU is a little lower. I think, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that Poland was one of the first countries where they released a device last year on Vodafone, I believe. So my guess is that, and these are countries where, and these are carriers, where they're really keen on branding the experience top to bottom. So it basically looks like a Vodafone phone. I don't know if you guys remember, but a few years ago, Vodafone released basically its own operating system that lasted about a month. But that really is the new feature phone. Yeah, but it's, well, yes and no. But it's worse than feature phones. This is the problem with it. It's worse than feature phones. I actually got to try out the $25 proof of concept, and it really proves nothing at all. I mean, to Dan's point, the new phones are so much more mature than last year and so much more usable than last year with Firefox OS. But here's the other thing that I can tell you, and it's the thing that gives me no hope for this OS. Nobody at Firefox's presentation, nobody at Firefox's booth here at MWC, is using a Firefox OS phone. So if it's not good enough for the people who are making it and for making the software to use on a regular basis, it's just not going to happen. Because you need those people to essentially be testing it for you. You can't just flood markets that can't afford the higher-end smartphones and hope that that will somehow give you success. I take Chris's point about being friendly to carriers, but I just don't think that the user is going to be. I'm not sure that Firefox OS has anything to offer consumers. I would love to be part of it, but I don't think it is. No, but here's the thing. This $25 smartphone that I have at that booth today has a garbage display, and it has amazing lag. Like, it's almost like an anchorman where his dog ate the whole wheel of change. You can't even get mad at the lag because it's so pervasive. So yeah. You just feel bad for the phone. Yeah, so I would take those $25. I would add $5 extra somehow, and I would get the cheap Nokia. Because that would at least get me an internet. But to be super clear, the Nokia you're referring to, the 220, is just a candy bar. Like a candy bar straight out of 2005. The 220 looks great, though. You're smoking, I don't know what you're smoking. You're smoking some powerful narcotic. Well, here's the thing. If you want a disposable phone, for example, and you only have $30, you get the Nokia. Because that thing will get things done for you. If you will be frustrated to the high heavens, you pay the $25 and you get a Firefox device phone. And you get nothing done. Like honestly, if you have $25 and you can't afford to spend more, then I don't know. Save your money and start sending telegrams. Didn't the last telegram network in the world just shut down last year, if I'm not mistaken? It was in India, I think. Yes, but yesterday we covered Telegram, the new security-focused mobile messaging app. That's true. That's a very clever transition. No, it's completely unrelated. Also, hold on. Side note, I need to loop back to this. Chris, it is in fact you who is on drugs. Because the 220 is a beautiful candy bar phone, and these Firefox phones look like garbage. Cool story, bro. Yep, well, that's where I stand on it. Yeah, so HTC had some random announcements, like you're going to be able to share your processor power from your phone, which, cool story, guys. No, it's good. Oh, come on. It is good. I mean, I have been one of the big fanboys of the screen computing ever since study at home, and all those ones were a big deal on PC. And I think Samsung. So what kind of work are they doing? Well, it depends. I think you can pick your own project. But they're basically doing scientific research, and they're using power cycles from your phone to contribute to that. It's like folding at home. That was on the key. Whatever. And it doesn't affect battery life or consume cellular data? It only works when you're connected to Wi-Fi and plugged into the wall, I believe. So I don't know. Maybe this is too nerdy, but one of the big things, one of the most important factors of distributed computing is floating-point performance, and our processors are really bad at that. So I would love to know what kinds of projects are available for you to choose. It's because the performance for watt seems bad. It's worth noting that Samsung is doing the exact same thing. They launched an alarm clock app a week or two ago that does the exact same concept. So there are obviously applications for it. I don't know how much or what specifically they are, but both companies are pursuing almost the same exact idea. OK. It seems like horse swallow. It's just total bull crap. Did you say horse swallow? Is it a cod or a horse? Then he escalated it to bull crap. Let's just remind everybody that Evan is from Kentucky. I thought it was cod swallow, but I didn't know that horses had swallows. What is a swallow? I don't know. I love your sense of public responsibility and communal cooperation, guys. We get to talk about a bit of distributed computing and contributing to good causes and discoveries and whatnot. That's great. No, sure, that's fine. I want everybody to do distributed computing really well and accomplish the goals and do the research. But the thing is, if this is a PR stunt, because you get to feel good about doing something with your phone, that's great. But if it's just wasting electricity and wearing out your parts and it isn't actually very effective. No, Evan, you're totally right. It is wasting electricity. Because all the other battery power that you use on things like Flappy Bird and whatever, that's productive. Well, at least that's entertaining. No, that's providing you utility in the means that you want it to do. But this is, I'll wait to see which projects are on. Vlad, every time I break 30,000 in threes on the iPhone, another angel gets its wings. And I have given wings to at least six angels. Humble brag. That wasn't even a humble brag. That was just a brag. It was just a straight up brag. Regular brag. I'm not ashamed of that straight up brag at all. That is the definition of holier than thou. I used to be a big contributor to distributed.net in the search for prime numbers back in the day. And actually, my roommate covertly installed SETI at home on countless workstations at the University of Michigan and was eventually caught and got into some amount of trouble for it. So I understand the appeal of contributing to distributed computing efforts. But I don't know, I think that this is indicative of two troubling trends. One is the trend that maybe we've topped out, at least in the short term, we've topped out the need for additional processor power in phones. Because you look at, I mean, never mind the GS5. You look at the GS4 or the HTC One from last year, they're perfectly fine and fast. And there are no new capabilities coming to Android short of something like Project Tango that would require a C change in the amount of processing power that's available to you. So now you're just sitting on this massive excess of gigaflops that you might as well contribute to a distributed computing effort. That's problem one. Then problem two, of course, like Evan says, I mean, the additional power consumption is a very real phenomenon. Like my power bill went up when I had distributed.net running on my desktop PC. Like there was a measurable impact in my bill. So if this becomes a big thing, that's going to be something to consider. OK. Yeah, I agree. That's the worst transition ever. Is there anything else that you guys want to chat about? I mean, the new HTC One leaked. It looks like we thought it would look. It's got an extra camera sensor on it. It comes in several colors and seems, I don't know. It looks like a slightly more rounded one. Yeah. It does look slightly more rounded. I'm excited. I don't think I would say. Sorry, the only thing I would say about the HTC One is that it looks a little bit more forgivable in light of the Galaxy S5. True. Yeah. Good point. Well. I don't know. Like I really hope that the new one has a regular, really great camera. Like if the main camera is subpar and they try and kind of like mask that with whatever could possibly be going on with the second camera, I'm going to be so dissatisfied personally. I can't even. Evan, that's what the Sony QX100 is for, bro. Oh my god. That is the sardine pan that I just opened. Well, ladies and gentlemen, I'm calling it. That is the Virtual Show Barcelona edition 2014. I want to thank Vlad and Dan especially for joining us from the show floor in Barcelona. Pretty awesome. You can follow them on Twitter as DCCpert and VladSapov. You can also follow the rest of us. I am Backlon. Chris is ZPower. Evan is Evan Rogers with a D. Although I'm sure the guy without the G is also nice. But you should follow Evan because he's awesome. We are all at Verge. You can leave a comment on this very post when, well, you can do it right now. You can do whatever you want. You can also talk to us in the forums. And we will be back soon, probably next week. And until then, we're going to miss you dearly.
