 I missed last week's show and I was so gutted about the whole thing that I decided I would commandeer the whole introduction, just jump right in, get rid of Dieter, get rid of Chris, ban that imposter, they're all gone, it's just me. And speaking of the introduction actually, have you ever thought about who we're doing it for? Because I have. I've spent a lot of time thinking about it and I realized nobody actually comes to our show without knowing what they're coming in and getting themselves in for. So I'm not even going to introduce it, you guys know what this is. Hello guys, welcome to the VVS show. Episode 18, week of September 24th, I am Vlad Savov. I'm Dan Seifert. Hey, there's somebody else. Hey, how's it going? And Dieter Bohn. Yes sir. Dieter Bohn is joining us via a phone, which is really fitting, this being the Verge Mobile show and everything else. So Dieter, which Blackberry are you using today? Yeah, I'm not using the Blackberry Dev Alpha B because I'm not a developer, I guess, so I don't have one. I don't own a single Blackberry anymore, actually, which is sad, but also not sad at all. It's sad, but it's also entirely not surprising. Well, I mean, the thing is I only own one. I'm really shedding a tear for it. So as you guys might notice that Chris is not with us right now. Hopefully he'll be able to join us in a little bit, but we're going to plow ahead with just the three of us for now. Well, I mean, the truth is we don't really like Chris. Just three of us. And we never have. Yeah. Speak for yourself, Dieter. Your vendetta with Chris is like a whole other thing. It's quite a show. But that's actually a fitting number. I didn't say I don't love it. Just the three of us. But just the three of us is a fitting number. And we'll get it. We'll get onto that because room was really bullish about having a real shot at number three, which is then we're saying just before the show is we're going to take it all the way, guys, all the way to number three. So rim is high aspirations, high ambitions, receive platform. But we know who's number one. Or do we? Oh, well, we know who shares the number one spot. And that's Apple with the iPhone. And I'm actually surprised. We've been talking about the iPhone five so long. I'm actually surprised that it only just went on sale this past weekend. And it feels like forever. The initial sales have been. Yeah, it has been breaking records as usual. We've had a chance to review it. Some of you guys have had a chance to play with and use it. I've only I've only seen it really and play with that mockup way back at the foot. So I'll let you guys take it away. I mean, then how do you feel about the iPhone five? Well, you know, like you said, it feels like it's been around forever. I mean, it just it. I've had mine less than a week and it feels like an old friend because I knew about it for so long for before it actually hit the market. But you know, it's exactly what we kind of expected it to be. If you didn't catch our iPhone review, iPhone five review that went up last week, definitely check it out. But it's largely the same experience as the iPhone four s except everything is faster. The processor is much faster. You've got LTE data, which is much faster. And you've got, you know, slightly thinner, slightly lighter body with a bigger screen. But it's still an iPhone. It's still, you know, is iOS. So your experience hasn't changed too dramatically if you're coming from an earlier iPhone model. Apart from your maps experience, right? I just want to, you know, in addition to the iPhone five reviews, we've also got an iOS six review that Dan worked on and I contributed to a bit. And basically iOS is as iOS as iOS has ever been. It is iOS. It's the same. And like we talked about this last week and you know, my piece of think that's very, very iterative. And I mean, to be very clear, like it's super fast. I didn't think that the iPhone four was slow, but iPhone four s was slow, but the iPhone four definitely was chugging. And so the iPhone five feels much, much faster and voice quality for calls is better. At least I think so. I'm talking to you on one right now. And I'm actually relatively happy with the battery life. I had mine run the gamut yesterday from 6 30 a.m. and it finally conked out, I want to say around eight 30. And that was with moderate to heavy use and at least a full hour of phone calls. So like I would like that to be better, but it's definitely on par or slightly better than the LTE Android phones that I've used. And that's particularly remarkable to me because I'm pretty sure this thing's got like fourteen hundred something milliamps for the battery, right? Yeah, you know, I'm actually not sure exactly what the capacity of the battery inside of it is. But it is it's very light and it's very thin, which indicates that producers are saying it's actually twenty one hundred, which actually sounds very high considering how light and how it is. If you compare it to other devices that have those size batteries, they tend to be a bit thicker or heavier. But like as you were saying with the speed, as you're saying with the speed, you know, I was coming from an iPhone four S and I like you said, I never felt like the iPhone four S was slow, but moving from the four S to the five, the speed jump is like so dramatic to me, even coming from Apple's previously fastest version of the iPhone. It's almost like you're jumping from like the three G to the four that that big of a speed jump to me. And I was actually kind of kind of impressed. I didn't expect it to be that big of a difference. So the battery is three percent of all five point three one fourteen thirty now that's iPhone four three point eight volt five point four five one hour fourteen forty. So that's actually pretty small for an LTE device. Everybody in chat is losing their mind that we didn't have this number on the tip of our tongue. Whoops. Hey, guys, I'm on the phone. Give me a break. I think I just got a bunch of tweets about it, too. Anyway, it's ridiculously small and ridiculously fast. So this this new processor, this is a six is apparently incredibly power efficient and fast. Right. I would expect it to be. Yes. Actually, from the things that Apple disclosed about the ASICS processor and of Anand Tech fame, included that it's actually running an A15 Cortex A15 processor, which is super exciting because I haven't had one of those yet. And that's going to be the next big jump. I think I think that's actually changed. I don't think it's an A15. It's no, no, I know. Oh, I know. All right. I was booting up to that. I was booting up to embarrassing my good friend. Shameful me. But but yes, so his initial conclusion was that it has to be called XA15 because of the properties that Apple was disclosing, because of the battery life that Apple is, etc. Whereas on further review, Anand found that it's actually a mixture of Cortex A9, Cortex A15. It is Apple's, so to speak, fully custom chip, fully custom Apple design. So it isn't a stock chip. Whereas previously, I mean, Apple has been saying ever since it's branded its processors as a whatever, A5, A5X, etc., and now A6, it has been saying that it's designing its own processors, but it was mostly sticking to templates, from what I know, ARM templates. And maybe just doing a few tweaks and optimizations here is that. Whereas now Apple said at the time it took over that company whose name I don't recall anymore, chip design company, said time to integrate it, work on it. And it's producing these really extremely efficient chips, like you're saying, Dieter. Which is good and all, and the bigger display is absolutely making the iPhone catch up with the four inch. I know there's a golden ratio, so I guess we'll call that the golden form factor, as far as I'm concerned, 44.3 inches. So Apple is catching up on that front, physically, and the display is now even thinner, making for the thinner phone overall. But ultimately, apart from this little tug that I had when the hype was at its highest and when we're building up to the launch and the release, I don't feel at all compelled to buy this new iPhone. It makes changes which are in the right direction, but I don't feel like it's pushing me the same way that the iPhone 4, when it was first announced, when it was first launched, just pushed me and forced me to buy it, essentially. It was such a big jump. But then you guys are saying that the user experience has improved so much, so maybe that would be the thing that might convince me. But seriously, about the maps issue. I saw the maps on iOS 6 on the iPad, and they look good and actually quick in terms of operation. I think they're quicker than Google Maps, which is down to the way they're coded, but the problem with them is that they actually suck in terms of just being maps. So what is your experience been there? I've had a couple of crashes and freezes, but nothing worse than Google Maps. I live in San Francisco, and so this whole issue that Apple's maps aren't as good as Google's maps just in terms of the raw map data, for me the pain point is losing transit. But in terms of street data and stuff, Apple's in California and they've got lots and lots of data from my area, so it's not a huge tragedy for me, although not having transit really, really sucks. I think it's a bigger deal outside the US and in rural areas. There's a lot of places where the map data just isn't up to snuff. We've got some reports on this. Chris had a report up that there was still a year left on the Google Maps agreement between Google and Apple, and Apple decided not to wait it out, to just put their app out there. Apparently, it took Google by surprise, which is in itself kind of surprising. But nevertheless, their new app for iOS isn't ready yet because of that. There have been a lot of complaints about the maps, and I think it's... I mean, here's my take. When Google Maps first launched on smartphones way back in the day, the Java version that was on Pop! OS and the other version that they had out there, it wasn't that great. It took them a long time to build up that crowdsource data. When I've been using mapping products way back in the day, TomTom way back, there was another one, Copilot, they had bad mapping and all these different mapping services. Back then, it wasn't okay. They were not that good, but we dealt with it. The problem now is that the expectation is there that when you launch maps, they need to be really good. It's just really hard to do that without years and years of data. Nokia's got that time. Google's had that time. Some of these other companies have also had that time, but Apple hasn't, despite the fact that it's partnered and it brought a bunch of map data. For a generation one first release smartphone maps product, I think it's quite good. Flyover is pretty but useless, but I think it's fast. I think it's quite good. The problem is quite good. It doesn't cut it anymore compared to the competition. Right. Absolutely. I think that's actually the thing that is to the mapping, me scandal. Actually, it's not a scandal. A lot of people are annoyed with it because they're not getting the same functionality, but most people are actually just making really poor jokes about it and just having a big laugh. What surprised most people, even those not tracking the industry as closely as we do, is that it's a really, really stark example of Apple playing catch up to others. Usually when Apple is trying to catch up to others, it does it behind the scenes and just comes out with the finished product. You're like, wow, there goes Apple. Apple is doing the unique, the amazing, et cetera, et cetera. It's not like the other guys. Whereas in this instance, exactly as the data says, this is just version one is to start Apple's mapping product. It has really, really obvious rough edges, which we're not used to seeing from Apple. Speaking of rough edges, here's a kickass segue. The aluminum on the new iPhone has been chipping away. Have you guys had that? Yeah. Mine has not a chip, but a cleared up scuff mark and it had it right out of the box. I'm frankly surprised by this because we know that it's possible to make aluminum that is very hard to scratch and get the shiny part underneath. We know because HTC did it with the One S. Yes, the One S can get scratches, but it seems like the iPhone, it's much simpler to do and show the shiny part underneath. In the case of the One S, that is a very unique treatment to that particular device that is not anodization, it's not electroplating. Maybe it is a form of electroplating, but it's a very intensive type of coating that happens to that. There were reports of that chipping as well, especially right when the phone first came out. It's quite apparent that none of that treatment has been applied to the iPhone 5. This seems like a standard anodization type of coating on top of it, which frankly, when you put other pieces of metal against it, it will scratch kind of easily. I think the real controversy or the uproar is that people, like you said, Dieter, are finding it this way out of the box, which is again, not something that you expect to see from Apple devices. Apple's always been lauded and has always taken high regard for its type of, quote, unboxing experience of pulling a device out for the first time and everything's pristine and clean and perfect. That's just not the case for some people with the iPhone 5. Just with respect to the One S, the name of that process has been printed on my mind because I've written and said it so many times. It's micro-arc oxidation. Oxidation, yeah. Micro-arc. It involves plasma bath, right? Yeah, the plasma blast, that's right. And millions and millions of votes of electricity and all other sorts of exciting stuff. Yeah, I mean, first of all- Here's my take on the scratching. Ask me in a year after my phone has gotten scratched and dinged up if I'm angry about it because if this thing gets scratched and dinged up and it looks kind of cool and distressed, then I'm totally happy with it. That's actually kind of neat. That'll give my phone character. The black phone looks like murder now and to have it look like distressed murder would actually be really cool. Yeah, that's like a breaking in process. Yeah, if it's like those old, what were the iPods that scratched like crazy? Yeah, the iPod Touches. If it looks like crap after it's scratched, then I'll be angry. But I'll just have to wait and see. Well if it has one thing going for it, the matte finish, I think even if it got scratched, the matte finish won't look quite as crappy as the chrome finishes that the old iPods had. Yeah, but also the issue with Apple's iPhone design since the iPhone 4, and I've been banging on about it, is that it's kind of too fragile and it also tries to be a little bit too perfect. I mean, we saw Johnny Ive at the iPhone 5 presentation and he was talking about, again, this is the most exacting design we've ever done. It's the best product we've ever done. Yada, yada, yada. But it is true that the design is so exacting and it's really, really trying to go for this luxury look and appeal. And there's also the glass parts on the back. This is the thing that convinces me that the new iPhone isn't going to look really, really awesome when you scratch it up. Because I know exactly what Dieter was talking about. When you have an aluminum product, whether it be cameras like Sony's NEX series, you know, or some of the older generation smartphones from HTC in particular, and it picks up a few scuffs and scratches and it kind of feels like it's your own. Or even like a wristwatch, you know, titanium wristwatches. People think titanium is such a hard material, it doesn't scratch. Actually it does. I scratch my titanium watch in a week. Yeah, no, but I have a Seiko titanium watch and I actually like it's scratches. They're kind of like these are my own. This tells me that I've had this product for a long time, we've been through things together, even if they're just completely mundane. The reason I don't think that is going to work with the iPhone 5 design is because of those glass parts, which move in a whole different design direction. They're about perfection and about looking really pretty, as opposed to the ruggedness of having scratches. But that's only one aspect. And the other thing I wanted to discuss is actually the front of the phone sticks to, from what I can tell, sticks to the exact same one big plate of glass design, which would be so vulnerable on the iPhone 4 and 4S design. And I think that's probably the thing that's putting me off the most from the new iPhone 5. I don't think the software, and I don't think the mapping issue is something that's going to put me off, it's not a deal breaker for me. And I don't think things like, oh, well, this phone has 1280x720 resolution and the iPhone doesn't have that exact same resolution. Those aren't deal breakers to me. But I just don't trust that I can use the iPhone 5 in the way that I use phones and have it survive that whole year that these were talking about. You just got to stop dropping your phone. I think, I mean, I think that the iPhone 5 is a bit more rugged than the 4 and the 4S. I mean, I mean, yes, of course, part of it's that doesn't have glass on the back, but it, it does feel like, and maybe it's just because it's lighter, so it's less likely to crack it and drop it, but it does feel like it's less likely to shatter if I drop it. The other thing that, that I fixed with the phone, they did their teardown is they, they changed up the way that the phone is put together. And so you can take, the first thing to come off is the screen and the display assembly. And so it should be much simpler to replace displays and cheaper, at least for Apple, to take a broken screen, replace it with a new screen. You don't have to take the whole phone apart. You can just take the screen off and pop a new one on it. Right. I think there was actually some commotion that traditionally with the iPhone, if you had a broken iPhone and you went to an Apple store, they just kind of would take it and replace it with a new version or a new model entirely. And now I think there was a report saying that with the iPhone five, the stores are planning to fix the screen in the store instead of giving you a whole replacement. So yeah, that definitely should cut costs for Apple at least, if not for, for you. I was just going to say that cheaper for Apple, but does that mean cheaper for the user? Yeah, it usually doesn't. When you get these pretty straightforward, you know, savings and costs, for whatever reason, they just can't seem to trickle down, which, you know, other than in a capitalist economy, you would think trickle down economics, you know, the foundation of everything good and holy and all of that stuff. But anyway, I'm straying into a whole other territory. Can we wrap up this really, really famous and over discussed phone by talking about Verizon and the OT situation? Yeah, so this is like really interesting. It's a familiar story. So the iPhone five, if you buy it from Verizon, it has a SIM card slot, just like the sprint model and the AT&T model. But the SIM card slot on the iPhone five from Verizon is actually unlocked. So you can actually put an AT&T SIM card in there and walk around using it on AT&T's HSPA plus network, which is a bit of a surprise. None of the other LTE phones that Verizon has released are unlocked in such a fashion. If you try to put an AT&T SIM into it, it won't work. And so it's been kind of a bit of a surprise. We did see this last year with the 4S from Sprint, came with a SIM card slot unlocked out of the box. And it was later on, shortly after the release of the phone, it was updated