 So, we talk a lot about cell phones and carriers on the show, but we don't really talk about our thoughts and our feelings about where we are in the universe and where this tiny little orb is that's hurtling through space, this rough blue little marble in a universe that's rapidly expanding and heading towards a cold, uncaring oblivion where no one sees us, no one cares, we're just dying and gone. We might talk about that on the Virgin Mobile, so actually on a related topic, we're probably going to talk about Nokia. Stay tuned for the Virgin Mobile show. Hi, I'm Dieter Bohn. I'm Vlad Stavl. I'm David Pierce. I'm Chris Ziegler, actually. I'm Chris Ziegler. It's really good to be here. It makes you more mysterious to have a different name underneath your face. It does. Nobody knows who I am. It's great. This is the Virgin Mobile show. It's episode 9 for the week of July 23rd. Vlad's back, and we are incredibly happy to have him back. And he's wearing a shirt, which is great. Disappointing. And he has hair. Yeah. Which is an upgrade. I got it like 10, 12 weeks ago. Yeah, I am. So I don't know if you guys heard, but my apartment flooded like a month ago because the sprinkler went off in the bathroom. And most of my stuff was fine, but I did lose like my electric razor. So I bought a new one and I decided, okay, I'm going to shave this beard off. And my girlfriend had complained about the beard a little bit. So she comes home after I do this favor, shave it off. And she's like, wow, you look kind of stupid. I'm going to put that beard back. Which is only going to take you like three months, which is cool. It's okay. We were talking about this before. Patience is a virtue and all of that stuff. I mean, for me, it's just a case of not shaving this morning. Yeah, I like to think that's like 45 minutes of Vlad growing his hair. Yeah, this is the Vlad 45 minute shadow. I like it. That's it. Vlad shaved right before the mobile show started. He actually just constantly walks around with it all the time, just shaving. Wow. So in terms of news this week, it was pretty much all financial results, financial results, financial results. That was the season. Yeah, we've got it from Verizon and AT&T and like they do, they're making a ton of money. I think the big news out of Verizon was that they finally reached the halfway point for smartphones. So half their postpaid subscribers are using smartphones. They added almost 900,000 new subscribers as well. And I don't even know what their profit was. It was something ridiculous. I mean, it always is. 15 billion in revenue. Actually, AT&T is a bit ahead of that. AT&T is a bit ahead of Verizon in terms of smartphone subscribers as a proportion of the overall number. I believe for AT&T, it's now 61.9%. So they're a few percentage points ahead, which may be owing to the iPhone and the fact that AT&T had so much more time to start selling that to people before Verizon. Maybe. I don't know. I'm European. I don't even know. What's Verizon? What's Verizon's percentage of- No, I just mean, what is that? Is that a thing? Yeah, you're just jealous because- I'm wrapping up my jokes. I promise to have funny ones by the end of the podcast. You're just jealous because carriers don't control every moment of your life all the time and you wish that they did is really what it is. That is correct. I think Verizon is my family. I do find myself in existential moments where I wish a mobile carrier would just step in and take care of me by taking my money. So the thing about AT&T's results is they're bragging that their ARPU, which we have talked about before, the average revenue per user, is still getting larger. It's the highest in the industry. They're making almost $65 per customer, which is, and that's per month, I'm assuming. That's pretty high. I don't know. We complained a whole lot about AT&T last week with the rumor that they might be charging extra for FaceTime access. I don't know. They're companies. They're making money. They're making plenty of money. I don't have any sympathy with profits like these that they don't have the resources to build out their networks and get the spectrum that they need. I'm absolutely on board with you. Here's the thing that comes to my mind, or the thing that I thought about today when we addressed the AT&T earnings. I believe for the quarter they had $3.9 billion in net profit, net of everything else. The thing you have to consider with that is that $3.9 billion over three months is over a billion per month. It's really complicated mathematics, but I think I managed it. That's how much the company is making in just pure unadulterated cash falling down into their coffers. This isn't reinvestment money. I don't even know that it's necessarily dividend money. I don't know what AT&T's position is in terms of dividend. It's just cash. For example, if AT&T wants to reinvest, if AT&T wants to make investments into infrastructure, that stuff actually shows up as an expense on AT&T's account sheets. When you see $3.9 billion in net profit, what you're seeing isn't money that is potentially going to be reinvested. It's the stuff that AT&T investors, well, I don't know about investors, again, that depends on dividend. Where does this profit actually go? It's actually a good point, which I don't even know. You get pure profit, you don't do a dividend, who gets that money? The point is, it doesn't stay in the industry. It doesn't benefit or help anybody. It just gets sucked out. That's the money that comes out of your pocket. It doesn't come back in to rebuild the industry or to build up 4G infrastructure. It just goes somewhere. We are such communists. I mean, screw it. I mean, how is it beneficial? Okay, we have this, and this is the thing that people say about capitalism. It's a great system for extracting value, right? But the point is, okay, we've extracted $3.9 billion worth of value, and then it just kind of disappears. The thing about profit is, it doesn't benefit anybody. If profit in all circumstances was reinvestment money, that would be awesome, terrific. If every single quarter, AT&T just reinvested nearly $4 billion into everything, into systems, and then AT&T came back and said, actually, guys, we don't have money. We need to raise your prices. I think people would understand. But at the moment, as a European, one of the big scary things for me, if I ever thought about relocating to the US, was how horribly I would be raped by American carriers, and the fact that I wouldn't even have a choice about who's doing it to me. It would be AT&T or Verizon, and it would probably be just AT&T because of Verizon, CDMA, and that's horrible. I need a phone that I can swap SIMs in and out of. Well, I think the theory, the counter argument to this seems to be that Verizon and AT&T come out and say, well, we invested all this money in infrastructure, and we built these networks, and now you're paying off all this money that we already put in. But at the same time, I can't imagine that if they're taking in $4 billion in profit every quarter, that that money, that they're constantly paying for this infrastructure that they already paid out for. And eventually, they've paid it off, and now it's just, as you said, filling somebody's pockets and going nowhere. But then again, lots of companies have excess money. Apple has, whatever, $100 billion in cash, and we don't really fault them for it. Yeah. Well, the difference is Apple doesn't lease spectrum from the people of the United States. So I mean- Yeah, this is- Sorry, go ahead, Edith. No, I was going to say, there used to be a history when AT&T had a monopoly of the company feeling like it had a public duty and a public trust to serve the phone lines and provide good quality and respect to their customers, basically. And now that it's been broken up, and we live in the world we live in, in the US, it seems like there's less of that. And so, I mean, we can't begrudge a corporation to earn profits. That's what a corporation does. That's what it's for. That's what their charters say. But nevertheless, it's still like, just in terms of thinking about the next time AT&T or Verizon comes out and spends a poor me story, I'm just saying I don't have any sympathy for that. No, agreed. And the point you raise is exactly why I'm having this mini rant. And I promise to have a full-size rant later on today. I hope so. The point you raise is exactly the important one, which is that AT&T and Verizon are operating systems which are fundamentally important to American people and to the American economy. If you don't have reliable 3G and now soon 4G networks, you're falling behind. You can't compete economically. And a big strength of the United States is the fact that, particularly with LTE, and particularly with myself being in the UK, and see how delayed that rollout is, you're one of the leading nations in terms of rolling out LTE. Verizon and AT&T have actually done that really aggressively and really well. So credit to them for that. But the fact is, they're still operating something that is fundamental to the nation and the country. So in those circumstances, you kind of have to impute an extra level of responsibility on these companies. Whereas Apple, I mean, what the hell? If Apple stops making iPads and iPhones, this might shock a lot of people, but the world isn't going to end. American economic competitiveness isn't going to end because there are no more iPhones. There are replacement-level devices for iPhones and iPads and all of these things, but there is no replacement-level alternative for Verizon's 3G and 4G network or AT&T. Which actually, if I can come up with a very small little digression to do with the Olympics, in the UK, they had a similar snafu, if you like, where they privatized the security around the Olympics. They hired out a private company, and they picked the one that offered the lowest bid, the lowest cost to the government. Like they do. Like you do. And then what ended up happening is that now the government is having to call in soldiers from the army to fill in because the private company couldn't provide a security personnel, which is just brilliant. And my conclusion putting the two things together is that when you have something that's really fundamental to a country, you kind of have to think long and hard about why you would ever want to privatize it. If it's so important that the government can't let it fail, such as Olympic security and at least in my opinion, mobile networks, then maybe the government should be running those things in the first place. And then maybe, as Dieter says, guys like AT&T and Verizon can still do their private operations by leasing that from the government or from the state. Well, I mean, we treat them like a utility. We've got power companies, we've got water, sewer. Those are all run by private companies in most countries, at least in the US, and they're just well regulated. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, yeah, that's my thinking. You kind of have to regulate, either regulate tightly or just run it by the government. I mean, I could say that water companies, particularly here in the UK, yes, they run private operations, but they don't do it particularly well. I don't really see the whole point of privatization. Seriously, man, just 100% taxes and let's go in. Live free. From each according to their ability to each according to what Vlad feels like. That's the thing. Yeah. I'd sign up for that, actually. I'm in on that. Yeah. Another earnings story came out, Nokia. So- Before we go to Nokia, I have one more thing that this is, and this is just occurring to me as I read over the earnings things again. Do you guys think that, it seems to me from reading these earnings reports that AT&T still has a huge iPhone advantage and that that's kind of driving AT&T? And I wonder, everybody sells the iPhone now. You can buy the iPhone on US cellular now, but it seems like AT&T sold more iPhones than Verizon did. And thus, I think in a related note, it's smartphone numbers are higher. It's like a lot of the new people who come are buying iPhones more than are buying Android phones percentage wise versus Verizon. And it seems like people still think of AT&T as the carrier where you buy an iPhone. That might be true, but let me make a quick point though. AT&T don't actually say how many iPhones they've sold. As usual with these financial reports, they've been tricky with their wording. So they say they've sold during the quarter 5.1 million smartphones sold sales, but they've activated 3. something million iPhones, which means we don't really have a direct comparison between or a direct way to say of AT&T smartphone sales, they've sold so many iPhones. Because for example, you could have bought one in Europe or you could have bought one elsewhere, brought it over to AT&T's network. You could be a replacement device that you're talking about. So we don't necessarily know, but I think your point, David, is solid. I do feel similarly that people think of AT&T first when they think about iPhone. It's kind of taken a while to feel the fruit, I guess, the message that you can get on every single carrier. Well, don't forget that AT&T, even though their LTE network is getting pretty widespread, they still are way behind Verizon. So Verizon was pushing LTE phones more than probably AT&T was. So I mean, on AT&T in most places in the country, the fastest network you could get on worked with the iPhone. With Verizon, you could get on a faster network if you got another device. So I would expect that once we see an LTE iPhone that those numbers will probably start to be a little bit closer. But I mean, your larger point that people think of AT&T as an iPhone network or think of the iPhone on AT&T, I think is totally true. And I think that the fact that there are so many older iPhones out there that are still perfectly good, still getting handed down to teenagers, still getting given to friends or whatever when somebody upgrades is another reason why AT&T continues to activate a ton of iPhones. Okay, here's the perfect segue. You know what else is on AT&T? The Lumia 900. Yay. Not very many of them, though. Vlad, are you using that phone as your daily driver now? I am. I am. I honestly am. I have the Lumia 900 and I honestly am using it as my daily driver and I am not actually suffering for it. Really? It does a decent job. You switched from the Linux, right? Yeah, I mean, this is part of my rant. I don't really want to get into it immediately. Okay, I'll wait then. But so long as you imagine there are no apps in the world, if you just think there's this software which is on the phone and that's it and there's no other ecosystem to tap into, you're fine. It's no problem. So long as you don't think Dropbox exists, you're fine. It's all good. I'm screwing around, but honestly, I use the media player. I really like the calendar. The email client is decent. It has issues, but it's decent. I mean, look, it's fine. It's a tolerable phone, I think. And okay, I'll just say the big reason why I actually switched to this. And also these are review units, by the way. I'm not spending my money on like a billion phones. I'll hand these review units back eventually. But yes, I had a One X and while I was away in Bulgaria, I used the Galaxy Nexus for two weeks with Jellabene, which is gorgeous. I was so right when I was logging into the Galaxy Nexus, still the best Android phone. I'm all convinced now. And Chris is just completely nuts and bonkers. But yeah, so I use the Galaxy Nexus and then I came back and I switched to the One X and just the onscreen keyboard and some of the other as quote, media synchrocy of sense just pissed me off to such a degree that I was like, screw this and I went to Lumi 900, which actually has a really, really nice onscreen keyboard. Again, with Windows Phone, they really have the basic fundamentals in place and ready. So that the onscreen keyboard, the camera app, which Jellabene actually kind of copies a little bit, you know, with the whole swiping in from the side to look at images you've already taken. So the fundamentals, I mean, we've said this before, the fundamentals of Windows Phone are there and they're in place. So I wouldn't necessarily, I wouldn't at all say that I would use the Lumi 900 permanently, but for a while as a change of pace, I think it's pretty, pretty cool. I mean, it's one of the best iPhones. It's really swanky. So I am trading my personal Galaxy Nexus for a Lumi 900. What? Yeah, what's happening? It's happening. I don't understand. We have a review unit of the Galaxy Nexus around. So if I need to use a Nexus, I still can. But the bottom line is the only Windows Phone that we have on the West Coast is my own personal Windows Phone, which is original Samsung Focus. No, Aditya, I'm shipping you one. Be patient. Please. Faster, man. Faster. It's on its way. We need to have a modern Windows Phone, as modern as you can get right now, and so I'm straight up, I'm doing it. I'm excited. This is going to be... I feel like I've had this experience with you like a dozen times now, Aditya, where you're like, I am switching, it's going to be great. And then eight minutes in, you're like, this is terrible, I'm going back to the Galaxy Nexus. Yeah. Well, I've been on the Galaxy S3 for about a week and it's grown on me quite a bit, although I'm still not using S Voice and I still wish that the multitasking key was there instead of a long press. But Chris is right, he's like the ghost looking over the entire podcast. TouchWiz is so much better than Sense. It is so much better than Sense. I think my One X has got a Cyanogen Mod Alpha on it right now and there's a bunch of stuff that's broken on it and I don't care. I'd rather use that than Sense at this point. On that point though, I need to show you something. I love that it's available on my Lumia 900. That might be good because it's been a bit unstable. People who are listening to the audio of this podcast are not going to really benefit from this, but take a look at this on the video. It's the Bing button on this phone. That is one of the most disused pieces of capacitive key software I've ever seen. I've never touched it. I think if you dust this phone for fingerprints, the one spot you'll never find my fingerprint is the Bing button. It's just useless. I don't even use search on a Google phone, which is Google search, which is better than Bing search. The very rare times when I use it, I actually do search with a microphone. I do voice search on Android, which works decently well, but that's the only time I ever bought it to do. If I want to actually search something, I open up a browser window. It's quicker for me. I got a really long conversation with our news manager out here, Brian Bishop, talking about how underutilized search is on phones, just because it doesn't seem to be as fast and as convenient