 Greetings, mobile accomplishers.
 Welcome to The Verge Mobile Show.
 This is a special edition.
 It's a day late because Mobile World Congress is crazy, the big giant phone show in Barcelona.
 We are joined by our reporters in Barcelona, also hosts of The Verge Mobile Show, Dan and
 Vlad.
 Chris is here as well, and we even have the inestimable Evan Rogers, aka Kwisatz Hoderak.
 How are you doing guys?
 That's not a word.
 Kwisatz Hoderak.
 Hello.
 It's a good dune joke.
 I didn't let everybody say, hey, I'm so and so and so and so.
 I said everybody's name.
 But that's because it's a crazy wild show.
 We do things differently the second day.
 So how is Barcelona, guys?
 How is the show going for you?
 It's actually been pretty good.
 It's been a surprisingly happening show for things that are being announced here.
 There's been a lot of products announced.
 A lot of companies are doing a lot of things, which is kind of like a stark difference from
 last year where not a lot of companies did anything.
 So we've been quite busy here.
 Yeah, last year was really very business-y.
 It almost felt like MWC was kind of dying in terms of consumer interest.
 It was all behind the scenes deals and things that then panned out during the year, which
 is probably still going to happen, but it's going to happen maybe in the later part of
 the week.
 Whereas this week, we had Sony and Samsung come out with new flagship phones, something
 that didn't really happen last year.
 HTC also had an announcement and a big teaser toward its event a month from now.
 So it's a lot more exciting, I think.
 So okay, it seems like the biggest news of the show has to be Samsung, right?
 Even though Sony stuff I think looks pretty great, Samsung is the dominant Android player
 and they've got their new flagship phone, and it looks like a Band-Aid.
 Yeah, that gold color is not flattering.
 Setting aside that comparison, I think, I mean, honestly, it doesn't just look like
 a Band-Aid.
 It feels like one.
 Oh, really?
 Frankly, it's like you took the Galaxy S4 and you're like, we need to give people something
 new to buy, so we'll just do incremental changes, we'll do incremental upgrades.
 That might not be the most charitable assessment to give it because the camera promises to
 have been much improved.
 It now has face detect, as well as contrast detect autofocus, promises to have fast focus
 on any smartphone camera, 0.3 seconds.
 That could be a really big advantage over the long term, but honestly, for myself, I'm
 underwhelmed, they just made the screen a bit bigger, 5.1 inches.
 They gave it a new physical design, which is still very much Samsung-y insofar as it's
 glitzy and just unappealing.
 I mean, maybe my tastes are too macho, but the curves feel all wrong.
 Where the headphone jack is, it kind of seems like it's breaking the design or something.
 I don't know, and the colors, I mean, it just, Samsung said, and this is just so crazy
 to me, they did research and they said that the number one thing that people demand from
 their smartphone is, and I quote, a modern glam look.
 And I feel like they really matched that demand with what they've delivered.
 It sounds like a terrible idea and it looks like one.
 That's why assessment of it, to be honest.
 Yeah, I don't, like what does that mean, modern glam look?
 This does not say glam to me.
 This says iterative update on the GS4, which was itself an iterative update on the GS3,
 and that's not necessarily a bad thing, but I mean, just looking at this camera module
 on the back and this, whether it's stippled or whatever, it's just super.
 It's Nexus 7.
 Yeah.
 So the other thing that is super uninspiring to me is, I know they want to make it waterproof,
 and that's actually really great, we were all super impressed with the Galaxy S4 Active,
 but this thing, flap over the USB port, is kind of the worst.
 Yeah, don't they have the technology, I mean, we've been seeing it for years at trade
 shows, they have the technology to like dip phones in some coating that makes it waterproof
 without needing these stupid flaps, right?
 Yeah, they do.
 Go ahead, Dan.
 I was going to say there was actually a couple of companies here this year showing off even
 more ways that they can do that, the same idea, just like a different approach of dipping
 some other different chemical, and then they don't need to have the silly port connectors
 and things like that.
 You know, it's funny that there's a port connector or port cover on the USB port, but
 the headphone jack is fine, so obviously they figured out ways to waterproof those ports
 without requiring a flap, and we see Sony does the same thing with its waterproof Z1
 and Z2, they have flap covers over the micro USB port, so it must be something to do with
 those connectors where it really has to be kept free of water for now.
 Yeah, the thing I was going to say is that there's also a distinction between being waterproof
 and water resistant, and the new Galaxy S5, it's only water resistant, it's IP67 rating,
 which if you care to go and read is slightly lower rating than the waterproof Xperia Z2
 from Sony.
 And you know, I've already made the jokes, and I'm going to repeat it, but okay, I'm
 going to repeat it.
 Sony should market the Xperia Z2 by saying that whereas Samsung's new phone can just
 get wet, Sony's can take a whole dive, you know?
 Yeah, okay.
 Okay, you love that joke.
 I would like to point out that IP67, in fact they spelled it out on stage, IP stands for
 Ingress Protection, and when he said that I was thinking there was some sort of tie-in
 to Ingress, the game, and it took me like a good minute to realize that he was talking
 not about some sort of like, you know, I thought there was like some co-branding thing or co-marketing
 thing where, you know, the phone would come bundled with Ingress and there'd be some like
 natural protection for like the player if they were using a GS5, but then I later realized
 that it had absolutely nothing to do with that.
 Chris, you're the only person in the world that made that connection.
 No, but all they needed to say was IP67 because that's like an acronym we've heard before,
 but no, he's like Ingress Protection 67 on stage.
 Listen, they're bringing this information to the masses.
 Like they want people to know it's not just acronyms, it's real Ingress Protection.
 Yeah.
 So what was the vibe at their unpacked event?
 Because typically unpacked events are totally batshit insane, and this one was like, you
 know, the standard like Samsung gets up and lists off a bunch of features.
 Well except for the 15 minutes of random orchestra.
 I mean the orchestra was kind of like when people were walking in and filing to their
 seats the orchestra was playing and I think they were having some technical difficulties
 that pushed the actual event back a few minutes so they had the orchestra play on.
 And as far as a Samsung event, this was the straightest Samsung event I've ever attended.
 They just played it right down the middle as far as like showing their products, showing
 what their ideas behind these products were, what they do, what they're capable of and
 their mission with them or whatever.
 And they had people who represented the products talk on stage as opposed to having a Broadway
 show and an actor try to represent these things.
 So as press going to this event where you go and you want to be there to learn about
 the new products, this is kind of something that we've been asking Samsung to do for
 a while.
 You know, there was no misogyny, there was no dance.
 Wow, I totally failed.
 So one of the things I failed to mention at the top of the show is that these guys are
 actually at the press area in Barcelona at the conference center and so connectivity
 is as it tends to be at the mobile show, at the mobile conference, really bad.
 I think they're just messing with us.
 Yeah, I mean, we're messable.
 So the other thing about the GS5, I mean I know we're talking a lot about this but it's
 like the most important Android phone.