to actually lock the slot. But what's different is that Verizon is saying that they're not going to lock it in the future. They're planning to leave it and keep it unlocked, which started a kind of a snowball of theories, thinking that the FCC's laws on the 700 megahertz spectrum that Verizon uses for its LTE network was requiring Verizon to unlock the SIM card slot for everyone. But Chris did an excellent report that kind of debunked that theory. And since the SIM card slot, the part that's unlocked to use, that allows you to use the phone on AT&T's network, doesn't even run on the 700 megahertz spectrum, and among other reasons, we kind of debunked that theory that it's just Verizon's just doing it for whatever reason it feels like. And mostly that it probably doesn't feel that it has a big loss to sell the phone unlocked instead of being forced by the FCC. I mean, why do you think we're doing it then? Right. But hang on real quick. Like what's Verizon's motivation? If it's not the FCC forcing their hand, if it's not, is it Apple forcing their hand? Is it Verizon just like coldly calculating? Well, I don't think, I don't think Apple's to buy it. I don't think Apple's involved at all. Okay. So it's Verizon. Let's, let's just assume that is it because they're going to have, uh, they know that the Verizon LTE works better for LTE global roaming and surviving just like straight up saying, well, if somebody really cares about unlocking or having a, you know, unlock GSM, then we're going to go ahead and offer that to them. Um, and not really advertise it, but just have it be out there and known. I mean, if that's what their justification of motivation is, I actually makes me really angry because like they will lock stuff down for no other reason or for whatever their reasons are for locking stuff down. Like Verizon always does, but there's one time they're like, oh, well we can get a little bit, bit of a net year, so let's just not lock it this time. And it's like, you know, be consistent. Yeah. Well, be a jerk, be a jerk all the time. We, we, we, we tested this with, with Verizon's other LTE phones. Like we had a razor M and we put an AT&T SIM card slot and it would refuse to work. It was definitely locked. Uh, and that's a, you know, very recent LTE phone from Verizon. So, um, why Verizon's doing it with the iPhone five? I really don't have a great answer other than it just doesn't feel like there's a big loss for it. Uh, if it's unlocked, I think that most people, I have a theory, I have a theory. Oh, hello. Hey, Mr. Ziegler is here. I'm so glad he's here. Machiavellian Chris, because that's, that's what my theory is. Uh, well, sorry, I was, I was off having, uh, some really important DM conversations with the federal communications commission. That's why I'm late. Oh my God. But, uh, yeah. Um, so, so iPhone five unlock. So here's my theory. Uh, I, I'm actually going to reject your theory, do you don't replace it with my own? I think what's happening is, uh, Verizon realizes that the, the iPhone five is the first C block device that's high profile enough to catch, uh, to catch the, you know, the attention of, of mainstream news outlets, which in turn is going to catch the attention or, you know, be more likely to catch the attention of the FCC. So I think that they're actually hedging their bets and saying, well, uh, you know, it'd be because everyone that I've talked to, uh, like no one seems to be able to agree on exactly what the rules mean, whether, uh, only the C block support of the device needs to be unlocked or if the entire phone needs to be unlocked. I think the rules are intentionally hazy. They never been tested. Nobody really knows what they means and we won't know what they mean until we go through the court system, which we haven't yet. I'm sure it's inevitable at some point it's going to happen. But in the meantime, I think that Verizon is just hedging their bets. Okay. Well, it certainly is given Verizon a fair amount of good press, um, because on the surface it looks like a consumer friendly move at least. What I'm sure what's going to happen is a bunch of people. Yeah. I mean, keep in mind that, that the iPhone five is one of the very few devices where, uh, the subsidy is greater than the ETF. That's very, very rare. Um, so, uh, or at least by this margin, it's, it's, it's rare. Um, you know, you get the, um, uh, the three 99 device. And I mean, I actually, I guess the subsidy is the same across, um, all three models. But anyway, uh, so, you know, you can, you can get a device on contract from Verizon, immediately break your contract, pay the ETF and then take it to simple mobile, uh, you know, or team mobile. And there you go. And it T-Mobile is pushing their iPhone, uh, you know, support so hard right now. It's hilarious. Uh, you know, they're issuing press releases on it. So, um, you know, I think that Verizon could end up becoming a reliable and desirable source for these unlocked devices. Which is absolutely blows my mind, uh, knowing how Verizon's been for the past decade. So it's just, it's just like really hard for me to wrap my head around that. Let's just say for the record, we don't all agree with Dieter who says, if you're going to be a jerk, just be a jerk all the time. Like if this is the start of a beautiful new relationship between Verizon and its users, uh, for whatever reason, that's a good thing. And I'm sorry, I'm trying to derail you guys from discussing the Apple five and Verizon, uh, but for the sake of our non us audience and the sake of our audience who might be a little bit sick of this phone by now, which I am, and I don't even have the goddamn thing. Can we please talk about HCS windows phones because they're kind of sexy. Yeah. I mean, they're super sexy. Let's talk. I mean, we talked like we didn't really talk about them last week. I guess we, our show was just before the announcement. Uh, so we didn't really know what was going to happen, but, uh, HTC revealed it's windows phone eight X and windows phone eight S last week. Um, both of which look like really attractive devices that are running the obviously windows phone eight platform. Um, and what might be the most interesting part about this story is the new, uh, rekindled tight relationship that HTC and Microsoft have for these devices. Um, so far, or to the point where Microsoft actually picked the name out for the smartphones and, and, and put windows phone right in the name and is calling these signature devices for the platform, which is a little bit different of a relationship than HTC has enjoyed with Microsoft in the past. Uh, and, um, Nokia was, you know, the, uh, the chosen one, uh, for, for windows phone for a long time, or at least that's how it seemed. Um, and so, so this is a little bit different and a little bit of a shakeup in the, uh, windows phone family, I guess you could say, uh, you know, just what are we about? A month away from its expected launch. Did anyone figure out what a signature device actually means? Like, what are they saying with those words? Well, it's going to be the center of the marketing for windows phone eight by Microsoft. So if we see market, uh, Microsoft marketing windows phone eight, um, like if we see a printed ad, uh, I would expect to see these HTC devices front and center, and then, you know, maybe to the side, you'll see the Nokia and maybe to further to the side, you'll see the Samsung's, which is kind of pretty rough. Yeah. Yes. Uh, the ATV is actually going to bring a windows phone into its own and it's going to become the dominant platform because of the ATV. DTS, uh, don't even get started on that phone. Nobody's actually seen the person yet. It's still pretty much like a render in a photo out of so at the moment, but you know, I actually got to see the eight X today in fact, um, because I'm special and they do special things like that for me. Um, and first of all, I think we need to separate the eight X and eight S a little bit. The eight S is such a mess of colors that I struggled to comprehend it. Uh, I think it has like four different color options and only one of them is relatively consistent in being reddish route is the yellow, gray and black version. I mean, you guys have seen these, right? They kind of, I think the yellow, gray and black version is so hot. I think the yellow, gray and black is, is of all of the ones for the eight S I think the yellow, gray and black is the winner. I mean, it just looks cool. Yeah. Nuts. You're completely guys backing up. He's nuts. Right. I'm with Dan. Wait, wait. You're talking about the eight S right? Yes. Yes. Correct. Eight tests. Yeah. The four each one, the smaller one, the mid ranger. Well that phone is completely irrelevant. So it's all about the eight X. I mean, look, you know, I will say that that HTC has taken a very, very different, um, you know, you can look at it two ways. Again, I'm thinking back to your report on, on, you know, color and how that's really playing into windows phones angle. But color aside, yes, both the new HTC and also of course the Nokia's are very colorful. If you look beyond that, I think, I just think that these are very different devices, aluminum nine 20 and the eight X because the nine 20 is such a thick and heavy phone. That's really pushing a camera quality and that's something the eight X is not really seeking to do and it's much thinner and I think sexier. So yeah, well I don't know, I don't know if that's accurate though because HTC is like big differentiator with its, any of its devices, but uh, you know, is the, the image sense, a chip is going to be in the eight X, which is the first time for a windows phone device to have the image sense. So I think as far as an HTC size, uh, it definitely is innovating on the image front. Obviously, you know, to the rest of us, it's not doing nearly as much as the Lumia nine 20 is, but as far as being totally different devices, uh, the, the eight X and the nine 20 look really similar from the front and if you like turn them on the side, it just looks like the eight X is a flattened version of the nine 20. Yeah, but what, uh, well in pictures maybe, but I feel like in, in person they end up cut. Like if you have the opportunity to hold them back to back, they end up being very different phones. I think very much so. Very much so. Uh, just to mention here, somebody tweeted the, because when, when the eight S and the eight X will be in announced, uh, Tom Warren is the guy who covered them, uh, their whole release and got to play with them a lot more than myself over here in London. Uh, my excuse being that I wasn't in the country, otherwise I would have been all over them. But so I was a little bit detached from them. Um, but somebody tweeted at me saying, Hey Vlad, somebody took the one X or rather HT took the one X display and shrunk it down to 4.3 inches. You must be, you know, fruit about it. You must be really excited. Uh, so I was like, well, I need to take a look at this freaking windows phone eight X display. And I don't know that it's, I really don't think it's the same exact technology as the one X. It isn't, uh, quite so vibrant. It doesn't have quite the same view in angles, but it is a really good display. I think it's very similar to what we saw in the resound last year. The resound was a 4.3 inch super LCD, uh, two with the seven 20 P display. Um, I think it might, it might be a little bit, a newer version of that as opposed to the one X's display shrunken down. Potentially, but I mean, I'm a fan. I do. I do like the display on the eight X just like Chris. I'm also a fan of the build and the design. And I definitely think that when you get the nine 20 in hand and the eight X in hand, you can tell a big difference. And immediately I can tell you that I prefer the eight X again, because it's smaller, because it's thinner, lighter, et cetera. Um, not, let's say the Viva nine 20 is a bad phone or device, but it's still a big, bigger and chunkier. Um, but HTC is really shooting itself in the foot by losing track of the details with the eight X and the details of the eight X actually color. And maybe I'm being extremely nitpicky here, but the volume slider, uh, the power button and the camera button, they're a sort of orange ish red. Whereas on the red model that is, whereas the phone itself is a pinky shade of red. And I really just really liked the red version of this phone. Um, but they just don't matching all the colors. So that red version actually has three different shades of the color. The yellow slash green version again has multiple shades of the color. And it's those little things that just kind of pestering and annoying you. And just finally, uh, to mention on the topic of the camera, um, HTC is still keeping the software lockdown completely. Like they wouldn't let me unlock the phone. Like there's, there's an actual passcode lock on the phone, but because of the windows phone camera functionality, you can actually turn on the camera without unlocking the phone and take a few photos and look at the photos. And I'm actually impressed by the eight X just, I just took a few quick photos with it and I'm impressed by his camera quality. I thought that phone is so thin. They would go for a really cheap camera sensor and it doesn't seem like they have, which is, you know, thumbs up so far. Anyway, I just like to point out how crazy it is that we've had, um, we have five now windows phone eight devices to Nokia's two HTC and Samsung's a T and Microsoft like is not led at any of these phone unveiling, you know, letting people see the full story of windows phone eight. No. And, and the software is nowhere near done because even though they were locked, one of them managed to crash multiple times in the same way. I really don't think I'm supposed to be saying this, but whatever, I didn't sign any embargo sheet. So I'm just telling you guys, the software is not done and it's, it's slowing everybody down and everybody would just love to be able to show off their devices to the fullest, but we're just going to have to wait. And if we trust Tom Warren, which I do, if I had kids, I would trust Tom Warren with my kids. It's basically going to happen. I think October 28th. What's going to happen October, you mean the, the unveiling of the platform, right? I think we just lost Vlad. Yeah. That's when we're expecting to see windows phone eight debut entirely so that we'll see everything that Microsoft has been essentially holding back from us to this up to this point. If they've been holding anything back, I don't think it's clear that they have. Well, I mean, I think, I think Microsoft would like us to think that it's been holding a lot of things back and that's the reason that it doesn't want us to see any of the software yet. But you know, you have a good point, Chris. They could not be, they could, they could just be holding for no reason. Then I'm going to storm Redmond with pitchforks. All tables in Redmond will be flipped if there's nothing new. Here it is. It's the thing that we wouldn't let you see for the past three months. Did you guys know it has screenshots? It can do screenshots. Well, so far, so far, what does eight have that 7.8 does not? We know that it has the, the kids feature. Kids corner. Awesome. There's something with rooms or something. Is that, is that eight exclusive or is that also 7.8? Oh, I know, I know. Windows Phone 8 supports higher resolution displays and multi-core processors. Oh my God. Yeah, but 7.8, 7.8 is mostly going to be for existing hardware anyway. Right. So, but I mean, you know, I'm just saying that like, you know, when, when these, when these platforms come out, presumably there are going to be differences between the two. I mean, I suppose if, if Microsoft is holding anything back, it would be that. That's a pretty big thing to, to, you know, withhold and that we haven't seen and we're not clear on yet. What's that? Differences between 7.8 and eight? Right. Yeah. Well, yeah, I know that that's exactly my point. Yeah. Right. We can expect some, some enterprise stuff that will only work in eight, you know, in terms of device management and other corporatey type things. Yeah, but nobody cares about that. That's one of the big advantages to switching to the new structure, the kernel. Right. Yeah. I, I, so I heard a rumor, I heard a rumor a few weeks ago from a very reliable source that Microsoft made a last minute decision to port a bunch of supposedly eight exclusive features back to 7.8. Which I think pushed both. Really? I think pushed both versions back a bit and, and I was chatting with Tom about it and he said, yeah, that made a lot of sense. So so it seems like they might be looking to actually close the gap between 7.8 and eight. I don't know if that's designed to appease the 10 existing owners or, I was going to say, I mean, you've already taken the bad, the bad press from having it, you know, having to confirm that you wouldn't offer an upgrade path from windows phone seven to windows 28 phone eight. You've already like given the fig leaf or the olive branch of a few features. I mean, just stick to your guns and focus on the new platform. Don't spend, don't spend your cycles on seven. And I know that's crazy for me to say, but once you've made the decision and already taken the hit for not offering a full upgrade, I mean, unless there's something there that they're back porting that they feel is essential to the entire ecosystem so that that all windows phones can play together and have this feature, I wouldn't spend the development cycles on it. Right. Yeah. I mean, I would agree. I don't, I don't know what their business, I mean, first of all, it's a rumor, but secondly, you know, we, yeah, we don't know what the business logic is. Right. So, I mean, I totally agree with both of you. You know, if that is true, then, you know, why would you waste time supporting the older platform when, you know, for all things considered, your bet is on the new platform and all the things that are involved with that. So we are stuck in an agreement. Hey, Vlad's back. That's what we're doing. What was that, Dieter? We talked really quick about Nokia's response to, you know, HTC's announcement. It was a little bit catty, as I recall. It was very catty. Let me see if I can pull it up here. Now, the official response was referred to it as a, quote, tactical rebranding. And then, you know, Nokia's executive Chris Weber posted some tweets saying that it takes more than matching colors to match the innovation of the Lumia 920 and happy to add a new signature to the Windows Phone ecosystem behind the Lumia 920. So it's, you know, it's a bit of a catty back and forth. And I don't think we really expected Nokia to respond in this fashion. I certainly didn't. Well, but I mean, they are, it is a really weird spot that Microsoft is all of a sudden throwing a whole bunch of love behind HTC after, you know, everybody just sort of thought of Nokia as the flagship Windows Phone device, the OEM. You know, the difference is like if HTC is a Windows Phone 8X and 8S, and I still am angry at HTC for calling phones X and S because I've got to enunciate so hard to enunciate them. Anyway, if they bomb out, they don't work, they can still take, you know, another shot at Android. I mean, Lord knows that they're not going to stop making Android phones. But Nokia is all in. Like, if Windows Phone doesn't work for Nokia, they don't really have a viable plan B. Not in the short term. Not for, you know, they might have something in Skunk Works, but they're not coming out with another smartphone. I highly doubt that they would go to Android. And it's interesting the relationship or this new promotion behind HTC from Microsoft because Nokia has put