as it needs to be on Android and iOS and even Windows phone. We stepped backwards from where we were with Blackberry and Windows Mobile and WebOS, where you had a keyboard just there waiting for you to start typing into it to search for stuff. Hitting that extra button and waiting for the UI to pop up the search bar and then waiting for the keyboard to appear and then start typing, that's just enough wait time where I just don't want to bother. I'd rather just look for the icon or pop up the browser window. But these are the economics of it as well. If you have an application and you know where it is, in order to access it, what you do is you swipe to unlock the phone. You do a few swipes. You might have to open up a folder, but it's just big motions and big sweeps that you do with your thumb, let's say. Whereas if you want to search for something, as you say, you have to bring up a search menu to begin with and then you have to start typing away. And big, rough, imprecise swipes are so much easier than actually typing something specifically as a name. This is why I use Voice Search on Android, as I mentioned, because again, that can be more imprecise and it can be something you do actually on the move as opposed to stopping and typing something in. I mean, that's my perspective. We got to get into it. Like, Sonokia's earnings, they only sold 600,000 Lumia handsets in North America. And I think overall, they sold for the quarter, I want to say $4 million. Yeah, it was $4 million. Yeah, $4 million and then $7 million to date. And then their quote was that Lumia activations were flat up after the Windows Phone 8 announcement. Basically my sense is that the Windows Phone 8 announcement and all the convention that we did about, oh, is this going to destroy Lumia sales? Is it going to hurt Lumia sales? It's like, maybe it did, but they were already so borderline and low to begin with that even a hit from that wasn't a huge blip on their sales radar. They are already selling it to people that were in the know, is my concern or my fear, at least in the US. Yeah, I think that's a fair point. I mean, look, to me, it's encouraging insofar as Nokia is still seeing growth in terms of Lumia sales. And I do also like to take the contrarian view with respect to Nokia, which a couple of years ago was, we have so much market share, how could things ever turn bad? And Chris and myself and Thomas Rick over here in Europe were saying, dudes, you need to figure out touchscreens or you're going to crash. So now I'm actually taking the opposite position. Nokia has been persistent in saying we have the cash. Yes, we're losing money, but we have the cash to cover it. So I guess that's where those profits go. They go into coffers and people actually save them, which is kind of unusual for the Western world. But yeah, okay, so Nokia has the cash. It says it can endure this period, this transitional period. Yes, it's stretching out to be months and months and now over a year, I guess. But there is some sunshine on the horizon with Windows Phone 8 and whatever is going to come later in the year. I mean, my perspective is, yes, the numbers themselves are rough and Nokia lost, what was it, like a billion dollars during the quarter or something like that? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, that's rough. I get it. But then Nokia still has reserves. It can still kind of weather the storm and then come back. So if we get something with the sort of iconic design that we saw from Nokia N9, which got continued in things like the Lumia 900, Nokia still has a chance. As far as I'm concerned, the latter part of this year is just going to be the crunch time for Nokia. And I think what's really interesting to me about Windows Phone 8 is less the software changes which are fine, but that finally Windows Phone 8 will have real top of the line specs attached to its handsets. And it makes me think like Nokia, I think, did the absolute best it could have within the constraints of Windows Phone. And it made a gorgeous phone. It has its issues. It's not a fantastic processor. It has the obvious ecosystem issues. But with Windows Phone 8, the Lumia 900, it might get a little better. But what could be much, much better is the next Lumia phone. And I think that is, I mean, if I were Nokia, I'd be furious right now because like as soon as you launch this flagship phone, they say, oh, we have potential for much better phones running this better operating system. So I think for right now, they just need to stall as long as they can until they get a real shot to launch the best phone they can possibly launch, which will be 720p and multi-core and NFC and all that stuff. And then say, here's a phone that we think can actually compete on the broader market. Well, that was supposed to be the Lumia 900. I mean, that's the thing. I mean, we talk about the Lumia sales are doing well. Well, Lumia sales is the distinction that they made for their Windows Phone products. And of course, they're going to grow because they started at nothing when they first started selling these earlier. So I mean, the thing that's interesting to me that you brought up, David, is Nokia hasn't competed directly against iPhone and Android sort of on the same spec war. And there's always been this sense like we know that there's another version of Windows Phone coming that's going to be better. We know that their hands are tied in terms of specs. I can't remember how long it's been since Nokia was like straight up head to head going against other flagships with no caveats in the market. I mean, like N95? I mean, how far back do we need to go? And so that'll be really interesting. And I think the most interesting thing is, at least as far as the US goes, Windows Phone 8 is going to see probably Verizon putting some serious marketing muscle behind it. And we're going to see these carriers once again starting up the game of playing the different OS providers against each other. And they're going to be throwing Windows Phone into that ring. And we saw AT&T do it a little bit, but I think with Windows Phone 8, we're going to see it a lot. We're going to see not just Nokia, but other manufacturers that are still playing in the Windows Phone game really get a big push from US carriers. And I think it's going to be really interesting to see if at that point with modern hardware, with competitive specs, and with competitive marketing help from the carriers, if it can compete. Like if all that happens, if they get all of that, and it still doesn't take off in some small way, that's a big problem. There's only so long that Microsoft can stick around and keep trying with this stuff. And they really need a win with Windows Phone 8. Oh, absolutely. To your point about when Nokia was last competing, if you speak with the fanboys, Nokia has never won. It's just that the world has kind of gone weird and stopped buying Nokia devices. Which is a totally logical argument. I think even the most strident Symbian fanboy would have to admit that you get a Symbian phone sort of knowing that you're buying into a different ecosystem relative to what else is out there. It's a smaller ecosystem in terms of apps, in terms of support from developers. You could still say it's competing on a one-to-one ratio, but there's that little caveat that like, sure, yeah, the PureView is competing on a one-to-one, but really it's not. Really you understand that you're getting into a different kind of ecosystem with that. And I feel like Nokia has always had that little caveat for the past few years anyway. Of course. And also, did you say that Nokia sold 600,000 Lumias in the US? Was that the number that we had in the US? In the quarter. Yeah, it was in the quarter. Yeah. In North America. It wasn't just the US, it was North America. So, Canada. But I believe that's roughly the same as the previous quarter, the quarter before that. It was about half a million units that Nokia sold in the US. So it does seem, again, North America, sorry. It does seem like Nokia's penetration of that market, which again has been a critical one, it's the one that Project Thunder was about and that Stephen Neelop emphasized growing in the US and North America in general. It hasn't happened. So again, that's a problem today. But the reason why I choose to be excited, not excited, but choose to look at Nokia's chances positively is precisely the thing that David touched on. It's the fact that you kind of finally dropped the chains of Windows Phone 7. I like the fact, with Windows Phone 7, I like the fact that you get a unified user experience across all devices. It's a good thing. But then the bad thing is that the very latest devices are stuck with limitations that were present with the very first devices. So as we've discussed, Nokia not upgrading the Lumia 900 to Windows Phone 8 is rough. No other Windows Phone 7 device is getting Windows Phone 8. It's rough for everybody who's bought one and who maybe was an early adopter and wanted to show faith in Microsoft, et cetera, et cetera. When at the same time you got the Apple 3GS getting iOS 6 and all of these things that you kind of want to try and ignore if you want to be happy with your life and your smartphone. But aside from all of those things, while I was in Bulgaria, as I said, I've been using the Galaxy Nexus. And I recall I tweeted about three weeks ago that the perfect smartphone today is the Galaxy Nexus with the Nokia 808 PureView as the camera. Because as we know, the Nexus camera sucks. So while I was away in Bulgaria for a couple of weeks, I tried that, I experimented, and took both with me. And I tried to live that lifestyle. The first thing to say is it doesn't really work. You can't really have two phones. You kind of need to use one phone and then just kind of accept the camera, settle for the camera, or pick a phone with a really great camera and then settle for the software. Which Aaron from our European team is inclined to do with the 808 PureView. I would argue very much against it. Because- Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's a whole bunch of reasons. But one really great example, as far as I'm concerned, is when I was on the Bulgarian seaside and me and my friend were struggling to get any sort of web connection. We didn't have SIM cards. I mean, it's a massive pain to even procure a SIM card. Never mind a micro SIM. A micro SIM is a mystery to those guys. But okay, we didn't have a SIM card. We finally found a Wi-Fi spot. And I left my Galaxy Nexus in the hotel room, went out with the 808 PureView because I thought I would want to take pictures. We got Wi-Fi. I got into Wi-Fi with the 808 PureView. That's the other thing. My friend had a Libia 900 with him. And he was fine, right? He could Skype with people. He could tweet. He could do anything. But I had the 808. And I was like, what can I do now? Can I upload pictures? Well, I don't have Dropbox. The only option really that I had was emailing pictures to myself, which kind of sucks. The preloaded official Twitter client, which everybody has said is bad, but it really shouldn't be bad. It has this peculiarity where if you don't have a SIM card in the phone, you can't turn the application on. You can't use the app at all without a SIM card, which is equal parts stupid and absurd. This was one of those Skype clients, so I couldn't get in touch with anybody. So I was literally at a cafe with Wi-Fi, holding this phone and wondering what in the hell can I actually do with this connection and this phone? And it was basically nothing. There's nothing. It's like you could take pictures with it or you can make phone calls with it. And that's where it all went. But the reason I can be kind of optimistic about Nokia is because I thought, well, if I could still have this camera and I could take my friend's Libia 900 functionality, essentially take Windows phone and slap it onto the camera of the 808 PDV, I might actually be okay with the fact that the Galaxy Nexus was in my hotel room or if it was nowhere near me. And then I might even say, that's a phone that's worth swapping your Galaxy Nexus for the Eater, but not the Lumia 900. What you should do is you should just buy some duct tape or like a little hinge and make yourself a fold-out flip phone with the PureView on the back and the Lumia 900 on the front. Just cram them together. It's going to be easy to just get the DSLR and stick a freaking tiny smartphone onto it, honestly. But this is my point. Like you're trading Galaxy Nexus for Lumia 900. I'm saying no, don't do it. Aaron wants to trade. What is he using at the moment? I think he's got a Galaxy S2 for the 808 PDV or maybe use the 808 PDV as a second phone. In either case, no. But if you combine the two, if you take the PureView, if you take the Lumia and you actually stick Windows Phone 8 on top of all of that, that's a competitive phone. Particularly, nothing can touch the 808 PDV on camera performance. My family had point and shoot cameras with them. I was taking the best photos with the PureView. I just left every other camera at home. It's a great camera. And Nokia has exactly what you need to push Windows Phone 8 forward. It has the ability to design great things. When you have the specs and when you have the software together, it can do it. I do feel like they can survive until, let's say, October time and do it. Come on. For Europe, Nokia. For Europe. Well, but then we're back to the point that you made a little while ago about how if apps weren't a thing, Windows Phone would be fantastic. But apps are a thing. I was having this conversation with somebody a while ago saying if it were 2007, Windows Phone is the best operating system and it's not even close. I really believe that. But then everybody else came out with app stores. But that's why I think Windows 8 could potentially be huge for Windows Phone 8 because now you can develop the apps together. Even in that they're launching Windows Phone 8 after Windows 8, and that could be huge because then you've got a month for people to start really developing apps for Windows 8 that can start migrating their way to Windows Phone 8. And I think that's the real chance that they have. Just a quick correction. Aaron just emailed me to say it's not true. He's not swapping any phone for the Apple way. He wants to use his second phone. So Aaron is saying it in detail at the moment. We're just saying something. If you have ever seen the guy's haircut. Yeah, Aaron's crazy. We can just say that. Okay. So while we have been podcasting, Apple's earnings have come out. Had $8.8 billion profit, $35 billion revenue, $17 million iPads, which is a big increase. Sales of iPhones dropped to $26 million compared to $35 million the previous quarter, but they always drop this quarter. Basically it looks like... The call is going on right now, and so we'll have more color as the day goes on. But it looks like it was a small miss, but it was a small miss relative to what analysts have been expecting. And so it's still huge. They've got $117 billion in cash on hand. They're doing fine. It just seems like finally, finally after so many years, everybody's sort of figured out that Apple posts big numbers and are starting to expect big numbers from Apple instead of meh. Yeah, they're finally getting used to this game that Apple plays where they way underestimate what their next quarter is going to be. And so then it always looks great because they outdo all of their own expectations. So analysts are like, well, they're clearly lying. So we're just going to way overshoot that. And then that'll maybe be the answer. Yeah. Yeah. What I was going to say, D2 is kind of underselling it when you say people are getting used to Apple posting big numbers. These aren't big numbers. These are just industry crushing numbers. They're humongous. This is why... That's the other thing. Analysts, if you've ever read analyst reports and estimates, they aren't afraid to be aggressive. Some of them make their name on the basis of the fact that they go way overboard with things and way overestimate things like Google stock price and all of that stuff just because they want to stand out. So they go really aggressive and then maybe they get lucky and things actually pan out. So even when you take the really aggressive guys and their estimates are beaten, Apple is just, as David says, I mean, yes, Apple underestimates things to do the classic thing of under promise over deliver. And now maybe analysts are wising up, but the scale of it is... I mean, I don't think it's really comprehensive. I know. I mean, let's put this into context. We just talked about Nokia having enough cash on hand to survive through this dip and get itself reestablished in the smartphone game. I think we're looking at 5.15 billion cash on hand in US dollars that Nokia has or let their liquid assets. That's less than what Apple added to their cash on hand this past quarter. 117 billion is where they're at now. So the amount that Nokia was able to add or lost from its cash on hand was literally a rounding error when you put it on the scale of what Apple's been doing. That made me really sad, actually. Yeah. I mean, and Apple's revenue is bigger than Microsoft and Google combined, which is just wild. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, wow. You know what really amazed me is that iPod sales are only down 10% over last year. Who is still buying iPods? If you don't already own an iPod, why are you buying an iPod? It just doesn't make any sense to me. I do feel like it's... Is that as iPod touch? Yeah. I mean, they're saying it accounts for more than half of their iPod sales. But like, just buy an iPhone or I mean, is it kids? That's my only theory is that kids are still getting iPod touches. Riding the London on the ground today, that was my impression. I saw a couple of iPod touches and it was kids playing games. So maybe it's Steve Jobs was absolutely spot on when he said it's a great gaming machine. And I mean, at the time he was saying it to cover the fact that he didn't have a front facing camera, but yeah. And it's the cheap gateway drug to all of Apple's other bigger, more expensive devices too. Yeah. Yeah. But man, I mean, Apple can actually like retire right now, not release another product, not ship another product for how many decades, whatever it is, keep the exact same level of staffing, exact same level of expenses. And yeah, I mean, Apple can like take a decade off and still be one of the healthiest companies in tech. Yeah. I mean, their content stores, the App Store and the iTunes Store was 4.1 billion in revenue. Like nobody's operating at this scale, nobody else is even close to operating at this scale. And like every quarter, I promise that I'm not going to sit here and boggle at how much, how big Apple is and how much money they're raking in. But even with this relatively disappointing quarter, it's still like the thing that I just can't get away from is just the scale relative to what anybody else is doing. It's like one or two orders of magnitude bigger. Even in a down quarter, it doesn't matter because the scale is so much bigger, it's like whatever. No, I agree. But let's think about the positive stuff. I do feel like the Nexus 7 is going to be a really, really significant device for Google. And it's a space with the Kindle Fire where we also expect to have a new Kindle Fire sometime running through the soon where, in terms of the price range anyway, it's a space where Apple isn't competing right now in those affordable tablets. Google has a strong enough app and content store. Amazon has a strong enough app and content store. So at least even while Apple is generating all of this profit and revenue, at least I do see good opportunity and good potential for competition. So I'm not really as worried as you might have been looking at Intel's dominance of chips, let's say a few years back, say a decade ago or whatever. It's always good to have competition. So it's kind of like, okay, Apple is making a lot of money, but at least Google is making moves. I do like Microsoft's aggressiveness with the Surface tablets and with Windows 8 and all of that stuff. We'll see how it all pans out. But at least there's competition going on and it doesn't really seem to me like we're going to end up in the situation where we just have an incumbent who isn't forced to keep innovating. For example, the iPhone, let's call it the iPhone 5, the next generation iPhone, it can't really afford to be just an iPhone 4T. The iPhone 4 and the iPhone 4S are way too similar, but you can't afford to have another one that is just the same. You do need to upgrade. There are other guys pushing you and guys who will take your position if you just kind of sit on the same spot. At least I hope so. At least I hope we're not just buying things because they're iPhones. Right? Anyone? We are. No, we totally are. I mean, look, I mean, when someone asks you on the street, what phone should I buy? And you don't know them from Peter, what do you say? Just get an iPhone. I mean, that's just how it's going to be for a while. I really took your attempt at being hopeful and just shut it down. No, I kind of disagree. I think I still recommend iPhones to people, but I think if they, I mean, there's no way this is going to happen. I really can't imagine this happening. But if Apple comes out with another iPhone that doesn't have LTE, I'll stop recommending iPhones to people. And it's an obvious thing that they have to upgrade, but that's to your point, Vlad, that people have come out, Apple claimed it was a battery thing, and then Motorola comes out with the Razer Max, which both has LTE and lasts forever. And so that's not an issue anymore. And Apple needs to figure out a way to compete with these things. And especially as Android gets better and the skins get better, Motorola's ice cream sandwich skin is great. And the smart actions is really cool. And I'm a huge fan. And now Apple has these real things that it's lacking in. And I like the Razer Max last longer than the current iPhone, even though it has LTE and it's faster and the smart actions is cool and it has NFC and all this stuff. And like Apple legitimately has some catching up that it needs to do, especially in these particular features, which I think is great. So totally, I agree. And the other thing is I have been noticing the fact that the gap has been narrowing. Like we kind of, being involved in the industry all the time, we kind of miss these things and the way things change. But I think back to when the iPhone 3GS was the latest iPhone just before the iPhone 4 came out. So what was that, 2009-ish? Yeah, I think that's right. Whatever. I mean, maybe to 2010. And when the iPhone 3GS was the latest iPhone, it was so far ahead of any Android phone. It wasn't even close. Like the smoothness of the interface was untouchable. Like I spent time reviewing and playing around with Android phones for months. And then I picked up a 3GS, started scrolling around it. And I was like, dude, I've been wasting my time. Like this thing is so far ahead of everything else. Why are we even bothering? Like 3GS at the time was just a massive chunk ahead of everything else. And it was just way too easy to say, best smartphone, iPhone 3GS, you're done. Clear. Finished. Whereas now we can have arguments. And they can be legitimate arguments as opposed to like drunk Neil I. Patel rants where it's like, no, goddammit. For the sake of such and such, it used to be this. And again, that gives me hope that we'll continue to have a competitive environment in mobile, which is what we need ultimately. And part of what we need is still Nuckeye. Whatever happens, I do feel like we need some European design flair so we don't end up with a whole bunch of products called Macs and capsulized like the Razr and missing vowels. Like the iPhone. I mean, seriously, iPhone, iPad, all of these names, they're ridiculous. Ice cream sandwich. Honestly, like if you're going to name a product, don't have Japanese people name it because you'll be a sequence of alphanumeric nonsense and don't have Americans name it because then it would be just straight nonsense. Like I don't know who we need. Maybe French people. French things sound classy. You don't understand what I mean, but they just sound classy. Right? That's true. Yes. Like LePhone. From LePhone. Yeah. That was a Chinese company coming up with that name. Yeah, that works. See? Do we want to talk about Beats Audio? No, Beats Audio bought a controlling interest back in their company back from HTC. CNET had reported that HTC maybe wasn't doing everything they needed to keep the relationship going like not meeting their financial something. I mean, I'm just disappointed that HTC has had such a rough time of it lately. I was really hoping that the One Series that they would come roaring back and instead they had this, I think what we have to call as a boondoggle with Beats, just a distraction. It's really disappointing because I really kind of want to root for them, but they're not winning anywhere right now. Yeah. I mean, look, as far as I'm concerned, it's HTC's fault because of cents. The Android that Google gives you has a rock solid, perfectly usable onscreen keyboard, and then you screwed that up. And you forced me to come back and fix it. People are telling me, who uses the stock keyboard on cents? Get SwiftKey, get CyanogenMod, get such and such. It's like, I don't want to. I paid my money for this device and HTC screwed it up and now you want me to work on removing the screw up. That's the exact opposite thing. This is why we commend guys like Vizio, right? Because Sean Hollister just reviewed recently the Vizio thin and light laptop. And I mean, as a laptop, it's not great. But one of the great things about it is that it's just straight windows with no bloatware, right? Yeah. Yeah. And thumbs up. Keep doing that. Everybody appreciates those things. And I'm sure Vizio is going to be able to sell at least some of these laptops just from the strength of the fact that there's no bloatware, there's no noise. It's just windows and you can just get on with using it. And you don't need to go through all of these hoops. And that's what HTC does with cents. I mean, HTC tried to minimize cents, they tried to improve it. And we're really hopeful and enthusiastic about that. I mean, Dieter, you wrote up a mini editorial about HTC finding its design roots again, but it just wasn't good enough. I don't think. Yeah, didn't make it. Yeah. So, I mean, look, HTC is going to come back probably later this year with new devices, Jelly Bean devices, for sure, right? And hopefully, they do something strong and impressive with Windows Phone and that kicks us back up again. I do feel like we need HTC and guys like LG, right? David, you reviewed the LG Forex HD and that was the highest rated LG we ever had. We need those guys to keep guys like Samsung in check because the whole Apple versus Samsung conversation, I am so sick and tired of it. I would love for 2013 to be a conversation about Apple versus Samsung versus LG versus HTC versus Nokia versus Sony, right? If Sony is still alive and kicking. Yeah. I mean, and the thing is, it seems like everyone is just a little ways off. Like Sony makes great phones. Aaron, our crazy Aaron, just reviewed the Xperia U and there's a lot to like about it, especially design-wise, but they ship it with Gingerbread and that's just, you can't do that anymore. That's insane. Right. But they've also updated, I think it was the Xperia P to Ice Cream Sandwich and it's a huge improvement and actually makes that a much more compelling phone. And there was the Xperia Ion in the US, which is the same way. It's a great phone except that it has Gingerbread, which is just absolutely unforgivable. And then HTC makes a gorgeous phone with an incredible display and senses too much. And on and on and on, they're just one small thing removed from having a really, really, really compelling system. And my great hope, and I'm sure this won't be true because it never is, is that at least one more person will figure it out in the next six months and we'll have a real legitimate third competitor. Because we're not that far away. Yeah. Just before we conclude- I mean, Samsung is the closest with the Galaxy S3. I mean, honestly, I mean, they're selling a ton of them. And it's like, I prefer the way the One X looks to it, but it's a good phone, it's a good experience and they haven't messed up Android too much. But it's just, I don't know, I find it boring. And I find the iPhone boring. Like I'm just, I'm bored. I want more charged action. I want more people legitimately fighting instead of getting beaten down. Dita wants to see the Nuckeer engage, make a comeback. That's what he wants. Oh, man. I would be all about that. It's obvious it works. We haven't had a sidekick in a while either. It might be time. Actually, did you guys see this Droid X fake thing that's getting made? Somebody made a fake PS Vita shell and loaded it up with ice cream sandwich and has also preloaded it with a whole bunch of ROM emulators. So it's just a straight up completely fake PS Vita running Android so that you can play ROMs on it. That's amazing. And it's called the Droid X360. So it takes all the boxes. Yeah, the Droid X360. That's pretty good. That's like everything the Xperia play should have been and wasn't at all, at all, at all, at all. Yeah. Dude, that's actually a hardware designed by SEO principles. So it's like, how do I get on anybody's search engine for any reason to do with gaming or Android? Just download the Droid, stick X360 in the name, make it into a PS Vita lookalike, and it can play PlayStation 1 games. So I mean, well, via the emulator. But yeah, all you need is Wii. Let's see how many people we can get to sue us if they can find us before we sell this thing. You can sell some crazy phones in China. That's okay. Should we talk about Sparrow that Google acquired them and they're not going to update their app anymore? Yes. I want to- There it is. Can I just sit here and sob for the next like 40, 45 minutes? No. No, David, that is not allowed. But we will permit you to have a good and proper rant, please. No. So I actually don't have, I don't even really have a rant. I think this is the most, for me, it's like the most high risk, high reward thing ever. I'm a serial switcher between apps and the Gmail app for Android is legitimately great. And the Gmail app for iOS is just a nightmare hell ride in the world. It's awful. I hate it. I hate it. I want it to die. That's just the end. And so my great hope is that Dom and his team will show up at Google and say, listen, let's just call Sparrow Gmail, change some of the colors, and here's our new app. It has multiple accounts. It doesn't crash all the time. It has push because Gmail has figured out how to do that. So I'm excited about that. And if the Sparrow ideas are just brought to the Gmail team, I think that's really exciting and especially really exciting for iOS users because the email system on iOS is awful. And it's the thing I like the least about my iPhone by a million miles. So that's a beautiful dream. But I mean, listen, it's not going to happen that quickly, even if that is what the goal is, or just add some Sparrow features to the existing Gmail app or whatever they're going to do. The thing that was great about Sparrow was they iterated it so quickly. And they can move quick, and they're nimble. And they can make a great app independently, and they can respond directly to user requests and features. And they talk to everybody. And inside the giant corporation that is Google on the team, within the team, with the manager who has another manager, even if Google has perfected not having crappy bureaucracy, and I imagine they're better than most companies, there's no way that they're going to be able to iterate as quickly as they did as an independent company or just be as responsive to user requests because it's going to need to get put through the corporate machine. I don't want to say they shouldn't have done it. I mean, if Google offered to buy my company that doesn't exist, I would probably seriously consider it. But nevertheless, it's a bummer for people who love the idea of independent apps. I mean, the thing I tweeted when I saw this news was rip chatter email. Back in the Palm OS days, the equivalent of Sparrow back then was this thing called chatter email that was basically the first app that could handle IMAP idle, which gave you push email over IMAP. And it had a million configuration options. Basically anything a user asked for, he baked it in. And so Palm hired him. And like chatter email died. And the Palm's email client at the time, which was called of, I forget what it was called, starts with a V, Palm's email at the time got like 1% better and then died. So I mean, in terms of like loving apps and loving responsive developers, it just can't get better. There's no way this purchase is going to turn into something that is more awesome than what Sparrow was becoming. So my counter to that, and this is again, back to my great dream of rainbows and unicorns, is that Google with Google Plus did kind of prove that it can iterate quickly and make a really good app. Like Google Plus mobile apps. What it cares, right. Right. Google really, really cared about making Google Plus a good experience. And in a matter of only a couple of months, went from a pretty bad app that was just a wrapper on a crappy mobile site to a really good, really attractive app that's one of the best out there for social networking stuff. And so when it wants to do it, it moves quickly and does well. And especially with this newfound design sense that Google seems to have found, can do some pretty great stuff. And so what I hope is that, you know, Sparrow didn't take a billion dollars and just go rest on their laurels at Google. I hope that the pitch was, we think you can do this great thing for a lot more people in a lot more places. And I hope that that's real. And I believe that Google can do it. I just hope that they do. And if not, I will literally come on this podcast and cry every single week. Every single week. Well, it's also interesting in light of the fact that, you know, Apple has taken Google Maps out of iOS 6. And so like Google, you know, they've got, you know, some apps on the iPhone. And you know, we just have been complaining about Gmail. Like they need to, you know, they know the iPhone's not going anywhere and they need to have a better experience for their apps on the iPhone. And you know, assuming that that's what they're going to put the Sparrow teams toward, you could be right. I could be doom and gloom for nothing and I take it all back. And I'm still blanking on the name of that Palm OS email client. And I'm not going to rest until I remember it. I have to take Dieter's side on this, to be honest with you. Versamail. Versamail. Congrats, Dieter. Good job. Because, I mean, the point about the flexibility of the independent developer and also just the decision making authority to be able to make decisions quickly is an important one. It really is. I recall an article where it was mentioned that some research was done into brainstorming, right? Because brainstorming is a really popular thing that took off in the 1950s and 60s where you get a whole team together and you say, this is our problem, let's come up with solutions. And then they all start thinking up things and putting things up on a chalkboard or whatever they were using at the time. I mean, you guys watch Mad Men, you will know better than me. And what they found actually with the research is that brainstorming does actually work. It slows things down, in fact. There's too many scattershot ideas. One person is thinking in one direction, another person is thinking in another direction. And what you actually benefit from is essentially dictatorial rule where one person sets the tone, sets the agenda, et cetera, and everybody follows along and works through that kind of thing. My evidence to say that the same is true in Google is Matthias Duarte's arrival. He arrived, ice cream sandwich popped up, and all of us were like, holy crap, Google now actually has Android design. There is actually a thing called Android design, as opposed to Android has apparently been designed by somebody or something somewhere. There's an idea of it. There's some sort of frost, some sort of direction where the design is going. Now I am wary of how much authority the Sparrow team are going to get. Because with their own app, it was a case of if we want to make a change, if David Piers emails us and says, guys, this is really important, let's do it, or you should do it. It's like a five-person team, right? They can just decide, yeah, David Piers is an intelligent and handsome man, we should follow his advice, let's do it. This is the point, Deezer's point about being nimble. It's like, fine, there's a change, it happened, and it's probably a good change, and it moves things forward. In Google, how do you get that sort of authority? I feel like Matthias was the exception. Google hired him and recruited him on the premise that they would give him really wide reign. They would essentially let him design whatever the hell he wanted to do with Android, and you can tell that he has this freedom to make design changes and design language changes. Are we going to see the same with the Sparrow team? Are they going to be allowed to run loose with Gmail? I don't think so, because Gmail is so fundamental to Google's web services, and Sparrow are still kind of, who are they? They're just a small group of successful designers. Yes, they're successful, that's why they were bought, but again, do you trust the Sparrow