 We were, like there had been all these rumors about they're going to tone down the design
 and it just like, they didn't slather on a ton of features other than the health stuff
 which we should get to.
 But they did like basically keep the same Samsung experience.
 It's not wildly pained.
 It's totally the same.
 It's totally the same.
 Yeah, not just the same software but the same ID which we already talked about before, like
 with the exception of the back.
 But like if you look at the phone from the front versus the GS4 and like, if you look
 at them separately, not literally side by side, but if you saw a picture of GS4 then
 a picture of GS5 from the front, I think you'd be hard pressed to tell the difference.
 And it's like, it just feels like Samsung is in cruise control right now which I mean,
 this is the classic like complacent, like company that's like basically printing money
 and becoming complacent, you know.
 And this story has played out time and time and time again over the past 15 years in the
 mobile industry and Samsung kind of needs to like step up its game.
 If the GS6 comes out and it doesn't look significantly different, I'm going to be
 very, very upset.
 The thing I would say is that Apple has kind of set expectations with respect to that in
 so far as you can have one design and then you can pretty much reissue it the next year
 but you're only allowed two years.
 You can't do it a third time.
 Yeah, that's the thing is Samsung has – or sorry, Samsung.
 Apple has done more to update its iPhone design.
 It iterates more often than Samsung at this point which seems counterintuitive and crazy
 but that's totally what's happening.
 Right and the thing is Apple plays it a bit more strange by saying this is not the iPhone
 6, it's the iPhone 5S.
 So it's pretty much like the old one, you just modified it a bit, we're not going
 to call it a 6.
 I think that's a bit more faithful, a bit more truthful to the consumer.
 But I mean, come on, you know how it is.
 Every year you have to reissue a new flagship phone whether you're ready to or not, whether
 the silicon is ready.
 One thing I would say, there's a Snapdragon 805 chip which is looking amazingly powerful
 as you've got to see it today.
 They're moving some equipment around next to me.
 But yeah, the Snapdragon 805 is a great chip but that's coming this summer whereas Samsung
 really needs to issue its new processor and its new device now so it can get the sales
 going.
 So the company is kind of forced into this corner essentially.
 I mean it's just the market dynamics.
 It's them, it's the carriers, everybody wants something new, people want something new.
 So then we kind of get these overly incremental upgrades.
 One thing I would say about that press event by the way, Dan says he's happy with it, I
 am not.
 I'm kind of disappointed that there wasn't a nice Michael Bay interview to tell us about
 the phone.
 Tell us about a 5 inch, 5.1 inch display Michael.
 So what you're saying is that you wanted a celebrity to just peace out.
 That's what you wanted.
 Pretty much.
 Okay.
 Okay, oh the heart rate monitor.
 You guys tried that, how does that thing work?
 It works as advertised believe it or not.
 It's able to grab your heart rate in like 5 to 10 seconds.
 I think it's kind of a clunky design because you have to hold your phone and wait for it.
 We're obviously going to talk about their wearables that they announced and I think
 that the implementation of the heart rate monitor in those is a much better system but
 if you don't want to buy a wearable, now your phone can read your heart rate if that's something
 you want to do.
 So is 5 seconds fast enough for a heart rate monitor or a heart rate reading?
 Like when would you be using this heart rate monitor?
 I would say probably in between sets if you're working out.
 That would be my guess.
 Even if you're getting freaked out that you're about to have a heart attack.
 That's true.
 Yeah, but it's not an EKG, it's just a heart rate monitor.
 So yeah, you can take isolated readings of your heart rate.
 Did they say anything about specifically what kind of athletics or activities you would
 use this in regard to S-Health?
 I don't know, I mean they had a bunch of things.
 No, they didn't really go into that.
 Oh Dan, Dan.
 Sorry, I think we're also kind of overlapping with the lag here.
 What I was going to say is they had things in the background basically.
 They had icons showing people running and cycling and all those things.
 And as Dan says, I really think it's something that you can, for example, measure your resting
 heart rate and then go and do a particular exercise and then come back, measure your
 heart rate again and then judge how intensive that is and whether it's a good idea.
 Maybe you can provide that information to your doctor and I don't know, your trainer,
 whatever people do.
 It's an extra piece of information and tracking, but to Dan's point, I really think that these
 heart rate monitors make a ton more sense in the new world to get to that fit and do
 on the phone itself.
 Right.
 So actually let's talk about these.
 So let's talk about the boring ones first and then move into the awesome ones.
 So there's the Gear Fit and the Gear Neo, right?
 And the Gear 2 and the Gear Neo seem like basic iterations.
 So what's the difference between these two?
 Well the difference between the Gear 2 and the Gear Neo is that the latter doesn't have
 the camera.
 Which is awesome because the camera is a silly feature.
 The Neo also looks cheaper.
 It doesn't have the metal finish on the top like the Gear 2 does.
 I do want to argue in favor of the camera because that was basically the sole thing
 that I actually liked about the original Galaxy Gear.
 It's a quirky little thing that you can just take the quickest of snapshots with and it
 really doesn't get in the way.
 You don't have to pour anything out and unlike Google Glass, you don't have to have something
 stuck on top of your head.
 But yeah, I mean I look at the Gear 2 both devices and I just frunk.
 And like the Galaxy Gear wasn't a terribly good idea.
 This is not either.
 They fixed the software like with minimal effort.
 They basically just added the ability, they added a home button so that you wouldn't have
 to like remember one of the stuff.
 Which to me just basically tells you that this is just frunk.
 It's bad.
 The display, I have a very important question.
 Is the display always on on the Gear 2?
 No.
 If it were, it would have no battery left.
 My god.
 And these are running Tizen, right?
 That's correct.
 So yeah, the biggest change is…
 So do you see any notable difference with these things running Tizen?
 Do they seem faster?
 Do the software seem exactly the same?
 The software experience is exactly the same.
 They do feel snappier and more responsive but that also could be because Samsung probably
 upgraded the internal hardware.
 The big difference here is that Samsung claims you can get two to three days of battery life
 with this as opposed to the one day that you got with the Galaxy Gear.
 Whether that's attributed to more efficient chips or Tizen being more efficient, we don't
 really know.
 But you know, it is definitely a welcome improvement.
 I mean you do not need…
 Let's put it this way.
 If your smartwatch requires a dual core 1 GHz processor, you're doing something fundamentally
 wrong in the design of your smartwatch.
 No smartwatch should have functionality that requires that kind of horsepower.
 It's just like…
 It's so Samsung.
 This entire product is so Samsung.
 I'm glad they refined this and took out some of the major pain points from the original
 Gear.
 I thought that they were almost apologetic on stage about the original Gear when they
 were announcing the Gear 2.
 But that being said…
 Oh yeah, they absolutely should be.
 Yeah, but that being said, this is not…
 I mean I think we can all agree this is not the Gear to get excited about, right?
 Absolutely.
 And also Chris, just to mention on the positive side of the equation with the Gear 2, they
 now have interchangeable straps which again is a step forward for Samsung.
 But the earlier point, and it's a very important one that DISA makes, they put a home button
 on it.