so much more investment into the Windows Phone platform between its dedicated apps for the platform. It's pretty much essentially pushed aside every other smartphone platform in order to push its weight behind Windows Phone. So yeah, like you're saying, if Windows Phone fails, Nokia kind of goes down with it, at least from what we can tell now. I think that Microsoft owes it to all of its Windows Phone OEMs. I mean, these guys need to really stick together right now. They can't afford to be, you know, to have a civil war. And it's Microsoft's responsibility as the patron saint of this platform to kind of keep the OEMs in line. And this behavior that they're exhibiting with the so-called signature HTC phones is not conducive to a healthy relationship between these OEMs, obviously. And it's very strange to me that they're doing this. I think that they need to be treating these OEMs equally and fairly. And I think that after, you know, it took them a long time to try to convince everybody that their relationship with non-Nokia OEMs would not be damaged by the Nokia partnership. And they got over that hump and HTC and Samsung came back to the table with additional phones. And now look what's happening. Now HTC is getting this special treatment. And it's very strange to me because, you know, to what end? Like a customer goes into a store, they're certainly not going to say, I want the signature phone, because what does that mean? But then even worse, if a sales guy comes to them and says, well, we have these two devices, we have this Lumia 920 from Nokia, and then we have this HTC phone that's the signature phone, then the customer is going to be like, well, I don't know what that means, but that sounds important or good or something. I guess I'll take the HTC. It's just bad. Microsoft should be the Switzerland of this platform. And they're not being that at all. Yeah. Yeah. No, that's exactly it. I feel like this entire move to brand the HTC devices as signature devices is superfluous. It's not something that Microsoft needed to do, which together with the move to the movie you guys were discussing to back port features down to Windows phone at 7.8 is kind of you can just move on. You know, you're big enough. You're major enough. People will follow you or they'll, you know, burn for the fact that they're not doing it. I mean, HTC still kind of wants to be split between Android and Windows phone. And as Dan was saying earlier, is now reemphasizing Windows phone. Those companies, HTC and Samsung, they prefer to have some sort of a fallback plan if things don't go perfectly according to plan with Android. So I mean, my only justification from Microsoft's perspective might be to say that HTC won't have invested so heavily into designing, let's say, the Windows phone 8x. I'm not going to give HTC that much credit for designing the 8s. So maybe that's what it is. Microsoft giving HTC that branding and that extra cache gets in return more investment, more design time, more production time from HTC. Basically just gets better phones. I don't know. I just feel like that might have been something Microsoft could have just simply paid for given that it has cash reserves and all of that. But also let's talk to mention that Microsoft has its signature series with Windows laptops and maybe desktops as well, but just Windows in general. And the signature series with Windows was just bloatware free versions, which is kind of hilarious because that basically means every Windows phone device ever shipped is pretty much signature because Microsoft locks down software so tight. So if you have a Windows phone, it's a signature Windows phone. You can tell people that. Nobody's going to know what it means, but you can tell them that. I mean, well, what HTC was saying and Microsoft was saying about the naming of these devices is as far as what the signature means, I believe Steve Ballmer might've said this or it was an HTC executive that said when somebody goes to a store and they want a Microsoft phone or a Windows phone, this phone has Windows phone right in its name. It's pretty obvious what it is. And I think that was what the idea behind the naming of these Windows phone 8X and Windows phone 8S was. Well, it's pretty easy to draw a parallel to... Go ahead, Dieter. I was just going to say, do we have to call it the Windows phone 8X running Windows phone? The Windows phone 8X? Would it be even more confusing as the Windows phone 8X running Android? That would really blow minds. Oh my God. That would actually be pretty cool. Would that hardware be cool? But what I was just going to mention is that Microsoft has already had this signature program in place on Windows where if you go into a Microsoft store, they sell a number of so-called signature devices that are stripped completely free of third party software essentially. And it's just pure Windows instead of all the crapware that you usually get when you buy a new PC. And so from that perspective, if you think of it that way, Microsoft is really slapping Nokia in the face because they're saying, well, we don't want all your crapware on these Windows phones. So we're going to give a special brand to these HTCs, which are basically shipping, you know, quote unquote stock, even though I'm not too comfortable using the term stock talking about a Windows phone device. But you know, if you think about it like that, you know, people draw that parallel. If they've heard the term signature used with Windows PCs before, then that's certainly the impression they're going to get with these phones. Correct me if I'm wrong because I may be like totally high, but isn't Nokia providing the mapping services for all of Windows phone 8? Yes. So essentially it would be like Microsoft saying, we don't want all of your crapware. We'll take some of it. But we don't want this other stuff that you insist on putting here. But we'll take your maps and we'll use those. And we're going to give those to everybody else as well. Yeah. I'm just going to raise two quick points here. Just two quick points here. First of all, Chris somehow managed to miss the bit where I mentioned the signature Windows devices and decided to make that point after me. But he augmented it with something interesting about Nokia. So I guess we'll just allow that. Also I'm going to wait so I can't physically test it. Look, Vlad, Vlad, I'm in a talk only mode right now. I'm not listening. I'm only talking. How is that any different than normal? The second point actually. I still remember when Microsoft and Nokia announced the whole partnership and Microsoft was making such a huge deal out of all the maps being integrated into Microsoft's just broad range of mapping services. It wasn't just going to be for it was just going to be Bing Maps. It was going to become Bing Maps. And that's where it's going right now. That Nokia's maps is essentially becoming Microsoft's mapping software. And to me at the time, I was like, why do they make such a big deal out of something so kind of regular and conventional as mapping? And now that Apple has tried to do it by itself, I can really see why that was such a big deal for Microsoft. Oh, totally. Like acquiring that part of Nokia was probably worth it for Microsoft just to save itself the source of headaches that Apple is enduring right now, because if you think Apple is having headaches with maps, just imagine a company that doesn't have the same level of customer trust that Apple has trying to sell them that sort of service. It would just be a nightmare. And very good point, Vaughn. So here's clearly what happened. Back five, six years ago when HTC and Microsoft were flying as high as they ever flew with Windows Mobile, Peter Chow, HTC CEO, Steve Ballmer were out partying and Steve Ballmer like accidentally killed somebody. And only Peter Chow was the only witness. And so rather than report him, he took a chip. And now that HTC has fallen on hard times and the one series hasn't done so well, he cast that chip in. And so that is why they get to call this on Windows song. I'm pretty sure that's the bomber killing somebody. Steve Ballmer killing somebody is a is a is one of the the storylines in Pulp Fiction, if I'm not mistaken. Oh, man. It's got weird. Really? OK, so so let's get on CEOs. Yeah. Let's talk about Thorsten Heinz and what he had to show us and tell us at the new Blackberry Jam. Thorsten is such a like just a nice guy. I mean, compared to Lazaridis and Vasily, like he gets on stage and you just want to like just like chuck him on the shoulder. Oh, nice job, man. And the other thing that's great about him is he doesn't lie about what Blackberry is anymore. He admits that they're not going to be number one, which was that he had this Q&A after Blackberry 10 was quasi sort of kind of announced for the second time, but not fully announced where he said we have a clear shot at number three. And later on, he clarified and said, no, no, no, I mean, we're aiming for number one long term and number one in all of mobile computing. In fact, he even took a swipe at Microsoft. You don't understand. People aren't going to use PCs or phones and tablets. We can be number one or both of those long term. But in the short term, we're aiming for number two. We're aiming for number one. We have a clear shot at number three and I think they can pull it off. And I don't know. So that's the context for what they announced, which was Blackberry 10 and a new device for developers. Well, I mean, if we want to go back to that, what's happening? Delay isn't a problem at all, guys. Go ahead, Dieter. Well, OK, I'll just jump into riffing on what Blackberry 10 is. So we've already seen some of it. They showed it up once and what they showed off this time wasn't the whole thing again, but it was like another iteration. And they're in this weird spot where they've got to keep showing different parts of it so they can get developers excited to make apps because they need apps to make the platform succeed. But they don't want to actually have their full announce. So they have these like half announcements. So what we saw Blackberry 10 is we finally know what the full UI paradigm looks like. And it's weird. You have up to eight apps running out of time and they're always running just like on the playbook. And they fit in these little things that they're calling active frames, which by the way is the worst name ever for a UI element. And they're like little miniature versions of the app. And you can switch between those really easily by swiping up on the screen. There's a grid of icons on the right hand side of the home screen. You can swipe over to those. And then on the left hand side of the home screen and actually on the left hand side of every single screen is this thing they're calling Blackberry Hub. And what that is is the unified like messaging and notification zone where all your emails are there, your Twitter messages are there, your LinkedIn messages are there, your Facebook messages are there. And it's also like developers can throw notifications in that area. So you can make this swipe up into the right gesture, which it works pretty well, but it's not quite as fluid as it could be from anywhere in the OS to jump right into your notifications in your email, which is kind of cool. It's kind of clever. If you use your phone primarily for messaging, it makes a lot of sense. So can I just jump in here quickly? Because I was looking at that and I couldn't possibly avoid thinking of the Nokia N9 and the MeeGo Hamilton UI, because that was based around three central home screens, which were notifications, applications and multitasking. And in particular with Rooms Blackberry 10, you have four of these active frames where you preview. I mean, it's essentially visual multitasking. Preview the applications that you have running. And the Nokia N9 also has the same four app interface. So to me, it was like you're just copying them. I mean, I think it's a good thing to copy, but it's like, where's the innovation room? That from MeeGo, they copied from WebOS. They've copied from the iPhone because you can drag and drop icons. The icon grid is just like the iPhone icon grid. I'm trying to think, do they steal anything from Android? Yeah, you swipe down from the top to bring up menus and stuff. I guess that's not Android. That's more of a webOS again. But like, unified notifications. They basically just borrowed from everything that they could and clashed it together in OS. And so the question is going to be like, will it, when you actually use it day to day, will it feel elegant and awesome or will it just feel kind of cobbled together? Well, there are two things to keep in mind here. One is that I'm assuming that they still have a number of TAT employees working on this UI. And TAT has done some really great stuff in the past. And also, we heard at some point, I don't know if this is something that we wrote about or not, but we've definitely heard that there was a concentrated effort at some point in RIM's recent history to hire X webOS people. And of course, we saw a lot of striking similarities with the playbook. And I think that that's ongoing. But one very important point that I wanted to make that absolutely no one on this podcast has made yet is that there's some striking similarities to Nokia's Harmatan UI. At this point, I'm just trolling Vlad. That's a very original point there, Chris. I'd like to hear you elaborate on that. Please do, Chris. Well, I want to say, going back to the comment of being number three, or they have a clear shot at being number three, just for us to be clear, right now, RIM is in number three. It is still the third most dominant smartphone platform. So really, what their clear shot is just trying to hold on to what they have and not let any more of that slip through their fingers. Yeah, he may have been referring to number three in North America. And I don't know if they still have managed to hang on to number three in North America. And he may have even been referring to number three speaking from an OEM standpoint. So it would be Apple, Samsung, and then RIM, instead of iOS, Android, and then Blackberry. But I mean, let's be really clear. They've also got some new enterprise stuff. They've got the thing where you can launch secure enterprise apps right next to your regular apps. And there's this weird toggle thing that you drag down on a blank spot on the icon screen to switch between which apps you can see. It's pretty weird. But I mean, if you've got to have secure apps, you've got to do something. It's going to be an elegant no matter what. But this battle is between Microsoft and Windows Phone 8 and RIM. And they're both trying to square the circle of appealing to enterprise and CIOs and IT guys for managing devices in a corporation and consumers at the same time. And I mean, I think Microsoft really believes it's going to just completely take over whatever RIM had left. And RIM is doing everything it can to keep that from happening. And until that battle shakes out, they're not going to be able to actually take on Android and iOS in a real way. OK. So, DJ, I have a question for you. So if you just assume for a moment that we anticipate to be the first library device, library in London, or so it was codenamed, just imagine that it has great industrial design. So let's take industrial design out of the picture. Imagine also there's a great camera. Let's take those aspects, the hardware, away from it. Are you excited by this software that you're seeing today? Like, yes, it's a coupling together of a whole bunch of what we still think are good ideas from other operating systems. But if you see it all come together with great industrial design and it actually flows and is responsive, which are big assumptions, does that excite you? Are you going to be psyched for the first half of next year? I'm intrigued. Like, I'm interested. I mean, you know, Dan was complaining that my hands-on post with the latest version of the BlackBerry 10 beta was really long. I was like, well, yeah, but this is the first new smartphone operating system since Windows Phone. And so at least there's some attention because they're trying to make something out of it. And there are some pretty good ideas here. So I like good ideas. I like them to be successful. So from that perspective, like, I'm interested. But am I psyched? Am I excited? There's nothing here that makes my jaw drop. There's nothing here that makes me go, oh my God, I must have that. And I don't know what that would be in the mobile space right now because I'm cynical and jaded and hate everything. But they definitely don't have that. And since they definitely don't have that, you know, I don't know what they can do to get it. And I don't know if, you know, is it enough to like tread water, which seems to be kind of their goal, and like pick up a little bit back in North America? It might be, especially if like what's left of the BlackBerry users are willing to transition over to it relatively quickly. But they definitely don't have something that is going to make somebody not buy an iPhone right now. They definitely don't have something that's going to make somebody not buy an Android phone and wait. Like, it's cool. It's interesting. But it's not like, oh my God, I must have that. And I honestly don't know what they could have done to like engender that feeling. I wish they had kind of because, you know, I'm like the underdogs. But they haven't done that here so far. I think it's a striking difference from what we saw in 2009 when webOS was introduced. When webOS was introduced, I think it had a lot of those things that are like, oh my God, this is incredible. And this is like, you know, really cool new ideas that we haven't seen anybody done before, or anybody do before. And it's like one of those I must have it type of deals. We all know how that worked out in the long run. But RIM doesn't, like Dita was saying, have any of that. These are all ideas that we've seen before that are just kind of cobbled together here and there into this RIM playbook type of user interface shrunk down onto a small screen. Well, I mean, I will say like, if hub is done right, that is actually kind of new. But it's just not that like, it's not like that jazzy, right? It's not that holy crappy, because it's like, oh, hey, you've got all your messages and notifications in one place where like acting on the messages and like talking to people and doing email in the same place as, you know, your Twitter notifications and your push notifications from your game and whatever else. So like taking those two functions and sort of throwing them all into one, you know, relatively convenient place that's accessible from anywhere is a really cool idea. But you know, we have to see if it's actually going to work. I mean, the other thing to point out is we haven't seen the full final feature set of the OS. They haven't officially launched this yet. We don't know, you know, they haven't officially launched the devices. But they're in this weird spot where they're like, they're showing little bits and bobs of the OS. And then when they finally will completely launch it, a lot of it's going to be like, oh, well, we saw that before. And they're in a rock and a hard place because they've got to do this to get developers because they got to get whatever apps that they can. And so like, I don't know, I would not want to be in RIM's position. And you're right, that there are a lot of parallels to level S. And one of the parallels that they're afraid of is announcing everything and then having six months of waiting before they actually ship something. So they're announcing as much as they have to in order to get developers. But