team enough to just let them have Gmail and run wild with it? I don't think Google would. I think you're probably right, and that makes me sad, but you know what I'm more worried about is Twitter, and the corporate policy coming down to the third party apps makes me really, really nervous. Go ahead, Dieter. Okay. Well, I was at the All Things Media Conference, and the CEO, Dick Costolo, was there, and I wrote an article calling them a social broadcasting network instead of just a social network, and I was totally right. They've been making noises recently that they're going to do something to change the rules for third party apps. They took LinkedIn's integration and they killed that, and they've just been making a lot of noise about these coming changes to their developer APIs that are going to be stricter, and they're saying stuff like, we want people to build off of Twitter. We don't want people to build off Twitter. We want people to build into Twitter. They need to make money, they need to make advertising, and they can do that in their own apps and on their own website more easily than they can off of Tweetbot or Plume or whatever other third party app you can name. Nobody knows exactly what the new rules are going to be, but it's clear that somebody somewhere wants to just kill off third party apps and all the first party apps and make it look like Facebook actually, where there are third party Facebook apps, but they're not really that widely used, they're not very official, blah, blah, blah, but everything sort of plugs into the Facebook ecosystem as a platform, as an app platform even. Ben Popper actually wrote a really good article about this back on July 9th. It's coming. Twitter's going to look more like Facebook, and your favorite third party app may not work. Nobody knows, or it will work differently or something. Which blows. I mean, it completely blows because I am so freaking invested into Twitter. I start to feel anxious if I don't tweet for like two days in a row. I am like one of Twitter's most loyal employees, and yes, I do work at it. I have multiple jobs. I work for Twitter, for Flickr, for Google Plus very occasionally. And you're a male model. Yeah, yeah. That's the one unpaid job. All the other ones are paid. Also the unappreciated one. I tweeted a picture of myself which lost me 10 followers. We discussed that last week actually. At the same time, that's a really interesting one about manipulating your Twitter audience because I lost 10 followers in the immediate wake of posting that picture, and then the next morning I had gained 20. So it's kind of like, okay, I lost one chunk of my audience who were just using and abusing me just for tech news. And again, the new chunk that appreciated me for myself and my body just became really important to me. Okay, this is something to do with Twitter. Whatever it is, man, if you could make this segue work, I will personally give you $1,000. I'm so curious where this is going right now. Okay, the point. The point is that I feel like I personally am over-invested in Twitter, and I feel like a lot of people are. And Twitter's strength has always been the fact that it's just kind of there. It just gives you the foundation and the basics. And then, kind of like what Dick Costolo said, you build on top of that. You say things. You use Twitter to do things. Whether it's Twitter or whether it's any other web service, mobile is a huge part of it, and a huge part of it going forward. So killing off third-party clients is not good because third-party clients have consistently been better than Twitter's own clients. This is my biggest problem. And Twitter being more like Facebook, again, makes me want to cry. Like David wants to cry with respect to Sparrow because Facebook is not the direction I want Twitter to move into. I want other things to be like Twitter. I don't want Twitter to be like Facebook, where things are so dire and clogged up and nasty and unpleasant. I kind of just want Twitter to stay exactly as it is and never change. Is Twitter... I mean, this whole argument that Twitter's making sounds like the one that the carriers are making, which is we don't want to be a dumb pipe. We funnel your data where you want it to go, and the end. They're wanting to do, again, what you said what Facebook is doing, which is say, we own the whole experience. And Facebook has gone even further and done the Facebook Connect stuff where it kind of underpins these other sites. And Twitter does that to an extent, but not quite as much. But Twitter seems to be saying, we don't want to be just the thing that delivers your data. We want to be in control of everything and be able to advertise to you ourselves and on and on and on. But that's the point. The difference is Twitter doesn't... They're a private company. They have a private network, basically. And their APIs exist at the will of the king. They can change or pull whatever they want because it's not an open spec. It's a spec controlled by them. There's this group called App.net that's trying to basically build an open source Twitter competitor. And so they're doing something kind of like Kickstarter. They've got 20 days. They want to reach a half a million dollars and then they're going to try and launch. And there's been some other attempts to create open APIs for something that's a lot like Twitter. And if they go down this path and there ends up being a huge backlash and they don't carefully manage how they're going to turn themselves into Facebook more, they don't have a monopoly on this kind of service. If somebody can build something and enough people move to it, it'll change. You know, maybe Google is excited to try and swoop in on that. I don't think that's likely. I think that Twitter is a different kind of service from Google+. But they... I don't know. What percentage of... There was a study that somebody figured out, he analyzed a million tweets and what percentage of users actually use third party clients. Yeah, it was this guy, Benjamin Mayo, who went through and found... This is a relatively unscientific thing. He went and found a million tweets, which is a lot, but nowhere near the actual scale of Twitter, obviously, and sorted it by clients. And the numbers are really interesting. The top... Let's see, I think he found 70.8% of his total originated from first party clients. And at most 29.2% of people use third party Twitter clients, which is really interesting. But it might actually be smaller because some of those were coming from like tweet buttons and stuff, right? Right, yeah. So, I think the web number is maybe skewed. I'm not sure quite how it's all calculated. But what I thought was really interesting is that Twitter has gone and systematically purchased all of the really popular third party ones. I expected... One, this looks totally different than I thought. The top four are web with a huge lead, and then Twitter for iPhone, Twitter for Android, and Twitter for Blackberry, which is really surprising because that those would be the top four really surprised me. But then you get down to like TweetDeck is way up there, and then it's like, oh, well, Twitter owns them. And the mobile web is high. And all these apps, as you go down, Twitter seems to have seen them and said, you're clearly doing well and doing something right, we're just gonna buy you. And that makes me wonder, is Twitter willing to have a bunch of different first party clients? Because that, to me, mitigates a lot of the problem. If they're willing to say, you can't build a TweetDeck competitor, but we're gonna make TweetDeck really good because it's ours now and you clearly like it, then I'm not okay with it, but more okay with it. But if they're gonna come out and say, well, this is Twitter for Mac, this is what it is, this is what it looks like, this is what you will use, and ditto for Android and iOS and the web and so on and so forth, that's what makes me nervous. Twitter actually owns a lot of Twitter clients and a lot of different ones, and I had kind of forgotten that. No, I agree with you, and I do feel like the clients that Twitter has bought have been uncontroversially strong ones and good ones, right? It bought Tweety and... I mean, that's fine. So long as Twitter actually maintains a strong user experience, that's fine. The thing that I'm cautioning against is... Or like the analogy that I was going to mention earlier is that the reason cockroaches survive as long as they do is because they're simple and they're basic and they don't need to evolve. And in many respects, Twitter is like that. I know it's not a very flattering analogy, but it's like that. It's got something really, really right in how basic the communication is between people. It's added some really useful and fundamental and handy features like picture previews and things like that, and just kind of enhance things in the right direction, right? So it's good. But for the most part, Twitter has now really reached the sort of critical mass. I mean, if you watch BBC News reports over here in the UK, nowadays it's like Jonathan English and then underneath his Twitter handle. It's that widespread. People finish off news reports and say, if you want to comment on the story, you can find me on Twitter at such and such spot. So actually, Twitter doesn't really need to be so aggressive about trying to be like something else like Facebook again. And the thing that I'm cautioning is the thing that I'm worried about is Twitter trying to be too aggressive in whatever sort of evolution it thinks it needs to do. Because I don't think- Well, what it thinks it needs to do is it thinks it needs to go public. It thinks it needs to make sure that it is monetized well so that it can pay its employees and then go public and then please its current and future shareholders. And so don't be confused. This move is about making sure that they have got a long term business where they can make real money. But they do already. The question is- I mean, real money in quotation marks, but they already have a business. Yeah, but we can't ask them to keep their business small just because we like it better, right? What we can do is we can take our business elsewhere if we don't like what they're turning into. Yeah. And that's just the warning point I was going to make and it's a quick one. If you recall, when Digg was at D-I-G-G, remember that site when it existed? When it was at its absolute peak, it felt like it was a juggernaut. You couldn't get away from Digg. Every website on the internet that cared about getting traffic, cared about getting on Digg, it was that high, it was that epic, it was that great. And then Digg did this really revolutionary redesign and kind of screwed itself. And now nobody cares. Now Reddit is the major website serving that kind of audience. And Digg is essentially nowhere to be found. So all I'm saying is fine, Twitter wants to evolve, Twitter wants to do better. But it takes very little, actually, to just completely piss off your entire audience. And as Digg says, alternatives can and will crop up. The basic functionality that Twitter has can be replicated by people smarter than I and an audience can be developed. I mean, imagine, for example, some other company with a lot of, how to put it, a lot of credibility with the online community. Probably like Valve and the way that they develop Steam, right? The same thing can really happen with a new social network. You just need enough discontent to, you know, steam up around Twitter, which hopefully never happens because I do like it and I have worked hard to build up my followers. You know, I'm already invested. Just leave me be and don't change Twitter too much. And that's all I'm saying. Do you remember the Dick Bar, which drove everyone away from Twitter? Oh yeah. The crazy ad thing? Yeah. I mean, so what's crazy about that, and you just made me think of this, Vlad, was that before the things like the Dick Bar, which everybody hated, I don't even remember what it was actually called. It was just, oh, it was the Quick Bar, but it's the Dick Bar. It's better. The Dick Bar drove everybody to, you know, Tweetbot and Tweetdeck and all these other clients. And if you do those, it's going to drive people to Facebook and Google+. And you know, that could be much more dangerous is that their bad decisions drive people not only away from Twitter apps, but away from Twitter. And I don't know, that might just be a conspiracy theory, but it's like people really, really, really hated that Quick Bar. And if the only other option had been, let's go use Google+, I really think people would have gone and used Google+. That's true. I don't want to go to use Google+. I really, it's fine. It's good. But the thing that's great on Twitter is it's limited. Okay, finish. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Agreed. But Google+, the only thing they need to do is sort out their freaking web interface, which has vast quantities of white space, which goes disused. And then you have this really narrow band of content in the middle. If they could actually have somebody who's familiar with web design work on their website, I could find myself living with Google+. I could live with that. Yeah. So Twitter needs to watch out. I'll take like 10% of my followers over to Google+. I mean, all you have to do is repost that picture you posted on Twitter and everybody's coming to Google+. I think that's clear. Oh yeah. Well, that's my point about how the other half are going to, I don't know, find another verge European editor. I guess Aaron can be a good substitute for me. So long as he gets a haircut. Jesus Christ. Seriously, that's the thing. I met up with the London team. I know nobody particularly cares, but I met up with the London teams today and all of them are scruffy. Like not one of them is shaved in the past week. Two of them have haircuts that are like white person afros. It's outrageous. You know, two weeks I'm away and all standards drop. It's terrible. It's terrible. I mean, the only reason I'm keeping the beard, again, it's a 45 minute shadow. I didn't have time to shave just before the podcast. But the only reason I'm keeping a beard is to kind of keep that going in Chris's absence. When Chris is back, I'll probably make myself presentable. Yeah, it's like it's like the Olympic flame. Somebody has to keep it and it doesn't matter who it is. But as long as somebody has it, we're OK. Oh, do you don't get me started on the Olympic flame. The number of times that thing has gone out and people have had to artificially turn it back on is that a whole tour of the UK. Somebody tried to snatch it when it was on tour, which is like, yeah, you think if you want to steal something, don't try to steal the Olympic flame. And honestly, that's like how are you going to get away with that? Think about it. What a story, though. So I'm going to wrap this podcast up now that we've complained about Twitter. If you want to follow us on Twitter while it still exists, you can. I'm at Backlund. Vlad is at FlatSeva. David is at Pierce. David, we're all together at Verge and we will be back at you next week. Thanks for watching. Thanks, guys. Bye.
 So, we talk a lot about cell phones and carriers on the show, but we don't really talk about
 our thoughts and our feelings about where we are in the universe and where this tiny
 little orb is that's hurtling through space, this rough blue little marble in a universe
 that's rapidly expanding and heading towards a cold, uncaring oblivion where no one sees
 us, no one cares, we're just dying and gone. We might talk about that on the Virgin Mobile,
 so actually on a related topic, we're probably going to talk about Nokia. Stay tuned for the
 Virgin Mobile show.
 Hi, I'm Dieter Bohn.
 I'm Vlad Stavl.
 I'm David Pierce. I'm Chris Ziegler, actually. I'm Chris Ziegler.
 It's really good to be here.
 It makes you more mysterious to have a different name underneath your face.
 It does. Nobody knows who I am. It's great.
 This is the Virgin Mobile show. It's episode 9 for the week of July 23rd. Vlad's back, and we
 are incredibly happy to have him back. And he's wearing a shirt, which is great.
 Disappointing.
 And he has hair.
 Yeah.
 Which is an upgrade.
 I got it like 10, 12 weeks ago.
 Yeah, I am. So I don't know if you guys heard, but my apartment flooded like a month ago
 because the sprinkler went off in the bathroom. And most of my stuff was fine, but I did lose
 like my electric razor. So I bought a new one and I decided, okay, I'm going to shave
 this beard off. And my girlfriend had complained about the beard a little bit. So she comes
 home after I do this favor, shave it off. And she's like, wow, you look kind of stupid.
 I'm going to put that beard back.
 Which is only going to take you like three months, which is cool.
 It's okay. We were talking about this before.
 Patience is a virtue and all of that stuff.
 I mean, for me, it's just a case of not shaving this morning.
 Yeah, I like to think that's like 45 minutes of Vlad growing his hair.
 Yeah, this is the Vlad 45 minute shadow.
 I like it.
 That's it.
 Vlad shaved right before the mobile show started. He actually just constantly walks around with
 it all the time, just shaving. Wow. So in terms of news this week, it was pretty much
 all financial results, financial results, financial results.
 That was the season.
 Yeah, we've got it from Verizon and AT&T and like they do, they're making a ton of money.
 I think the big news out of Verizon was that they finally reached the halfway point for
 smartphones. So half their postpaid subscribers are using smartphones.
 They added almost 900,000 new subscribers as well.
 And I don't even know what their profit was. It was something ridiculous.
 I mean, it always is.
 15 billion in revenue.
 Actually, AT&T is a bit ahead of that.
 AT&T is a bit ahead of Verizon in terms of smartphone subscribers as a proportion of
 the overall number.
 I believe for AT&T, it's now 61.9%.
 So they're a few percentage points ahead, which may be owing to the iPhone and the fact
 that AT&T had so much more time to start selling that to people before Verizon.
 Maybe. I don't know.
 I'm European. I don't even know.
 What's Verizon?
 What's Verizon's percentage of-
 No, I just mean, what is that? Is that a thing?
 Yeah, you're just jealous because-
 I'm wrapping up my jokes.
 I promise to have funny ones by the end of the podcast.
 You're just jealous because carriers don't control every moment of your life all the
 time and you wish that they did is really what it is.
 That is correct.
 I think Verizon is my family.
 I do find myself in existential moments where I wish a mobile carrier would just step in
 and take care of me by taking my money.
 So the thing about AT&T's results is they're bragging that their ARPU, which we have talked
 about before, the average revenue per user, is still getting larger.