 That just tells you everything you need to know.
 You're taking an interface that requires a home button, an interface that is usually
 fit on 4 to 5 inch devices and you're shrinking it down to the wrist.
 And it's just wrong.
 You need something that is specific to its physical dimensions.
 You need something that if it needs a button, it shouldn't be a home button at the bottom
 of it.
 Well, that's the same complaint as the Sony smartwatch 2, right?
 Absolutely.
 That it has basically the standard Android buttons below the display on the front which
 is insane.
 And the thing is you operate these things with either your forefinger or your thumb
 and they don't ring.
 So the Android buttons stay the same size in order for your thumb to be able to touch
 them properly, but then they occupy so much more space on something that fits on your
 wrist, something that is essentially supposed to be a watch.
 Right.
 Let's talk about the gear that's awesome, which is GearFit and it looks like pretty
 freaking good.
 Like it's maybe a little bit bigger than I might want a fitness band to be, but if
 they would just put the functionality of a smartwatch, just put notifications on this
 thing and have it be a health monitor, I would buy the hell out of it.
 Well I'd also want them to have it work with non-Samsung devices, but this thing looks
 great.
 I was going to say, Dieter, it actually does do notifications.
 You can get your calls and your messages and your emails on there, but it only works with
 Samsung devices.
 And like you said, I would buy one of these, but I don't really want to buy a Galaxy S5
 or whatever.
 Yeah.
 Wasn't one of their initial slides, didn't that include openness and cooperation with
 an industry?
 Weren't those the words that they used?
 Yeah, they said that the Gear was an open platform or something like that and it's kind
 of silly when it only works with Samsung devices.
 So it's an open platform for people to bring their apps to, but you can't take it to other
 platforms.
 Apparently that's what they mean.
 Not only does it only work with Samsung devices, by the way I apologize, the light in this
 room timed out and there's nothing I can do about it.
 Not only does it only work with Samsung devices, but only specific Samsung devices because
 we saw over the course of the original Galaxy Gear's very short lifespan, they slowly rolled
 out compatibility to additional Samsung phone models.
 It wasn't like on day one it would work with any Samsung you own.
 It originally only worked on the Gear, I mean the Note 3 I think, and then they rolled it
 out to the S4 and the GS3.
 So it looks sweet though.
 It looks really cool.
 Well, not only does it look sweet.
 I mean Vlad wrote a really great report about it and like the thing that we were talking
 about before and I'm going to steal his thunder and then I'll let him yell at me for it,
 is this is Samsung when it's at its best.
 Yes, it's iterative.
 Yes, they're using technology they've got off the shelf.
 Yes, they're stealing ideas from other companies, but every now and then they do all those things
 but they are able to turn something around really fast that's remarkably compelling.
 And sometimes Samsung Samsung's it up and we get the Gear and sometimes Samsung Samsung's
 it up and they do something that's like whoa hey, this is really nice.
 Yes, it's been a long time since we've actually had that latter experience.
 But what you said Samsung took Samsung's technology off the shelf, they took that technology
 off the Samsung shelf.
 We mock Samsung energy to the high heavens about those curved displays on smartphones
 and we're still right, we don't think we're wrong because they don't make that much sense
 in a smartphone.
 But putting that curved display on something that is supposed to wrap around your wrist
 and actually requires a curve makes perfect sense.
 And the thing that I would say with the Gear Fit is that it's just instantly recognizable.
 To me it's the exact opposite of the GS5.
 I'm seeing people with the GS4 all around the MWC show floor and I'm thinking do these
 guys have a GS5 already?
 You just can't tell the difference.
 Whereas with the Gear Fit because it's super
 artistic
 Hit us with the details.
 There's the Z2, which is the new flagship,
 and then the Z2 tablet, which is like,
 look at us, we made a thin tablet.
 Yeah, the Z2 is really nice.
 Oh, come on.
 Yeah, the Z2 seems appealing.
 You have to give the Z2 tablet a bit more credit, yes.
 As big a selling point as it's selling is,
 but I mean, in terms of technological feats
 and engineering feats, I think Sony is really stepping
 back into its own habits of just being way out ahead
 of everybody else.
 The feeling I get with other phone manufacturers
 is that they're meeting engineering limits before,
 or lower engineering limits than Sony is.
 Sony can push things so much harder and to such greater
 extremes than everybody else.
 I mean, the Z2 tablet, you have to hold it in your hands.
 It's extremely, extremely thin, and it
 keeps the same 6,000 mAh battery as tablet Z,
 that it succeeds.
 It's waterproof.
 And it has this new display, which really
 is the big highlight for Sony this year of the Z2 tablet.
 They have these light-colored LED displays.
 And I've been complaining about Sony displays
 in this flagship phone for years now.
 And they finally fixed it.
 And they fixed it in such great fashion.
 I mean, this is basically what this is.
 Hey, Vlad.
 They really are as good.
 Vlad, I just have a question for you.
 And you and I talked about this a little bit on Verge Live
 on Monday.
 But why is it, do you think, that Sony has not
 been able to make inroads and become a Samsung-level
 competitor on Android yet?
 Because by all appearances, they are
 making phones that are as good as any phones in the industry
 right now.
 Yeah, that is very much the case.
 But I would say right now, they just fixed their display.
 The phone that has their awesome, amazing display
 isn't on sale yet.
 It just got announced.
 So we basically need to give them some time.
 I've been saying this for all that time.
 The display is probably the most fundamental spec
 that you can have with your device.
 It's your input.
 Your output device is the first and last thing you see
 and you use.
 So if that stinks, if the person doesn't enjoy it,
 they don't enjoy the entire user experience.
 So I feel like I've built up a prejudice against Sony's
 Android screens just because their display isn't bad.
 So Vlad, talk to me about the specifics of this device
 a little bit.
 I know on the Tablet Z, they kind of
 used a material that was similar to the Xperia Z,
 and it was like a polycarbonate kind of material.
 What is the outside perimeter material on the Z2 Tablet?
 Is it aluminum like the Z1 and the Z2?
 That's correct.
 The smartphone has an aluminum frame around the outside
 and has glass in the front and in the back.
 And the tablet, it has a soft touch back, which is just,
 I can't really prove on that.
 I can't think of a way to improve it.
 It feels so good.
 It's probably a good reason to use an Android tablet.
 The Z2 tablet would be the one.
 So on the Z2, on the iPhone.
 Hang on.
 You've got to come up with a reason
 to use an Android tablet, especially at this size.
 These bezels are pretty big.
 I'm using a Nexus 7 as my primary tablet right now.
 And I've got to say, Android tablets, you look great.
 I don't know.
 I think Sony's actually doing a super interesting thing
 with their Tablet Zone right now,
 because the Tablet Z last year's model
 is actually super affordable.
 Compared to the iPad, you can get a Snapdragon.
 I think it's the 800 and the Z.
 Sony's making a great tablet here.
 This Z2 tablet looks great.
 It looks really good.
 They're selling a 16 gigabyte model.
 The hardware doesn't matter, because there's
 no support from the ecosystem for Android at this size.
 That's the problem.
 That's the only ecosystem that Sony has available to them.