they're trying to minimize the amount of time between the full launch and availability of devices. Can we talk about their other efforts to woo developers aside from features in their OS? No, no. Rejected Dan. It didn't happen. I didn't see it. You didn't see it. It might have been the best thing on the Internet yesterday. I think we might have it have it queued up to play a clip for the show. Is that true? I think I'm getting the nod from from our control room. Yeah. Yeah. We kind of have to make this happen. Hmm. proposition So don't be misled The launch is just ahead We'll have blackberry timbre And no touch and no creation And though I know you're all wondering when It won't be forever It was all everybody thought it was funny and everybody was in on the joke that they were sort of making fun of themselves because you know there's a really there's a big circle the wagons mentality around blackberry people right now and blackberry developers so it let off a bunch of steam but I mean it's like cringingly like hard to watch right and so the problem is like they put it on the internet and so while like I get the joke and developers get the joke is like you know somebody who has a teenager has a blackberry and uses from BBM that you know is going to see this completely out of context going to get the joke and appreciate what they're trying to do. Yeah but now listen they've already said the bar so freaking low. I mean I can't even get the bar in the frame here. I get so low with his previous advertising. This is just excellence. For him this is excellent. I think I think the head one with I believe was Christine Amelia and admittedly my expertise on pop sing singers isn't as great as my expertise on H.T.'s backlog of devices. But it was like a really really terrible confused weird ads which I think it has something to do with BBM. I don't even remember. I just I just remember being kind of cringing on rooms behalf. You know it was embarrassing on rooms behalf and I'm totally with you. I can see why people like this because it shows exactly as you're saying a sort of self-awareness from rim and a sort of humility that you absolutely will never have seen from my class radius and from the former company. So this just makes the company more approachable and being an underdog now which is what rim is acting like one will help it ultimately. And I understand that a lot of developers aren't just going to start investing their careers into rim just because it's a cute company but it doesn't hurt. I thought I was the only one that wasn't like completely cringing and freaked out by his video. I know that some other people at the verge like this is the worst thing I've ever seen. Josh like he tweeted this is the worst video I've ever seen. And like it's bad. So I mean it just feels very Microsofty like this is something Microsoft would have done in 1998. And it just kind of reeks of that. I know it's supposed to be a very self-aware tongue-in-cheek type of thing but just it just reeks of that corporate doesn't really get it type of vibe when you're seeing it from the outside. If you're not there at the the. What does Chris think? He's been kind of quiet. Hey guys can we talk about the iPhone 5 for a minute. I just have. I hate to completely change that. We'll get back to rim. But I was just sitting here holding this iPhone 5 and I observed something very important. Back up. Back up. Stop. Stop right there. I just want to point out that the thing that Chris said would happen last week on the podcast is exactly what happened. He didn't preorder. He said he wasn't going to get it. And then he went and waited in line. I want to say you said you were waiting in the iPhone line not one but two days in a row. Is that true. No you're making that up. I was there only on Friday. Okay. Yeah. No actually I was I was in a tent in front of the Apple store the night before. No. Yeah. It was really easy. Yeah I guess I should talk about my my experience getting the phone. So you know AT&T just opened this quote unquote chip store in Chicago which we did a piece on not too long ago and I think that everyone just kind of forgot that it existed because it was like there were like you know 10 people in line for the phone at 4 p.m. on Friday and they had stock of everything. They were no danger of running out of anything. Meanwhile like a block down the street at the Apple store you know is lying around the block. So yeah anyway so but no the only point I wanted to make I'll be real quick about it. This is that if you hold the iPhone 5 until the side to side the screen gets very dim which is something that you don't have on the one X if I remember correctly. So I would I would venture to say that the one X retains the title of the best display on a mobile phone. So you're saying the viewing angles of the one X are better than the iPhone 5 display. Yes. OK. Yeah I think I agree with that. Although Chris I got to say Vlad made that exact point earlier. My only goal is to remake every point that Vlad makes from now on on every part of the city. When I was making that point I was making about the 8x not about the iPhone and I'm not even sure that Chris was around at that time because Chris salt at some point like a superhero. Right. Well like I said I was too busy de-emming with the FCC. So Chris's goal is to make your point over and over again and my goal is to just troll the podcast and lie and take us off topic and get derailed which I have done successfully. Also there's one other thing that I want to say about RIM that they gave out new developer devices to the developers here. They're calling it the dev alpha B and they said they'd ran out of the original ones so they had to give out make new ones. And looking at these new ones like it's really really obvious that this is basically the L series of London the first device it's going to ship. And what they did is they took off the outer casing of the phone and replaced it with a big ugly plastic box. Like it's very clear that that's what happened. That makes perfect sense too because you know why would they spend money making another device for developers when they you know they need to start making the actual phone. So if they're going to actually hit you know their ship date they need to have stuff in carrier testing now. In fact they do have stuff in carrier testing now. So why would they waste resources making a phone that they're never going to ship when they could use the actual phone and just put a different box on it so that you know it doesn't turn out accidentally announcing the device today. Right. By the way. What is really great on the dev alpha. What was happening there was a process was the screen resolution etc. I'm kind of out of that. They're not talking processor but it's 16 gigs of storage gig of RAM and a 1280 by 768 screen and I'm pretty sure it's OLED. And you know what you know there's some hang ups and crashes but when BlackBerry 10 works and it's not bugging out which is still is a little bit because it's still in beta. It's actually really fast really responsive. I'm pretty pleased with it. The screen resolution is interesting because they've told developers that they should target 1280 by 720 and 720 by 720. But that the first device that ships would be 768 by 1280. And like that's just kind of weird that you know they're telling developers to target a screen resolution that isn't going to be on the first flagship device of the ship. Yeah that is odd and it'll be interesting to see how that's handled if it's done with letterboxing or I guess zooming or stretching. Yeah. I'm pretty sure they recommended letterboxing. So is that a sign that RAM no longer has the component muscle to like source displays that they want instead they had to take what was available on the market. I think it definitely could be. I also think that it might them giving developers that guidance is actually kind of a nice thing because you know they knew that the square one was going to be 720 by 720 so they're just giving the developers as few targets as possible which is something that RIM has never done. Like developing for BlackBerry has always been a huge mess and you know RIM has pretty much admitted it. And so it's I was talking to Kevin from factory about this a little bit that they're probably going to they're getting smarter about sourcing stuff and they're getting smarter about making fewer versions of you know their hardware because with old BlackBerry devices they was like redoing it all over again every time they ship the phone. But I'm guessing that it was just a matter of like they had the screen they had to ship and that the next one's gonna be 720 and so they just tried to simplify the message to their developers. Was there any any other features of the dev alpha B hardware that kind of stood out to you or just kind of. I mean it's got a camera. I don't know how good it is. It's you know it's it's a it's a phone in a box it's meant for developer purposes so there's not a whole lot to say there until we actually get to test the final hardware even even if I'm right. Is the final hardware in an ugly shell. It's not fair to like you know actually judge it because they're not calling it final hardware and you know there might be tiny divisions between now and they actually ship. So and you know in terms of like developers like there aren't a whole lot of big names here I think biggest name here is probably four square. They got trotted up on stage but like Facebook is gonna be on it. Twitter is gonna be on it. LinkedIn is gonna be on it. As far as I know all those apps are developed by RIM not by those companies. There'll be a bunch of game off games but there's not like you know they didn't promise Instagram. They didn't promise Skype. They didn't promise Hulu. So there's a real big question of do they have those apps lined up and they just are waiting to announce them or are they just not going to have them. Right. Actually I was just going to say go through the device. It would be really hilarious if RIM came back and introduced to London or the L series and started telling us about how much thinner and how much lighter it is than the current brick that is showing us people. And then tried to pitch that as like this is how far we've come over the past five months. We took this old shell. We stuck this new one and it's so much better. I mean listen the other thing is like you were saying Dieter. RIM is going to be trickling out announcements of features and things like that over the course of the next six months or however long it takes to release this first phone release BlackBerry 10. So Facebook and Twitter apps are a good start to having those at launch. I would be more reassured if RIM announced that we have an email app and a calendar app at launch. Those are kind of important. But also I'm seeing here one of our headlines says that app submissions begin on October 10th. So which is the 10th of the 10th whether you're using the US calendar or the normal Cuban calendar. Kind of a nice little coincidence but that gives a lot of time and space for RIM and others to do a bit of development and get the platform up to speed. So let's try and be optimistic. Because that's what we can really do with RIM. Optimism. Indeed. Which is kind of the wrong note to wrap up on. Yeah usually we end on RIM and it's always such a down note. I mean I think in some respects this is a down note because being optimistic with RIM is like the most futile thing in the mobile industry. Oh no wait I have a really good down note we can end on. Samsung and TouchWiz and the dialer code. Yes you have some experience with that right Dieter? Yeah so I mean I haven't been following too closely other than because I've been here at the BlackBerry thing but I did help help test this. So apparently TouchWiz phones have a thing where you can dial in a code on the dialer and hit send and I guess not hit send and it will hard reset the phone and erase everything. And like it's actually relatively common on a lot of phones you can send commands via SMS and so someone figured out that you could send the command to open a dialer. Oh no it's not SMS you could you could send a command open the dialer via an iFrame in the web browser or just by clicking a link which is similar to an SMS vulnerability. Anyway the point is I've entered a link and I hard reset my phone but it was really weird because it didn't happen right away it sat on the screen for a little bit and so I had to test it a couple of times. And it doesn't seem like it's consistent across every Samsung device. I know Vlad you said you weren't seeing it on your Galaxy S3 is that right? Right not my own but we've got one here in the UK and we tested that one to death and it just it didn't affect it. The thing here and the thing that has emerged today is actually that this is a more widespread thing actually that we initially thought it doesn't seem to be touch specific anymore. Which is a really helpful one I would like to clarify by making zero statements about touch with like it's not a touch with issue and your Samsung like your first job will be to come out to people and say this is not a touch with problem. But it's a dialer issue and somebody has done some research into is looked into it they found the same vulnerability on other Android devices so it's not Samsung exclusive it's not touch with exclusive. So shouldn't just bash Samsung too hard. And apparently this isn't a vulnerability that has been identified and it's been patched. But this is the problem here that is in passion some Android devices and not others so the Galaxy S2 still needs a firmware update to get this fixed up. Some Galaxy S3 seems to be running the latest software which makes it invulnerable to this thing and some others like theaters seem to be running potentially an older version of software again. Samsung's communication here has been really sucky to be honest so we're not really perfectly clear on what exactly is going on but the best thing to say is that the very latest version of the software I mean Jelly Bean is apparently completely unaffected. Galaxy Nexus devices are unaffected. If you have the very latest version of whatever Android software your phone manufacturer is making available that will be your best way to avoid this. The other thing is don't click links that you don't know where they're going to lead you to. Don't don't click links that I send you to because I send that link to Dieter and he resets his phone. It was my fault. I think the answer is don't click links. You don't do it. You can't type everything into the world are manually admittedly. Yes. If you're clicking links on your mobile phone. Something's wrong. Like you should be using a mouse. Yes this is entirely the user's fault. This entirely. All right on that note I think I think that's a good good wrap up for our mobile show this week. Would you say so. Bring it. I think it's going to be great. I believe you did the intro so you do the outro there Vlad. Oh man I was asking that just so I could avoid doing it. But yeah why not. Why not. Let's see. What are we supposed to say. What is important. Like I was saying there isn't that much important important information contained in the introduction when we know that everyone who's watching listening to the live stream the recording knows where they're getting themselves in for. So really introducing it is kind of an act of vanity. And the outro is another act of vanity. But let's do it. Let's not meander with it. You can find us on Twitter. Dan is at DC Cypherd I believe or C for these are background. Chris is at Z power and I'm at a really mysterious place that you don't know. Also I'm trying to tweet so I'm not going to tell you where I am. You won't find me on Twitter hopefully at least for a couple of days so I can get in touch with my friends and my roots and shave at some point. You can email us at mobile show at the verge dot com if the email hasn't changed and you can get in touch with us via our lovely website the virtual come where you can comment on this live recording post. Please do take me with critiques about facial hair styles and other such things of import and please take part in our forums. We do that too and we love reading our readers feedback and thoughts so that we can rip them off and talk about something new next week's mobile show. So until then. All right. Thanks for watching guys.
 I missed last week's show and I was so gutted about the whole thing that I decided I would
 commandeer the whole introduction, just jump right in, get rid of Dieter, get rid of Chris,
 ban that imposter, they're all gone, it's just me.
 And speaking of the introduction actually, have you ever thought about who we're doing
 it for?
 Because I have.
 I've spent a lot of time thinking about it and I realized nobody actually comes to our
 show without knowing what they're coming in and getting themselves in for.
 So I'm not even going to introduce it, you guys know what this is.
 Hello guys, welcome to the VVS show.
 Episode 18, week of September 24th, I am Vlad Savov.
 I'm Dan Seifert.
 Hey, there's somebody else.
 Hey, how's it going?
 And Dieter Bohn.
 Yes sir.
 Dieter Bohn is joining us via a phone, which is really fitting, this being the Verge Mobile
 show and everything else.
 So Dieter, which Blackberry are you using today?
 Yeah, I'm not using the Blackberry Dev Alpha B because I'm not a developer, I guess, so
 I don't have one.
 I don't own a single Blackberry anymore, actually, which is sad, but also not sad at all.
 It's sad, but it's also entirely not surprising.
 Well, I mean, the thing is I only own one.
 I'm really shedding a tear for it.
 So as you guys might notice that Chris is not with us right now.
 Hopefully he'll be able to join us in a little bit, but we're going to plow ahead with just
 the three of us for now.
 Well, I mean, the truth is we don't really like Chris.
 Just three of us.
 And we never have.
 Yeah.
 Speak for yourself, Dieter.
 Your vendetta with Chris is like a whole other thing.
 It's quite a show.
 But that's actually a fitting number.
 I didn't say I don't love it.
 Just the three of us.
 But just the three of us is a fitting number.
 And we'll get it.
 We'll get onto that because room was really bullish about having a real shot at number
 three, which is then we're saying just before the show is we're going to take it all the
 way, guys, all the way to number three.
 So rim is high aspirations, high ambitions, receive platform.
 But we know who's number one.
 Or do we?
 Oh, well, we know who shares the number one spot.
 And that's Apple with the iPhone.
 And I'm actually surprised.
 We've been talking about the iPhone five so long.
 I'm actually surprised that it only just went on sale this past weekend.
 And it feels like forever.
 The initial sales have been.
 Yeah, it has been breaking records as usual.
 We've had a chance to review it.
 Some of you guys have had a chance to play with and use it.
 I've only I've only seen it really and play with that mockup way back at the foot.
 So I'll let you guys take it away.
 I mean, then how do you feel about the iPhone five?
 Well, you know, like you said, it feels like it's been around forever.
 I mean, it just it.
 I've had mine less than a week and it feels like an old friend because I knew about it
 for so long for before it actually hit the market.
 But you know, it's exactly what we kind of expected it to be.
 If you didn't catch our iPhone review, iPhone five review that went up last week, definitely
 check it out.
 But it's largely the same experience as the iPhone four s except everything is faster.
 The processor is much faster.
 You've got LTE data, which is much faster.