 It's the highest in the industry.
 They're making almost $65 per customer, which is, and that's per month, I'm assuming.
 That's pretty high.
 I don't know.
 We complained a whole lot about AT&T last week with the rumor that they might be charging
 extra for FaceTime access.
 I don't know.
 They're companies.
 They're making money.
 They're making plenty of money.
 I don't have any sympathy with profits like these that they don't have the resources to
 build out their networks and get the spectrum that they need.
 I'm absolutely on board with you.
 Here's the thing that comes to my mind, or the thing that I thought about today when
 we addressed the AT&T earnings.
 I believe for the quarter they had $3.9 billion in net profit, net of everything else.
 The thing you have to consider with that is that $3.9 billion over three months is over
 a billion per month.
 It's really complicated mathematics, but I think I managed it.
 That's how much the company is making in just pure unadulterated cash falling down into
 their coffers.
 This isn't reinvestment money.
 I don't even know that it's necessarily dividend money.
 I don't know what AT&T's position is in terms of dividend.
 It's just cash.
 For example, if AT&T wants to reinvest, if AT&T wants to make investments into infrastructure,
 that stuff actually shows up as an expense on AT&T's account sheets.
 When you see $3.9 billion in net profit, what you're seeing isn't money that is potentially
 going to be reinvested.
 It's the stuff that AT&T investors, well, I don't know about investors, again, that
 depends on dividend.
 Where does this profit actually go?
 It's actually a good point, which I don't even know.
 You get pure profit, you don't do a dividend, who gets that money?
 The point is, it doesn't stay in the industry.
 It doesn't benefit or help anybody.
 It just gets sucked out.
 That's the money that comes out of your pocket.
 It doesn't come back in to rebuild the industry or to build up 4G infrastructure.
 It just goes somewhere.
 We are such communists.
 I mean, screw it.
 I mean, how is it beneficial?
 Okay, we have this, and this is the thing that people say about capitalism.
 It's a great system for extracting value, right?
 But the point is, okay, we've extracted $3.9 billion worth of value, and then it just kind
 of disappears.
 The thing about profit is, it doesn't benefit anybody.
 If profit in all circumstances was reinvestment money, that would be awesome, terrific.
 If every single quarter, AT&T just reinvested nearly $4 billion into everything, into systems,
 and then AT&T came back and said, actually, guys, we don't have money.
 We need to raise your prices.
 I think people would understand.
 But at the moment, as a European, one of the big scary things for me, if I ever thought
 about relocating to the US, was how horribly I would be raped by American carriers, and
 the fact that I wouldn't even have a choice about who's doing it to me.
 It would be AT&T or Verizon, and it would probably be just AT&T because of Verizon,
 CDMA, and that's horrible.
 I need a phone that I can swap SIMs in and out of.
 Well, I think the theory, the counter argument to this seems to be that Verizon and AT&T
 come out and say, well, we invested all this money in infrastructure, and we built these
 networks, and now you're paying off all this money that we already put in.
 But at the same time, I can't imagine that if they're taking in $4 billion in profit
 every quarter, that that money, that they're constantly paying for this infrastructure
 that they already paid out for.
 And eventually, they've paid it off, and now it's just, as you said, filling somebody's
 pockets and going nowhere.
 But then again, lots of companies have excess money.
 Apple has, whatever, $100 billion in cash, and we don't really fault them for it.
 Yeah.
 Well, the difference is Apple doesn't lease spectrum from the people of the United States.
 So I mean-
 Yeah, this is-
 Sorry, go ahead, Edith.
 No, I was going to say, there used to be a history when AT&T had a monopoly of the company
 feeling like it had a public duty and a public trust to serve the phone lines and provide
 good quality and respect to their customers, basically.
 And now that it's been broken up, and we live in the world we live in, in the US, it seems
 like there's less of that.
 And so, I mean, we can't begrudge a corporation to earn profits.
 That's what a corporation does.
 That's what it's for.
 That's what their charters say.
 But nevertheless, it's still like, just in terms of thinking about the next time AT&T
 or Verizon comes out and spends a poor me story, I'm just saying I don't have any sympathy
 for that.
 No, agreed.
 And the point you raise is exactly why I'm having this mini rant.
 And I promise to have a full-size rant later on today.
 I hope so.
 The point you raise is exactly the important one, which is that AT&T and Verizon are operating
 systems which are fundamentally important to American people and to the American economy.
 If you don't have reliable 3G and now soon 4G networks, you're falling behind.
 You can't compete economically.
 And a big strength of the United States is the fact that, particularly with LTE, and
 particularly with myself being in the UK, and see how delayed that rollout is, you're
 one of the leading nations in terms of rolling out LTE.
 Verizon and AT&T have actually done that really aggressively and really well.
 So credit to them for that.
 But the fact is, they're still operating something that is fundamental to the nation and the
 country.
 So in those circumstances, you kind of have to impute an extra level of responsibility
 on these companies.
 Whereas Apple, I mean, what the hell?
 If Apple stops making iPads and iPhones, this might shock a lot of people, but the world
 isn't going to end.
 American economic competitiveness isn't going to end because there are no more iPhones.
 There are replacement-level devices for iPhones and iPads and all of these things, but there
 is no replacement-level alternative for Verizon's 3G and 4G network or AT&T.
 Which actually, if I can come up with a very small little digression to do with the Olympics,
 in the UK, they had a similar snafu, if you like, where they privatized the security around
 the Olympics.
 They hired out a private company, and they picked the one that offered the lowest bid,
 the lowest cost to the government.
 Like they do.
 Like you do.
 And then what ended up happening is that now the government is having to call in soldiers
 from the army to fill in because the private company couldn't provide a security personnel,
 which is just brilliant.
 And my conclusion putting the two things together is that when you have something that's really
 fundamental to a country, you kind of have to think long and hard about why you would
 ever want to privatize it.
 If it's so important that the government can't let it fail, such as Olympic security and
 at least in my opinion, mobile networks, then maybe the government should be running those
 things in the first place.
 And then maybe, as Dieter says, guys like AT&T and Verizon can still do their private
 operations by leasing that from the government or from the state.
 Well, I mean, we treat them like a utility.
 We've got power companies, we've got water, sewer.
 Those are all run by private companies in most countries, at least in the US, and they're
 just well regulated.
 Yeah.
 Yeah.
 So, I mean, yeah, that's my thinking.
 You kind of have to regulate, either regulate tightly or just run it by the government.
 I mean, I could say that water companies, particularly here in the UK, yes, they run
 private operations, but they don't do it particularly well.
 I don't really see the whole point of privatization.
 Seriously, man, just 100% taxes and let's go in.
 Live free.
 From each according to their ability to each according to what Vlad feels like.
 That's the thing.
 Yeah.
 I'd sign up for that, actually.
 I'm in on that.
 Yeah.
 Another earnings story came out, Nokia.
 So-
 Before we go to Nokia, I have one more thing that this is, and this is just occurring to
 me as I read over the earnings things again.
 Do you guys think that, it seems to me from reading these earnings reports that AT&T still
 has a huge iPhone advantage and that that's kind of driving AT&T?
 And I wonder, everybody sells the iPhone now.
 You can buy the iPhone on US cellular now, but it seems like AT&T sold more iPhones than
 Verizon did.
 And thus, I think in a related note, it's smartphone numbers are higher.
 It's like a lot of the new people who come are buying iPhones more than are buying Android
 phones percentage wise versus Verizon.
 And it seems like people still think of AT&T as the carrier where you buy an iPhone.
 That might be true, but let me make a quick point though.
 AT&T don't actually say how many iPhones they've sold.
 As usual with these financial reports, they've been tricky with their wording.
 So they say they've sold during the quarter 5.1 million smartphones sold sales, but they've
 activated 3. something million iPhones, which means we don't really have a direct comparison
 between or a direct way to say of AT&T smartphone sales, they've sold so many iPhones.
 Because for example, you could have bought one in Europe or you could have bought one
 elsewhere, brought it over to AT&T's network.
 You could be a replacement device that you're talking about.
 So we don't necessarily know, but I think your point, David, is solid.
 I do feel similarly that people think of AT&T first when they think about iPhone.
 It's kind of taken a while to feel the fruit, I guess, the message that you can get on every
 single carrier.
 Well, don't forget that AT&T, even though their LTE network is getting pretty widespread,
 they still are way behind Verizon.
 So Verizon was pushing LTE phones more than probably AT&T was.
 So I mean, on AT&T in most places in the country, the fastest network you could get on worked
 with the iPhone.
 With Verizon, you could get on a faster network if you got another device.
 So I would expect that once we see an LTE iPhone that those numbers will probably start
 to be a little bit closer.
 But I mean, your larger point that people think of AT&T as an iPhone network or think
 of the iPhone on AT&T, I think is totally true.
 And I think that the fact that there are so many older iPhones out there that are still
 perfectly good, still getting handed down to teenagers, still getting given to friends
 or whatever when somebody upgrades is another reason why AT&T continues to activate a ton
 of iPhones.
 Okay, here's the perfect segue.
 You know what else is on AT&T?
 The Lumia 900.
 Yay.
 Not very many of them, though.
 Vlad, are you using that phone as your daily driver now?
 I am.
 I am.
 I honestly am.
 I have the Lumia 900 and I honestly am using it as my daily driver and I am not actually
 suffering for it.
 Really?
 It does a decent job.
 You switched from the Linux, right?
 Yeah, I mean, this is part of my rant.
 I don't really want to get into it immediately.
 Okay, I'll wait then.
 But so long as you imagine there are no apps in the world, if you just think there's this
 software which is on the phone and that's it and there's no other ecosystem to tap into,
 you're fine.
 It's no problem.
 So long as you don't think Dropbox exists, you're fine.
 It's all good.
 I'm screwing around, but honestly, I use the media player.
 I really like the calendar.
 The email client is decent.
 It has issues, but it's decent.
 I mean, look, it's fine.
 It's a tolerable phone, I think.
 And okay, I'll just say the big reason why I actually switched to this.
 And also these are review units, by the way.
 I'm not spending my money on like a billion phones.
 I'll hand these review units back eventually.
 But yes, I had a One X and while I was away in Bulgaria, I used the Galaxy Nexus for two
 weeks with Jellabene, which is gorgeous.
 I was so right when I was logging into the Galaxy Nexus, still the best Android phone.
 I'm all convinced now.
 And Chris is just completely nuts and bonkers.
 But yeah, so I use the Galaxy Nexus and then I came back and I switched to the One X and
 just the onscreen keyboard and some of the other as quote, media synchrocy of sense just
 pissed me off to such a degree that I was like, screw this and I went to Lumi 900, which
 actually has a really, really nice onscreen keyboard.
 Again, with Windows Phone, they really have the basic fundamentals in place and ready.
 So that the onscreen keyboard, the camera app, which Jellabene actually kind of copies
 a little bit, you know, with the whole swiping in from the side to look at images you've
 already taken.
 So the fundamentals, I mean, we've said this before, the fundamentals of Windows Phone
 are there and they're in place.
 So I wouldn't necessarily, I wouldn't at all say that I would use the Lumi 900 permanently,
 but for a while as a change of pace, I think it's pretty, pretty cool.
 I mean, it's one of the best iPhones.
 It's really swanky.
 So I am trading my personal Galaxy Nexus for a Lumi 900.
 What?
 Yeah, what's happening?
 It's happening.
 I don't understand.
 We have a review unit of the Galaxy Nexus around.
 So if I need to use a Nexus, I still can.
 But the bottom line is the only Windows Phone that we have on the West Coast is my own personal
 Windows Phone, which is original Samsung Focus.
 No, Aditya, I'm shipping you one.
 Be patient.
 Please.
 Faster, man.
 Faster.
 It's on its way.
 We need to have a modern Windows Phone, as modern as you can get right now, and so I'm
 straight up, I'm doing it.
 I'm excited.
 This is going to be...
 I feel like I've had this experience with you like a dozen times now, Aditya, where
 you're like, I am switching, it's going to be great.
 And then eight minutes in, you're like, this is terrible, I'm going back to the Galaxy
 Nexus.
 Yeah.
 Well, I've been on the Galaxy S3 for about a week and it's grown on me quite a bit, although
 I'm still not using S Voice and I still wish that the multitasking key was there instead
 of a long press.
 But Chris is right, he's like the ghost looking over the entire podcast.
 TouchWiz is so much better than Sense.
 It is so much better than Sense.
 I think my One X has got a Cyanogen Mod Alpha on it right now and there's a bunch of stuff
 that's broken on it and I don't care.
 I'd rather use that than Sense at this point.
 On that point though, I need to show you something.
 I love that it's available on my Lumia 900.
 That might be good because it's been a bit unstable.
 People who are listening to the audio of this podcast are not going to really benefit from
 this, but take a look at this on the video.
 It's the Bing button on this phone.
 That is one of the most disused pieces of capacitive key software I've ever seen.
 I've never touched it.
 I think if you dust this phone for fingerprints, the one spot you'll never find my fingerprint
 is the Bing button.
 It's just useless.
 I don't even use search on a Google phone, which is Google search, which is better than
 Bing search.
 The very rare times when I use it, I actually do search with a microphone.
 I do voice search on Android, which works decently well, but that's the only time I
 ever bought it to do.
 If I want to actually search something, I open up a browser window.
 It's quicker for me.
 I got a really long conversation with our news manager out here, Brian Bishop, talking
 about how underutilized search is on phones, just because it doesn't seem to be as fast
 and as convenient as it needs to be on Android and iOS and even Windows phone.
 We stepped backwards from where we were with Blackberry and Windows Mobile and WebOS, where
 you had a keyboard just there waiting for you to start typing into it to search for
 stuff.
 Hitting that extra button and waiting for the UI to pop up the search bar and then waiting
 for the keyboard to appear and then start typing, that's just enough wait time where
 I just don't want to bother.
 I'd rather just look for the icon or pop up the browser window.
 But these are the economics of it as well.
 If you have an application and you know where it is, in order to access it, what you do
 is you swipe to unlock the phone.
 You do a few swipes.
 You might have to open up a folder, but it's just big motions and big sweeps that you do
 with your thumb, let's say.
 Whereas if you want to search for something, as you say, you have to bring up a search
 menu to begin with and then you have to start typing away.
 And big, rough, imprecise swipes are so much easier than actually typing something specifically
 as a name.
 This is why I use Voice Search on Android, as I mentioned, because again, that can be
 more imprecise and it can be something you do actually on the move as opposed to stopping
 and typing something in.
 I mean, that's my perspective.
 We got to get into it.
 Like, Sonokia's earnings, they only sold 600,000 Lumia handsets in North America.
 And I think overall, they sold for the quarter, I want to say $4 million.
 Yeah, it was $4 million.
 Yeah, $4 million and then $7 million to date.
 And then their quote was that Lumia activations were flat up after the Windows Phone 8 announcement.
 Basically my sense is that the Windows Phone 8 announcement and all the convention that
 we did about, oh, is this going to destroy Lumia sales?
 Is it going to hurt Lumia sales?