 Yeah.
 Well, I mean, yeah.
 But it's like, sorry for your luck, guys.
 You're making great stuff that nobody should buy right now.
 Is this true, sadly?
 That is true.
 So what's way more interesting to me is the Z2 phone.
 I think the Z2 phone looks awesome.
 I agree.
 Yeah, tell me about it.
 Well, what's there to tell?
 Aside from the display, it really
 is more or less the Z1.
 It keeps the exact same footprint,
 but grows to 5.2 inches, which means that much of an upgrade.
 It has a Snapdragon 80201, which is a very incremental upgrade
 on the 800.
 It's basically the same chip, which
 is no bad thing because it's a very good chip.
 Camera is basically left the same.
 And that has 4K video recording.
 But again, it's one of those upgrades
 where it's like, I don't have anything that plays back 4K.
 Not even the phone plays back 4K.
 So I don't really care about the damn video
 being at that resolution.
 And it really is all about that display
 because it is very nice.
 It's great color fidelity, beautiful viewing angles.
 I mean, they claim it has the widest color count of any mobile
 device, which is something that you probably need to measure.
 I just think it's one of the better ones in the market
 right now, which is as much as someone needs to do.
 I mean, it's still got the glass back.
 That's fine.
 I mean, not hearing that the camera's been improved much
 is a little bit disappointing to me.
 But I got to say, looking at this,
 comparing it to the Nexus 7 that I'm using now,
 and even the HTC One, which is generally regarded
 as one of the better designed or best designed Android phones,
 this seems really nice.
 And as long as they haven't screwed the software up too
 much, and it sounds like they've continued their trend of doing
 what they're doing with software with the Z1, which is not
 being totally overbearing with it,
 this is an interesting phone to me.
 This is the kind of phone that, if this doesn't have
 any success, then I feel like there's something fundamentally
 wrong with the Android ecosystem,
 that Sony can make a phone this good and nobody cares.
 Yeah, but the same could be said about the HTC One.
 Yeah, but I mean, you can always talk up HTC
 to just having any marketing money and just being that.
 Sony does not spend some marketing money in the US.
 Right, well that's the other thing.
 I mean, hopefully they can get some success with this
 in some other markets.
 I think it's great.
 I will say that Sony is one of the few mobile phone makers
 whose mobile phone division is making a profit.
 But yeah, they do have trouble breaking into the US.
 They bring their devices to the US
 far later than anywhere else in the world.
 And they're only on one carrier so far.
 So it's really hard for them to really make
 a dent in the US market with these devices,
 even if they are really excellent and attractive
 devices.
 And also, let's not overestimate the difficulties
 that HTC has had.
 The company just announced this week
 that the HTC One and the One family
 have been its most successful phones in terms of sales,
 most successful smartphones.
 So they have been doing OK in terms of sales.
 It's just they haven't had a portfolio around the One.
 They've had one flagship phone.
 And when people can't afford to buy the flagship phone,
 HTC just hasn't really had the compelling lower price point
 device to point them to.
 Then they end up in some garbage from Samsung.
 Well, what about the One Mini?
 It's not a One Mini.
 That's exactly the problem.
 It's a One minus a couple of its most fundamental advantages.
 If they called it the One minus, that
 would be like a really good thing for the product.
 Frankly, they shouldn't have done it.
 They should have done a better phone.
 Yeah.
 No, I totally agree.
 The other insane thing that happened at Mobile World
 Congress is Nokia has announced Android phones.
 So that's the Nokia X, the XL, and the X Plus.
 So I mean, how are they?
 Are they fast?
 Are they any good?
 Is it terrible?
 Is it awesome?
 Tell me about these phones.
 So I got to play with all three of them.
 And I guess the X and the X Plus are pretty much the same thing.
 The X Plus just has a dual SIM.
 And I keep coming back to the point
 where Nokia has a Windows phone already at this price point that
 offers a better user experience than the Nokia X.
 The X is running a forged version of Android
 that's based on Android 4.1.
 So it's like two years old.
 It's really dated software.
 And the performance is very apparent
 that this is the older version of Android when you're jumping
 into third party apps and you're trying
 to bounce around between your apps and things like that.
 There's a lot of lag.
 It's pretty sluggish.
 It's just not a really pleasant user experience.
 People with a very good experience
 they are mimicking the home screen interface
 of their Lumia phones.
 But they kind of missed, like it looks
 like the home screen of the Lumia phone.
 But it loses all of the animations and all
 the other beauty parts of Windows phone.
 So it's just like very surface level similarities.
 And the main navigation is pretty fast
 as far as swiping up and down the home screen.
 But once you're in apps, things get pretty dicey.
 And then it's hard to say that this
 is going to be Nokia's savior.
 They're really using this as like a Trojan horse
 to get people onto Microsoft's cloud services.
 But I'm not sure I fully buy that approach.
 I think it'll get people used to using Android apps instead
 of using Microsoft services.
 I think the biggest thing here is, at least the vibe
 that we get, is that essentially it's a Windows phone with
 a shortcut into running Android apps.
 That's what's happening here.
 It isn't really an Android phone because it doesn't have
 any of the Android applications.
 It tries to replace them with Nokia Microsoft alternatives.
 And it's like, we have Windows phone.
 We can't get traction with it.
 We also can't get it cheap enough.
 So we're going to run the cheaper platform that
 has a much wider app ecosystem.
 I disagree.
 I don't buy that they can't get it cheap enough.
 And unlocked Lumia 520 is $69 in the US.
 Yes, that's the thing.
 This is going to be launching for 89 euro.
 That's considerably more expensive than a 520
 is right now.
 And this thing looks like Windows phone,
 but it does not perform like Windows phone.
 It's not a Windows phone experience.
 So it's very surface level.
 Nokia said numerous times that they plan to keep pushing
 this price lower, but they're already lower with Lumia.
 I don't get it.
 Am I the only one who thinks this looks
 like an unholy monster?
 Like this has none of the advantages of Windows phone
 and all the disadvantages and ugliness of a basically
 web-aware rectangle UI.
 Yeah, that's the first.
 This is the worst of both worlds.
 There's just a lot of confusing things with the UI.
 When you install a new app, there's no app tray or app list.
 It just gets thrown down at the bottom of your home screen.
 And so you can put it in folders and stuff like that,
 but there's really no great organization there.
 It's got this second home screen called Fastlane, which
 Nokia is kind of like combining your most recent apps
 and notifications into one feed, which they say
 is very popular on their Asha phones,
 but I'm not sure it really translates that well on Android.
 And then Nokia is always known for putting great cameras
 in their devices, and these particular ones
 have fixed focus three megapixel cameras that are terrible.
 So it's like there's no advantage to it.
 The only advantage that a user has when they buy this
 is the fact that it has a Nokia name.
 You're not getting Nokia's great design.
 You're not getting Nokia's great camera technology.
 You're not getting Nokia's great software.
 You're getting scraps.
 This doesn't even seem like a good,
 this is like the saddest vendor lock-in ever.
 Like for Google, it makes sense that they are pushing devices
 that really bring people into their service ecosystem
 because their lock-in is so great.