 And you've got, you know, slightly thinner, slightly lighter body with a bigger screen.
 But it's still an iPhone.
 It's still, you know, is iOS.
 So your experience hasn't changed too dramatically if you're coming from an earlier iPhone model.
 Apart from your maps experience, right?
 I just want to, you know, in addition to the iPhone five reviews, we've also got an iOS
 six review that Dan worked on and I contributed to a bit.
 And basically iOS is as iOS as iOS has ever been.
 It is iOS.
 It's the same.
 And like we talked about this last week and you know, my piece of think that's very, very
 iterative.
 And I mean, to be very clear, like it's super fast.
 I didn't think that the iPhone four was slow, but iPhone four s was slow, but the iPhone
 four definitely was chugging.
 And so the iPhone five feels much, much faster and voice quality for calls is better.
 At least I think so.
 I'm talking to you on one right now.
 And I'm actually relatively happy with the battery life.
 I had mine run the gamut yesterday from 6 30 a.m. and it finally conked out, I want to
 say around eight 30.
 And that was with moderate to heavy use and at least a full hour of phone calls.
 So like I would like that to be better, but it's definitely on par or slightly better
 than the LTE Android phones that I've used.
 And that's particularly remarkable to me because I'm pretty sure this thing's got like fourteen
 hundred something milliamps for the battery, right?
 Yeah, you know, I'm actually not sure exactly what the capacity of the battery inside of
 it is.
 But it is it's very light and it's very thin, which indicates that producers are saying
 it's actually twenty one hundred, which actually sounds very high considering how light and
 how it is.
 If you compare it to other devices that have those size batteries, they tend to be a bit
 thicker or heavier.
 But like as you were saying with the speed, as you're saying with the speed, you know,
 I was coming from an iPhone four S and I like you said, I never felt like the iPhone four
 S was slow, but moving from the four S to the five, the speed jump is like so dramatic
 to me, even coming from Apple's previously fastest version of the iPhone.
 It's almost like you're jumping from like the three G to the four that that big of a
 speed jump to me.
 And I was actually kind of kind of impressed.
 I didn't expect it to be that big of a difference.
 So the battery is three percent of all five point three one fourteen thirty now that's
 iPhone four three point eight volt five point four five one hour fourteen forty.
 So that's actually pretty small for an LTE device.
 Everybody in chat is losing their mind that we didn't have this number on the tip of our
 tongue.
 Whoops.
 Hey, guys, I'm on the phone.
 Give me a break.
 I think I just got a bunch of tweets about it, too.
 Anyway, it's ridiculously small and ridiculously fast.
 So this this new processor, this is a six is apparently incredibly power efficient and
 fast.
 Right.
 I would expect it to be.
 Yes.
 Actually, from the things that Apple disclosed about the ASICS processor and of Anand Tech
 fame, included that it's actually running an A15 Cortex A15 processor, which is super
 exciting because I haven't had one of those yet.
 And that's going to be the next big jump.
 I think I think that's actually changed.
 I don't think it's an A15.
 It's no, no, I know.
 Oh, I know.
 All right.
 I was booting up to that.
 I was booting up to embarrassing my good friend.
 Shameful me.
 But but yes, so his initial conclusion was that it has to be called XA15 because of the
 properties that Apple was disclosing, because of the battery life that Apple is, etc.
 Whereas on further review, Anand found that it's actually a mixture of Cortex A9, Cortex
 A15.
 It is Apple's, so to speak, fully custom chip, fully custom Apple design.
 So it isn't a stock chip.
 Whereas previously, I mean, Apple has been saying ever since it's branded its processors
 as a whatever, A5, A5X, etc., and now A6, it has been saying that it's designing its
 own processors, but it was mostly sticking to templates, from what I know, ARM templates.
 And maybe just doing a few tweaks and optimizations here is that.
 Whereas now Apple said at the time it took over that company whose name I don't recall
 anymore, chip design company, said time to integrate it, work on it.
 And it's producing these really extremely efficient chips, like you're saying, Dieter.
 Which is good and all, and the bigger display is absolutely making the iPhone catch up with
 the four inch.
 I know there's a golden ratio, so I guess we'll call that the golden form factor, as
 far as I'm concerned, 44.3 inches.
 So Apple is catching up on that front, physically, and the display is now even thinner, making
 for the thinner phone overall.
 But ultimately, apart from this little tug that I had when the hype was at its highest
 and when we're building up to the launch and the release, I don't feel at all compelled
 to buy this new iPhone.
 It makes changes which are in the right direction, but I don't feel like it's pushing me the
 same way that the iPhone 4, when it was first announced, when it was first launched, just
 pushed me and forced me to buy it, essentially.
 It was such a big jump.
 But then you guys are saying that the user experience has improved so much, so maybe
 that would be the thing that might convince me.
 But seriously, about the maps issue.
 I saw the maps on iOS 6 on the iPad, and they look good and actually quick in terms of operation.
 I think they're quicker than Google Maps, which is down to the way they're coded, but
 the problem with them is that they actually suck in terms of just being maps.
 So what is your experience been there?
 I've had a couple of crashes and freezes, but nothing worse than Google Maps.
 I live in San Francisco, and so this whole issue that Apple's maps aren't as good as
 Google's maps just in terms of the raw map data, for me the pain point is losing transit.
 But in terms of street data and stuff, Apple's in California and they've got lots and lots
 of data from my area, so it's not a huge tragedy for me, although not having transit really,
 really sucks.
 I think it's a bigger deal outside the US and in rural areas.
 There's a lot of places where the map data just isn't up to snuff.
 We've got some reports on this.
 Chris had a report up that there was still a year left on the Google Maps agreement between
 Google and Apple, and Apple decided not to wait it out, to just put their app out there.
 Apparently, it took Google by surprise, which is in itself kind of surprising.
 But nevertheless, their new app for iOS isn't ready yet because of that.
 There have been a lot of complaints about the maps, and I think it's... I mean, here's
 my take.
 When Google Maps first launched on smartphones way back in the day, the Java version that
 was on Pop!
 OS and the other version that they had out there, it wasn't that great.
 It took them a long time to build up that crowdsource data.
 When I've been using mapping products way back in the day, TomTom way back, there was
 another one, Copilot, they had bad mapping and all these different mapping services.
 Back then, it wasn't okay.
 They were not that good, but we dealt with it.
 The problem now is that the expectation is there that when you launch maps, they need
 to be really good.
 It's just really hard to do that without years and years of data.
 Nokia's got that time.
 Google's had that time.
 Some of these other companies have also had that time, but Apple hasn't, despite the fact
 that it's partnered and it brought a bunch of map data.
 For a generation one first release smartphone maps product, I think it's quite good.
 Flyover is pretty but useless, but I think it's fast.
 I think it's quite good.
 The problem is quite good.
 It doesn't cut it anymore compared to the competition.
 Right.
 Absolutely.
 I think that's actually the thing that is to the mapping, me scandal.
 Actually, it's not a scandal.
 A lot of people are annoyed with it because they're not getting the same functionality,
 but most people are actually just making really poor jokes about it and just having a big
 laugh.
 What surprised most people, even those not tracking the industry as closely as we do,
 is that it's a really, really stark example of Apple playing catch up to others.
 Usually when Apple is trying to catch up to others, it does it behind the scenes and just
 comes out with the finished product.
 You're like, wow, there goes Apple.
 Apple is doing the unique, the amazing, et cetera, et cetera.
 It's not like the other guys.
 Whereas in this instance, exactly as the data says, this is just version one is to start
 Apple's mapping product.
 It has really, really obvious rough edges, which we're not used to seeing from Apple.
 Speaking of rough edges, here's a kickass segue.
 The aluminum on the new iPhone has been chipping away.
 Have you guys had that?
 Yeah.
 Mine has not a chip, but a cleared up scuff mark and it had it right out of the box.
 I'm frankly surprised by this because we know that it's possible to make aluminum that is
 very hard to scratch and get the shiny part underneath.
 We know because HTC did it with the One S. Yes, the One S can get scratches, but it seems
 like the iPhone, it's much simpler to do and show the shiny part underneath.
 In the case of the One S, that is a very unique treatment to that particular device that is
 not anodization, it's not electroplating.
 Maybe it is a form of electroplating, but it's a very intensive type of coating that
 happens to that.
 There were reports of that chipping as well, especially right when the phone first came
 out.
 It's quite apparent that none of that treatment has been applied to the iPhone 5.
 This seems like a standard anodization type of coating on top of it, which frankly, when
 you put other pieces of metal against it, it will scratch kind of easily.
 I think the real controversy or the uproar is that people, like you said, Dieter, are
 finding it this way out of the box, which is again, not something that you expect to
 see from Apple devices.
 Apple's always been lauded and has always taken high regard for its type of, quote,
 unboxing experience of pulling a device out for the first time and everything's pristine
 and clean and perfect.
 That's just not the case for some people with the iPhone 5.
 Just with respect to the One S, the name of that process has been printed on my mind because
 I've written and said it so many times.
 It's micro-arc oxidation.
 Oxidation, yeah.
 Micro-arc.
 It involves plasma bath, right?
 Yeah, the plasma blast, that's right.
 And millions and millions of votes of electricity and all other sorts of exciting stuff.
 Yeah, I mean, first of all-
 Here's my take on the scratching.
 Ask me in a year after my phone has gotten scratched and dinged up if I'm angry about
 it because if this thing gets scratched and dinged up and it looks kind of cool and distressed,
 then I'm totally happy with it.
 That's actually kind of neat.
 That'll give my phone character.
 The black phone looks like murder now and to have it look like distressed murder would
 actually be really cool.
 Yeah, that's like a breaking in process.
 Yeah, if it's like those old, what were the iPods that scratched like crazy?
 Yeah, the iPod Touches.
 If it looks like crap after it's scratched, then I'll be angry.
 But I'll just have to wait and see.
 Well if it has one thing going for it, the matte finish, I think even if it got scratched,
 the matte finish won't look quite as crappy as the chrome finishes that the old iPods
 had.
 Yeah, but also the issue with Apple's iPhone design since the iPhone 4, and I've been banging
 on about it, is that it's kind of too fragile and it also tries to be a little bit too perfect.
 I mean, we saw Johnny Ive at the iPhone 5 presentation and he was talking about, again,
 this is the most exacting design we've ever done.
 It's the best product we've ever done.
 Yada, yada, yada.
 But it is true that the design is so exacting and it's really, really trying to go for this
 luxury look and appeal.
 And there's also the glass parts on the back.
 This is the thing that convinces me that the new iPhone isn't going to look really, really
 awesome when you scratch it up.
 Because I know exactly what Dieter was talking about.
 When you have an aluminum product, whether it be cameras like Sony's NEX series, you
 know, or some of the older generation smartphones from HTC in particular, and it picks up a
 few scuffs and scratches and it kind of feels like it's your own.
 Or even like a wristwatch, you know, titanium wristwatches.
 People think titanium is such a hard material, it doesn't scratch.
 Actually it does.
 I scratch my titanium watch in a week.
 Yeah, no, but I have a Seiko titanium watch and I actually like it's scratches.
 They're kind of like these are my own.
 This tells me that I've had this product for a long time, we've been through things together,
 even if they're just completely mundane.
 The reason I don't think that is going to work with the iPhone 5 design is because of
 those glass parts, which move in a whole different design direction.
 They're about perfection and about looking really pretty, as opposed to the ruggedness
 of having scratches.
 But that's only one aspect.
 And the other thing I wanted to discuss is actually the front of the phone sticks to,
 from what I can tell, sticks to the exact same one big plate of glass design, which
 would be so vulnerable on the iPhone 4 and 4S design.
 And I think that's probably the thing that's putting me off the most from the new iPhone
 5.
 I don't think the software, and I don't think the mapping issue is something that's going
 to put me off, it's not a deal breaker for me.
 And I don't think things like, oh, well, this phone has 1280x720 resolution and the iPhone
 doesn't have that exact same resolution.
 Those aren't deal breakers to me.
 But I just don't trust that I can use the iPhone 5 in the way that I use phones and
 have it survive that whole year that these were talking about.
 You just got to stop dropping your phone.
 I think, I mean, I think that the iPhone 5 is a bit more rugged than the 4 and the 4S.
 I mean, I mean, yes, of course, part of it's that doesn't have glass on the back, but it,
 it does feel like, and maybe it's just because it's lighter, so it's less likely to crack
 it and drop it, but it does feel like it's less likely to shatter if I drop it.
 The other thing that, that I fixed with the phone, they did their teardown is they, they
 changed up the way that the phone is put together.
 And so you can take, the first thing to come off is the screen and the display assembly.
 And so it should be much simpler to replace displays and cheaper, at least for Apple,
 to take a broken screen, replace it with a new screen.
 You don't have to take the whole phone apart.
 You can just take the screen off and pop a new one on it.
 Right.
 I think there was actually some commotion that traditionally with the iPhone, if you
 had a broken iPhone and you went to an Apple store, they just kind of would take it and
 replace it with a new version or a new model entirely.
 And now I think there was a report saying that with the iPhone five, the stores are
 planning to fix the screen in the store instead of giving you a whole replacement.
 So yeah, that definitely should cut costs for Apple at least, if not for, for you.
 I was just going to say that cheaper for Apple, but does that mean cheaper for the user?
 Yeah, it usually doesn't.
 When you get these pretty straightforward, you know, savings and costs, for whatever
 reason, they just can't seem to trickle down, which, you know, other than in a capitalist
 economy, you would think trickle down economics, you know, the foundation of everything good
 and holy and all of that stuff.
 But anyway, I'm straying into a whole other territory.
 Can we wrap up this really, really famous and over discussed phone by talking about
 Verizon and the OT situation?
 Yeah, so this is like really interesting.
 It's a familiar story.
 So the iPhone five, if you buy it from Verizon, it has a SIM card slot, just like the sprint
 model and the AT&T model.
 But the SIM card slot on the iPhone five from Verizon is actually unlocked.
 So you can actually put an AT&T SIM card in there and walk around using it on AT&T's
 HSPA plus network, which is a bit of a surprise.
 None of the other LTE phones that Verizon has released are unlocked in such a fashion.
 If you try to put an AT&T SIM into it, it won't work.
 And so it's been kind of a bit of a surprise.
 We did see this last year with the 4S from Sprint, came with a SIM card slot unlocked
 out of the box.
 And it was later on, shortly after the release of the phone, it was updated to actually lock
 the slot.
 But what's different is that Verizon is saying that they're not going to lock it in the future.
 They're planning to leave it and keep it unlocked, which started a kind of a snowball of theories,
 thinking that the FCC's laws on the 700 megahertz spectrum that Verizon uses for its LTE network
 was requiring Verizon to unlock the SIM card slot for everyone.
 But Chris did an excellent report that kind of debunked that theory.
 And since the SIM card slot, the part that's unlocked to use, that allows you to use the
 phone on AT&T's network, doesn't even run on the 700 megahertz spectrum, and among other
 reasons, we kind of debunked that theory that it's just Verizon's just doing it for whatever
 reason it feels like.
 And mostly that it probably doesn't feel that it has a big loss to sell the phone unlocked
 instead of being forced by the FCC.
 I mean, why do you think we're doing it then?
 Right.
 But hang on real quick.
 Like what's Verizon's motivation?
 If it's not the FCC forcing their hand, if it's not, is it Apple forcing their hand?
 Is it Verizon just like coldly calculating?
 Well, I don't think, I don't think Apple's to buy it.
 I don't think Apple's involved at all.