 It's like, maybe it did, but they were already so borderline and low to begin with that even
 a hit from that wasn't a huge blip on their sales radar.
 They are already selling it to people that were in the know, is my concern or my fear,
 at least in the US.
 Yeah, I think that's a fair point.
 I mean, look, to me, it's encouraging insofar as Nokia is still seeing growth in terms of
 Lumia sales.
 And I do also like to take the contrarian view with respect to Nokia, which a couple
 of years ago was, we have so much market share, how could things ever turn bad?
 And Chris and myself and Thomas Rick over here in Europe were saying, dudes, you need
 to figure out touchscreens or you're going to crash.
 So now I'm actually taking the opposite position.
 Nokia has been persistent in saying we have the cash.
 Yes, we're losing money, but we have the cash to cover it.
 So I guess that's where those profits go.
 They go into coffers and people actually save them, which is kind of unusual for the Western
 world.
 But yeah, okay, so Nokia has the cash.
 It says it can endure this period, this transitional period.
 Yes, it's stretching out to be months and months and now over a year, I guess.
 But there is some sunshine on the horizon with Windows Phone 8 and whatever is going
 to come later in the year.
 I mean, my perspective is, yes, the numbers themselves are rough and Nokia lost, what
 was it, like a billion dollars during the quarter or something like that?
 Yeah.
 Yeah, I mean, that's rough.
 I get it.
 But then Nokia still has reserves.
 It can still kind of weather the storm and then come back.
 So if we get something with the sort of iconic design that we saw from Nokia N9, which got
 continued in things like the Lumia 900, Nokia still has a chance.
 As far as I'm concerned, the latter part of this year is just going to be the crunch
 time for Nokia.
 And I think what's really interesting to me about Windows Phone 8 is less the software
 changes which are fine, but that finally Windows Phone 8 will have real top of the line specs
 attached to its handsets.
 And it makes me think like Nokia, I think, did the absolute best it could have within
 the constraints of Windows Phone.
 And it made a gorgeous phone.
 It has its issues.
 It's not a fantastic processor.
 It has the obvious ecosystem issues.
 But with Windows Phone 8, the Lumia 900, it might get a little better.
 But what could be much, much better is the next Lumia phone.
 And I think that is, I mean, if I were Nokia, I'd be furious right now because like as soon
 as you launch this flagship phone, they say, oh, we have potential for much better phones
 running this better operating system.
 So I think for right now, they just need to stall as long as they can until they get a
 real shot to launch the best phone they can possibly launch, which will be 720p and multi-core
 and NFC and all that stuff.
 And then say, here's a phone that we think can actually compete on the broader market.
 Well, that was supposed to be the Lumia 900.
 I mean, that's the thing.
 I mean, we talk about the Lumia sales are doing well.
 Well, Lumia sales is the distinction that they made for their Windows Phone products.
 And of course, they're going to grow because they started at nothing when they first started
 selling these earlier.
 So I mean, the thing that's interesting to me that you brought up, David, is Nokia hasn't
 competed directly against iPhone and Android sort of on the same spec war.
 And there's always been this sense like we know that there's another version of Windows
 Phone coming that's going to be better.
 We know that their hands are tied in terms of specs.
 I can't remember how long it's been since Nokia was like straight up head to head going
 against other flagships with no caveats in the market.
 I mean, like N95?
 I mean, how far back do we need to go?
 And so that'll be really interesting.
 And I think the most interesting thing is, at least as far as the US goes, Windows Phone
 8 is going to see probably Verizon putting some serious marketing muscle behind it.
 And we're going to see these carriers once again starting up the game of playing the
 different OS providers against each other.
 And they're going to be throwing Windows Phone into that ring.
 And we saw AT&T do it a little bit, but I think with Windows Phone 8, we're going to
 see it a lot.
 We're going to see not just Nokia, but other manufacturers that are still playing in the
 Windows Phone game really get a big push from US carriers.
 And I think it's going to be really interesting to see if at that point with modern hardware,
 with competitive specs, and with competitive marketing help from the carriers, if it can
 compete.
 Like if all that happens, if they get all of that, and it still doesn't take off in
 some small way, that's a big problem.
 There's only so long that Microsoft can stick around and keep trying with this stuff.
 And they really need a win with Windows Phone 8.
 Oh, absolutely.
 To your point about when Nokia was last competing, if you speak with the fanboys, Nokia has never
 won.
 It's just that the world has kind of gone weird and stopped buying Nokia devices.
 Which is a totally logical argument.
 I think even the most strident Symbian fanboy would have to admit that you get a Symbian
 phone sort of knowing that you're buying into a different ecosystem relative to what else
 is out there.
 It's a smaller ecosystem in terms of apps, in terms of support from developers.
 You could still say it's competing on a one-to-one ratio, but there's that little caveat that
 like, sure, yeah, the PureView is competing on a one-to-one, but really it's not.
 Really you understand that you're getting into a different kind of ecosystem with that.
 And I feel like Nokia has always had that little caveat for the past few years anyway.
 Of course.
 And also, did you say that Nokia sold 600,000 Lumias in the US?
 Was that the number that we had in the US?
 In the quarter.
 Yeah, it was in the quarter.
 Yeah.
 In North America.
 It wasn't just the US, it was North America.
 So, Canada.
 But I believe that's roughly the same as the previous quarter, the quarter before that.
 It was about half a million units that Nokia sold in the US.
 So it does seem, again, North America, sorry.
 It does seem like Nokia's penetration of that market, which again has been a critical one,
 it's the one that Project Thunder was about and that Stephen Neelop emphasized growing
 in the US and North America in general.
 It hasn't happened.
 So again, that's a problem today.
 But the reason why I choose to be excited, not excited, but choose to look at Nokia's
 chances positively is precisely the thing that David touched on.
 It's the fact that you kind of finally dropped the chains of Windows Phone 7.
 I like the fact, with Windows Phone 7, I like the fact that you get a unified user experience
 across all devices.
 It's a good thing.
 But then the bad thing is that the very latest devices are stuck with limitations that were
 present with the very first devices.
 So as we've discussed, Nokia not upgrading the Lumia 900 to Windows Phone 8 is rough.
 No other Windows Phone 7 device is getting Windows Phone 8.
 It's rough for everybody who's bought one and who maybe was an early adopter and wanted
 to show faith in Microsoft, et cetera, et cetera.
 When at the same time you got the Apple 3GS getting iOS 6 and all of these things that
 you kind of want to try and ignore if you want to be happy with your life and your smartphone.
 But aside from all of those things, while I was in Bulgaria, as I said, I've been using
 the Galaxy Nexus.
 And I recall I tweeted about three weeks ago that the perfect smartphone today is the Galaxy
 Nexus with the Nokia 808 PureView as the camera.
 Because as we know, the Nexus camera sucks.
 So while I was away in Bulgaria for a couple of weeks, I tried that, I experimented, and
 took both with me.
 And I tried to live that lifestyle.
 The first thing to say is it doesn't really work.
 You can't really have two phones.
 You kind of need to use one phone and then just kind of accept the camera, settle for
 the camera, or pick a phone with a really great camera and then settle for the software.
 Which Aaron from our European team is inclined to do with the 808 PureView.
 I would argue very much against it.
 Because-
 Yeah.
 Yeah.
 I mean, there's a whole bunch of reasons.
 But one really great example, as far as I'm concerned, is when I was on the Bulgarian
 seaside and me and my friend were struggling to get any sort of web connection.
 We didn't have SIM cards.
 I mean, it's a massive pain to even procure a SIM card.
 Never mind a micro SIM.
 A micro SIM is a mystery to those guys.
 But okay, we didn't have a SIM card.
 We finally found a Wi-Fi spot.
 And I left my Galaxy Nexus in the hotel room, went out with the 808 PureView because I thought
 I would want to take pictures.
 We got Wi-Fi.
 I got into Wi-Fi with the 808 PureView.
 That's the other thing.
 My friend had a Libia 900 with him.
 And he was fine, right?
 He could Skype with people.
 He could tweet.
 He could do anything.
 But I had the 808.
 And I was like, what can I do now?
 Can I upload pictures?
 Well, I don't have Dropbox.
 The only option really that I had was emailing pictures to myself, which kind of sucks.
 The preloaded official Twitter client, which everybody has said is bad, but it really shouldn't
 be bad.
 It has this peculiarity where if you don't have a SIM card in the phone, you can't turn
 the application on.
 You can't use the app at all without a SIM card, which is equal parts stupid and absurd.
 This was one of those Skype clients, so I couldn't get in touch with anybody.
 So I was literally at a cafe with Wi-Fi, holding this phone and wondering what in the hell
 can I actually do with this connection and this phone?
 And it was basically nothing.
 There's nothing.
 It's like you could take pictures with it or you can make phone calls with it.
 And that's where it all went.
 But the reason I can be kind of optimistic about Nokia is because I thought, well, if
 I could still have this camera and I could take my friend's Libia 900 functionality,
 essentially take Windows phone and slap it onto the camera of the 808 PDV, I might actually
 be okay with the fact that the Galaxy Nexus was in my hotel room or if it was nowhere
 near me.
 And then I might even say, that's a phone that's worth swapping your Galaxy Nexus for
 the Eater, but not the Lumia 900.
 What you should do is you should just buy some duct tape or like a little hinge and
 make yourself a fold-out flip phone with the PureView on the back and the Lumia 900 on
 the front.
 Just cram them together.
 It's going to be easy to just get the DSLR and stick a freaking tiny smartphone onto
 it, honestly.
 But this is my point.
 Like you're trading Galaxy Nexus for Lumia 900.
 I'm saying no, don't do it.
 Aaron wants to trade.
 What is he using at the moment?
 I think he's got a Galaxy S2 for the 808 PDV or maybe use the 808 PDV as a second phone.
 In either case, no.
 But if you combine the two, if you take the PureView, if you take the Lumia and you actually
 stick Windows Phone 8 on top of all of that, that's a competitive phone.
 Particularly, nothing can touch the 808 PDV on camera performance.
 My family had point and shoot cameras with them.
 I was taking the best photos with the PureView.
 I just left every other camera at home.
 It's a great camera.
 And Nokia has exactly what you need to push Windows Phone 8 forward.
 It has the ability to design great things.
 When you have the specs and when you have the software together, it can do it.
 I do feel like they can survive until, let's say, October time and do it.
 Come on.
 For Europe, Nokia.
 For Europe.
 Well, but then we're back to the point that you made a little while ago about how if apps
 weren't a thing, Windows Phone would be fantastic.
 But apps are a thing.
 I was having this conversation with somebody a while ago saying if it were 2007, Windows
 Phone is the best operating system and it's not even close.
 I really believe that.
 But then everybody else came out with app stores.
 But that's why I think Windows 8 could potentially be huge for Windows Phone 8 because now you
 can develop the apps together.
 Even in that they're launching Windows Phone 8 after Windows 8, and that could be huge
 because then you've got a month for people to start really developing apps for Windows
 8 that can start migrating their way to Windows Phone 8.
 And I think that's the real chance that they have.
 Just a quick correction.
 Aaron just emailed me to say it's not true.
 He's not swapping any phone for the Apple way.
 He wants to use his second phone.
 So Aaron is saying it in detail at the moment.
 We're just saying something.
 If you have ever seen the guy's haircut.
 Yeah, Aaron's crazy.
 We can just say that.
 Okay.
 So while we have been podcasting, Apple's earnings have come out.
 Had $8.8 billion profit, $35 billion revenue, $17 million iPads, which is a big increase.
 Sales of iPhones dropped to $26 million compared to $35 million the previous quarter, but they
 always drop this quarter.
 Basically it looks like...
 The call is going on right now, and so we'll have more color as the day goes on.
 But it looks like it was a small miss, but it was a small miss relative to what analysts
 have been expecting.
 And so it's still huge.
 They've got $117 billion in cash on hand.
 They're doing fine.
 It just seems like finally, finally after so many years, everybody's sort of figured
 out that Apple posts big numbers and are starting to expect big numbers from Apple instead of
 meh.
 Yeah, they're finally getting used to this game that Apple plays where they way underestimate
 what their next quarter is going to be.
 And so then it always looks great because they outdo all of their own expectations.
 So analysts are like, well, they're clearly lying.
 So we're just going to way overshoot that.
 And then that'll maybe be the answer.
 Yeah.
 Yeah.
 What I was going to say, D2 is kind of underselling it when you say people are getting used to
 Apple posting big numbers.
 These aren't big numbers.
 These are just industry crushing numbers.
 They're humongous.
 This is why...
 That's the other thing.
 Analysts, if you've ever read analyst reports and estimates, they aren't afraid to be aggressive.
 Some of them make their name on the basis of the fact that they go way overboard with
 things and way overestimate things like Google stock price and all of that stuff just because
 they want to stand out.
 So they go really aggressive and then maybe they get lucky and things actually pan out.
 So even when you take the really aggressive guys and their estimates are beaten, Apple
 is just, as David says, I mean, yes, Apple underestimates things to do the classic thing
 of under promise over deliver.
 And now maybe analysts are wising up, but the scale of it is...
 I mean, I don't think it's really comprehensive.
 I know.
 I mean, let's put this into context.
 We just talked about Nokia having enough cash on hand to survive through this dip and get
 itself reestablished in the smartphone game.
 I think we're looking at 5.15 billion cash on hand in US dollars that Nokia has or let
 their liquid assets.
 That's less than what Apple added to their cash on hand this past quarter.
 117 billion is where they're at now.
 So the amount that Nokia was able to add or lost from its cash on hand was literally a
 rounding error when you put it on the scale of what Apple's been doing.
 That made me really sad, actually.
 Yeah.
 I mean, and Apple's revenue is bigger than Microsoft and Google combined, which is just
 wild.
 Yeah.
 Yeah.
 I mean, wow.
 You know what really amazed me is that iPod sales are only down 10% over last year.
 Who is still buying iPods?
 If you don't already own an iPod, why are you buying an iPod?
 It just doesn't make any sense to me.
 I do feel like it's...
 Is that as iPod touch?
 Yeah.
 I mean, they're saying it accounts for more than half of their iPod sales.
 But like, just buy an iPhone or I mean, is it kids?
 That's my only theory is that kids are still getting iPod touches.
 Riding the London on the ground today, that was my impression.
 I saw a couple of iPod touches and it was kids playing games.
 So maybe it's Steve Jobs was absolutely spot on when he said it's a great gaming machine.
 And I mean, at the time he was saying it to cover the fact that he didn't have a front
 facing camera, but yeah.
 And it's the cheap gateway drug to all of Apple's other bigger, more expensive devices
 too.
 Yeah.
 Yeah.
 But man, I mean, Apple can actually like retire right now, not release another product, not
 ship another product for how many decades, whatever it is, keep the exact same level
 of staffing, exact same level of expenses.
 And yeah, I mean, Apple can like take a decade off and still be one of the healthiest companies
 in tech.
 Yeah.
 I mean, their content stores, the App Store and the iTunes Store was 4.1 billion in revenue.
 Like nobody's operating at this scale, nobody else is even close to operating at this scale.