 But this is like, oh, well, introduce people
 to Microsoft services, but you'll still be running Android
 apps.
 But Microsoft doesn't make a huge amount of money
 from these services.
 I don't think Google had anything
 to do with this, or any participation,
 or anybody called Google and asked
 would you buy it if we did a really garbage Nokia
 with Microsoft services running on top of Android.
 But I think the biggest issue here is also
 from Microsoft's perspective, it's
 just kind of a head scratcher.
 I see why Microsoft's acquired Nokia.
 There's a lot of good reasons to think
 if Nokia was going to pursue this plan anyway,
 Microsoft wouldn't have liked to have its main Windows Phone
 manufacturer split its focus between Windows Phone
 and Android.
 That would not have been a good idea.
 But once Microsoft agreed to acquire Nokia,
 and I know that deal hasn't closed yet,
 it really should have put a stop to this.
 Because what does it say to Windows Phone developers?
 Like do we carry on making Windows Phone apps,
 or do we switch to Android knowing
 that Microsoft is going to support Android apps now?
 It's a really confusing situation for them, isn't it?
 Yeah, no, it's totally confusing.
 And I mean, honestly to me, it just
 seems like what Nokia has decided
 is they don't believe that they're
 going to get the apps that they think
 that people want at the low end any time soon.
 And so they just said, look, we're going to do Android
 on the low end because we want people
 to be able to sideload those apps on there.
 Like the UI is whatever.
 It's not great.
 I can't decide if I think it's patronizing.
 There's the simplification of just having a single home
 screen, but then there's the fast lane,
 which seems a little complicated.
 Whatever.
 It's like, fine.
 It's not that interesting to me.
 What's interesting to me is that Nokia, somebody inside Nokia,
 felt that in order to do what they were trying,
 in order to achieve what they're trying to achieve
 in the emerging markets that they're trying to tackle,
 that Windows Phone wasn't going to get there.
 And if we're right that it's not really about price,
 it's not really about driving down the price of Windows
 Phone, driving Windows Phone down to work on lower and lower
 hardware because the 520 seems to prove that they're
 relatively close and they could get closer.
 If it's not about the hardware and it's not about price,
 it's got to be about software.
 It's got to be that inside Nokia,
 they had a fundamental belief that they weren't
 going to get what they needed to get in terms of app support
 in order to drive it in emerging markets.
 It's got to be the only answer that makes sense to them.
 I've said this before, but it really feels like to me
 that Nokia had a group within that was working on this
 for a long time.
 And it was very apparent that they were working on it
 for a long time.
 It's based on Android 4.1, which is a two-year-old version
 of the operating system.
 And they were just like, this Microsoft deal
 is closing soon.
 We are pushing this to market.
 We've been working on it for so long.
 We're not having this scrapped.
 And so there's that part of it.
 The other part, I think, is that, like you said, Peter,
 that it's a tacit admission that Windows Phone does not
 have the apps that people are looking for
 and that people buy phones because of the apps.
 You buy a smartphone because of the apps that it can use.
 And that's why Nokia initially explored this Android project
 for however long ago when they started developing on it.
 I think most people disagree with me on this.
 But I think there's a very real possibility
 that Microsoft will kin this.
 And it will disappear within 30 days of the closure
 of the acquisition.
 So I would say that I would believe you more
 if Nokia had announced one phone.
 But they announced three.
 And they announced a line of them.
 And they announced a Nokia Store that they need to maintain
 and all these other things that are pretty entrenched ideas,
 I guess, and entrenched services that they need to offer
 with these phones.
 But Ken was two devices and an entire cloud network
 devoted to them.
 I mean, that's fair.
 But there was also two devices sold on one carrier
 that literally nobody bought.
 Yeah.
 Right.
 Well, on the other hand, Nokia didn't
 exactly spend even five minutes on naming these devices.
 They just borrowed agency's naming scheme
 from like two years ago.
 Well, let's put it this way.
 I think that if you want a collector's item,
 you should strongly consider picking up a Nokia X.
 Because I can't see Microsoft continuing
 to put R&D dollars into developing Android devices.
 So even if these last, say, a full year on the marketplace,
 I don't think they're going to get successors.
 That would be my guess.
 But you know what else?
 This basically disproves Bill Gates.
 Because he said the world is getting better all the time.
 Whereas two or three years ago, the collector's device
 from Nokia was the N9, which to this day
 is one of the prettiest and nicest devices,
 even though it's kind of left.
 But these are no N9s.
 That's for sure.
 These are no N9s.
 That's my point, Dan.
 That's my point.
 The collector's device is getting worse.
 It's not getting better.
 So the other thing I really, really need to hear about,
 because you guys have held it and I have not,
 is Project Tango, which is Google's I
 can see the whole room and space thing out spatially.
 Right on the phone, better than a connector.
 Like a connector.
 I don't know.
 It seems insane.
 So tell me about this thing.
 So I remember talking to you guys a week ago or so
 when Google announced it.
 And I was pretty mad on the whole announcement.
 I was like, oh, so they're announcing another phone
 to give us augmented reality games.
 But then I got to see the thing in person.
 And it is pretty wild what it can do.
 It's got these multiple cameras and sensors on it
 that capture a far greater amount of data.
 It can measure distance.
 It can measure spatial awareness and things like that.
 And then it's got a custom processor inside
 that can crunch all of that data, feed it into an API,
 and spit it out to an app.
 So it can do things like you can hold up the phone,
 and then it can just literally start
 to build a 3D model of the room as you move the phone
 around the room in real time.
 And so you move the phone around,
 and you can see the object in front of you
 get built in a 3D model on the screen.
 And so this technology has actually
 been around for a long time.
 The founders of the company, Movidius,
 that developed this particular device
 compared it to what the Mars Rover does
 when it was on the surface of Mars mapping things out.
 But they've now shrunk it down into a thing
 that can fit in the palm of your hand
 and run on a smartphone battery.
 It's pretty wild.
 It's quite a trip to use.
 Did it work?
 Yeah, it worked.
 I mean, it worked.
 Like they built this thing.
 It's a developer's device that Google's
 going to give out to developers to build apps to actually make
 use of all this data.
 But they had a couple of demonstration apps
 to show the capabilities of it.
 So this one that is playing on the video right now
 is a distance heat map.
 So items that are further away are a darker blue.
 Items that are closer to you are orange.
 And as you move things, it adjusts
 as you move the phone around.
 So everything pretty much worked as they said it would.
 It was able to build a 3D model of the table in front of me
 right before my eyes and things like that.
 It was quite impressive.
 I came away far more impressed with it
 after seeing it in person than I was a week ago when I had just
 seen that Google announced it.
 So OK, I mean, obviously the hardware is super janky.
 But that's like because it's a developer device
 and they're only making 200 of them.
 Did they talk about whether or not
 this was going to turn into like,
 do they have plans to do production?
 Or is this just a crazy wild experiment?
 What the hell?
 So they were really cagey about that.
 I think they were really, we were talking to Movidius.
 We were not talking to Google's side of things.
 So I think Movidius was very concerned about spilling
 Google's plans and things like that.