 Okay.
 So it's Verizon.
 Let's, let's just assume that is it because they're going to have, uh, they know that
 the Verizon LTE works better for LTE global roaming and surviving just like straight up
 saying, well, if somebody really cares about unlocking or having a, you know, unlock GSM,
 then we're going to go ahead and offer that to them.
 Um, and not really advertise it, but just have it be out there and known.
 I mean, if that's what their justification of motivation is, I actually makes me really
 angry because like they will lock stuff down for no other reason or for whatever their
 reasons are for locking stuff down.
 Like Verizon always does, but there's one time they're like, oh, well we can get a little
 bit, bit of a net year, so let's just not lock it this time.
 And it's like, you know, be consistent.
 Yeah.
 Well, be a jerk, be a jerk all the time.
 We, we, we, we tested this with, with Verizon's other LTE phones.
 Like we had a razor M and we put an AT&T SIM card slot and it would refuse to work.
 It was definitely locked.
 Uh, and that's a, you know, very recent LTE phone from Verizon.
 So, um, why Verizon's doing it with the iPhone five?
 I really don't have a great answer other than it just doesn't feel like there's a big loss
 for it.
 Uh, if it's unlocked, I think that most people, I have a theory, I have a theory.
 Oh, hello.
 Hey, Mr. Ziegler is here.
 I'm so glad he's here.
 Machiavellian Chris, because that's, that's what my theory is.
 Uh, well, sorry, I was, I was off having, uh, some really important DM conversations
 with the federal communications commission.
 That's why I'm late.
 Oh my God.
 But, uh, yeah.
 Um, so, so iPhone five unlock.
 So here's my theory.
 Uh, I, I'm actually going to reject your theory, do you don't replace it with my own?
 I think what's happening is, uh, Verizon realizes that the, the iPhone five is the first C block
 device that's high profile enough to catch, uh, to catch the, you know, the attention
 of, of mainstream news outlets, which in turn is going to catch the attention or, you know,
 be more likely to catch the attention of the FCC.
 So I think that they're actually hedging their bets and saying, well, uh, you know, it'd
 be because everyone that I've talked to, uh, like no one seems to be able to agree on exactly
 what the rules mean, whether, uh, only the C block support of the device needs to be
 unlocked or if the entire phone needs to be unlocked.
 I think the rules are intentionally hazy.
 They never been tested.
 Nobody really knows what they means and we won't know what they mean until we go through
 the court system, which we haven't yet.
 I'm sure it's inevitable at some point it's going to happen.
 But in the meantime, I think that Verizon is just hedging their bets.
 Okay.
 Well, it certainly is given Verizon a fair amount of good press, um, because on the surface
 it looks like a consumer friendly move at least.
 What I'm sure what's going to happen is a bunch of people.
 Yeah.
 I mean, keep in mind that, that the iPhone five is one of the very few devices where,
 uh, the subsidy is greater than the ETF.
 That's very, very rare.
 Um, so, uh, or at least by this margin, it's, it's, it's rare.
 Um, you know, you get the, um, uh, the three 99 device.
 And I mean, I actually, I guess the subsidy is the same across, um, all three models.
 But anyway, uh, so, you know, you can, you can get a device on contract from Verizon,
 immediately break your contract, pay the ETF and then take it to simple mobile, uh, you
 know, or team mobile.
 And there you go.
 And it T-Mobile is pushing their iPhone, uh, you know, support so hard right now.
 It's hilarious.
 Uh, you know, they're issuing press releases on it.
 So, um, you know, I think that Verizon could end up becoming a reliable and desirable source
 for these unlocked devices.
 Which is absolutely blows my mind, uh, knowing how Verizon's been for the past decade.
 So it's just, it's just like really hard for me to wrap my head around that.
 Let's just say for the record, we don't all agree with Dieter who says, if you're going
 to be a jerk, just be a jerk all the time.
 Like if this is the start of a beautiful new relationship between Verizon and its users,
 uh, for whatever reason, that's a good thing.
 And I'm sorry, I'm trying to derail you guys from discussing the Apple five and Verizon,
 uh, but for the sake of our non us audience and the sake of our audience who might be
 a little bit sick of this phone by now, which I am, and I don't even have the goddamn thing.
 Can we please talk about HCS windows phones because they're kind of sexy.
 Yeah.
 I mean, they're super sexy.
 Let's talk.
 I mean, we talked like we didn't really talk about them last week.
 I guess we, our show was just before the announcement.
 Uh, so we didn't really know what was going to happen, but, uh, HTC revealed it's windows
 phone eight X and windows phone eight S last week.
 Um, both of which look like really attractive devices that are running the obviously windows
 phone eight platform.
 Um, and what might be the most interesting part about this story is the new, uh, rekindled
 tight relationship that HTC and Microsoft have for these devices.
 Um, so far, or to the point where Microsoft actually picked the name out for the smartphones
 and, and, and put windows phone right in the name and is calling these signature devices
 for the platform, which is a little bit different of a relationship than HTC has enjoyed with
 Microsoft in the past.
 Uh, and, um, Nokia was, you know, the, uh, the chosen one, uh, for, for windows phone
 for a long time, or at least that's how it seemed.
 Um, and so, so this is a little bit different and a little bit of a shakeup in the, uh,
 windows phone family, I guess you could say, uh, you know, just what are we about?
 A month away from its expected launch.
 Did anyone figure out what a signature device actually means?
 Like, what are they saying with those words?
 Well, it's going to be the center of the marketing for windows phone eight by Microsoft.
 So if we see market, uh, Microsoft marketing windows phone eight, um, like if we see a
 printed ad, uh, I would expect to see these HTC devices front and center, and then, you
 know, maybe to the side, you'll see the Nokia and maybe to further to the side, you'll see
 the Samsung's, which is kind of pretty rough.
 Yeah.
 Yes.
 Uh, the ATV is actually going to bring a windows phone into its own and it's going to become
 the dominant platform because of the ATV.
 DTS, uh, don't even get started on that phone.
 Nobody's actually seen the person yet.
 It's still pretty much like a render in a photo out of so at the moment, but you know,
 I actually got to see the eight X today in fact, um, because I'm special and they do
 special things like that for me.
 Um, and first of all, I think we need to separate the eight X and eight S a little bit.
 The eight S is such a mess of colors that I struggled to comprehend it.
 Uh, I think it has like four different color options and only one of them is relatively
 consistent in being reddish route is the yellow, gray and black version.
 I mean, you guys have seen these, right?
 They kind of, I think the yellow, gray and black version is so hot.
 I think the yellow, gray and black is, is of all of the ones for the eight S I think
 the yellow, gray and black is the winner.
 I mean, it just looks cool.
 Yeah.
 Nuts.
 You're completely guys backing up.
 He's nuts.
 Right.
 I'm with Dan.
 Wait, wait.
 You're talking about the eight S right?
 Yes.
 Yes.
 Correct.
 Eight tests.
 Yeah.
 The four each one, the smaller one, the mid ranger.
 Well that phone is completely irrelevant.
 So it's all about the eight X. I mean, look, you know, I will say that that HTC has taken
 a very, very different, um, you know, you can look at it two ways.
 Again, I'm thinking back to your report on, on, you know, color and how that's really
 playing into windows phones angle.
 But color aside, yes, both the new HTC and also of course the Nokia's are very colorful.
 If you look beyond that, I think, I just think that these are very different devices, aluminum
 nine 20 and the eight X because the nine 20 is such a thick and heavy phone.
 That's really pushing a camera quality and that's something the eight X is not really
 seeking to do and it's much thinner and I think sexier.
 So yeah, well I don't know, I don't know if that's accurate though because HTC is like
 big differentiator with its, any of its devices, but uh, you know, is the, the image sense,
 a chip is going to be in the eight X, which is the first time for a windows phone device
 to have the image sense.
 So I think as far as an HTC size, uh, it definitely is innovating on the image front.
 Obviously, you know, to the rest of us, it's not doing nearly as much as the Lumia nine
 20 is, but as far as being totally different devices, uh, the, the eight X and the nine
 20 look really similar from the front and if you like turn them on the side, it just
 looks like the eight X is a flattened version of the nine 20.
 Yeah, but what, uh, well in pictures maybe, but I feel like in, in person they end up
 cut.
 Like if you have the opportunity to hold them back to back, they end up being very different
 phones.
 I think very much so.
 Very much so.
 Uh, just to mention here, somebody tweeted the, because when, when the eight S and the
 eight X will be in announced, uh, Tom Warren is the guy who covered them, uh, their whole
 release and got to play with them a lot more than myself over here in London.
 Uh, my excuse being that I wasn't in the country, otherwise I would have been all over them.
 But so I was a little bit detached from them.
 Um, but somebody tweeted at me saying, Hey Vlad, somebody took the one X or rather HT
 took the one X display and shrunk it down to 4.3 inches.
 You must be, you know, fruit about it.
 You must be really excited.
 Uh, so I was like, well, I need to take a look at this freaking windows phone eight
 X display.
 And I don't know that it's, I really don't think it's the same exact technology as the
 one X. It isn't, uh, quite so vibrant.
 It doesn't have quite the same view in angles, but it is a really good display.
 I think it's very similar to what we saw in the resound last year.
 The resound was a 4.3 inch super LCD, uh, two with the seven 20 P display.
 Um, I think it might, it might be a little bit, a newer version of that as opposed to
 the one X's display shrunken down.
 Potentially, but I mean, I'm a fan.
 I do.
 I do like the display on the eight X just like Chris.
 I'm also a fan of the build and the design.
 And I definitely think that when you get the nine 20 in hand and the eight X in hand, you
 can tell a big difference.
 And immediately I can tell you that I prefer the eight X again, because it's smaller, because
 it's thinner, lighter, et cetera.
 Um, not, let's say the Viva nine 20 is a bad phone or device, but it's still a big, bigger
 and chunkier.
 Um, but HTC is really shooting itself in the foot by losing track of the details with the
 eight X and the details of the eight X actually color.
 And maybe I'm being extremely nitpicky here, but the volume slider, uh, the power button
 and the camera button, they're a sort of orange ish red.
 Whereas on the red model that is, whereas the phone itself is a pinky shade of red.
 And I really just really liked the red version of this phone.
 Um, but they just don't matching all the colors.
 So that red version actually has three different shades of the color.
 The yellow slash green version again has multiple shades of the color.
 And it's those little things that just kind of pestering and annoying you.
 And just finally, uh, to mention on the topic of the camera, um, HTC is still keeping the
 software lockdown completely.
 Like they wouldn't let me unlock the phone.
 Like there's, there's an actual passcode lock on the phone, but because of the windows
 phone camera functionality, you can actually turn on the camera without unlocking the phone
 and take a few photos and look at the photos.
 And I'm actually impressed by the eight X just, I just took a few quick photos with
 it and I'm impressed by his camera quality.
 I thought that phone is so thin.
 They would go for a really cheap camera sensor and it doesn't seem like they have, which
 is, you know, thumbs up so far.
 Anyway, I just like to point out how crazy it is that we've had, um, we have five now
 windows phone eight devices to Nokia's two HTC and Samsung's a T and Microsoft like is
 not led at any of these phone unveiling, you know, letting people see the full story of
 windows phone eight.
 No.
 And, and the software is nowhere near done because even though they were locked, one
 of them managed to crash multiple times in the same way.
 I really don't think I'm supposed to be saying this, but whatever, I didn't sign any embargo
 sheet.
 So I'm just telling you guys, the software is not done and it's, it's slowing everybody
 down and everybody would just love to be able to show off their devices to the fullest,
 but we're just going to have to wait.
 And if we trust Tom Warren, which I do, if I had kids, I would trust Tom Warren with
 my kids.
 It's basically going to happen.
 I think October 28th.
 What's going to happen October, you mean the, the unveiling of the platform, right?
 I think we just lost Vlad.
 Yeah.
 That's when we're expecting to see windows phone eight debut entirely so that we'll see
 everything that Microsoft has been essentially holding back from us to this up to this point.
 If they've been holding anything back, I don't think it's clear that they have.
 Well, I mean, I think, I think Microsoft would like us to think that it's been holding a
 lot of things back and that's the reason that it doesn't want us to see any of the software
 yet.
 But you know, you have a good point, Chris.
 They could not be, they could, they could just be holding for no reason.
 Then I'm going to storm Redmond with pitchforks.
 All tables in Redmond will be flipped if there's nothing new.
 Here it is.
 It's the thing that we wouldn't let you see for the past three months.
 Did you guys know it has screenshots?
 It can do screenshots.
 Well, so far, so far, what does eight have that 7.8 does not?
 We know that it has the, the kids feature.
 Kids corner.
 Awesome.
 There's something with rooms or something.
 Is that, is that eight exclusive or is that also 7.8?
 Oh, I know, I know.
 Windows Phone 8 supports higher resolution displays and multi-core processors.
 Oh my God.
 Yeah, but 7.8, 7.8 is mostly going to be for existing hardware anyway.
 Right.
 So, but I mean, you know, I'm just saying that like, you know, when, when these, when
 these platforms come out, presumably there are going to be differences between the two.
 I mean, I suppose if, if Microsoft is holding anything back, it would be that.
 That's a pretty big thing to, to, you know, withhold and that we haven't seen and we're
 not clear on yet.
 What's that?
 Differences between 7.8 and eight?
 Right.
 Yeah.
 Well, yeah, I know that that's exactly my point.
 Yeah.
 Right.
 We can expect some, some enterprise stuff that will only work in eight, you know, in
 terms of device management and other corporatey type things.
 Yeah, but nobody cares about that.
 That's one of the big advantages to switching to the new structure, the kernel.
 Right.
 Yeah.
 I, I, so I heard a rumor, I heard a rumor a few weeks ago from a very reliable source
 that Microsoft made a last minute decision to port a bunch of supposedly eight exclusive
 features back to 7.8.
 Which I think pushed both.
 Really?
 I think pushed both versions back a bit and, and I was chatting with Tom about it and he
 said, yeah, that made a lot of sense.
 So so it seems like they might be looking to actually close the gap between 7.8 and
 eight.
 I don't know if that's designed to appease the 10 existing owners or,
 I was going to say, I mean, you've already taken the bad, the bad press from having it,
 you know, having to confirm that you wouldn't offer an upgrade path from windows phone seven
 to windows 28 phone eight.
 You've already like given the fig leaf or the olive branch of a few features.
 I mean, just stick to your guns and focus on the new platform.
 Don't spend, don't spend your cycles on seven.
 And I know that's crazy for me to say, but once you've made the decision and already
 taken the hit for not offering a full upgrade, I mean, unless there's something there that
 they're back porting that they feel is essential to the entire ecosystem so that that all windows
 phones can play together and have this feature, I wouldn't spend the development cycles on
 it.
 Right.
 Yeah.
 I mean, I would agree.
 I don't, I don't know what their business, I mean, first of all, it's a rumor, but secondly,
 you know, we, yeah, we don't know what the business logic is.
 Right.
 So, I mean, I totally agree with both of you.
 You know, if that is true, then, you know, why would you waste time supporting the older
 platform when, you know, for all things considered, your bet is on the new platform and all the
 things that are involved with that.
 So we are stuck in an agreement.
 Hey, Vlad's back.
 That's what we're doing.
 What was that, Dieter?
 We talked really quick about Nokia's response to, you know, HTC's announcement.
 It was a little bit catty, as I recall.
 It was very catty.
 Let me see if I can pull it up here.
 Now, the official response was referred to it as a, quote, tactical rebranding.