 And like every quarter, I promise that I'm not going to sit here and boggle at how much,
 how big Apple is and how much money they're raking in.
 But even with this relatively disappointing quarter, it's still like the thing that I
 just can't get away from is just the scale relative to what anybody else is doing.
 It's like one or two orders of magnitude bigger.
 Even in a down quarter, it doesn't matter because the scale is so much bigger, it's
 like whatever.
 No, I agree.
 But let's think about the positive stuff.
 I do feel like the Nexus 7 is going to be a really, really significant device for Google.
 And it's a space with the Kindle Fire where we also expect to have a new Kindle Fire sometime
 running through the soon where, in terms of the price range anyway, it's a space where
 Apple isn't competing right now in those affordable tablets.
 Google has a strong enough app and content store.
 Amazon has a strong enough app and content store.
 So at least even while Apple is generating all of this profit and revenue, at least I
 do see good opportunity and good potential for competition.
 So I'm not really as worried as you might have been looking at Intel's dominance of
 chips, let's say a few years back, say a decade ago or whatever.
 It's always good to have competition.
 So it's kind of like, okay, Apple is making a lot of money, but at least Google is making
 moves.
 I do like Microsoft's aggressiveness with the Surface tablets and with Windows 8 and
 all of that stuff.
 We'll see how it all pans out.
 But at least there's competition going on and it doesn't really seem to me like we're
 going to end up in the situation where we just have an incumbent who isn't forced to
 keep innovating.
 For example, the iPhone, let's call it the iPhone 5, the next generation iPhone, it can't
 really afford to be just an iPhone 4T.
 The iPhone 4 and the iPhone 4S are way too similar, but you can't afford to have another
 one that is just the same.
 You do need to upgrade.
 There are other guys pushing you and guys who will take your position if you just kind
 of sit on the same spot.
 At least I hope so.
 At least I hope we're not just buying things because they're iPhones.
 Right?
 Anyone?
 We are.
 No, we totally are.
 I mean, look, I mean, when someone asks you on the street, what phone should I buy?
 And you don't know them from Peter, what do you say?
 Just get an iPhone.
 I mean, that's just how it's going to be for a while.
 I really took your attempt at being hopeful and just shut it down.
 No, I kind of disagree.
 I think I still recommend iPhones to people, but I think if they, I mean, there's no way
 this is going to happen.
 I really can't imagine this happening.
 But if Apple comes out with another iPhone that doesn't have LTE, I'll stop recommending
 iPhones to people.
 And it's an obvious thing that they have to upgrade, but that's to your point, Vlad, that
 people have come out, Apple claimed it was a battery thing, and then Motorola comes out
 with the Razer Max, which both has LTE and lasts forever.
 And so that's not an issue anymore.
 And Apple needs to figure out a way to compete with these things.
 And especially as Android gets better and the skins get better, Motorola's ice cream
 sandwich skin is great.
 And the smart actions is really cool.
 And I'm a huge fan.
 And now Apple has these real things that it's lacking in.
 And I like the Razer Max last longer than the current iPhone, even though it has LTE
 and it's faster and the smart actions is cool and it has NFC and all this stuff.
 And like Apple legitimately has some catching up that it needs to do, especially in these
 particular features, which I think is great.
 So totally, I agree.
 And the other thing is I have been noticing the fact that the gap has been narrowing.
 Like we kind of, being involved in the industry all the time, we kind of miss these things
 and the way things change.
 But I think back to when the iPhone 3GS was the latest iPhone just before the iPhone 4
 came out.
 So what was that, 2009-ish?
 Yeah, I think that's right.
 Whatever.
 I mean, maybe to 2010.
 And when the iPhone 3GS was the latest iPhone, it was so far ahead of any Android phone.
 It wasn't even close.
 Like the smoothness of the interface was untouchable.
 Like I spent time reviewing and playing around with Android phones for months.
 And then I picked up a 3GS, started scrolling around it.
 And I was like, dude, I've been wasting my time.
 Like this thing is so far ahead of everything else.
 Why are we even bothering?
 Like 3GS at the time was just a massive chunk ahead of everything else.
 And it was just way too easy to say, best smartphone, iPhone 3GS, you're done.
 Clear.
 Finished.
 Whereas now we can have arguments.
 And they can be legitimate arguments as opposed to like drunk Neil I. Patel rants where it's
 like, no, goddammit.
 For the sake of such and such, it used to be this.
 And again, that gives me hope that we'll continue to have a competitive environment in mobile,
 which is what we need ultimately.
 And part of what we need is still Nuckeye.
 Whatever happens, I do feel like we need some European design flair so we don't end up with
 a whole bunch of products called Macs and capsulized like the Razr and missing vowels.
 Like the iPhone.
 I mean, seriously, iPhone, iPad, all of these names, they're ridiculous.
 Ice cream sandwich.
 Honestly, like if you're going to name a product, don't have Japanese people name it because
 you'll be a sequence of alphanumeric nonsense and don't have Americans name it because then
 it would be just straight nonsense.
 Like I don't know who we need.
 Maybe French people.
 French things sound classy.
 You don't understand what I mean, but they just sound classy.
 Right?
 That's true.
 Yes.
 Like LePhone.
 From LePhone.
 Yeah.
 That was a Chinese company coming up with that name.
 Yeah, that works.
 See?
 Do we want to talk about Beats Audio?
 No, Beats Audio bought a controlling interest back in their company back from HTC.
 CNET had reported that HTC maybe wasn't doing everything they needed to keep the relationship
 going like not meeting their financial something.
 I mean, I'm just disappointed that HTC has had such a rough time of it lately.
 I was really hoping that the One Series that they would come roaring back and instead they
 had this, I think what we have to call as a boondoggle with Beats, just a distraction.
 It's really disappointing because I really kind of want to root for them, but they're
 not winning anywhere right now.
 Yeah.
 I mean, look, as far as I'm concerned, it's HTC's fault because of cents.
 The Android that Google gives you has a rock solid, perfectly usable onscreen keyboard,
 and then you screwed that up.
 And you forced me to come back and fix it.
 People are telling me, who uses the stock keyboard on cents?
 Get SwiftKey, get CyanogenMod, get such and such.
 It's like, I don't want to.
 I paid my money for this device and HTC screwed it up and now you want me to work on removing
 the screw up.
 That's the exact opposite thing.
 This is why we commend guys like Vizio, right?
 Because Sean Hollister just reviewed recently the Vizio thin and light laptop.
 And I mean, as a laptop, it's not great.
 But one of the great things about it is that it's just straight windows with no bloatware,
 right?
 Yeah.
 Yeah.
 And thumbs up.
 Keep doing that.
 Everybody appreciates those things.
 And I'm sure Vizio is going to be able to sell at least some of these laptops just from
 the strength of the fact that there's no bloatware, there's no noise.
 It's just windows and you can just get on with using it.
 And you don't need to go through all of these hoops.
 And that's what HTC does with cents.
 I mean, HTC tried to minimize cents, they tried to improve it.
 And we're really hopeful and enthusiastic about that.
 I mean, Dieter, you wrote up a mini editorial about HTC finding its design roots again,
 but it just wasn't good enough.
 I don't think.
 Yeah, didn't make it.
 Yeah.
 So, I mean, look, HTC is going to come back probably later this year with new devices,
 Jelly Bean devices, for sure, right?
 And hopefully, they do something strong and impressive with Windows Phone and that kicks
 us back up again.
 I do feel like we need HTC and guys like LG, right?
 David, you reviewed the LG Forex HD and that was the highest rated LG we ever had.
 We need those guys to keep guys like Samsung in check because the whole Apple versus Samsung
 conversation, I am so sick and tired of it.
 I would love for 2013 to be a conversation about Apple versus Samsung versus LG versus
 HTC versus Nokia versus Sony, right?
 If Sony is still alive and kicking.
 Yeah.
 I mean, and the thing is, it seems like everyone is just a little ways off.
 Like Sony makes great phones.
 Aaron, our crazy Aaron, just reviewed the Xperia U and there's a lot to like about it,
 especially design-wise, but they ship it with Gingerbread and that's just, you can't do
 that anymore.
 That's insane.
 Right.
 But they've also updated, I think it was the Xperia P to Ice Cream Sandwich and it's a
 huge improvement and actually makes that a much more compelling phone.
 And there was the Xperia Ion in the US, which is the same way.
 It's a great phone except that it has Gingerbread, which is just absolutely unforgivable.
 And then HTC makes a gorgeous phone with an incredible display and senses too much.
 And on and on and on, they're just one small thing removed from having a really, really,
 really compelling system.
 And my great hope, and I'm sure this won't be true because it never is, is that at least
 one more person will figure it out in the next six months and we'll have a real legitimate
 third competitor.
 Because we're not that far away.
 Yeah.
 Just before we conclude-
 I mean, Samsung is the closest with the Galaxy S3.
 I mean, honestly, I mean, they're selling a ton of them.
 And it's like, I prefer the way the One X looks to it, but it's a good phone, it's a
 good experience and they haven't messed up Android too much.
 But it's just, I don't know, I find it boring.
 And I find the iPhone boring.
 Like I'm just, I'm bored.
 I want more charged action.
 I want more people legitimately fighting instead of getting beaten down.
 Dita wants to see the Nuckeer engage, make a comeback.
 That's what he wants.
 Oh, man.
 I would be all about that.
 It's obvious it works.
 We haven't had a sidekick in a while either.
 It might be time.
 Actually, did you guys see this Droid X fake thing that's getting made?
 Somebody made a fake PS Vita shell and loaded it up with ice cream sandwich and has also
 preloaded it with a whole bunch of ROM emulators.
 So it's just a straight up completely fake PS Vita running Android so that you can play
 ROMs on it.
 That's amazing.
 And it's called the Droid X360.
 So it takes all the boxes.
 Yeah, the Droid X360.
 That's pretty good.
 That's like everything the Xperia play should have been and wasn't at all, at all, at all,
 at all.
 Yeah.
 Dude, that's actually a hardware designed by SEO principles.
 So it's like, how do I get on anybody's search engine for any reason to do with gaming or
 Android?
 Just download the Droid, stick X360 in the name, make it into a PS Vita lookalike, and
 it can play PlayStation 1 games.
 So I mean, well, via the emulator.
 But yeah, all you need is Wii.
 Let's see how many people we can get to sue us if they can find us before we sell this
 thing.
 You can sell some crazy phones in China.
 That's okay.
 Should we talk about Sparrow that Google acquired them and they're not going to update their
 app anymore?
 Yes.
 I want to-
 There it is.
 Can I just sit here and sob for the next like 40, 45 minutes?
 No.
 No, David, that is not allowed.
 But we will permit you to have a good and proper rant, please.
 No.
 So I actually don't have, I don't even really have a rant.
 I think this is the most, for me, it's like the most high risk, high reward thing ever.
 I'm a serial switcher between apps and the Gmail app for Android is legitimately great.
 And the Gmail app for iOS is just a nightmare hell ride in the world.
 It's awful.
 I hate it.
 I hate it.
 I want it to die.
 That's just the end.
 And so my great hope is that Dom and his team will show up at Google and say, listen, let's
 just call Sparrow Gmail, change some of the colors, and here's our new app.
 It has multiple accounts.
 It doesn't crash all the time.
 It has push because Gmail has figured out how to do that.
 So I'm excited about that.
 And if the Sparrow ideas are just brought to the Gmail team, I think that's really exciting
 and especially really exciting for iOS users because the email system on iOS is awful.
 And it's the thing I like the least about my iPhone by a million miles.
 So that's a beautiful dream.
 But I mean, listen, it's not going to happen that quickly, even if that is what the goal
 is, or just add some Sparrow features to the existing Gmail app or whatever they're going
 to do.
 The thing that was great about Sparrow was they iterated it so quickly.
 And they can move quick, and they're nimble.
 And they can make a great app independently, and they can respond directly to user requests
 and features.
 And they talk to everybody.
 And inside the giant corporation that is Google on the team, within the team, with the manager
 who has another manager, even if Google has perfected not having crappy bureaucracy, and
 I imagine they're better than most companies, there's no way that they're going to be able
 to iterate as quickly as they did as an independent company or just be as responsive to user requests
 because it's going to need to get put through the corporate machine.
 I don't want to say they shouldn't have done it.
 I mean, if Google offered to buy my company that doesn't exist, I would probably seriously
 consider it.
 But nevertheless, it's a bummer for people who love the idea of independent apps.
 I mean, the thing I tweeted when I saw this news was rip chatter email.
 Back in the Palm OS days, the equivalent of Sparrow back then was this thing called chatter
 email that was basically the first app that could handle IMAP idle, which gave you push
 email over IMAP.
 And it had a million configuration options.
 Basically anything a user asked for, he baked it in.
 And so Palm hired him.
 And like chatter email died.
 And the Palm's email client at the time, which was called of, I forget what it was called,
 starts with a V, Palm's email at the time got like 1% better and then died.
 So I mean, in terms of like loving apps and loving responsive developers, it just can't
 get better.
 There's no way this purchase is going to turn into something that is more awesome than what
 Sparrow was becoming.
 So my counter to that, and this is again, back to my great dream of rainbows and unicorns,
 is that Google with Google Plus did kind of prove that it can iterate quickly and make
 a really good app.
 Like Google Plus mobile apps.
 What it cares, right.
 Right.
 Google really, really cared about making Google Plus a good experience.
 And in a matter of only a couple of months, went from a pretty bad app that was just a
 wrapper on a crappy mobile site to a really good, really attractive app that's one of
 the best out there for social networking stuff.
 And so when it wants to do it, it moves quickly and does well.
 And especially with this newfound design sense that Google seems to have found, can do some
 pretty great stuff.
 And so what I hope is that, you know, Sparrow didn't take a billion dollars and just go
 rest on their laurels at Google.
 I hope that the pitch was, we think you can do this great thing for a lot more people
 in a lot more places.
 And I hope that that's real.
 And I believe that Google can do it.
 I just hope that they do.
 And if not, I will literally come on this podcast and cry every single week.
 Every single week.
 Well, it's also interesting in light of the fact that, you know, Apple has taken Google
 Maps out of iOS 6.
 And so like Google, you know, they've got, you know, some apps on the iPhone.
 And you know, we just have been complaining about Gmail.
 Like they need to, you know, they know the iPhone's not going anywhere and they need
 to have a better experience for their apps on the iPhone.
 And you know, assuming that that's what they're going to put the Sparrow teams toward, you
 could be right.
 I could be doom and gloom for nothing and I take it all back.
 And I'm still blanking on the name of that Palm OS email client.
 And I'm not going to rest until I remember it.
 I have to take Dieter's side on this, to be honest with you.
 Versamail.
 Versamail.
 Congrats, Dieter.
 Good job.
 Because, I mean, the point about the flexibility of the independent developer and also just
 the decision making authority to be able to make decisions quickly is an important one.
 It really is.
 I recall an article where it was mentioned that some research was done into brainstorming,
 right?
 Because brainstorming is a really popular thing that took off in the 1950s and 60s where
 you get a whole team together and you say, this is our problem, let's come up with solutions.