 But the CEO did hint to me that this
 could be in consumer products in the very near future.
 But he wouldn't say how much it costs
 to build these developer devices or an exact time
 when it will be in a smartphone on a shelf in a store.
 Assuming you need to pay more for this thing,
 what app would make me be like, you know what?
 I want to spend an extra $50 to get the Super Tango Power
 from, like I think, what the killer app is.
 I mean, I think we need to wait and see
 what the killer app will be.
 That's why these developers are going to get it.
 Some sample applications are very obvious things,
 building a 3D model of a room or a set very quickly and easily.
 But they also say that they could put this
 in like a neck-worn wearable device
 and use it as something to assist the visually impaired,
 since it can detect how far away things are.
 If an obstacle is in someone's path,
 it can give them an alert or an audio clue.
 And then there's the visual effects industry
 that could use this to build 3D models for movies and things
 like that.
 I don't think it's an application that everybody
 would make use of.
 But there are definitely things where
 this could be a useful device.
 So Dan, let me ask you this.
 It kind of seems like the fact that this technology is
 bundled into a smartphone is actually
 not the most important part, just that they
 can get it down to the size.
 They have it in a smartphone for convenience's sake.
 It's a mobile computing platform, essentially.
 And if they're going to do that, why not just make it a phone?
 But were they also talking about having this
 in a slew of devices that weren't quite
 as computationally powerful as smartphones?
 I mean, that's a fair assessment.
 I mean, the key development that they wanted to stress
 was the fact that they have this processor that they developed
 that can take all of this data and analyze it and crunch it
 and manage it.
 And they've made this processor small enough and power
 efficient enough that it can run in a smartphone form factor.
 So they're using the smartphone as a vehicle to show it off.
 But there's no reason that it couldn't also
 be applied in other small-sized things,
 like a GoPro camera with this type of technology
 or something like that.
 Right.
 Not only could you have it in a GoPro,
 you could have it in something like Google Glass.
 And I'm sure Google is very interested in that
 for indoor mapping, like they said in their announcement
 video.
 But it seems like this is something
 that could possibly go into all sorts of different products.
 But it is interesting to see it in phone form factor.
 Yeah, I don't see why they couldn't apply it
 to a variety of different form factors.
 I just wonder if that was what they were
 most vocal about at MVC.
 They were really kind of cagey as to what future plans would
 be, to be honest with you.
 It's not really, they didn't make
 it seem like it was limited to just smartphones.
 What else is going on out there, guys?
 What else did you see?
 I don't know what else we saw that we could talk about.
 We saw a lot of things.
 It's not Firefox.
 We should talk about the new Firefox OS.
 So they updated Firefox.
 They showed us version 1.3, which is the latest version.
 It's on a couple of devices that will be hitting market
 in a month or whatever.
 And it's a faster, much more refined interface
 than the Firefox we saw a year ago.
 It really felt like this was the latest version.
 It really felt like this was Firefox growing up
 quite a bit in the past year.
 It's still definitely very low end.
 And definitely, a device like the Moto G with Android 4.4
 runs circles around it.
 But it's a lot better than it used to be.
 And you can have devices with higher resolution displays
 and faster processors and things like that that make it
 an actually usable smartphone.
 I remember last year when we first saw the first Firefox
 phones, you would open up the dialer,
 and then you'd wait, and then you'd push a button,
 and then you'd wait for it to receive the button command.
 And then it was like when basic things like the dialer
 were virtually unusable, it was like a non-starter.
 But they've addressed those.
 The performance for those basic core features is a lot better.
 But it's hard to see this really competing
 well against the cheap Android phones that
 are really flooding the market.
 But the cheap Android phones, let's be super clear.
 Are not good.
 I guess they're better.
 The Moto G is an excellent phone.
 The Moto G is the counter to your argument there.
 But the Moto G unsubsidized is what?
 $100 and what?
 $180.
 $199.
 Yeah, and I mean, Firefox is going
 to move a lot lower than that.
 Yeah, but there's no reason that the Moto G is just
 like the first of a really good low end phone.
 I have a feeling that Motorola has said
 that it plans to go even cheaper and still maintain the quality.
 So I don't think Firefox has a long time
 to hold that slot without being really challenged.
 Yeah.
 And I also feel like to Dan's point,
 Android phones are likely to trickle down
 to lower price points quicker than Firefox OS is going
 to be able to really build out any sort of app ecosystem
 and really get itself to the sort of responsiveness
 that can hope to match devices like the Moto G.
 Just this week, it was revealed from Motorola
 that the Moto G apparently is one of his best selling phones
 and that the company is making a profit, whatever you say.
 So it's not a lost lead.
 I know Motorola itself has been losing money,
 but the Moto G hasn't.
 Right.
 Yeah, I mean, Mozilla's ultimate goal here
 is a $30 phone, which is pretty remarkable when you consider
 that Nokia on stage this week, like their first announcement
 before they got into Nokia X was the 220,
 which is a 29 euro phone that has a keypad, a tiny color
 display, and like its headline features
 that it can get on the internet.
 So the fact that Firefox wants to actually produce
 a true touchscreen smartphone for $30 is pretty remarkable.
 And that's not to say that you're
 going to get a headline experience on that device.
 I would say you have to put a heavy quotation marks
 around smartphone.
 Very heavy.
 I mean, they're so heavy, they might even crush it.
 Like what is, aside from price, what
 is Mozilla's competitive advantage in the market
 right now?
 There isn't one.
 Well, no, I'll tell you what it is.
 It's the fact that they cater to the needs of carriers.
 So you're seeing where you're seeing
 a lot of wins for Mozilla, and I think
 where you're going to continue to see the most wins, is
 in carriers that operate in emerging markets,
 and maybe European countries where ARPU is a little lower.
 I think, correct me if I'm wrong,
 but I think that Poland was one of the first countries where
 they released a device last year on Vodafone, I believe.
 So my guess is that, and these are countries where,
 and these are carriers, where they're really
 keen on branding the experience top to bottom.
 So it basically looks like a Vodafone phone.
 I don't know if you guys remember, but a few years ago,
 Vodafone released basically its own operating system
 that lasted about a month.
 But that really is the new feature phone.
 Yeah, but it's, well, yes and no.
 But it's worse than feature phones.
 This is the problem with it.
 It's worse than feature phones.
 I actually got to try out the $25 proof of concept,
 and it really proves nothing at all.
 I mean, to Dan's point, the new phones
 are so much more mature than last year
 and so much more usable than last year with Firefox OS.
 But here's the other thing that I can tell you,
 and it's the thing that gives me no hope for this OS.
 Nobody at Firefox's presentation,
 nobody at Firefox's booth here at MWC,
 is using a Firefox OS phone.
 So if it's not good enough for the people who are making it
 and for making the software to use on a regular basis,
 it's just not going to happen.
 Because you need those people to essentially be testing it
 for you.
 You can't just flood markets that
 can't afford the higher-end smartphones
 and hope that that will somehow give you success.
 I take Chris's point about being friendly to carriers,
 but I just don't think that the user is going to be.
 I'm not sure that Firefox OS has anything to offer consumers.
 I would love to be part of it, but I don't think it is.