 And then, you know, Nokia's executive Chris Weber posted some tweets saying that it takes
 more than matching colors to match the innovation of the Lumia 920 and happy to add a new signature
 to the Windows Phone ecosystem behind the Lumia 920.
 So it's, you know, it's a bit of a catty back and forth.
 And I don't think we really expected Nokia to respond in this fashion.
 I certainly didn't.
 Well, but I mean, they are, it is a really weird spot that Microsoft is all of a sudden
 throwing a whole bunch of love behind HTC after, you know, everybody just sort of thought
 of Nokia as the flagship Windows Phone device, the OEM.
 You know, the difference is like if HTC is a Windows Phone 8X and 8S, and I still am
 angry at HTC for calling phones X and S because I've got to enunciate so hard to enunciate
 them.
 Anyway, if they bomb out, they don't work, they can still take, you know, another shot
 at Android.
 I mean, Lord knows that they're not going to stop making Android phones.
 But Nokia is all in.
 Like, if Windows Phone doesn't work for Nokia, they don't really have a viable plan B. Not
 in the short term.
 Not for, you know, they might have something in Skunk Works, but they're not coming out
 with another smartphone.
 I highly doubt that they would go to Android.
 And it's interesting the relationship or this new promotion behind HTC from Microsoft because
 Nokia has put so much more investment into the Windows Phone platform between its dedicated
 apps for the platform.
 It's pretty much essentially pushed aside every other smartphone platform in order to
 push its weight behind Windows Phone.
 So yeah, like you're saying, if Windows Phone fails, Nokia kind of goes down with it, at
 least from what we can tell now.
 I think that Microsoft owes it to all of its Windows Phone OEMs.
 I mean, these guys need to really stick together right now.
 They can't afford to be, you know, to have a civil war.
 And it's Microsoft's responsibility as the patron saint of this platform to kind of keep
 the OEMs in line.
 And this behavior that they're exhibiting with the so-called signature HTC phones is
 not conducive to a healthy relationship between these OEMs, obviously.
 And it's very strange to me that they're doing this.
 I think that they need to be treating these OEMs equally and fairly.
 And I think that after, you know, it took them a long time to try to convince everybody
 that their relationship with non-Nokia OEMs would not be damaged by the Nokia partnership.
 And they got over that hump and HTC and Samsung came back to the table with additional phones.
 And now look what's happening.
 Now HTC is getting this special treatment.
 And it's very strange to me because, you know, to what end?
 Like a customer goes into a store, they're certainly not going to say, I want the signature
 phone, because what does that mean?
 But then even worse, if a sales guy comes to them and says, well, we have these two
 devices, we have this Lumia 920 from Nokia, and then we have this HTC phone that's the
 signature phone, then the customer is going to be like, well, I don't know what that means,
 but that sounds important or good or something.
 I guess I'll take the HTC.
 It's just bad.
 Microsoft should be the Switzerland of this platform.
 And they're not being that at all.
 Yeah.
 Yeah.
 No, that's exactly it.
 I feel like this entire move to brand the HTC devices as signature devices is superfluous.
 It's not something that Microsoft needed to do, which together with the move to the movie
 you guys were discussing to back port features down to Windows phone at 7.8 is kind of you
 can just move on.
 You know, you're big enough.
 You're major enough.
 People will follow you or they'll, you know, burn for the fact that they're not doing it.
 I mean, HTC still kind of wants to be split between Android and Windows phone.
 And as Dan was saying earlier, is now reemphasizing Windows phone.
 Those companies, HTC and Samsung, they prefer to have some sort of a fallback plan if things
 don't go perfectly according to plan with Android.
 So I mean, my only justification from Microsoft's perspective might be to say that HTC won't
 have invested so heavily into designing, let's say, the Windows phone 8x.
 I'm not going to give HTC that much credit for designing the 8s.
 So maybe that's what it is.
 Microsoft giving HTC that branding and that extra cache gets in return more investment,
 more design time, more production time from HTC.
 Basically just gets better phones.
 I don't know.
 I just feel like that might have been something Microsoft could have just simply paid for
 given that it has cash reserves and all of that.
 But also let's talk to mention that Microsoft has its signature series with Windows laptops
 and maybe desktops as well, but just Windows in general.
 And the signature series with Windows was just bloatware free versions, which is kind
 of hilarious because that basically means every Windows phone device ever shipped is
 pretty much signature because Microsoft locks down software so tight.
 So if you have a Windows phone, it's a signature Windows phone.
 You can tell people that.
 Nobody's going to know what it means, but you can tell them that.
 I mean, well, what HTC was saying and Microsoft was saying about the naming of these devices
 is as far as what the signature means, I believe Steve Ballmer might've said this or it was
 an HTC executive that said when somebody goes to a store and they want a Microsoft phone
 or a Windows phone, this phone has Windows phone right in its name.
 It's pretty obvious what it is.
 And I think that was what the idea behind the naming of these Windows phone 8X and Windows
 phone 8S was.
 Well, it's pretty easy to draw a parallel to...
 Go ahead, Dieter.
 I was just going to say, do we have to call it the Windows phone 8X running Windows phone?
 The Windows phone 8X?
 Would it be even more confusing as the Windows phone 8X running Android?
 That would really blow minds.
 Oh my God.
 That would actually be pretty cool.
 Would that hardware be cool?
 But what I was just going to mention is that Microsoft has already had this signature program
 in place on Windows where if you go into a Microsoft store, they sell a number of so-called
 signature devices that are stripped completely free of third party software essentially.
 And it's just pure Windows instead of all the crapware that you usually get when you
 buy a new PC.
 And so from that perspective, if you think of it that way, Microsoft is really slapping
 Nokia in the face because they're saying, well, we don't want all your crapware on these
 Windows phones.
 So we're going to give a special brand to these HTCs, which are basically shipping,
 you know, quote unquote stock, even though I'm not too comfortable using the term stock
 talking about a Windows phone device.
 But you know, if you think about it like that, you know, people draw that parallel.
 If they've heard the term signature used with Windows PCs before, then that's certainly
 the impression they're going to get with these phones.
 Correct me if I'm wrong because I may be like totally high, but isn't Nokia providing the
 mapping services for all of Windows phone 8?
 Yes.
 So essentially it would be like Microsoft saying, we don't want all of your crapware.
 We'll take some of it.
 But we don't want this other stuff that you insist on putting here.
 But we'll take your maps and we'll use those.
 And we're going to give those to everybody else as well.
 Yeah.
 I'm just going to raise two quick points here.
 Just two quick points here.
 First of all, Chris somehow managed to miss the bit where I mentioned the signature Windows
 devices and decided to make that point after me.
 But he augmented it with something interesting about Nokia.
 So I guess we'll just allow that.
 Also I'm going to wait so I can't physically test it.
 Look, Vlad, Vlad, I'm in a talk only mode right now.
 I'm not listening.
 I'm only talking.
 How is that any different than normal?
 The second point actually.
 I still remember when Microsoft and Nokia announced the whole partnership and Microsoft
 was making such a huge deal out of all the maps being integrated into Microsoft's just
 broad range of mapping services.
 It wasn't just going to be for it was just going to be Bing Maps.
 It was going to become Bing Maps.
 And that's where it's going right now.
 That Nokia's maps is essentially becoming Microsoft's mapping software.
 And to me at the time, I was like, why do they make such a big deal out of something
 so kind of regular and conventional as mapping?
 And now that Apple has tried to do it by itself, I can really see why that was such a big deal
 for Microsoft.
 Oh, totally.
 Like acquiring that part of Nokia was probably worth it for Microsoft just to save itself
 the source of headaches that Apple is enduring right now, because if you think Apple is having
 headaches with maps, just imagine a company that doesn't have the same level of customer
 trust that Apple has trying to sell them that sort of service.
 It would just be a nightmare.
 And very good point, Vaughn.
 So here's clearly what happened.
 Back five, six years ago when HTC and Microsoft were flying as high as they ever flew with
 Windows Mobile, Peter Chow, HTC CEO, Steve Ballmer were out partying and Steve Ballmer
 like accidentally killed somebody.
 And only Peter Chow was the only witness.
 And so rather than report him, he took a chip.
 And now that HTC has fallen on hard times and the one series hasn't done so well, he
 cast that chip in.
 And so that is why they get to call this on Windows song.
 I'm pretty sure that's the bomber killing somebody.
 Steve Ballmer killing somebody is a is a is one of the the storylines in Pulp Fiction,
 if I'm not mistaken.
 Oh, man.
 It's got weird.
 Really?
 OK, so so let's get on CEOs.
 Yeah.
 Let's talk about Thorsten Heinz and what he had to show us and tell us at the new Blackberry
 Jam.
 Thorsten is such a like just a nice guy.
 I mean, compared to Lazaridis and Vasily, like he gets on stage and you just want to
 like just like chuck him on the shoulder.
 Oh, nice job, man.
 And the other thing that's great about him is he doesn't lie about what Blackberry is
 anymore.
 He admits that they're not going to be number one, which was that he had this Q&A after
 Blackberry 10 was quasi sort of kind of announced for the second time, but not fully announced
 where he said we have a clear shot at number three.
 And later on, he clarified and said, no, no, no, I mean, we're aiming for number one long
 term and number one in all of mobile computing.
 In fact, he even took a swipe at Microsoft.
 You don't understand.
 People aren't going to use PCs or phones and tablets.
 We can be number one or both of those long term.
 But in the short term, we're aiming for number two.
 We're aiming for number one.
 We have a clear shot at number three and I think they can pull it off.
 And I don't know.
 So that's the context for what they announced, which was Blackberry 10 and a new device for
 developers.
 Well, I mean, if we want to go back to that, what's happening?
 Delay isn't a problem at all, guys.
 Go ahead, Dieter.
 Well, OK, I'll just jump into riffing on what Blackberry 10 is.
 So we've already seen some of it.
 They showed it up once and what they showed off this time wasn't the whole thing again,
 but it was like another iteration.
 And they're in this weird spot where they've got to keep showing different parts of it
 so they can get developers excited to make apps because they need apps to make the platform
 succeed.
 But they don't want to actually have their full announce.
 So they have these like half announcements.
 So what we saw Blackberry 10 is we finally know what the full UI paradigm looks like.
 And it's weird.
 You have up to eight apps running out of time and they're always running just like on the
 playbook.
 And they fit in these little things that they're calling active frames, which by the way is
 the worst name ever for a UI element.
 And they're like little miniature versions of the app.
 And you can switch between those really easily by swiping up on the screen.
 There's a grid of icons on the right hand side of the home screen.
 You can swipe over to those.
 And then on the left hand side of the home screen and actually on the left hand side
 of every single screen is this thing they're calling Blackberry Hub.
 And what that is is the unified like messaging and notification zone where all your emails
 are there, your Twitter messages are there, your LinkedIn messages are there, your Facebook
 messages are there.
 And it's also like developers can throw notifications in that area.
 So you can make this swipe up into the right gesture, which it works pretty well, but it's
 not quite as fluid as it could be from anywhere in the OS to jump right into your notifications
 in your email, which is kind of cool.
 It's kind of clever.
 If you use your phone primarily for messaging, it makes a lot of sense.
 So can I just jump in here quickly?
 Because I was looking at that and I couldn't possibly avoid thinking of the Nokia N9 and
 the MeeGo Hamilton UI, because that was based around three central home screens, which were
 notifications, applications and multitasking.
 And in particular with Rooms Blackberry 10, you have four of these active frames where
 you preview.
 I mean, it's essentially visual multitasking.
 Preview the applications that you have running.
 And the Nokia N9 also has the same four app interface.
 So to me, it was like you're just copying them.
 I mean, I think it's a good thing to copy, but it's like, where's the innovation room?
 That from MeeGo, they copied from WebOS.
 They've copied from the iPhone because you can drag and drop icons.
 The icon grid is just like the iPhone icon grid.
 I'm trying to think, do they steal anything from Android?
 Yeah, you swipe down from the top to bring up menus and stuff.
 I guess that's not Android.
 That's more of a webOS again.
 But like, unified notifications.
 They basically just borrowed from everything that they could and clashed it together in
 OS.
 And so the question is going to be like, will it, when you actually use it day to day, will
 it feel elegant and awesome or will it just feel kind of cobbled together?
 Well, there are two things to keep in mind here.
 One is that I'm assuming that they still have a number of TAT employees working on this
 UI.
 And TAT has done some really great stuff in the past.
 And also, we heard at some point, I don't know if this is something that we wrote about
 or not, but we've definitely heard that there was a concentrated effort at some point in
 RIM's recent history to hire X webOS people.
 And of course, we saw a lot of striking similarities with the playbook.
 And I think that that's ongoing.
 But one very important point that I wanted to make that absolutely no one on this podcast
 has made yet is that there's some striking similarities to Nokia's Harmatan UI.
 At this point, I'm just trolling Vlad.
 That's a very original point there, Chris.
 I'd like to hear you elaborate on that.
 Please do, Chris.
 Well, I want to say, going back to the comment of being number three, or they have a clear
 shot at being number three, just for us to be clear, right now, RIM is in number three.
 It is still the third most dominant smartphone platform.
 So really, what their clear shot is just trying to hold on to what they have and not let any
 more of that slip through their fingers.
 Yeah, he may have been referring to number three in North America.
 And I don't know if they still have managed to hang on to number three in North America.
 And he may have even been referring to number three speaking from an OEM standpoint.
 So it would be Apple, Samsung, and then RIM, instead of iOS, Android, and then Blackberry.
 But I mean, let's be really clear.
 They've also got some new enterprise stuff.
 They've got the thing where you can launch secure enterprise apps right next to your
 regular apps.
 And there's this weird toggle thing that you drag down on a blank spot on the icon screen
 to switch between which apps you can see.
 It's pretty weird.
 But I mean, if you've got to have secure apps, you've got to do something.
 It's going to be an elegant no matter what.
 But this battle is between Microsoft and Windows Phone 8 and RIM.
 And they're both trying to square the circle of appealing to enterprise and CIOs and IT
 guys for managing devices in a corporation and consumers at the same time.
 And I mean, I think Microsoft really believes it's going to just completely take over whatever
 RIM had left.
 And RIM is doing everything it can to keep that from happening.
 And until that battle shakes out, they're not going to be able to actually take on Android
 and iOS in a real way.
 OK.
 So, DJ, I have a question for you.
 So if you just assume for a moment that we anticipate to be the first library device,
 library in London, or so it was codenamed, just imagine that it has great industrial
 design.
 So let's take industrial design out of the picture.
 Imagine also there's a great camera.
 Let's take those aspects, the hardware, away from it.
 Are you excited by this software that you're seeing today?
 Like, yes, it's a coupling together of a whole bunch of what we still think are good ideas
 from other operating systems.
 But if you see it all come together with great industrial design and it actually flows and
 is responsive, which are big assumptions, does that excite you?
 Are you going to be psyched for the first half of next year?
 I'm intrigued.
 Like, I'm interested.
 I mean, you know, Dan was complaining that my hands-on post with the latest version of
 the BlackBerry 10 beta was really long.
 I was like, well, yeah, but this is the first new smartphone operating system since Windows
 Phone.
 And so at least there's some attention because they're trying to make something out of it.
 And there are some pretty good ideas here.
 So I like good ideas.
 I like them to be successful.
 So from that perspective, like, I'm interested.
 But am I psyched?
 Am I excited?
 There's nothing here that makes my jaw drop.
 There's nothing here that makes me go, oh my God, I must have that.
 And I don't know what that would be in the mobile space right now because I'm cynical
 and jaded and hate everything.