 And then they all start thinking up things and putting things up on a chalkboard or whatever
 they were using at the time.
 I mean, you guys watch Mad Men, you will know better than me.
 And what they found actually with the research is that brainstorming does actually work.
 It slows things down, in fact.
 There's too many scattershot ideas.
 One person is thinking in one direction, another person is thinking in another direction.
 And what you actually benefit from is essentially dictatorial rule where one person sets the
 tone, sets the agenda, et cetera, and everybody follows along and works through that kind
 of thing.
 My evidence to say that the same is true in Google is Matthias Duarte's arrival.
 He arrived, ice cream sandwich popped up, and all of us were like, holy crap, Google
 now actually has Android design.
 There is actually a thing called Android design, as opposed to Android has apparently been
 designed by somebody or something somewhere.
 There's an idea of it.
 There's some sort of frost, some sort of direction where the design is going.
 Now I am wary of how much authority the Sparrow team are going to get.
 Because with their own app, it was a case of if we want to make a change, if David Piers
 emails us and says, guys, this is really important, let's do it, or you should do it.
 It's like a five-person team, right?
 They can just decide, yeah, David Piers is an intelligent and handsome man, we should
 follow his advice, let's do it.
 This is the point, Deezer's point about being nimble.
 It's like, fine, there's a change, it happened, and it's probably a good change, and it moves
 things forward.
 In Google, how do you get that sort of authority?
 I feel like Matthias was the exception.
 Google hired him and recruited him on the premise that they would give him really wide
 reign.
 They would essentially let him design whatever the hell he wanted to do with Android, and
 you can tell that he has this freedom to make design changes and design language changes.
 Are we going to see the same with the Sparrow team?
 Are they going to be allowed to run loose with Gmail?
 I don't think so, because Gmail is so fundamental to Google's web services, and Sparrow are
 still kind of, who are they?
 They're just a small group of successful designers.
 Yes, they're successful, that's why they were bought, but again, do you trust the Sparrow
 team enough to just let them have Gmail and run wild with it?
 I don't think Google would.
 I think you're probably right, and that makes me sad, but you know what I'm more worried
 about is Twitter, and the corporate policy coming down to the third party apps makes
 me really, really nervous.
 Go ahead, Dieter.
 Okay.
 Well, I was at the All Things Media Conference, and the CEO, Dick Costolo, was there, and
 I wrote an article calling them a social broadcasting network instead of just a social network,
 and I was totally right.
 They've been making noises recently that they're going to do something to change the rules
 for third party apps.
 They took LinkedIn's integration and they killed that, and they've just been making
 a lot of noise about these coming changes to their developer APIs that are going to
 be stricter, and they're saying stuff like, we want people to build off of Twitter.
 We don't want people to build off Twitter.
 We want people to build into Twitter.
 They need to make money, they need to make advertising, and they can do that in their
 own apps and on their own website more easily than they can off of Tweetbot or Plume or
 whatever other third party app you can name.
 Nobody knows exactly what the new rules are going to be, but it's clear that somebody
 somewhere wants to just kill off third party apps and all the first party apps and make
 it look like Facebook actually, where there are third party Facebook apps, but they're
 not really that widely used, they're not very official, blah, blah, blah, but everything
 sort of plugs into the Facebook ecosystem as a platform, as an app platform even.
 Ben Popper actually wrote a really good article about this back on July 9th.
 It's coming.
 Twitter's going to look more like Facebook, and your favorite third party app may not
 work.
 Nobody knows, or it will work differently or something.
 Which blows.
 I mean, it completely blows because I am so freaking invested into Twitter.
 I start to feel anxious if I don't tweet for like two days in a row.
 I am like one of Twitter's most loyal employees, and yes, I do work at it.
 I have multiple jobs.
 I work for Twitter, for Flickr, for Google Plus very occasionally.
 And you're a male model.
 Yeah, yeah.
 That's the one unpaid job.
 All the other ones are paid.
 Also the unappreciated one.
 I tweeted a picture of myself which lost me 10 followers.
 We discussed that last week actually.
 At the same time, that's a really interesting one about manipulating your Twitter audience
 because I lost 10 followers in the immediate wake of posting that picture, and then the
 next morning I had gained 20.
 So it's kind of like, okay, I lost one chunk of my audience who were just using and abusing
 me just for tech news.
 And again, the new chunk that appreciated me for myself and my body just became really
 important to me.
 Okay, this is something to do with Twitter.
 Whatever it is, man, if you could make this segue work, I will personally give you $1,000.
 I'm so curious where this is going right now.
 Okay, the point.
 The point is that I feel like I personally am over-invested in Twitter, and I feel like
 a lot of people are.
 And Twitter's strength has always been the fact that it's just kind of there.
 It just gives you the foundation and the basics.
 And then, kind of like what Dick Costolo said, you build on top of that.
 You say things.
 You use Twitter to do things.
 Whether it's Twitter or whether it's any other web service, mobile is a huge part of it,
 and a huge part of it going forward.
 So killing off third-party clients is not good because third-party clients have consistently
 been better than Twitter's own clients.
 This is my biggest problem.
 And Twitter being more like Facebook, again, makes me want to cry.
 Like David wants to cry with respect to Sparrow because Facebook is not the direction I want
 Twitter to move into.
 I want other things to be like Twitter.
 I don't want Twitter to be like Facebook, where things are so dire and clogged up and
 nasty and unpleasant.
 I kind of just want Twitter to stay exactly as it is and never change.
 Is Twitter...
 I mean, this whole argument that Twitter's making sounds like the one that the carriers
 are making, which is we don't want to be a dumb pipe.
 We funnel your data where you want it to go, and the end.
 They're wanting to do, again, what you said what Facebook is doing, which is say, we own
 the whole experience.
 And Facebook has gone even further and done the Facebook Connect stuff where it kind of
 underpins these other sites.
 And Twitter does that to an extent, but not quite as much.
 But Twitter seems to be saying, we don't want to be just the thing that delivers your data.
 We want to be in control of everything and be able to advertise to you ourselves and
 on and on and on.
 But that's the point.
 The difference is Twitter doesn't...
 They're a private company.
 They have a private network, basically.
 And their APIs exist at the will of the king.
 They can change or pull whatever they want because it's not an open spec.
 It's a spec controlled by them.
 There's this group called App.net that's trying to basically build an open source Twitter
 competitor.
 And so they're doing something kind of like Kickstarter.
 They've got 20 days.
 They want to reach a half a million dollars and then they're going to try and launch.
 And there's been some other attempts to create open APIs for something that's a lot like
 Twitter.
 And if they go down this path and there ends up being a huge backlash and they don't carefully
 manage how they're going to turn themselves into Facebook more, they don't have a monopoly
 on this kind of service.
 If somebody can build something and enough people move to it, it'll change.
 You know, maybe Google is excited to try and swoop in on that.
 I don't think that's likely.
 I think that Twitter is a different kind of service from Google+.
 But they...
 I don't know.
 What percentage of...
 There was a study that somebody figured out, he analyzed a million tweets and what percentage
 of users actually use third party clients.
 Yeah, it was this guy, Benjamin Mayo, who went through and found...
 This is a relatively unscientific thing.
 He went and found a million tweets, which is a lot, but nowhere near the actual scale
 of Twitter, obviously, and sorted it by clients.
 And the numbers are really interesting.
 The top...
 Let's see, I think he found 70.8% of his total originated from first party clients.
 And at most 29.2% of people use third party Twitter clients, which is really interesting.
 But it might actually be smaller because some of those were coming from like tweet buttons
 and stuff, right?
 Right, yeah.
 So, I think the web number is maybe skewed.
 I'm not sure quite how it's all calculated.
 But what I thought was really interesting is that Twitter has gone and systematically
 purchased all of the really popular third party ones.
 I expected...
 One, this looks totally different than I thought.
 The top four are web with a huge lead, and then Twitter for iPhone, Twitter for Android,
 and Twitter for Blackberry, which is really surprising because that those would be the
 top four really surprised me.
 But then you get down to like TweetDeck is way up there, and then it's like, oh, well,
 Twitter owns them.
 And the mobile web is high.
 And all these apps, as you go down, Twitter seems to have seen them and said, you're clearly
 doing well and doing something right, we're just gonna buy you.
 And that makes me wonder, is Twitter willing to have a bunch of different first party clients?
 Because that, to me, mitigates a lot of the problem.
 If they're willing to say, you can't build a TweetDeck competitor, but we're gonna make
 TweetDeck really good because it's ours now and you clearly like it, then I'm not okay
 with it, but more okay with it.
 But if they're gonna come out and say, well, this is Twitter for Mac, this is what it is,
 this is what it looks like, this is what you will use, and ditto for Android and iOS and
 the web and so on and so forth, that's what makes me nervous.
 Twitter actually owns a lot of Twitter clients and a lot of different ones, and I had kind
 of forgotten that.
 No, I agree with you, and I do feel like the clients that Twitter has bought have been
 uncontroversially strong ones and good ones, right?
 It bought Tweety and...
 I mean, that's fine.
 So long as Twitter actually maintains a strong user experience, that's fine.
 The thing that I'm cautioning against is...
 Or like the analogy that I was going to mention earlier is that the reason cockroaches survive
 as long as they do is because they're simple and they're basic and they don't need to evolve.
 And in many respects, Twitter is like that.
 I know it's not a very flattering analogy, but it's like that.
 It's got something really, really right in how basic the communication is between people.
 It's added some really useful and fundamental and handy features like picture previews and
 things like that, and just kind of enhance things in the right direction, right?
 So it's good.
 But for the most part, Twitter has now really reached the sort of critical mass.
 I mean, if you watch BBC News reports over here in the UK, nowadays it's like Jonathan
 English and then underneath his Twitter handle.
 It's that widespread.
 People finish off news reports and say, if you want to comment on the story, you can
 find me on Twitter at such and such spot.
 So actually, Twitter doesn't really need to be so aggressive about trying to be like something
 else like Facebook again.
 And the thing that I'm cautioning is the thing that I'm worried about is Twitter trying to
 be too aggressive in whatever sort of evolution it thinks it needs to do.
 Because I don't think-
 Well, what it thinks it needs to do is it thinks it needs to go public.
 It thinks it needs to make sure that it is monetized well so that it can pay its employees
 and then go public and then please its current and future shareholders.
 And so don't be confused.
 This move is about making sure that they have got a long term business where they can make
 real money.
 But they do already.
 The question is-
 I mean, real money in quotation marks, but they already have a business.
 Yeah, but we can't ask them to keep their business small just because we like it better,
 right?
 What we can do is we can take our business elsewhere if we don't like what they're turning
 into.
 Yeah.
 And that's just the warning point I was going to make and it's a quick one.
 If you recall, when Digg was at D-I-G-G, remember that site when it existed?
 When it was at its absolute peak, it felt like it was a juggernaut.
 You couldn't get away from Digg.
 Every website on the internet that cared about getting traffic, cared about getting on Digg,
 it was that high, it was that epic, it was that great.
 And then Digg did this really revolutionary redesign and kind of screwed itself.
 And now nobody cares.
 Now Reddit is the major website serving that kind of audience.
 And Digg is essentially nowhere to be found.
 So all I'm saying is fine, Twitter wants to evolve, Twitter wants to do better.
 But it takes very little, actually, to just completely piss off your entire audience.
 And as Digg says, alternatives can and will crop up.
 The basic functionality that Twitter has can be replicated by people smarter than I and
 an audience can be developed.
 I mean, imagine, for example, some other company with a lot of, how to put it, a lot of credibility
 with the online community.
 Probably like Valve and the way that they develop Steam, right?
 The same thing can really happen with a new social network.
 You just need enough discontent to, you know, steam up around Twitter, which hopefully never
 happens because I do like it and I have worked hard to build up my followers.
 You know, I'm already invested.
 Just leave me be and don't change Twitter too much.
 And that's all I'm saying.
 Do you remember the Dick Bar, which drove everyone away from Twitter?
 Oh yeah.
 The crazy ad thing?
 Yeah.
 I mean, so what's crazy about that, and you just made me think of this, Vlad, was that
 before the things like the Dick Bar, which everybody hated, I don't even remember what
 it was actually called.
 It was just, oh, it was the Quick Bar, but it's the Dick Bar.
 It's better.
 The Dick Bar drove everybody to, you know, Tweetbot and Tweetdeck and all these other
 clients.
 And if you do those, it's going to drive people to Facebook and Google+.
 And you know, that could be much more dangerous is that their bad decisions drive people not
 only away from Twitter apps, but away from Twitter.
 And I don't know, that might just be a conspiracy theory, but it's like people really, really,
 really hated that Quick Bar.
 And if the only other option had been, let's go use Google+, I really think people would
 have gone and used Google+.
 That's true.
 I don't want to go to use Google+.
 I really, it's fine.
 It's good.
 But the thing that's great on Twitter is it's limited.
 Okay, finish.
 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
 Agreed.
 But Google+, the only thing they need to do is sort out their freaking web interface,
 which has vast quantities of white space, which goes disused.
 And then you have this really narrow band of content in the middle.
 If they could actually have somebody who's familiar with web design work on their website,
 I could find myself living with Google+.
 I could live with that.
 Yeah.
 So Twitter needs to watch out.
 I'll take like 10% of my followers over to Google+.
 I mean, all you have to do is repost that picture you posted on Twitter and everybody's
 coming to Google+.
 I think that's clear.
 Oh yeah.
 Well, that's my point about how the other half are going to, I don't know, find another
 verge European editor.
 I guess Aaron can be a good substitute for me.
 So long as he gets a haircut.
 Jesus Christ.
 Seriously, that's the thing.
 I met up with the London team.
 I know nobody particularly cares, but I met up with the London teams today and all of
 them are scruffy.
 Like not one of them is shaved in the past week.
 Two of them have haircuts that are like white person afros.
 It's outrageous.
 You know, two weeks I'm away and all standards drop.
 It's terrible.
 It's terrible.
 I mean, the only reason I'm keeping the beard, again, it's a 45 minute shadow.
 I didn't have time to shave just before the podcast.
 But the only reason I'm keeping a beard is to kind of keep that going in Chris's absence.
 When Chris is back, I'll probably make myself presentable.
 Yeah, it's like it's like the Olympic flame.
 Somebody has to keep it and it doesn't matter who it is.
 But as long as somebody has it, we're OK.
 Oh, do you don't get me started on the Olympic flame.
 The number of times that thing has gone out and people have had to artificially turn it
 back on is that a whole tour of the UK.
 Somebody tried to snatch it when it was on tour, which is like, yeah, you think if you
 want to steal something, don't try to steal the Olympic flame.
 And honestly, that's like how are you going to get away with that?
 Think about it.
 What a story, though.
 So I'm going to wrap this podcast up now that we've complained about Twitter.
 If you want to follow us on Twitter while it still exists, you can.
 I'm at Backlund.
 Vlad is at FlatSeva.
 David is at Pierce.
 David, we're all together at Verge and we will be back at you next week.
 Thanks for watching.
 Thanks, guys.
 Bye.