 No, but here's the thing.
 This $25 smartphone that I have at that booth today
 has a garbage display, and it has amazing lag.
 Like, it's almost like an anchorman
 where his dog ate the whole wheel of change.
 You can't even get mad at the lag because it's so pervasive.
 So yeah.
 You just feel bad for the phone.
 Yeah, so I would take those $25.
 I would add $5 extra somehow, and I
 would get the cheap Nokia.
 Because that would at least get me an internet.
 But to be super clear, the Nokia you're referring to, the 220,
 is just a candy bar.
 Like a candy bar straight out of 2005.
 The 220 looks great, though.
 You're smoking, I don't know what you're smoking.
 You're smoking some powerful narcotic.
 Well, here's the thing.
 If you want a disposable phone, for example,
 and you only have $30, you get the Nokia.
 Because that thing will get things done for you.
 If you will be frustrated to the high heavens,
 you pay the $25 and you get a Firefox device phone.
 And you get nothing done.
 Like honestly, if you have $25 and you can't afford
 to spend more, then I don't know.
 Save your money and start sending telegrams.
 Didn't the last telegram network in the world
 just shut down last year, if I'm not mistaken?
 It was in India, I think.
 Yes, but yesterday we covered Telegram,
 the new security-focused mobile messaging app.
 That's true.
 That's a very clever transition.
 No, it's completely unrelated.
 Also, hold on.
 Side note, I need to loop back to this.
 Chris, it is in fact you who is on drugs.
 Because the 220 is a beautiful candy bar phone,
 and these Firefox phones look like garbage.
 Cool story, bro.
 Yep, well, that's where I stand on it.
 Yeah, so HTC had some random announcements,
 like you're going to be able to share your processor
 power from your phone, which, cool story, guys.
 No, it's good.
 Oh, come on.
 It is good.
 I mean, I have been one of the big fanboys
 of the screen computing ever since study at home,
 and all those ones were a big deal on PC.
 And I think Samsung.
 So what kind of work are they doing?
 Well, it depends.
 I think you can pick your own project.
 But they're basically doing scientific research,
 and they're using power cycles from your phone
 to contribute to that.
 It's like folding at home.
 That was on the key.
 Whatever.
 And it doesn't affect battery life or consume cellular data?
 It only works when you're connected to Wi-Fi
 and plugged into the wall, I believe.
 So I don't know.
 Maybe this is too nerdy, but one of the big things,
 one of the most important factors of distributed
 computing is floating-point performance,
 and our processors are really bad at that.
 So I would love to know what kinds of projects
 are available for you to choose.
 It's because the performance for watt seems bad.
 It's worth noting that Samsung is doing the exact same thing.
 They launched an alarm clock app a week or two ago
 that does the exact same concept.
 So there are obviously applications for it.
 I don't know how much or what specifically they are,
 but both companies are pursuing almost the same exact idea.
 OK.
 It seems like horse swallow.
 It's just total bull crap.
 Did you say horse swallow?
 Is it a cod or a horse?
 Then he escalated it to bull crap.
 Let's just remind everybody that Evan is from Kentucky.
 I thought it was cod swallow, but I didn't know
 that horses had swallows.
 What is a swallow?
 I don't know.
 I love your sense of public responsibility
 and communal cooperation, guys.
 We get to talk about a bit of distributed computing
 and contributing to good causes and discoveries and whatnot.
 That's great.
 No, sure, that's fine.
 I want everybody to do distributed computing really
 well and accomplish the goals and do the research.
 But the thing is, if this is a PR stunt,
 because you get to feel good about doing something
 with your phone, that's great.
 But if it's just wasting electricity and wearing out
 your parts and it isn't actually very effective.
 No, Evan, you're totally right.
 It is wasting electricity.
 Because all the other battery power
 that you use on things like Flappy Bird and whatever,
 that's productive.
 Well, at least that's entertaining.
 No, that's providing you utility in the means
 that you want it to do.
 But this is, I'll wait to see which projects are on.
 Vlad, every time I break 30,000 in threes on the iPhone,
 another angel gets its wings.
 And I have given wings to at least six angels.
 Humble brag.
 That wasn't even a humble brag.
 That was just a brag.
 It was just a straight up brag.
 Regular brag.
 I'm not ashamed of that straight up brag at all.
 That is the definition of holier than thou.
 I used to be a big contributor to distributed.net
 in the search for prime numbers back in the day.
 And actually, my roommate covertly
 installed SETI at home on countless workstations
 at the University of Michigan and was eventually caught
 and got into some amount of trouble for it.
 So I understand the appeal of contributing
 to distributed computing efforts.
 But I don't know, I think that this
 is indicative of two troubling trends.
 One is the trend that maybe we've topped out,
 at least in the short term, we've
 topped out the need for additional processor power
 in phones.
 Because you look at, I mean, never mind the GS5.
 You look at the GS4 or the HTC One from last year,
 they're perfectly fine and fast.
 And there are no new capabilities coming to
 Android short of something like Project Tango that
 would require a C change in the amount of processing power
 that's available to you.
 So now you're just sitting on this massive excess
 of gigaflops that you might as well contribute
 to a distributed computing effort.
 That's problem one.
 Then problem two, of course, like Evan says,
 I mean, the additional power consumption
 is a very real phenomenon.
 Like my power bill went up when I had distributed.net running
 on my desktop PC.
 Like there was a measurable impact in my bill.
 So if this becomes a big thing, that's
 going to be something to consider.
 OK.
 Yeah, I agree.
 That's the worst transition ever.
 Is there anything else that you guys want to chat about?
 I mean, the new HTC One leaked.
 It looks like we thought it would look.
 It's got an extra camera sensor on it.
 It comes in several colors and seems, I don't know.
 It looks like a slightly more rounded one.
 Yeah.
 It does look slightly more rounded.
 I'm excited.
 I don't think I would say.
 Sorry, the only thing I would say about the HTC One
 is that it looks a little bit more
 forgivable in light of the Galaxy S5.
 True.
 Yeah.
 Good point.
 Well.
 I don't know.
 Like I really hope that the new one has
 a regular, really great camera.
 Like if the main camera is subpar
 and they try and kind of like mask that with whatever
 could possibly be going on with the second camera,
 I'm going to be so dissatisfied personally.
 I can't even.
 Evan, that's what the Sony QX100 is for, bro.
 Oh my god.
 That is the sardine pan that I just opened.
 Well, ladies and gentlemen, I'm calling it.
 That is the Virtual Show Barcelona edition 2014.
 I want to thank Vlad and Dan especially for joining us
 from the show floor in Barcelona.
 Pretty awesome.
 You can follow them on Twitter as DCCpert and VladSapov.
 You can also follow the rest of us.
 I am Backlon.
 Chris is ZPower.
 Evan is Evan Rogers with a D. Although I'm
 sure the guy without the G is also nice.
 But you should follow Evan because he's awesome.
 We are all at Verge.
 You can leave a comment on this very post when, well,
 you can do it right now.
 You can do whatever you want.
 You can also talk to us in the forums.
 And we will be back soon, probably next week.
 And until then, we're going to miss you dearly.