 But they definitely don't have that.
 And since they definitely don't have that, you know, I don't know what they can do to
 get it.
 And I don't know if, you know, is it enough to like tread water, which seems to be kind
 of their goal, and like pick up a little bit back in North America?
 It might be, especially if like what's left of the BlackBerry users are willing to transition
 over to it relatively quickly.
 But they definitely don't have something that is going to make somebody not buy an iPhone
 right now.
 They definitely don't have something that's going to make somebody not buy an Android
 phone and wait.
 Like, it's cool.
 It's interesting.
 But it's not like, oh my God, I must have that.
 And I honestly don't know what they could have done to like engender that feeling.
 I wish they had kind of because, you know, I'm like the underdogs.
 But they haven't done that here so far.
 I think it's a striking difference from what we saw in 2009 when webOS was introduced.
 When webOS was introduced, I think it had a lot of those things that are like, oh my
 God, this is incredible.
 And this is like, you know, really cool new ideas that we haven't seen anybody done before,
 or anybody do before.
 And it's like one of those I must have it type of deals.
 We all know how that worked out in the long run.
 But RIM doesn't, like Dita was saying, have any of that.
 These are all ideas that we've seen before that are just kind of cobbled together here
 and there into this RIM playbook type of user interface shrunk down onto a small screen.
 Well, I mean, I will say like, if hub is done right, that is actually kind of new.
 But it's just not that like, it's not like that jazzy, right?
 It's not that holy crappy, because it's like, oh, hey, you've got all your messages and
 notifications in one place where like acting on the messages and like talking to people
 and doing email in the same place as, you know, your Twitter notifications and your
 push notifications from your game and whatever else.
 So like taking those two functions and sort of throwing them all into one, you know, relatively
 convenient place that's accessible from anywhere is a really cool idea.
 But you know, we have to see if it's actually going to work.
 I mean, the other thing to point out is we haven't seen the full final feature set of
 the OS.
 They haven't officially launched this yet.
 We don't know, you know, they haven't officially launched the devices.
 But they're in this weird spot where they're like, they're showing little bits and bobs
 of the OS.
 And then when they finally will completely launch it, a lot of it's going to be like,
 oh, well, we saw that before.
 And they're in a rock and a hard place because they've got to do this to get developers because
 they got to get whatever apps that they can.
 And so like, I don't know, I would not want to be in RIM's position.
 And you're right, that there are a lot of parallels to level S. And one of the parallels
 that they're afraid of is announcing everything and then having six months of waiting before
 they actually ship something.
 So they're announcing as much as they have to in order to get developers.
 But they're trying to minimize the amount of time between the full launch and availability
 of devices.
 Can we talk about their other efforts to woo developers aside from features in their OS?
 No, no.
 Rejected Dan.
 It didn't happen.
 I didn't see it.
 You didn't see it.
 It might have been the best thing on the Internet yesterday.
 I think we might have it have it queued up to play a clip for the show.
 Is that true?
 I think I'm getting the nod from from our control room.
 Yeah.
 Yeah.
 We kind of have to make this happen.
 Hmm.
 proposition
 So don't be misled
 The launch is just ahead
 We'll have blackberry timbre
 And no touch and no creation
 And though I know you're all wondering when
 It won't be forever
 It was all everybody thought it was funny and everybody was in on the joke that they were sort of making fun of themselves because you know there's a really there's a big circle the wagons mentality around blackberry people right now and blackberry developers so it let off a bunch of steam but I mean it's like
 cringingly like hard to watch right and so the problem is like they put it on the internet and so while like I get the joke and developers get the joke is like you know somebody who has a teenager has a blackberry and uses from BBM that you know is going to see this completely out of context
 going to get the joke and appreciate what they're trying to do.
 Yeah but now listen they've already said the bar so freaking low. I mean I can't even get the bar in the frame here. I get so low with his previous advertising. This is just excellence.
 For him this is excellent. I think I think the head one with I believe was Christine Amelia and admittedly my expertise on pop sing singers isn't as great as my expertise on H.T.'s backlog of devices.
 But it was like a really really terrible confused weird ads which I think it has something to do with BBM. I don't even remember. I just I just remember being kind of cringing on rooms behalf.
 You know it was embarrassing on rooms behalf and I'm totally with you. I can see why people like this because it shows exactly as you're saying a sort of self-awareness from rim and a sort of humility that you absolutely will never have seen from my class
 radius and from the former company. So this just makes the company more approachable and being an underdog now which is what rim is acting like one will help it ultimately. And I understand that a lot of developers aren't just going to start investing
 their careers into rim just because it's a cute company but it doesn't hurt. I thought I was the only one that wasn't like completely cringing and freaked out by his video.
 I know that some other people at the verge like this is the worst thing I've ever seen. Josh like he tweeted this is the worst video I've ever seen. And like it's bad. So I mean it just feels very Microsofty like this is something Microsoft would have done in 1998.
 And it just kind of reeks of that. I know it's supposed to be a very self-aware tongue-in-cheek type of thing but just it just reeks of that corporate doesn't really get it type of vibe when you're seeing it from the outside. If you're not there at the the.
 What does Chris think? He's been kind of quiet.
 Hey guys can we talk about the iPhone 5 for a minute. I just have. I hate to completely change that. We'll get back to rim. But I was just sitting here holding this iPhone 5 and I observed something very important.
 Back up. Back up. Stop. Stop right there. I just want to point out that the thing that Chris said would happen last week on the podcast is exactly what happened. He didn't preorder. He said he wasn't going to get it. And then he went and waited in line.
 I want to say you said you were waiting in the iPhone line not one but two days in a row. Is that true.
 No you're making that up. I was there only on Friday.
 Okay. Yeah. No actually I was I was in a tent in front of the Apple store the night before. No. Yeah. It was really easy. Yeah I guess I should talk about my my experience getting the phone.
 So you know AT&T just opened this quote unquote chip store in Chicago which we did a piece on not too long ago and I think that everyone just kind of forgot that it existed because it was like there were like you know 10 people in line for the phone at 4 p.m. on Friday and they had stock of everything.
 They were no danger of running out of anything. Meanwhile like a block down the street at the Apple store you know is lying around the block.
 So yeah anyway so but no the only point I wanted to make I'll be real quick about it.
 This is that if you hold the iPhone 5 until the side to side the screen gets very dim which is something that you don't have on the one X if I remember correctly.
 So I would I would venture to say that the one X retains the title of the best display on a mobile phone.
 So you're saying the viewing angles of the one X are better than the iPhone 5 display. Yes. OK. Yeah I think I agree with that.
 Although Chris I got to say Vlad made that exact point earlier.
 My only goal is to remake every point that Vlad makes from now on on every part of the city. When I was making that point I was making about the 8x not about the iPhone and I'm not even sure that Chris was around at that time because Chris salt at some point like a superhero.
 Right. Well like I said I was too busy de-emming with the FCC.
 So Chris's goal is to make your point over and over again and my goal is to just troll the podcast and lie and take us off topic and get derailed which I have done successfully.
 Also there's one other thing that I want to say about RIM that they gave out new developer devices to the developers here.
 They're calling it the dev alpha B and they said they'd ran out of the original ones so they had to give out make new ones.
 And looking at these new ones like it's really really obvious that this is basically the L series of London the first device it's going to ship.
 And what they did is they took off the outer casing of the phone and replaced it with a big ugly plastic box.
 Like it's very clear that that's what happened. That makes perfect sense too because you know why would they spend money making another device for developers when they you know they need to start making the actual phone.
 So if they're going to actually hit you know their ship date they need to have stuff in carrier testing now.
 In fact they do have stuff in carrier testing now. So why would they waste resources making a phone that they're never going to ship when they could use the actual phone and just put a different box on it so that you know it doesn't turn out accidentally announcing the device today.
 Right. By the way. What is really great on the dev alpha. What was happening there was a process was the screen resolution etc. I'm kind of out of that.
 They're not talking processor but it's 16 gigs of storage gig of RAM and a 1280 by 768 screen and I'm pretty sure it's OLED.
 And you know what you know there's some hang ups and crashes but when BlackBerry 10 works and it's not bugging out which is still is a little bit because it's still in beta.
 It's actually really fast really responsive. I'm pretty pleased with it.
 The screen resolution is interesting because they've told developers that they should target 1280 by 720 and 720 by 720.
 But that the first device that ships would be 768 by 1280. And like that's just kind of weird that you know they're telling developers to target a screen resolution that isn't going to be on the first flagship device of the ship.
 Yeah that is odd and it'll be interesting to see how that's handled if it's done with letterboxing or I guess zooming or stretching.
 Yeah. I'm pretty sure they recommended letterboxing.
 So is that a sign that RAM no longer has the component muscle to like source displays that they want instead they had to take what was available on the market.
 I think it definitely could be.
 I also think that it might them giving developers that guidance is actually kind of a nice thing because you know they knew that the square one was going to be 720 by 720 so they're just giving the developers as few targets as possible which is something that RIM has never done.
 Like developing for BlackBerry has always been a huge mess and you know RIM has pretty much admitted it.
 And so it's I was talking to Kevin from factory about this a little bit that they're probably going to they're getting smarter about sourcing stuff and they're getting smarter about making fewer versions of you know their hardware because with old BlackBerry devices they was like redoing it all over again every time they ship the phone.
 But I'm guessing that it was just a matter of like they had the screen they had to ship and that the next one's gonna be 720 and so they just tried to simplify the message to their developers.
 Was there any any other features of the dev alpha B hardware that kind of stood out to you or just kind of.
 I mean it's got a camera. I don't know how good it is. It's you know it's it's a it's a phone in a box it's meant for developer purposes so there's not a whole lot to say there until we actually get to test the final hardware even even if I'm right.
 Is the final hardware in an ugly shell. It's not fair to like you know actually judge it because they're not calling it final hardware and you know there might be tiny divisions between now and they actually ship.
 So and you know in terms of like developers like there aren't a whole lot of big names here I think biggest name here is probably four square.
 They got trotted up on stage but like Facebook is gonna be on it. Twitter is gonna be on it. LinkedIn is gonna be on it. As far as I know all those apps are developed by RIM not by those companies.
 There'll be a bunch of game off games but there's not like you know they didn't promise Instagram. They didn't promise Skype. They didn't promise Hulu.
 So there's a real big question of do they have those apps lined up and they just are waiting to announce them or are they just not going to have them.
 Right. Actually I was just going to say go through the device. It would be really hilarious if RIM came back and introduced to London or the L series and started telling us about how much thinner and how much lighter it is than the current brick that is showing us people.
 And then tried to pitch that as like this is how far we've come over the past five months. We took this old shell. We stuck this new one and it's so much better.
 I mean listen the other thing is like you were saying Dieter. RIM is going to be trickling out announcements of features and things like that over the course of the next six months or however long it takes to release this first phone release BlackBerry 10.
 So Facebook and Twitter apps are a good start to having those at launch. I would be more reassured if RIM announced that we have an email app and a calendar app at launch. Those are kind of important.
 But also I'm seeing here one of our headlines says that app submissions begin on October 10th. So which is the 10th of the 10th whether you're using the US calendar or the normal Cuban calendar.
 Kind of a nice little coincidence but that gives a lot of time and space for RIM and others to do a bit of development and get the platform up to speed. So let's try and be optimistic.
 Because that's what we can really do with RIM. Optimism.
 Indeed.
 Which is kind of the wrong note to wrap up on. Yeah usually we end on RIM and it's always such a down note.
 I mean I think in some respects this is a down note because being optimistic with RIM is like the most futile thing in the mobile industry.
 Oh no wait I have a really good down note we can end on. Samsung and TouchWiz and the dialer code.
 Yes you have some experience with that right Dieter?
 Yeah so I mean I haven't been following too closely other than because I've been here at the BlackBerry thing but I did help help test this.
 So apparently TouchWiz phones have a thing where you can dial in a code on the dialer and hit send and I guess not hit send and it will hard reset the phone and erase everything.
 And like it's actually relatively common on a lot of phones you can send commands via SMS and so someone figured out that you could send the command to open a dialer.
 Oh no it's not SMS you could you could send a command open the dialer via an iFrame in the web browser or just by clicking a link which is similar to an SMS vulnerability.
 Anyway the point is I've entered a link and I hard reset my phone but it was really weird because it didn't happen right away it sat on the screen for a little bit and so I had to test it a couple of times.
 And it doesn't seem like it's consistent across every Samsung device. I know Vlad you said you weren't seeing it on your Galaxy S3 is that right?
 Right not my own but we've got one here in the UK and we tested that one to death and it just it didn't affect it.
 The thing here and the thing that has emerged today is actually that this is a more widespread thing actually that we initially thought it doesn't seem to be touch specific anymore.
 Which is a really helpful one I would like to clarify by making zero statements about touch with like it's not a touch with issue and your Samsung like your first job will be to come out to people and say this is not a touch with problem.
 But it's a dialer issue and somebody has done some research into is looked into it they found the same vulnerability on other Android devices so it's not Samsung exclusive it's not touch with exclusive.
 So shouldn't just bash Samsung too hard.
 And apparently this isn't a vulnerability that has been identified and it's been patched.
 But this is the problem here that is in passion some Android devices and not others so the Galaxy S2 still needs a firmware update to get this fixed up.
 Some Galaxy S3 seems to be running the latest software which makes it invulnerable to this thing and some others like theaters seem to be running potentially an older version of software again.
 Samsung's communication here has been really sucky to be honest so we're not really perfectly clear on what exactly is going on but the best thing to say is that the very latest version of the software I mean Jelly Bean is apparently completely unaffected.
 Galaxy Nexus devices are unaffected.
 If you have the very latest version of whatever Android software your phone manufacturer is making available that will be your best way to avoid this.
 The other thing is don't click links that you don't know where they're going to lead you to.
 Don't don't click links that I send you to because I send that link to Dieter and he resets his phone.
 It was my fault.
 I think the answer is don't click links.
 You don't do it.
 You can't type everything into the world are manually admittedly.
 Yes.
 If you're clicking links on your mobile phone.
 Something's wrong.
 Like you should be using a mouse.
 Yes this is entirely the user's fault.
 This entirely.
 All right on that note I think I think that's a good good wrap up for our mobile show this week.
 Would you say so.
 Bring it.
 I think it's going to be great.
 I believe you did the intro so you do the outro there Vlad.
 Oh man I was asking that just so I could avoid doing it.
 But yeah why not.
 Why not.
 Let's see.
 What are we supposed to say.
 What is important.
 Like I was saying there isn't that much important important information contained in the introduction when we know that everyone who's watching listening to the live stream the recording knows where they're getting themselves in for.
 So really introducing it is kind of an act of vanity.
 And the outro is another act of vanity.
 But let's do it.
 Let's not meander with it.
 You can find us on Twitter.
 Dan is at DC Cypherd I believe or C for these are background.
 Chris is at Z power and I'm at a really mysterious place that you don't know.
 Also I'm trying to tweet so I'm not going to tell you where I am.
 You won't find me on Twitter hopefully at least for a couple of days so I can get in touch with my friends and my roots and shave at some point.
 You can email us at mobile show at the verge dot com if the email hasn't changed and you can get in touch with us via our lovely website the virtual come where you can comment on this live recording post.
 Please do take me with critiques about facial hair styles and other such things of import and please take part in our forums.
 We do that too and we love reading our readers feedback and thoughts so that we can rip them off and talk about something new next week's mobile show.
 So until then.
 All right.
 Thanks for watching guys.